Chapter One — The Last Page
He fell to his knees, the world around him fading into the color of ash and silence. The sky didn't weep, the earth didn't mourn—only the wind moved, whispering through the ruins like it had somewhere better to be. His hands, blood-slick and trembling, reached for something that wasn't there—companions who'd long fled, a promise no one kept. The light in his eyes dimmed, not from pain but from realization—the kind that cuts deeper than any blade. Alone, forgotten, he exhaled one last breath into the indifferent dusk. "I wish I knew," he whispered, and the world kept turning without him…
"Utterly pathetic ," I said aloud, soft enough that only the row in front of me heard. A girl smirked. A boy snorted. Someone scoffed at the amount of effort the hero "put in" before falling. That was the thing about stories ,people wanted drama, not logic.
Mr. Hargrove glanced over the rim of his glasses. "Lucas. Keep your…."
"My phone, I know. Honestly Mr. Hargrove I see this school as a waste of my time , I know everything so why not put my time on something less boring ".
I slid my phone into my bag , but I couldn't get my mind of the webnovel i just read .People who die stupidly repeat the same pattern: they act on emotion, they neglect contingencies, they assume loyalty exists outside of strategy. That was the real crime.
Lucas Anderson," the teacher said, "if humans share about 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees, what makes us so different?"
The class froze. A few whispered guesses—"intelligence," "speech," "evolution"—all wrong, all basic. Lucas sighed, finally looking up. "It's not about how much we share," he said. "It's about what we use. Two percent doesn't sound like much, but it's the difference between instinct and imagination. We didn't evolve to survive better—we evolved to question why we're surviving at all." My teacher skid his glasses up "That's quite a perspective Lucas , Well done ."
I folded my arms and watched the graphite smear where my pencil had chewed the paper. Watching is what I did when I didn't speak. Small things tell stories: the way Mark tapped his knee three times before he shifted his gaze ,domestic stress; the dried scar at Jenna's wrist—dad's temper; the new earbuds Jamal pretended not to have—money saved in secret. I catalogued, I filed. It's efficient.
None of it was my business.
My phone vibrated once in my pocket. Night shift tonight—warehouse on Third. We could get by on that and Mom's hours at the diner. My sister's braces needed a tightening next month, and I had promised Lyra a book for her birthday. Promises are contracts. You keep them.
I keep my family because they are the only unscheduled variables in my life that do not betray pattern. My mother, Meriel—she laughs on the wrong days and it's the only music I let myself hear. Lyra, seven, who still thinks dragons exist and that bread tastes better when you toast it yourself. My father, an asshole who left because he was to pathetic to do his duties.
The bell for dismissal hummed like an old refrigerator. The chairs scraped. People spilled out as if propelled by social gravity, heading to buses, to the subway, to jobs that would eat them and give nothing back. I walked home with the practiced gait of someone who knows every crack in the pavement—Route Three, past the pawnshop with its crooked neon, cutting through the alley that smelled of old rain and oil.
Our building looked the same as always: a tired rectangle with a door that had lost the fight with its frame. The hallway smelled like boiled cabbage and static. My key fit after two tries. The apartment was small: one room for the three of us, a kitchenette with a stove that complained like an old man when lit, a single bathroom that took three minutes to heat up water. I liked it because the clothes lines in the window caught the light in a way that made the rooms feel less like boxed-in things and more like places where sunlight could practice patience.
The door was ajar.
I saw it before I heard it. The sliver of darkness didn't belong. A line of cold air pushed past where the threshold should be warm. My brain reordered possibilities—burglary, squatters, a neighbor's prank—but the pattern didn't match. The hallway light was on; Mom always turned it off when she worked late.
"Mom?" I called, stepping through. The rooms smelled not of boiled cabbage but of iron and oil, a metallic tang that washed over my tongue and made my stomach fold into itself.
"Mom!!!" Lyra's small voice answered—then a sound I had never learned to hear until that moment: the thin, clipped sound of someone breaking other people's breath. It is a sound that lives at the edge of hearing and then crawls into your bones.
I ran. The living room was a map of motion: overturned chairs, toys scattered like forgotten punctuation. At the center were the silhouettes. Two of them stood, boots planted like punctuation marks at a cruel sentence's end. Their coats were black enough to swallow light. Their faces were masked. Their masks had seams that didn't fit the geometry of any face I knew, rims that seemed to hum and breathe. A faint blue haze clung to them, not the breath of cold but something else—like a halo seen through broken glass.
My mother was on the floor. Her hair fell like wet wheat over her shoulders. She screamed "LUCAS RUN!!". The next thing I knew one on the masked men stepped on her leg with a force so loud I heard the crack. She screamed.
I moved without thinking where thinking usually is—because there is a place where reaction lives in the muscle before the mind can catalog what is happening. I tried to tackle one of them. Two others there were more than I first counted—held me before I could get a breath.
They were strong, but not rough. They were precise the way glass is precise when it cuts. My shoulder burned where one of them wrapped a hand so tight it felt like a vice. "Stop," I said. My voice was hoarse. They hummed like something tuned to a frequency that made my teeth ache.
One of the masked men—taller, with a mask that had a single vertical seam—leaned down toward my mother. His voice was muffled by the fabric and by a mechanical grain that sounded wrong. " Your bloodline has to be erased and never reincarnate , we can't have the Architect's blood line respawning again."
My mouth filled with the kind of sound I had spent a lifetime disallowing, a raw animal note. My hands crawled, palms slapping at the floor where Mom's blood was starting to bleed. Lyra's small body shuddered. The taller man's hands grabbed my sister's head and squashed it ending her life. I watched has my sister's headless body dropped to the group and became still. My mom screamed again tears rolling from her eyes .
"Why?" I managed. "Who—what are you?"
He straightened as if to answer and did something else entirely. He looked at me as if I were an interesting theorem. "You were never meant to exist , you were an error so was your family." The tears were pouring I could hardly breathe. My mum was barely clinging to life they had already beaten her half to death . I had to ask " Why!!!!, we were living a peaceful life, why would you rob that from us ? Why did you have to torture them ? Why not give them a quick death at least? He looked at me coldly .
Power radiated off them in a way I had read about but never seen. Not the cheap power of bravado or the raw energy of anger. This was a cold, quantified force—a presence that bent the light slightly, made my bones hum, made the cheap paint on the walls look like it had a diffraction pattern. I knew enough—an observation catalogued faster than fear could mutate—to sense the wrongness: signatures that did not match anything human, anything I had ever seen in late-night forums about energy fields and cults. This was otherworldly, and it screamed of design.
I had a single sentence ready in my brain—neat, mathematical, a promise promised with a voice that could not be undone. "I will kill you, Mark my words ." My words were shallow sparks.
They laughed, without warmth. Then they did the last thing I would live to hate them for. One of them reached into a pocket and withdrew something that reflected light—a little silver cylinder. He raised it without hurry, and the world tapered into a colorless tunnel.
I had the time to count precisely three breaths before everything became noise and absence.
They said the bloodline was erased. The last frame in my life was my mother's hand reaching for me and missing. Lyra's face carved itself into my memory like a coin pressed into wax. I tasted iron and grief and the certainty that the pattern I had been cataloguing all my life had finally been interrupted.
When my vision folded into black, I promised it one thing: I would not die here unanswered. I would multiply whatever cost they demanded—tenfold, a hundredfold—until the ledger balanced.
Then the light died.