- "Removal of an infestation has several stages, the first being the introduction of a pesticide."
---
The lab after hours was a mausoleum of white light. The kind that hums above you like an endless swarm, never blinking, never softening. Kael sat hunched over the stainless table, syringe in hand, his pale eyes narrowed to the glass vial that shimmered faintly under the lamplight. He moved with a surgeon's patience—no wasted gestures, no flourish. Beside him, Lucian stood in the reflection of the cabinets, hands clasped neatly behind his back as though presiding over some sacred rite.
On the table, the rat twitched.
Kael depressed the syringe. A clear solution slid into the vein with the silence of water. For a few seconds, nothing happened. The rat sniffed, licked its paws, as if nothing in the world had shifted. Then its body folded without a sound. Limbs stilled. Chest collapsed to stillness. Eyes glazed in instant surrender.
Kael set the syringe down with the same precision he had used to pick it up. "Forty-seven minutes latency," he murmured, jotting the numbers in a careful hand. "Respiration ceased in under ten seconds. No frothing, no convulsions. Clean."
Lucian's grey eyes caught the rat's corpse as if it were a gemstone. His lips curved—not into warmth, but into the sculpted grin of a man who had seen proof of divinity. "Beautiful. Not death. Correction." He leaned closer, voice a whisper only Kael could hear. "Like pruning disease-"
Kael did not look up. "But unstable. Half-life is still under five hours. If ingested too late, it will degrade."
"That is long enough." Lucian's gaze shifted past the rat to the empty desks beyond, sterile counters lined with labelled boxes. "An hour of invisibility is all we need. Imagine them eating, chattering, rutting like termites in wood. Then silence."
Kael's eyes flicked up once, golden under the fluorescents. He didn't smile, but the smallest trace of acknowledgment passed across his expression. "Then we need latency to match the routine. An hour from ingestion to death. Not before, not after."
Lucian nodded, satisfied. "Then we will give them exactly that."
---
For a moment, both were silent. Lucian's attention drifted to the glass window, where night pressed its forehead against the glass. He saw her in memory—the girl with veins like blue threads across white wrists, diary clasped like scripture.
Her body had fallen clean from the rooftop, no screams, no flailing. The diary had opened mid-air, pages fluttering like albino moths, scattering confessions no one would ever read in sequence.
"Katya was proof," Lucian said softly. "Proof they see what we place before them. A corpse staged with her words, and they applauded the illusion. Suicide, they said." He let out a sharp, amused exhale. "No one thought to peel deeper."
Kael's pen stopped. His eyes unfocused, remembering the way the syringe had pierced her skin like slipping into paper. "The compound dissolved. Nothing left." He spoke the words as an observation, not pride.
Lucian's gaze snapped back. "Which means the stage is ready. All that remains is the audience."
---
The colony was chosen
It was Lucian who decided the hive.
They sat later in his immaculate room, the mirror doubling their reflections into infinity. Lucian leaned over the desk as if over a map of war.
"The cafeteria," he declared. "Every hive has its drones. Mouths that chew. Bodies that swell and digest. Remove them, and the queen is exposed as only a bloated fraud."
Kael's fingers traced the rim of the vase absentmindedly. "Cafeteria is predictable. Meals distributed at fixed intervals. Uniform dosage is achievable. Powder can be introduced into the water tanks, or dusted in. Dissolves without color."
Lucian's expression sharpened into delight. "Friday. The hall is full. The hive humming in unison. And then—collapse. A chorus of silence."
Kael's voice remained neutral, but his words carried weight. "We'll need to finalise the measure. A spoonful too much and symptoms appear early. Too little and anomalies survive."
Lucian looked into the mirror, at his own sharp reflection doubled beside Kael's still figure. "Then we refine. We prune until every margin is perfect."
---
The process of refinement felt almost sacred; days became a liturgy of death. Rats, insects, tissue cultures.
Kael measured with relentless patience—droplet by droplet, dilution by dilution. He charted decay curves, heart rates, autopsy timings. His notes were immaculate, as though each dead rat deserved a thesis.
Lucian watched differently. He didn't care for numbers. He cared for the spectacle. For the way the rat scurried one moment and lay still the next, a switch flipped by unseen will. He muttered comparisons: "Like cutting antennae. Like pinching the thorax. Watch them stiffen."
Finally, after nights of narrowing the dose, Kael capped his pen. "One hour latency. Ten seconds to stillness. Undetectable under blood screens. Stability confirmed at six hours." He looked at Lucian directly. "It works."
Lucian's breath left him almost like laughter. "Then the hive is ready to burn."
---
The day of execution was as awaited a Friday which arrived with the ordinary banality of school life.
Students spilled into the cafeteria, trays clattering, conversations buzzing. The air was heavy with fried oil, damp coats, the incessant scrape of cutlery. To Lucian's eyes, it was the noise of a termite mound, blind mouths chewing wood into pulp.
Kael moved silently along the periphery. His hand slipped casually near the water dispenser, a flick of wrist, powder dissolving invisibly into the stream. No one noticed; no one ever did. Teachers barked, girls laughed, boys jostled each other like rutting stags. Kael vanished back to his corner.
Lucian sat in perfect poise at a central table. His grey eyes scanned the room as though observing a vivarium. He did not eat. His tray remained untouched, immaculate. He leaned his chin against his hand and watched the insects gorge themselves.
Time passed. The bell echoed. Still they chewed.
Then the first one coughed.
A boy near the window, hand pressed to his throat. His friend laughed, slapped his back. But the laugh cut short when the boy slumped forward, tray clattering.
Another tray fell. A girl staggered, eyes rolling, collapsed into the aisle. A scream rose, shrill and broken.
And then the hive split open.
Dozens fell in stuttering sequence—like dominos, like locusts sprayed with toxin. Some convulsed once, then lay still. Others crumpled mid-stride. Bodies hit tile with dull, repetitive thuds.
Lucian's eyes glowed. He leaned back, perfectly calm in the rising panic. Around him, teachers scrambled, shouting for ambulances, dragging students by the arms. The cafeteria erupted into chaos—screams, sobs, trampling feet. The sound of insects in death.
---
Kael stood in the shadow of the doorway, golden eyes fixed on the scene. Blank, recording. His lips parted only slightly, as if tasting the silence between screams.
The cafeteria unraveled in a way that made no cinematic sense—no slow-motion tragedy, no neat crescendo. It tore, ragged and immediate, into noise and incomprehension. One moment it was the ordinary cacophony of trays and conversation; the next, it was a place seized by sudden, animal panic.
A boy at the central island clutched his throat, eyes bulging, and the sound he made was not a word so much as a raw oblong of terror. It bent the air. His tray tipped, the clack of ceramic on tile a punctuation to the beginning of collapse. Around him a dozen smaller noises erupted—children stumbling, the high thin wail of a girl's laugh somewhere and then strangled off, the metallic scream of a teacher's whistle blown uselessly into the chaos.
They fell like knots being cut from a rope: heads dropping, knees folding, bodies folding in on themselves with a graceless, immediate economy. Some hit the floor and lay still, like clothes discarded after use. Others convulsed and then stilled. One boy clapped both hands over his mouth as if to catch light gone wrong; he slid down the bench, eyes already losing colour. A teacher screamed for medics and a different voice—older, calmer—barked orders that were half-commands and half-prayers. The sound of shoes on tile multiplied, people running, chairs scraping, the bright, useless clatter of cutlery falling to the floor.
It smelled then of old oil and coffee and a metallic tang that prickled on the tongue. Sweat and a new, acid fear. Kids who had been laughing thirty seconds before lay with mouths open and no sound at all. A pair of girls tried to carry a friend who had gone limp and skirted, the back of their knees buckling with the weight she had become. The overhead speakers cut out as someone slammed their hand against the wall. The whole room contracted toward itself, a hive in the middle of being pried open.
Lucian watched like a man watching moths against a glass. He did not flinch. He did not move beyond the minimal gestures that preserved his invisibility—lifted chin, a hand tucked at the back of a collar, the cool attention of someone who will later write an account and never once mention trembling. His face remained a careful mask: interested, amused, inscrutable. Kael's paper-thin script of notes would be the only ink to capture the timing and the patterns. Lucian only catalogued the aesthetics: the rhythm of collapse, the way panic sounded when a school full of mouths stopped at once.
Teachers became pinpricks of frantic authority. They hauled bodies away, called for help, shoved others toward exits with the practiced panic of adults trying to throw a blanket over something burning. One teacher dropped to his knees and pressed a palm to the throat of a girl whose skin had gone too pale. He whispered as he worked and the whisper was a tiny sound among so much noise, a prayer disguised as protocol.
Paramedics arrived in a roar—beyond them the staccato pulse of sirens bleating through the schoolyard—and the cafeteria filled with the thin, functional language of professionals: names called, limbs checked, pulse points found and cataloged. Stretcher beds lined the adjacent corridor; the floor was quickly scuffed a hundred new footprints. Nurses wrapped wounds and poured water that did nothing because the cause was not a laceration, not a visible toxin; it was something that reached under the skin like a quiet hand. People knelt over the still and the not-still, fingers trembling while they tried to hold on to a moment that would not hold them back.
From the doorway, Kael's gaze was dry and mathematical. He watched the sequence he and Lucian had arranged unfold with the same clinical attention he had once used to read a heart monitor in the lab: intake, latency, the final flattening into stillness. He noted tiny variances—a child who had eaten less and still moved, a boy who clamped his jaw and kept crawling towards the exit. Those anomalies lodged in him like data points that would not let him sleep.
And in the middle of the storm, Lucian was a blade honed and warm in its rocking. He did not help. He did not hesitate. Instead he let the panic make the world vivid for him, tracing the geometry of fear and the terrible beauty of it. He relished in it. When a teacher reached for a boy who would not lift his head, Lucian's eyes flicked, imperious, and then returned to the crowd. For them, for this experiment, restraint was as necessary as action. Any conspicuous help might have tethered them to the scene; they had to be observers, architects of effect invisible in the aftermath.
Earlier that day—hours now and a lifetime before—everything had been ordinary. The cafeteria had its usual noise, its established paths and routines: students queued, servers ladled trays, water tanks hummed, staff in aprons moved like clock hands. The mundane was their ally. They had exploited it not by force but by understanding the flows that no one questioned: who replenished the soup urns, the rhythm of a lunchtime service, the small trust adults place in the anonymity of supply chains. They had watched. They had waited. They had inserted an idea into the circulation of ordinary life so small it was invisible to anyone who did not know to see.
Kael remembered the moment of access—the quiet corridor past the back door where deliveries stacked in boxes like forgotten offerings. He had been patient in that dim space, patient in the way of someone with no need to hurry. He had never drawn attention. Someone in a jacket passed, a supervisor with a clipboard who barely cared for the boy's eyes; someone else rolled a trolley full of trays, two steps, another two—routine so rote the movements were blind. The instrument of their art did not scream; it hid inside things people trusted. He did not need to smear it across the world. He only needed to slip it into the predictable arteries.
Lucian had played his part with the same invisible choreography. He had taken his usual central seat that day, the expression he wore like a coin to be spent. He had let conversation brush him the way leaves brush a statue; he had let girls look and boys resent. He had managed, with a gesture or a glance, to situate himself where the collapse would look most natural. He had been careful to carry nothing, to make sure his coat hung empty, his hands unencumbered. The true artistry was in acting as if you belonged to the scene instead of above it.
The watching was the work. Lucian counted in the subtle arithmetic of human bodies: how many lined up, who sat two seats away from a sink, the ratio of mouths to trays at every long table. He cataloged the smallest variables—a boy who always ate quickly, a girl who bottled half her soup for later—and he and Kael placed their trust in probability and in the boredom of systems that could be predicted and therefore bent.
Now those probabilities congealed into catastrophe. The first call for ambulances had been shouted as if someone remembered an emergency for the first time; then the second, the third, piling like pebbles in a riverbed until there was nothing but a white flash of motion and steel. Volunteers came running—teachers and nearby students throwing improvised blankets, hair falling over faces, hands pulling at sleeves to make something work. Outside the doors the schoolyard spilled with parents who had been summoned by frantic phones: faces wet and terrified, the mouth forming prayers without sound.
Inside, the medics were efficient and inscrutable, the way professionals are when they have seen violence in some form and have learned to file it into procedures. They moved anatomically, checking, resuscitating, cataloguing. Whoever had died had died cleanly, without the messy theatre of blood and shredded flesh. That made what remained harder: the living were disrupted in ways that did not announce themselves easily to headlines. Those who survived did so with a scramble of broken things—stitches of trauma, a thousand small falterings in their skeletons. The hospital took nearly everyone who could still be carried.
Lucian and Kael had rehearsed this aspect in the sterility of their nights: not just how the compound should behave biologically, but how institutions behaved when faced with inexplicable mass harm. They predicted panic would be parsed into protocols, grief folded into statistics. The authorities would first look for contamination, then for an accident, then for sabotage; but the invisible that had been used moved like smoke through a net of surveillance. It left at most a suggestion in the blood and no trace the routine panels would raise flags at. That was their design: a result that would read to the untrained eye as incident—not design.
When the stretchers came, when screaming parents clustered beyond the cordon, Lucian closed the expression on his face the way one closes a book. He moved as if to join the flow of concerned adults, then stopped as if remembering something more important—to sit, to watch, to record. His posture was immaculate human grief; his eyes were iron. Kael remained a pillar in the doorway, clutching the thin piece of paper where he would later scrawl times and anomalies, the survivors' names noted in a cold column. He had watched, before their work that morning, diagrams of consumption and knew precisely—in concept, not in lettered detail—how many would need to ingest the compound to guarantee a certain result. That knowledge tasted of power.
Amid the chaos, small things clung to their plan's success. A girl who had only sipped, and then had been dragged from the room to the light, survived with a fever. A lanky boy who had been late to lunch and eaten a half-portion staggered but stayed conscious, his teeth clenched around the taste of something bitter that should have been innocuous. Kael's pen tapped once against his notebook; he circled the names and numbers like a man mapping prey that had not behaved as expected.
"Seem their intake was lower than the rest," he said finally, voice flat and factual when they later sat in a shadowed alcove away from the patrol of ambulances. He spoke as though choosing between line items on a ledger. "There's no alternate possibility."
Lucian let out a small sound that approximated pleasure. "Cockroaches," he said, and the cruelty of the word was a delicate thing in his mouth. "Seems there are simply cockroaches in the swarm. They'll be harder to kill, but their struggle is—" he paused, considering the adjective as if testing it for taste, "—more pleasant to watch. Repulsive, yet oddly entertaining."
Kael's stare did not flinch. "We account for anomalies next time. We calibrate." He shut his notebook like a lid closing on a specimen jar.
When the night finally edged in and the flashing lights beyond their window slowed to a paler pulse, the official numbers began to form in their heads like small islands of fact. Scores taken, dozens transported, only a sliver left to be called survivors. In the hush that followed, the academy would hold meetings, doctors would confer and raise questions into microphones, parents would demand answers, and the newspapers would print sober lines about contamination and grief. Everyone would point fingers and chart possibilities. No one would look, not truly, at the two boys who had watched the theatre from the best seat—cool, alert, unremarked.
And under the surface of all those official words, two quiet certainties crystallized. Their method worked. The invisible had proven its rapture. But so had the stubbornness of life: some would slip through, hold on; they were not yet gods. For that small failure — that clinging defiance of bodies that took less or ate less — they would find a remedy. Calibration would be next. The net would be tighter. The hive would be quieter.
---
By night, the school was cordoned in tape. Sirens had come and gone.
The news flickered on in Lucian's room.
It had become a habit for Kael to stay over, since neither's parents were present enough to care, and there was more to do at a time like this than keep their thoughts to themselves. Sharing theories, speculations, calculations, ideas... Suddenly felt as necessary as eating or drinking.
The TV screen glared it's red headlines at it's two observers:
"Breaking: sudden unexplainable collapse of students at Saint Lymira Academy. Twenty-three dead. Dozens hospitalised. Investigations ongoing."
Only with this, he couldn't be certain. Lucian switched the channel:
"...The students hospitalised are showing no signs of recovery; organ functioning appears to cease for unknown reasons."
Just to check, he changed the channel again. Same blaring headlines. Same monotone style of announcement:
"Scientists are baffled by the recent case of St. Lymira, stating that it could not be coincidence and that despite lack of proof it may be a purposeful act of terrorism."
With this, his suspicions were confirmed. Lucian's smile was glass-cut. He lifted his chin as though listening to a symphony. "Like a fire sweeping dry grass."
Kael leaned against the desk, arms folded, gaze on the screen. His voice was flat, factual. "But as I mentioned, two survived. The purge wasn't executed with total perfection."
Lucian's head tilted, eyes bright with cruel amusement. "Ah. Well, it is often the case that it takes more than one eradication until there are no outliers. It is a precaution one must take to prevent the parasite from growing immune or..." he paused, his gaze meeting Kael's.
"...Escaping still breathing."
Kael didn't argue. His pen tapped once against the desk. "Next time, we refine dosage. No anomalies."
Lucian's reflection in the mirror burned silver with conviction. "Next time, Kael, the hive will not rise again at all."
By then, though they were yet to admit it, they already felt that they would become achitects of extinction without any regrets.
Self-made gods who purge the repulsive for the sake of the future.