Location: Mordveil Quarter — Crestwood City
Time: Midday — The Lockdown
---
Mordveil Quarter did not look like a place where people lived. It looked like a place people were stored.
The buildings rose in stacks—dark, angular, rain-stained—their upper floors leaning over the street as if trying to touch each other. Neon signs hung dead in their brackets. Old scaffolding clung to the walls like rusted vines. Between the towers ran an elevated road, cracked and patched, and above it all hung a ceiling of cables, wires, and half-finished skybridges that led nowhere.
The traffic on that elevated road had stopped entirely.
Crestwood PD had put barricades across both lanes. Armored cruisers sat angled across the asphalt, lights turning slow and patient, red-blue-red-blue, throwing color across the concrete like the city was bleeding. Cops in heavy vests stood in loose clusters, one with a clipboard, one with a scanner, one drinking coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. A drone hummed overhead, sweeping its lens across each vehicle.
A line of trucks waited in the left lane.
The first truck's driver's window rolled down.
Roman Volkov rested one arm on the wheel and watched a tired-looking cop approach. The man had a face like wet cardboard—rumpled, unimpressed, and clearly three hours into a shift that had already been too long. He didn't say hello. He didn't look up. He just held out his hand.
"License and registration."
Roman handed them over without a word.
The cop read the card. Then he read it again. Then he looked up.
"You're an immigrant, right?"
Roman's jaw moved before his mouth did. His voice stayed polite.
"Yes."
The cop grunted. "What are you carrying?"
Inside the truck—behind Roman, in the cargo space—nobody moved.
Roman's face did the thing it always did when he was about to lie: it got still. He reached down, picked up a clipboard, and answered as if he were discussing the weather.
"Imported vehicles. From Jiwon. Small orders. Domestic market."
The cop's eyes narrowed. "Jiwon."
"Yes." Roman's expression didn't change. "You know Jiwon. The islands. The big city with the electric signs. The place where they make the Kiriko series."
The cop blinked. "The what?"
"The Kiriko series." Roman's voice warmed, just a fraction—enough to be a problem. "You know. The cartoon. The one with the girl in blue. Spinning bird kick. She has the loud voice and the thighs of a—" He caught himself. "Ahem. She says, 'Kikō shimasu!' when she fights."
He mimicked the pose. One leg raised, one fist pulled to his chest. He did not appear to notice he was doing it.
The cop stared at him.
Roman held the pose for one full second too long, then lowered his leg.
"Kiriko is my favorite fictional character," he said. "She was created in Jiwon. Where they make cartoons. It is a very important cultural export there. The cartoon industry. They call it garakuton. Very big. Very respected."
Behind him, in the truck's cargo space, a small, strangled giggle escaped someone's mouth.
The cop's expression did something complicated. He looked at the clipboard. He looked at Roman. He looked at the clipboard again.
"Right," he said slowly. "Okay. Well." He handed the documents back. "Get some help, man. It's not too late."
Roman took the papers with both hands. "Thank you, officer."
The window rolled up.
The truck moved.
---
Inside the Truck
The cargo space was dark, dusty, and full of people who had just heard everything.
Mateo was in the corner with his head down, shoulders shaking, tears leaking out of both eyes. He wasn't even trying to be quiet. He was crying—laughing so hard he couldn't breathe, wiping his face with the back of his hand, wheezing like a kettle.
Ba had his hand over his mouth, but his hand was doing nothing. Every time he tried to stop, another laugh broke through. "Maricón," he gasped at Roman through the wall. "Ay, maricón."
Mei Lin leaned back against a crate, arms folded, a thin smile on her face. She looked at Roman the way a cat looks at a bird that has just fallen out of a tree.
"Gosh, darling," she said. "You always portrayed yourself so brave. So strong. So Sovikian. And here you are." She tilted her head. "It isn't a shame to show one's inner feminism, you know. Even if you are a male." She tapped her chin. "It isn't too late for you to come out."
The truck's cargo space howled.
Roman's hands tightened on the wheel. His ears went red. His neck went red. His face followed.
"Cut it out," he said.
Mateo wiped his eyes, still wheezing. "How—" he managed, "—how do you even know that character? How?"
Roman's flush deepened.
"I watched it when I was young," he snapped. "In Sovik. We had one channel. It was cartoons or the news. I picked cartoons."
"Uh-huh," Mei Lin said. "Sure."
"I was just trying to make the cop get out of our hide!" Roman's voice cracked. He slipped into Sovikian for the rest—a fast, furious string of words that meant, roughly, of all the things to be laughed at for, it's this.
Mateo laughed harder.
"How did you know the pose?" he asked.
Roman's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Shut up," he said.
The truck rolled on toward the Crestwood perimeter.
---
WELB 7 News
The studio lights came up. The desk was spotless. The banner behind it said WELB 7 — BREAKING NEWS, and under it, in smaller letters, a rolling ticker that never stopped moving.
Janet sat at the desk with her hands folded, her hair perfect, her expression precisely calibrated to concerned but not alarmed. She turned slightly toward Camera Two and began.
"Good afternoon, Crestwood. We begin with a developing story out of Fenwick District."
The screen behind her cut to a photograph.
A young man—twenty-four years old, according to the caption beneath his face—stood in the middle of a night street with his hands in his pockets and his chin lifted, looking at the camera like he'd just been told a joke and hadn't decided yet whether it was funny. Behind him: cars, lights, a crowd. The caption read: NATHAN DRAYKE, 24 — MISSING.
"Twenty-four-year-old Nathan Drayke," Janet said, "has been reported missing by individuals claiming to be his friends. Authorities describe him as an undocumented immigrant, known on the Vtube platform for a viral stream under the name The Vaultbreaker—"
A new clip appeared. Nathan Drayke, mid-laugh, in front of a row of parked cars at night, weaving between them with his arms out like a man performing a magic trick.
"—and for an illegal street race in Fenwick District, footage of which was uploaded to social media earlier this week."
Janet's expression didn't change.
"Circumstances surrounding his disappearance are currently unknown. The last confirmed sighting of Mr. Drayke was in the viral video you may have seen—one in which he can be heard performing a freestyle widely believed to be about Miss Sylvia Saiyan of the Kaelos clan."
The screen cut to a still from the freestyle video—Nathan mid-verse, one hand raised, the hype men bouncing behind him.
"Miss Saiyan's family has declined to comment."
Janet paused—one beat, exactly. And then, in the voice of a woman who had been in this business long enough to know that some pauses did more work than sentences:
"Authorities are asking anyone with information on Mr. Drayke's whereabouts to contact the Crestwood Police Department."
The broadcast cut to commercial.
---
The Livestream
The comments didn't cut.
@RealOne_77: "literally this screams kidnapping"
@MordveilMike: "more like murder to me tbh"
@CrestwoodTruth: "that guy got what was coming to him. so bluntly offending someone from a prestigious family like the Saiyans? what was that idiot thinking 😭"
@ChalkHead: "sniffed too much chalk and everything went to his head. well. there goes another young soul lost to stupidity."
@SilentObserver: "the freestyle was fire though. RIP to a real one"
@NoRegrets: "he knew what he was doing. he wanted the smoke."
@OffGrid_Owl: "nobody saying the real thing. nobody disappears this clean unless somebody wants them to."
@CarFanatic: "that race footage was insane though. the guy had hands behind the wheel."
@FinalTake: "clout is a hell of a drug."
The stream kept playing. The comments kept moving. The city kept turning.
And somewhere in a truck passing through a checkpoint in Mordveil, a man who no longer existed on paper watched the comments roll by on a cracked phone screen and smiled.
---
The barricade lifted. The truck rolled through.
Behind it, the line of vehicles waited for their turn, and the drone overhead kept sweeping, and the lights kept rotating red-blue-red-blue across the wet asphalt.
Nobody in the truck spoke for a while.
Then Roman, very quietly, said: "If any of you tell anyone about the pose—"
"We won't," Mateo said.
"We won't," Ba said.
"We'll tell everyone," Mei Lin said.
The truck rolled on into the dark of the quarter.
And the news kept playing.