The first thing they took was your name. The last thing was your ability to miss it. Manifested by cognitive dissonance, in a world where society’s willful degeneration had led to the rise of an Orwellian regime, the people’s freedoms were dwindling and under relentless siege, no thanks to intentional blindness. The anonymity of cash had been eradicated, and every transaction now flowed through a single, world-sanctioned digital vein, all logged, scored, and weaponized. Surveillance drones scattered the skies, and the Watchers’ neural grids tracked all movements and purchases. Even idle curiosities were considered threats waiting to bloom. Ryder Blackwood understood this long before most. 2 The Cleansing At the age of twenty-two, he moved throughout the Silent District with the quiet discipline of someone who had spent a lifetime awaiting turmoil. He measured each footfall, and every glance he caught was critically assessed. Years of martial arts training (mostly in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Krav Maga) had carved economy into his muscles. He never wasted a motion, not even so much as a flinch without purpose. Shadows slipped over his high cheekbones, which exhibited a faint scar skimming his left jaw. Remnants of both fighting and a home life that had taught him pain first and explanation belatedly. Ever since witnessing the imminent decimation of society as a whole throughout the country, along with an exponential rise of the police state, he never walked the same path twice in a row. 3 Lucian Frost Tonight, he cut along a service alley bordering what had once been a community bank, now just a hollowed-out shell housing a biometric ATM pod flanked by twin Watcher pylons. The holo-signage above its sealed doors emitted the same message in a dozen tongues: CURRENCY IS TRUST UNREGISTERED EXCHANGE IS TREASON Ryder’s lip twitched, the closest he’d come to a smile in quite some time. He’d watched the shift happen incrementally, as coins dissipated from pockets and cash notes disappeared from tills at a rapid rate, being replaced by quick-response chips and retinal confirmations, before the last physical bill in existence was paraded on state feeds as if it were a relic from a diseased age. 4 The Cleansing His father Elias had called it progression, all the way up until the audits and asset freezes were implemented. First, it was Ryder’s older sister Elara who vanished into a reeducation camp at sixteen for “subversive coding.” Then came Elias’s disappearance into a transport convoy he never returned from, simply for voicing his opinion in retort to an autocratic government. Ryder’s mother Gloria called it nothing at all. She found her solace by retreating into a flat-screen glow of docility, until that too went dark in a scheduled District blackout that became unexpectedly elongated. She didn’t last long after Elias was taken; her body gave up in quiet surrender before that particular week ended. Ryder called it what it was: Leverage. 5 Lucian Frost From fifteen on, he trained harder, hit smarter and studied even longer. As his peers scrolled through curated feeds, he was busy mapping out camera angles and their blind spots, while learning essentials like how to fall without making a sound. He dialed things in, like how to break someone’s wrist with a twist so clean they didn’t scream until a second after. He cataloged weaknesses the way others collected memories. Broken family. Broken city. Same mechanics. Pressure a fault line long enough, and it is bound to rupture. A drone buzzed overhead, with its searchlight combing the alley. Ryder instantly slipped into a narrow wedge between a rusting vent stack and a cracked ferrocrete column, with the angle already measured. He 6 The Cleansing activated his portable signal jammer in order to confuse it. A light skimmed past him, washing the opposite wall and then faded seamlessly. The drone’s whirr receded toward the central town plaza. He checked the time on his obsolete analog watch, still ticking away stubbornly in a world of silent digital displays. It was five minutes until the first students would begin filtering past the Academy checkpoint a couple of blocks over and five minutes until Anya Volkov walked into something she deserved fair warning of. He’d been watching her for weeks now, before attempting to collaborate minds, not like the Watchers who were thirsty for leverage, but with the 7 Lucian Frost wary curiosity of someone who’d recognized an out of-place piece in a rigged game. She was a young chemistry teacher in her mid twenties who recently transferred into a Silent District school that no one in their right mind requested, unless they were desperate, reckless–or both. Her record, or what little he could pry from scrambled channels, ran cleaner than made any sense. Her eyes, when she thought no one was watching, ran darker than the state-approved optimism she was forced to wear in the halls. Ryder slipped from the alley with his hood up and hands loose at his sides, blending into the thin trickle of early pedestrians. 8 The Cleansing The Academy’s outer gates loomed ahead, with their steel teeth sunk into the ferrocrete, flanked by Watcher pylons humming with a low-grade menace. It sat inside the Safe Zone–A thin artery of functioning infrastructure carved through the ruins, where the Regime still maintained power, water, and the delusion of order. The main transit line cut through the wreckage, ferrying workers and students between the Safe Zone’s few intact blocks and the bombed-out Districts beyond. Above them, a screen looped President Thorne’s latest address, consisting of loyalty pledges, digital credit incentives, and riot footage stripped clean of context. Ryder scanned the crowd, indexing faces, strides, and tells. There was a mother gripping her child’s wrist too tightly. 9 Lucian Frost A delivery driver who had a cargo box that was too light for the strain on his shoulders. Two Watcher Executors stood at the gate, postures bored but eyes sharp. One had a nervous tic in his fingers. The other was too still, too eager and too ready for action. Then he saw her. Anya Volkov stepped off the transit platform with a satchel slung over her shoulder. Her hair was pinned in a style that was trying way too hard to be neat in a city that no longer rewarded effort. Her badge blinked pale blue against her coat: A. VOLKOV CHEMISTRY 10 The Cleansing She moved with the quiet, contained energy of someone living half in thought and half in the now. A soft frown dug between her brows as she passed a donation kiosk broadcasting the day’s credit quotas. Her gaze lingered on the armored van near the gate, on the faint scuff marks where someone had once tried to scratch a message into the metal before it was ground smooth. She squared her shoulders before presenting her wrist chip, then hesitated a fraction of a second before forcing a polite smile for the Executor. She was seeing the seams, even if she did not yet know what to do with them. Ryder adjusted his path to intersect hers beyond the gate. 11 Lucian Frost This was no coincidence at all, as he never met anyone unintentionally. But if the Regime was recruiting teachers to rewrite civics in its own image, then someone like Anya, a young, bright, and not yet dead behind the eyes individual, was either an enemy of the state... Or a liability to him. Quite possibly both. The scanner chirped acceptance as Anya breezed through the gate. The Executor with the nervous fingers watched her go for a beat too long. Ryder’s jaw clenched. Tonight, the digital ledgers would still mark him a non-entity, only a ghost who was threading the 12 The Cleansing Watchers’ blind spots. As he followed Anya toward the Academy doors, every sense was attuned to the weight of invisible eyes and the hum of a city being oppressed by a leash of code. His purpose crystallized now more acutely than ever. He wasn’t just preparing anymore. He was choosing when, where and how to strike first. Immediately after hearing this first dire transmission on a feed, he knew there was no further time to waste: Watcher Command Directive 09.4 Priority Broadcast: Civil Order Enforcement Update: Citizens of the United Dominion, recent acts of civil disobedience within restricted territories have disrupted the balance that ensures your safety and prosperity. All unauthorized gatherings, encrypted communications, and instances of tampering with surveillance infrastructure are acts of 13 Lucian Frost treason and punishable by death under Article Seven of the Order Preservation Act. Effective immediately, END TRANSMISSION
Chapter 1