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Lily was sitting at her desk, turning around to face me. But it wasn’t just Lily.
Her eyes—usually a bright, expressive hazel—were completely, entirely black. The pupils had dilated so far that no color remained, reflecting the terror on my own face like two polished pieces of obsidian. Strands of dark, pulsing veins webbed out from the corners of her eyes across her pale cheeks, throbbing in time with an invisible pulse.
“What… what are you?” I whispered, my voice cracking, backing away until my spine hit the bedroom wall.
Lily sighed, a sound that carried a weight far too heavy for a child. The blackness in her eyes slowly receded, melting back into her normal hazel color, and the veins beneath her skin faded away into nothingness. She looked like my innocent little girl again, but the illusion was ruined.
“I am still Lily, Mom,” she said softly, standing up from her chair. “But I am also the anchor. What we are doing… you can’t possibly understand. It’s bigger than school. It’s bigger than this city. It’s about ensuring our survival.”
“You’re extracting something from under our house!” I yelled, tears finally spilling over. “You talked about removing me! You called me stupid!”
“I said love makes you stupid,” Lily corrected gently, taking a step toward me. I flinched, pulling myself tighter against the wall. She noticed and stopped, a flicker of genuine sadness crossing her face. “And it does. If you loved me less, you would have noticed the signs a year ago. You would have questioned why the basement electricity bills were so high, or why the soil in the garden is entirely dead.”
“What is the Gateway, Lily? Who is the Architect?” My voice was trembling so hard I could barely form the words.
“The ones who are coming,” she answered simply. “The ones who own the future. The school, the town… it’s all just a facade to keep the adults occupied while we prepare the grid. We are building the extraction points. Today was the final harvest for this sector.”
“I’m calling the police,” I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, my fingers slick with sweat. “I’m getting you out of here, we’re leaving—”
“The police won’t help you, Mom. Half of the department’s children are in my unit,” Lily said, her voice dropping to a chillingly practical whisper. “Why do you think Chief Vance’s son is always ‘studying’ at our library? We run this town now. Not the adults.”
I managed to pull my phone out, my thumb hovering over the emergency call screen. But before I could press it, the screen went completely black. A single line of glowing blue text appeared on the display: DISCONNECTED FROM THE AXIS.