- "The queen cannot fight without her workers to do the dirty work. She can only command and run."
---
Morning came slower now. The city still functioned — trams screeched, neon advertising screens blinked awake, cafés stank of burnt coffee and sweet grease — but something hung in the air, acrid and unspoken. News tickers ran longer than usual, headlines stretched across glowing displays with the same rhythm of urgency: MYSTERIOUS COLLAPSE IN CITY DISTRICT. INVESTIGATIONS CONTINUE.
Lucian leaned against the iron fence outside school, blazer unbuttoned, hair catching the sunlight like it belonged on an expensive poster. He was half-listening to the chatter around him, half-feeding on it. Groups of students murmured about police combing through restaurants and snack bars, about forensic vans parked outside alleyways. Theories spilled easily from their mouths, each one duller than the last.
"Some say it's like a virus. I heard from my cousin the government's hiding it."
"No, it's radiation—my uncle swears there's a leak in the eastern plant."
"Cursed. Has to be cursed. People don't just… drop like that."
Lucian's smile cut clean through their panic.
"Maybe," he said, tilting his head, voice smooth as if he were gossiping in a theatre foyer. "Or maybe the world is tired of carrying dead weight."
The girls giggled despite the chill in his tone, drawn to the way his eyes glittered, to the calm assurance that seemed untouchable. The boys scowled, muttering about his arrogance when his back turned. Lucian drank it in, the polarity of reactions felt like the best award to his performance. Praise and envy: two sides of the same mirror in which he only saw his own superiority reflected.
---
Inside the school, paranoia had already nested itself. Desks wiped with disinfectant. Hall monitors posted at the entrance to the canteen, checking trays. Posters on every wall: Report Symptoms. Stay Vigilant. Protect One Another. It was laughable.
Kael sat at his desk as if nothing had changed, pencil tapping a steady rhythm against paper. His golden eyes were angled down, yet his ears were sharpened toward the teachers at the front, their voices low, clipped.
"…forensic team couldn't identify a primary agent. They're testing for bacterial traces, but so far nothing. Victims presented with organ failure but no common toxin."
"They'll have to expand the panel. If it's chemical, it's… novel."
Novel. The word pleased Kael. His pencil paused. He let it rest against the paper and folded his hands neatly, storing the overheard fragments like pressed specimens in glass slides. When the bell rang, he left without comment, slipping unnoticed between groups of jittery students who still believed themselves safe if they only whispered hard enough.
---
The contrast arrived almost by accident: a teacher intercepting him in the corridor.
"Kael. A word?"
It was Dr. Ivanova, the physics lecturer with tired grey eyes and soft lines around her mouth. She carried books like shields, but there was gentleness in the way she spoke to him.
"You're one of the few still focused, aren't you?" She gave a small, weary smile. "It's chaos in the classrooms. I can hardly keep them listening. But you—" she tapped the folder in her arms, "—you're still taking notes like the world makes sense."
Kael inclined his head. He didn't say it aloud, but her observation was correct: the world made sense because he and Lucian were the ones scripting its collapse.
"You've got a rare mind," she continued, voice soft but firm. "Don't waste it. When you look at the panic out there, remember—your calm is an asset. Maybe even something the rest of us can lean on."
She meant it kindly. Kael filed it coldly, a specimen of unguarded trust. He almost pitied her, almost wondered what it might be like to allow her words to matter. But the thought dissolved as quickly as it formed, drowned beneath the knowledge that her world was already rotting.
---
At lunch, Lucian basked in the circle of attention as usual. Girls lingered at his table, leaning too close, voices syrupy with admiration. He flicked glances at them, smiled without warmth, offered careless remarks that set them blushing.
One of them, a slender girl with auburn hair and notebooks full of doodles, dared to linger after the others left. "Lucian," she began, voice tentative, "don't you ever get… scared? About what's happening?"
He looked at her properly then, studying her face the way he might study an insect pinned under glass. Her fear shimmered in her eyes, soft, human, fragile.
"Scared?" His laugh was quiet, edged with contempt. "No. Fear is for those who don't understand where they're standing. If you only knew how small this all was…"
She didn't understand, of course. But she leaned in anyway, as though proximity to his certainty could make her safer. Lucian allowed it, if only to amuse himself. The fragility of her hope was borderline pathetic: so easily offered, so easily crushed.
---
That evening at the lab, the two of them reconvened. The fluorescent lights hummed above stainless steel benches, rows of equipment reflecting their faces in warped fragments.
Kael set down his notes. "Teachers are talking about contamination vectors. Forensics are circling, but they don't have a trace."
Lucian smirked, pulling on latex gloves. "Of course they don't. They're blind. And even if they weren't, what would they do? Lock down the city? Halt the swarm from feeding?"
Kael was methodical, grounding the words that drifted like poetry from Lucian's lips. "We'll need a delivery system with tighter control. What we've done spreads too quickly to remain invisible. Smaller doses. More precision."
Lucian tilted his head, considering. "Precision for efficiency. But don't forget the spectacle—sometimes their panic is more useful than their silence."
Between them lay petri dishes, fragments of tissue samples, charts where Kael had already calculated distribution models. He pointed to the margins. "If we refine this into a biological carrier—fungal spores, perhaps—it could nest unnoticed before activating."
Lucian's eyes gleamed. "A sleeper agent in their lungs. Beautiful."
Kael didn't flinch at the word. He simply noted the practicality: incubation periods, thresholds, the mathematics of collapse. And yet—when Lucian read over his notes, eyes alight with visions of a purified world—Kael felt the faintest pulse of something warmer than calculation. A recognition that this partnership was not just function, but necessity.
---
They walked home under sodium streetlights, silence folding between them. Lucian's stride was sharp, elegant. Kael's slower, thoughtful. For once, Kael broke it.
"Do you think they'll ever see us for what we are?" His voice was low, almost lost to the sound of passing traffic.
Lucian's reply was immediate, unwavering. "They already do. They just don't have the words yet."
Kael looked at him sidelong, at the curve of his mouth in the yellow light, at the confidence that never cracked. He thought, briefly, of Dr. Ivanova's gentle encouragement, of the auburn-haired girl's trembling question. He thought of how easily they had placed their hope in him, in Lucian. Fragile threads reaching toward fire.
And he knew then, with the clarity of fact, that he would never need their kind of connection. His only anchor was walking beside him, hands folded loosely in his coat pockets, speaking of swarms and superiority with the conviction of prophecy.
---
The week after the club massacre, the city's air felt different—clogged not with smoke or dust but with unease. Every corner seemed to bristle with suspicion.
Television screens in shop windows churned out updates with the same manic energy as a swarm. Anchors spoke about "unprecedented patterns," forensic experts were interviewed in confident tones only to contradict one another by evening, and headlines blared words like contagion, toxin, anomaly. In the streets, conversations dissolved into whispers as soon as someone drew near.
At school, teachers began enforcing curfews. Bags were searched at random. The corridors thrummed with rumours, half-superstition and half-paranoia: curses, demons, secret chemicals leaking through the ventilation system.
Lucian listened, smiling thinly, as a group of girls whispered at their lockers.
"They say it's in the water."
"No, it's in the food—they're dosing us."
"My cousin swore she saw a figure… something in black, watching."
Lucian leaned against the lockers, arms folded, and with the lightest of inflections asked, "And if it's simply you? If people like you are breeding sickness yourselves?"
The girls froze, unsettled. His tone was casual, but something in his gaze made them scatter down the hallway like startled insects.
Kael observed from the side, silent. He admired Lucian's ability to turn suspicion back on others, to melt seamlessly into the role of a charming classmate when needed, only to strip that mask off in an instant.
But Kael had overheard something else—teachers muttering near the staffroom, one saying, "We may have a contamination vector in the student population." Another: "We'll need to test water samples. God help us if this isn't random."
The phrase contamination vector rang in his ears for days. It made him feel as though the adults were fumbling through the dark, brushing dangerously close to truth yet still blind.
---
That Friday, they sat in the common room where a state broadcast flickered on-screen. A woman in a pale suit, immaculate as porcelain, addressed the nation. She carried herself with such certainty it was almost offensive.
"Our young people are the lifeblood of our society," she declared. "We cannot falter in protecting them. We will enact new measures—new oversight—to ensure every child thrives."
Lucian's mouth curved into a slow, sardonic smile.
"Thrives," he murmured, tasting the word as though it were sour. "Like maggots thriving in rot."
Kael did not look up from the notes he pretended to read. Yet his voice, quiet and flat, cut the air: "Wasted breath. Wasted oxygen."
Lucian's eyes gleamed at the answer. He turned his gaze back to the woman on-screen. Cameras adored her—every gesture, every pause. She embodied control, power, inevitability.
"One day," Lucian whispered, just loud enough for Kael alone, "someone ought to silence her perfection. Tear out the script she recites and see if she still bleeds like the rest."
There was no laughter in his tone, only something coldly amused. Kael said nothing, but a faint pressure coiled in his chest—a mix of revulsion at her sanctimony and an unspoken agreement with Lucian's disdain.
---
That night, walking home beneath the dull orange glow of sodium lamps, Kael became aware of Lucian's footsteps beside his own. Steady, matched. He hated how it steadied him. The streets felt less hollow when Lucian was there, though the word safe curdled in his mind as weakness.
Lucian spoke as though delivering a lecture to the void:
"You know what they'll never managed to fully percieve, Kael? That what we're doing isn't destruction. It's reduction. Cutting back the overgrowth until only the necessary remains. The rest of them—these fevers of flesh—they multiply without thought. We bring balance."
Kael watched his profile in the lamplight, sharp and composed, the certainty radiating like heat. He almost said it then—that he needed him, that without Lucian's clarity the world seemed unbearable. But the words stayed fossilised inside him. Instead, his fingers brushed the iron railing as they crossed the bridge, grounding him.
Lucian glanced over, half-smile faint. Kael's lips nearly twitched in return. Almost.
---
The idea came a week later, born not from rage but from curiosity.
They had killed in broad swathes before—masses collapsing in moments. It was efficient, yes, but crude. There was elegance in slowness, in precision, in letting decay unfold stage by stage.
The chosen subject was insignificant: a boy from their class, pale, often overlooked, the kind who dissolved into the background. No one would notice if he faltered; no one would defend him.
"Like another ant," Lucian said softly. "One ant strays, the colony does not mourn. That's why he's perfect."
Kael engineered the method—a carrier strain refined in the lab, subtle enough to take hold unseen. Not a poison to burn instantly, not fumes to sweep through a crowd, but something alive, microscopic, creeping. He adjusted its potency with care, almost tenderness, making it both inevitable and gradual.
Delivery was simple: a small contamination slipped into a drink. The boy swallowed his fate without knowing.
---
By the week's end, symptoms emerged. At first, only a cough, brushed off as trivial. By the second, his hands trembled when he reached for books. Friends chuckled awkwardly, insisting he was fine, though their laughter thinned with each day.
Lucian and Kael watched from the edges, silent observers.
Kael kept notes in a coded book, every detail precise: Day 6: coughing increased. Day 9: marked tremors, appetite reduced. Day 12: pallor, sclera tinged yellow.
When Lucian leaned over once, Kael snapped the notebook shut. His pulse betrayed him, but Lucian only smiled, eyes glittering.
The boy's decline was slow, ghastly. His movements grew sluggish, his face waxy. By the third week, whispers followed him through corridors. He withdrew, isolated, as though the sickness exiled him from his own peers.
Lucian found beauty in it—the stripping away of vitality until only weakness remained. He spoke about it as though sculpting, chiselling flesh down to reveal its essence.
Kael felt something else. Not pity—not for the boy. But an unsettling flicker of recognition in himself: the more the subject deteriorated, the more he recognised the way Lucian's presence propped him up, the way he clung silently to that certainty.
---
One evening, after hours bent over lab flasks, Kael's exhaustion betrayed him. He scrawled notes clumsily, ink bleeding into the margin.
Lucian leaned across the bench, voice light but deliberate.
"Careless," he teased. "Imagine ruining a masterpiece with sloppy hands."
Kael's head snapped up, ready with some dry retort—but the smirk on Lucian's lips disarmed him. Against his will, his own mouth twitched, almost smiling. The moment was fragile, gone in an instant, but Lucian caught it.
He stored it away, like a precious specimen.
---
The boy collapsed two days later in the cafeteria. The silence that followed was total—hundreds of eyes fixated, the air taut with dread. Teachers rushed, dragging him away. Murmurs erupted. Was it the curse? The contagion? Another strike of whatever unseen hand was thinning their numbers?
Lucian and Kael sat calmly, finishing their meals. To them, it was merely the conclusion of an experiment.
But the fear that rippled outward, the way the school seemed to contract into itself afterward—that was the real result. The colony was restless. Ants scrambling, sensing their structure was being dismantled grain by grain.
---
The next evening, on the walk home, Lucian spoke with a brightness that made Kael's chest tighten.
"Do you see it? How fragile they are? It takes almost nothing—just a trace, just patience—and their entire illusion of health crumbles. That's the art, Kael. Not in one grand spectacle, but in slow unraveling."
Kael didn't answer. He watched his breath coil into the cold air, feeling again that dangerous pull—the urge to admit the truth. That what tethered him here wasn't only science, wasn't only ideology. It was Lucian.
Instead, he pressed his silence into shape, as he always did. And Lucian, satisfied, walked on.
But in Kael's mind, something restless stirred—something he could neither extinguish nor name.