Thursday began heavy, the sky pressing down. Lucy felt it the moment he woke—an ominous weight, like before the supermarket fight.
His mother noticed at breakfast.
"Another sleepless night?" she asked, spooning oatmeal into his bowl.
He nodded, unwilling to admit he'd dreamed again of David—always devouring, always bound by black chains.
At school, tension hung in the air. By noon, in the cafeteria, it broke.
David stormed in, hair wild, eyes burning. The dark threads engulfing him were so dense Lucy could hardly see anything else.
Without asking, David yanked a tray from a younger student. The boy protested. David shoved him hard.
"Calm down, freak!" someone shouted.
The jeer was the spark.
David smashed a chair against the table. The clang echoed, panic erupting. Students screamed, plates clattered.
Lucy's Eyes burned. The vision returned: David, face twisted, wrapped in red and black threads like a monster. The exact scene he had foreseen.
"Stop, David!" Lucy shouted, pushing through the crowd.
David spun, chest heaving. Their eyes met. Lucy saw past hunger into despair, the void of someone cornered.
Teachers rushed in, trying to restrain him. He fought with unnatural strength. A girl fell crying. Fear thickened the air.
The Sentence pulsed in Lucy's eyes, begging to be released. But he hesitated. If he used it here, what would happen? How could he explain?
Instead, he yelled the only words he could:
"You're not alone!"
For an instant, the threads wavered. Not gone, but shaken. Enough for two teachers to pin him down and drag him away.
Silence fell, heavy and brittle. Everyone stared at Lucy as if he held the answers. He lowered his gaze, heart hammering, and sat down.
He walked home like a ghost. David had snapped, and Lucy knew it wasn't over.
Inside, he froze. His father sat on the couch, guitar across his knees. Lucy couldn't remember the last time he'd seen him at this hour.
"You're late," the man muttered, barely looking up.
"There was trouble at school."
His father nodded distractedly, strumming dull, off-key notes.
His mother appeared from the kitchen with a forced smile.
"Your father got a gig this weekend. Just a bar, but it's something."
"Yeah," the man replied flatly.
Lucy risked the Eyes. The gray thread was still there, thick and fading. Not hate, not love—just indifference. A cord stretched to breaking.
It hurt more than David's outburst.
Dinner was quiet, cutlery scraping plates. His father left first, vanishing into his room, door shutting behind him.
Lucy met his mother's faint smile, a fragile mask.
That night, in his notebook, he wrote:
David erupted today. The Sentence burned, but I held it back.
I saw despair in his eyes. Not just sin, but a cry for help.
My father was home. The gray thread remains. Worse than anger—it's not feeling at all.
He closed the notebook, collapsing into bed with a bitter certainty: people's strings break in different ways. David was snapping under hunger, while his father unraveled in silence.
And he, bearer of the Karmic Eyes, had to decide which string to hold first.