Part XXII - A Killer's Eyes
By late August, the Phoenix Empire had a new, physical heart—and it beat with the rhythmic, churning sound of old iron. The used printing press, purchased with Sarge's blood money, had been wrestled into a corner of the living room, where it now dominated the space like a squat, greasy idol. It was a hulking, malevolent beast of cast iron and churning gears, and its presence had fundamentally changed their home. The apartment no longer smelled of coffee and Maria's cooking; it was now permanently thick with something industrial and alien: the sharp, metallic odor of hot grease, ozone, and the bitter tang of cheap ink.
The machine had become Maria's nightly tormentor. It was a relic, prone to jamming at the worst possible moments. Each night, long after Isaiah was asleep and the apartment was quiet, she would begin the ritual. She'd feed a sheet of the expensive paper—paper they couldn't afford to waste—into the machine, hold her breath, and pray. More often than not, her prayers went unanswered. There would be a sickening crunch of gears, followed by the sight of a beautiful page being mangled and smeared with ugly streaks of ink. She would wrestle with it, her hands stained black, a smudge of ink eventually finding its way to her cheekbone like a warrior's sigil. But the press, for all its faults, was not the true bottleneck in their frantic production of Chapter Three. The real problem was the artist.
The titan's mind was willing, but his three-year-old body was failing. The relentless, industrial schedule they had imposed was a poison, slowly eroding his childish resilience. He would sit at his small drawing table for hours, his shoulders slumped, his head propped up on a tiny hand. Maria would watch him from the kitchen, her heart a tight, aching knot of guilt and a profound, unsettling awe. She saw the genius in the swift, confident strokes of his pencil as he laid out the first few pages of the new chapter, "The Turtle and the Bear Thief." It was whimsical, brilliant, and perfect. But she also saw the immense toll it was taking: the heavy eyelids, the listless way he moved, the dark circles that shadowed his eyes. It had been getting worse for days, but on this particular evening, a deeper exhaustion had settled over him. He had barely touched his dinner, and now, as he sat at his drawing table, a profound silence emanated from the living room.
From the kitchen, Maria listened to that silence. It was, in its own way, more worrying than the sound of a pencil scratching. The silence stretched, tense and heavy.
It was broken by a low, guttural growl of pure frustration—a sound that made the hairs on her arms stand up.
"Isaiah?" she called out softly, her voice laced with concern.
There was no answer. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she walked quietly from the kitchen into the living room. She saw him slumped at his drawing table, his head in his hands, his small shoulders trembling slightly. He wasn't drawing; he was just sitting there, a picture of pure defeat. Her heart ached.
"Just one more page, sweetie," she said, her voice now barely a whisper, trying to soothe the tension she could feel radiating from him. "Then we can stop for the night, I promise. We're so close."
Her words, meant to soothe, landed like fuel on a fire. He went rigid. For a split second, all the sound in the room seemed to die, sucked into the vortex of his building rage. Then, a guttural roar of pure frustration ripped from his small chest: "NO MORE!"
He hurled the pencil with all his might, the two shouted words hanging in the air as the pencil clattered sharply against the far wall. The sound of the impact was immediately followed by a raw, heartbreaking wail. It was the pure, unfiltered sound of a tired little boy who had been pushed past his absolute limit, and it cut through Maria like a knife.
She dropped the dish towel she was holding onto the kitchen counter and was moving before she even made a conscious decision, her heart pounding. She rounded the corner into the living room to find him slumped at his drawing table, his small body trembling, his face buried in his arms.
"Oh, baby," she whispered, her voice aching with a guilt that had been building for weeks. She crossed the room in two quick strides and was on her knees beside him in an instant, her hands gently rubbing his back. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
The Titan's consciousness registered a flash of cosmic humiliation, repulsed by the weakness of this tiny body. Then, all thought vanished. He just turned and collapsed into her, burying his face in her shoulder, his small hands clutching her shirt. He was nothing but a child. The exhaustion was a storm that had finally broken over them.
Without a word, Maria gently scooped him up from his chair. He was so light, a fragile weight in her arms, all the fight gone out of him. She stood, holding him tight against her chest as she rocked him gently. His heartbroken sobs, muffled against her shoulder, began to subside into shuddering breaths.
A tiny, broken whisper reached her ear.
"Can't," he breathed, the word a pure admission of his tiny body's limits. "I can't."
The simple confession shattered what was left of Maria's composure. She squeezed her eyes shut, holding him tighter as if she could physically absorb his pain.
"Shhh, I know," she murmured, her own voice thick with guilt. "You don't have to. No more tonight. I promise. We're done. We're all done."
She carried him to his small room, the weight of him both a comfort and an accusation. He was quiet now, his exhausted body limp against her shoulder. She gently laid him down in his bed and pulled the thin blanket up to his chin. His eyes were already half-closed, his tear-streaked face soft in the dim glow of his nightlight.
Just as she thought he was asleep, he spoke, his voice a sleepy, slurred whisper: "Don't be sad, Mommy."
The words, so simple and perceptive, were a fresh wound in her already aching heart. She had to bite her lip to keep a sob from escaping. She leaned down and kissed his forehead, her hand stroking his hair.
"I'm not sad when I'm with you," she whispered back, her voice thick with unshed tears. "I love you, sweetie. Get some rest."
A tiny, contented sigh escaped him, and then he was gone, pulled under by the deep, peaceful tide of sleep. Maria stood over him for a long time, one hand resting on his chest, feeling the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing. This was her son. Her brilliant, impossible, and fragile little boy. He was not an empire. He was a child. And she had almost broken him.
That realization settled deep in her bones, a cold, heavy certainty. For the next few days, the drawing table in the living room remained untouched. The press in the corner sat cold and silent. She let him be a child, watching with a painful sort of relief as he simply played with his blocks, his small world blessedly free of deadlines and expectations. The guilt, however, remained, a constant, low hum beneath the surface of their newfound peace.
It was only a few nights later, when the quiet of the apartment felt less like a reprieve and more like the ticking of a clock, that she returned to her own desk. The press was mercifully silent, and Isaiah was asleep. Maria sat, working under the bright, focused beam of a magnifying lamp. This was her sacred duty as editor and inker. She had the finished pages for the first half of the story stacked neatly beside her. Now, she was starting on the chapter's key action sequence: the confrontation with the Bear Thief.
As she began to ink the lines of the villain, a profound chill ran down her spine. The drawing was, like all his work, brilliant. But it was more than that. She had rendered the Bear Thief with cold, terrifying anatomical precision. As her pen traced the lines, she saw the sheer will to inflict pain, the flat, predatory emptiness in his eyes—eyes that mirrored the same ancient, calculating coldness she sometimes glimpsed in her son's. The question screamed in her mind: How does a three-year-old know how to draw a Titan's eyes?
Maria leaned back from the desk, her breathing shallow. This wasn't just a story anymore. It was an artifact from a place she couldn't understand. Every clean line she inked felt like an act of complicity. By publishing this chillingly realistic depiction of violence, what was she unleashing? The drawing was the final straw. She knew, with an absolute and unshakable certainty, that she could not continue to push him like this. The cost was too high.
She found Marcus in the kitchen, poring over a calendar, his face a mask of stress. He was mapping out their remaining production days against the looming, blood-red circle he had drawn around the date their first payment to Sarge was due.
"He's taking a break," Maria said, her voice quiet but firm.
Marcus looked up, his eyes tired and bloodshot. "What're you talking about? We're not even done with Chapter Three."
Marcus ran a hand through his hair, his frustration palpable as he stabbed a finger at the calendar. "A break? Maria, we can't! Chapter Three hits Gary's shelves next week, and he's already pushing for a banner on Four. Sarge's money is the deadline. We stop production, we die. It's that simple."
Maria didn't raise his voice. She didn't need to. She walked to her desk, picked up the freshly inked drawing of the Bear Thief, and held it out to him.
"Look at this, Marcus," she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Don't look at it like a comic book character. Just look at it. Tell me how a three-year-old boy knows how to draw that. Tell me."
Marcus took the art board from her. He stared at it, his business-minded focus slowly melting away. The hard lines of his face softened, replaced by a look of dawning horror and utter confusion. He traced a finger over the villain's eyes, not quite touching the paper, as if afraid of what he might feel.
"My God, Maria," he whispered, his voice rough. "Where does a kid learn to draw a face like that? That's not a bully... that's a killer." He set the art board down on the kitchen table as if it were a loaded gun.
"That's what I'm talking about," Maria said, her voice quiet but filled with a new, hard authority. "That's why this is not a negotiation. That is my son in there. I don't know what's happening, or where this comes from, but the empire does not come before him. He will rest."
Marcus looked from the chilling drawing on the table back to her face, his arguments about deadlines and money forgotten, replaced by the same cold fear he saw in her eyes. He gave a slow, heavy nod, finally understanding the true cost of what they were doing.
In the final, frantic days before the deadline, Isaiah's burnout became a full-blown creative rebellion. He refused to draw the climactic fight scene with the Bear Thief. The story, with its violence and its darkness, no longer held any interest for him. Instead, he started obsessively drawing other things. He drew the helpless, sad-eyed sea turtle over and over. And from memory, he drew the faces of the kind, elderly men he saw playing chess in the park. The apartment was littered with these new, gentle drawings, while the action-packed conclusion of Chapter 3 remained a gaping, unfinished hole.
One night, Maria stood in the middle of a living room, a picture of quiet desperation. She stared at the wall where she had pinned up the finished pages. On one side was the dark, violent sequence of the Bear Thief. On the other hand was her collection of Isaiah's new, gentle drawings. They were two separate, warring stories.
And then, in a flash of exhausted, desperate inspiration, she saw it. They didn't have to finish the fight scene. They could pivot.
An idea, brilliant and pure, took shape in her mind. She ran to her desk, grabbing Isaiah's folder of detailed story notes—the blueprints for his entire Pilaf Saga. She frantically flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for: the notes for Chapter 4, titled "They Call Him...the Turtle Hermit!" The plan was all there: after the Bear Thief, the grateful Turtle was supposed to return with a "gift"—the introduction of the mysterious old master.
She looked from the notes for the next chapter to the scattered, obsessive drawings Isaiah had just made. The turtle. The old men. It all clicked into place. She could solve the problem of this chapter by pulling the ending of the next chapter into this one. It was a radical editorial choice, a complete restructuring of the narrative, but it was their only way out.
She began to work with a feverish energy she hadn't felt in weeks. She wasn't a mother or a machine operator anymore; she was a master editor, performing surgery on a living story. She carefully selected the best of Isaiah's new drawings. She rearranged the existing panels to create a new final sequence. The hero, Goku, would defeat the Bear Thief quickly, with the single, powerful "Jan-Ken Fist" move from the notes. The violence would be swift, not gratuitous. Then, the real ending—the ending of the next chapter—would begin.
She used Isaiah's new art to perfectly create the final, magical sequence from his future chapter notes: the grateful Turtle returns from the sea, but he is not alone. He is carrying a mysterious, wizened old man with a turtle shell on his back. Maria worked through the night, a whirlwind of ink, glue, and bristol board. She created a new final scene that perfectly introduced the wise, ancient mentor figure, using the exact character Isaiah had already created, but bringing him into the story ahead of schedule. It was a brilliant cliffhanger.
She inked the final line just as the first, pale light of dawn began to filter through the window. She leaned back in her chair, every muscle in her body aching, her eyes burning from lack of sleep. The finished art boards for Chapter 3 were stacked neatly on her desk, complete. The chapter, and perhaps the empire itself, had been saved. But it hadn't been saved by the raw, untamed genius of her son. It had been saved by the quiet, desperate brilliance of his editor, a mother who had found a way to build a future out of broken pieces.