Riley
The woods went quiet after the first mile.
Not peaceful quiet. The wrong kind. The kind where birds stop singing and squirrels stop running and everything with sense knows something is wrong. I noticed it five minutes in. Filed it away. Kept walking.
The duffel was heavier than I expected. I'd shifted it three times already, left shoulder to right, then back again. My boots were soaked through from the damp ground. The map was in my pocket, the route burned into my memory.
I followed the trail east, toward the highway Helena had marked. The red line on her map led to a town called Harpers Creek, forty miles away. A place that was "still safe. For now." I didn't believe that. Nowhere was safe. But safe was relative. Some places were just slower to burn.
I'd been walking for maybe an hour when I heard them.
Footsteps. Multiple sets. Behind me. Not trying to be quiet.
I didn't speed up. Didn't slow down. Didn't turn around. That was the first rule of being invisible: never let them know you've seen them. The second rule: always have a plan.
There were three of them. I knew without looking. The footsteps were uneven—one heavier, two lighter. Men. Adults. Which meant they were either desperate or infected. Desperate was dangerous. Infected was worse.
I did a quick inventory without breaking stride. The duffel had weight but I could drop it. The multitool in my pocket was small but sharp. Helena's note was in my other pocket. Nothing else.
The gun came later. I didn't know that yet.
The trail curved ahead, a sharp bend where the trees grew thick and the light barely reached. I knew what they were thinking. The bend was where they'd make their move. Out of sight. No witnesses. Easy.
I let them think that.
I turned the corner.
The footsteps behind me sped up. Footsteps always sped up at corners. People were predictable. They thought corners meant privacy. They thought corners meant no one was watching.
They were wrong.
The first man came around fast. Tall. Thin. Unshaven. Eyes too bright. Not infected—not yet—but the panic was already there, the thing that made people stupid. His hand was reaching for my arm.
I didn't think. I moved.
My fist connected with his throat before his fingers touched me. It was a clean hit—the kind I'd practiced on the punching bag Helena bought me when I was twelve, the one she pretended not to notice I used at 3 AM when I couldn't sleep.
He made a sound like a choked gasp and stumbled backward, both hands going to his neck. His eyes went wide. He wasn't expecting that. No one ever expected anything from the gray hoodie. From the invisible girl.
I saw the gun then. Holstered on his left hip. His weak side. His non-dominant hand.
Stupid.
I grabbed it. The weight was familiar—I'd never held a real gun before, but I'd held Helena's old training model, the one she used for her lab's active shooter drills. She'd shown me once. Just in case.
She'd known.
The second man was already coming around the corner. He saw his friend on the ground. He saw the gun in my hand. His brain was still processing when I pulled the trigger.
The sound was louder than I expected. A crack that split the quiet open. The second man's chest bloomed red and he went down without a sound, his own gun clattering from his hand, unfired.
I didn't feel anything. That was the strange part. My heart was steady. My hands were steady. My breathing was exactly where it should be. I was calmer than I had any right to be. Calmer than I should have been.
I looked down at the first man. He was still on his knees, still clutching his throat, staring at his friend's body with an expression that was almost comical. Like he couldn't understand how the math had gone wrong.
I raised the gun.
Then the world went dark.
---
Something hit the back of my head. Hard.
I was falling before I felt it, my knees buckling, the gun slipping from my fingers. The ground rushed up and I caught myself with one hand, leaves and dirt grinding into my palm. My vision swam. The edges of everything went gray.
Footsteps. A fourth set. I hadn't heard him. He'd been waiting. Behind the trees. Patient. Quiet.
A hand grabbed my hood. Pulled me up. My head screamed. I tasted blood.
I was face to face with a man I hadn't seen before. Older. Maybe fifty. Gray hair cropped short. A face that had seen things. He was holding me up like I weighed nothing, his grip tight on my hood, my feet barely touching the ground.
He looked at me. Not at the gun. Not at the bodies. At me.
And he smiled.
It wasn't a kind smile. It wasn't cruel either. It was the smile of someone who had found something they'd been looking for.
"Riley Voss," he said.
I stopped struggling. Not because I was scared. Because if he knew my name, then this wasn't random. This was something else. Something Helena had tried to warn me about.
He tilted his head, studying me. "You're important. So don't die, kid."
Important. Not safe. Not protected. Important. That was worse. Important meant I was useful. Useful meant I was a tool. Tools didn't get to choose what they were used for.
My vision was clearing. The gray was receding. My head still throbbed but my thoughts were sharpening, sorting themselves into categories. Threat. Information. Exit.
I looked at him. Really looked. The way he held me—confident. The way he'd approached—calculated. The way he'd waited—patient.
He was dangerous. But he wasn't going to kill me. He'd said it himself. I was important.
I let my body go slack. His grip tightened instinctively, adjusting to my weight. That was the opening.
I met his eyes.
"I'll kill you," I said.
My voice was quiet. Flat. No heat. No threat. Just a statement of fact. Like saying the sun would rise or winter would come. Something inevitable.
His smile didn't waver. If anything, it widened.
"That's what I'm counting on," he said.
Something sharp pricked my neck. A needle. I hadn't even seen him move.
The world tilted. The gray came back, faster this time, swallowing everything. His face blurred. The trees blurred. The ground was gone. I was falling again, but I couldn't feel it.
The last thing I heard was his voice, calm and certain:
"Sleep, Riley. You've got work to do."
Then nothing.
---
I woke up to the sound of crying.
My eyes opened. The world was blurry at first, shapes without edges. I blinked slowly, forcing focus. My head throbbed—a deep, pulsing pain at the base of my skull where he'd hit me. My mouth was dry. My limbs felt heavy, like they belonged to someone else.
I was sitting on a hard bench. Metal. Cold even through my jeans. The air smelled like diesel and sweat and something else—fear. Fear had a smell. I'd learned that in foster care. It came out of people's pores, mixed with their sweat, turned the air sour.
I turned my head. Slow. Careful.
I was on a bus. A big one. Not a school bus—this was something else. Government-looking. Gray metal walls. Small windows with wire mesh embedded in the glass. The seats were bolted to the floor in rows, each one filled with a body.
Kids. All kids.
I counted without moving my lips. Twenty. Maybe more. Rows of them, slumped against each other, some still unconscious, some staring at nothing, some crying.
Rachel Han was three rows ahead.
She was curled against the window, her knees pulled to her chest, her face red and wet. Her shoulders shook with every sob. The girl next to her—someone I didn't recognize—had her arm around Rachel, but it didn't seem to be helping. Rachel kept crying, kept gasping, kept saying something I couldn't hear over the engine.
I watched her for a moment. Then I looked away.
I didn't go to her. I didn't call her name. I didn't reach out.
I could have. It would have been easy. Walk over. Say something. It's okay. We'll be okay. Someone's coming. The words were right there. I knew them. I'd said them before, in foster homes, to younger kids who cried at night. I'd learned to say them without meaning them.
But that was the problem. I wouldn't mean it. And Rachel—Rachel was the kind of person who would know. Not because she was smart. Because she was soft. She'd feel the lie. And then she'd cry harder, and I'd have to stand there and watch it happen, and I wouldn't feel anything except annoyance.
So I didn't move.
I sat on my bench, my back against the cold metal wall, and I watched the other kids instead. Cataloging. Sorting.
There was a boy near the front, maybe seventeen, his jaw tight, his eyes scanning the bus like he was looking for exits. Smart. Or paranoid. Sometimes the same thing.
A girl in the back, twelve at most, her face blank, her hands folded in her lap. Not crying. Not scared. That was more interesting. That was someone to watch.
A boy with a broken nose, blood dried under his nostrils, his wrists bound with a plastic zip tie. He'd fought. He'd lost. He was still watching the door like he was waiting for another chance.
And Rachel. Crying. Breaking. Already gone.
I reached up and touched the back of my head. My fingers came away with dried blood. Not much. The wound was small. But my head still pounded, and every bump in the road sent a spike of pain down my neck.
The man had hit me hard enough to drop me. Hard enough to draw blood. But not hard enough to kill. Important. That's what he'd said. You're important.
Important for what?
The bus hit a pothole. The whole thing lurched. Somewhere behind me, a kid started screaming—not words, just noise, the sound of someone who had run out of everything except fear. An adult voice yelled at them to shut up. I heard the crack of something hard against something soft. The screaming stopped.
I closed my eyes.
I thought about Helena. About her note. About the map she'd drawn, the route she'd planned, the bag she'd packed. She'd tried to get me out. She'd tried to warn me.
She'd known someone was coming for me.
There's a man named Cole. He'll find you. I don't know if you can trust him, but he knows things I don't.
Cole. The gray-haired man had said his name was Cole? No. He hadn't said it at all. He'd just known mine.
Maybe he was Cole. Maybe he wasn't. Either way, he'd found me.
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling of the bus. Gray metal. Riveted seams. A single flickering light.
I was in a cage. Moving. Going somewhere.
I didn't know where. I didn't know why. I didn't know what they wanted from me.
But I knew one thing.
I was going to find Cole—or whoever he was—and I was going to make him regret putting his hands on me.
---
Helena
The car smelled like coffee and fear.
Helena's hands were shaking on the steering wheel. She noticed them shaking. She told herself to stop. They kept shaking anyway.
The roads were empty. That was wrong. The highway should have been busy at this hour, even with the virus, even with the news. But the lanes stretched out in front of her, gray and vacant, like the world had already decided this part wasn't worth saving.
She'd driven to the school first. The parking lot was empty. The doors were locked. A single police car sat at the front entrance, the officer inside looking at his phone, not at her. She'd banged on the window anyway. Asked about her daughter. The officer had shrugged. Kids were sent home. Don't know anything else.
Home. Riley wasn't home. Helena had checked. She'd driven back to the craftsman house, left the car running, ran inside. Empty. The cereal bowl still in the drying rack. Riley's room still bare. The bag she'd packed—the one she'd hidden in the shed—was gone.
Riley had gotten the note. Riley was out there. And now Riley was gone.
Helena pressed her foot harder on the accelerator. The speedometer climbed. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five.
She was going back to the lab. To the files. To the records she wasn't supposed to have seen. To the names of the people who had planned this.
She knew what Project Last Generation was. She knew because she'd helped build it.
Not the training. Not the experiments. Not the monsters. But the virus? The virus that killed adults and left children standing? The virus that was engineered to collapse society just enough to need a new generation?
She'd modeled the transmission vectors. She'd run the simulations. She'd told herself it was theoretical. She'd told herself it was for vaccine development. She'd told herself a hundred lies, and she'd believed every single one, because believing the lies was easier than admitting what she was doing.
And now Riley was gone.
Helena's phone buzzed on the passenger seat. She didn't look at it. She knew who it was. The same number had been calling for three days. She'd ignored it every time.
She grabbed the phone. Threw it out the window. Watched it shatter against the guardrail in the rearview mirror.
She was done hiding. Done lying. Done being quiet.
She was going to find out who took her daughter. And then she was going to burn them down.
---
The lab was dark when she got there.
That was wrong too. The lab never went dark. The lights ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There was always someone there, always something running, always the hum of machines and the glow of screens.
Now it was dark. Silent. Dead.
Helena parked crooked, half on the curb, and ran for the entrance. Her badge still worked. The door clicked open. She stepped inside.
The hallway was empty. The main lab was empty. The offices were empty. Computers gone. Hard drives gone. Files gone. Every trace of the last six months erased like it had never existed.
She walked to her office. It was the only room still intact. Her desk was there. Her chair. Her personal laptop, still plugged in, still running.
She sat down. Opened the laptop.
The screen flickered. A single file sat on the desktop. A video file. Labeled with Riley's name.
Helena's hands stopped shaking. Her whole body went still.
She clicked play.
The video was short. Thirty seconds. A man she didn't recognize, gray-haired, calm, sitting in front of a white wall. He looked directly into the camera.
"Dr. Voss. Your daughter has been selected for Project Last Generation. This is not a punishment. This is not a threat. This is an opportunity. She has the psychological profile we need. The emotional distance. The survival instinct. She will be trained. She will be tested. She will become part of the future."
He paused. Smiled.
"You knew this was coming. You helped design the parameters. You knew what kind of child would be chosen."
The smile faded.
"If you want to see her again, you'll continue your work. The virus isn't finished. Neither are you. We'll be in touch."
The screen went black.
Helena sat in the dark office, the dead lab, the empty building. The silence pressed in on her from all sides.
She had helped design the parameters. She had known what kind of child would be chosen.
She had never thought it would be Riley.
She closed the laptop. Stood up. Walked out of the lab without looking back.
The car was still running. She got in. Sat there for a long moment, her hands in her lap, her breathing slow and deliberate.
Then she put the car in drive and pulled onto the empty highway.
She didn't know where she was going. She didn't know how to find Riley. She didn't know who to trust or what to do or how to fix what she'd helped break.
But she knew one thing.
She was going to find a way.
-_- -_- -_- --------------
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Now. Let Riley tell it.