A month had eased some of the rawness. Time did what it could: dull edges and make breathing less sharp. Sabrina laughed again with the brittle sound of someone rehearsing joy; Luna slept better on some nights and worse on others. They continued their assigned tasks, as always, the System’s hum a constant undercurrent to their days. Their lives had learned to hold two rhythms: the small domestic rituals with Denis, and the cold instructions that arrived on the devices.
Denis watched them with a watchfulness that had become part of his bones. He could see improvement; they were not the same hollow creatures from the night of the patrolman’s death. Yet the laugh that surfaced sometimes did not reach the eyes. The house felt like a stage where two actors practiced grief in the daylight and cruelty in the dark.
Then the devices pulsed another message.
It arrived in the quiet of an early afternoon, when sunlight cut slanted through the living-room blinds and the kettle steamed on the stove. The screen lit with harsh, official type:
FROM: ZOLA (Mad Scientist)
SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT: Acquire biological material — 3 hearts, 2 livers, 4 kidneys, and 5 liters of blood.
REWARD: Personal approval from Zola.
PUNISHMENT: Extended psychological conditioning; physical debilitation protocols.
NOTE: Method of acquisition is left to your discretion. All attempts will be monitored.
Beneath it, in a smaller block, another line blinked—an optional side assignment signed by a different hand:
OPTIONAL: From Bullseye
OBJECTIVE: Ruin the days of three specified persons. Method irrelevant.
REWARD: Bullseye’s approval.
Sabrina read the message first and the color left her face; it returned a little paler than before. Luna’s fingers trembled on the glass as she scrolled and scrolled again, as if the second reading might change the content.
“This is… impossible,” Luna whispered. “Where would anyone even—”
Sabrina’s jaw set. “It says ‘discretion’,” she muttered. The word felt like a mocking riddle. “That means someone else will decide if it’s good enough. If we bring something small, maybe she’ll accept it.” Her voice was already shifting into that careful, cold tone she used when shaping a plan.
They both knew what the ask would imply. The list was not only monstrous in quantity but in intention. Zola’s signature in the code had the soft, implacable cruelty of someone who measured life as material.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Luna’s mouth opened and closed; she could not form the thought she feared to voice. “We can’t,” she said at last. “We can’t do… that.”
Sabrina folded her arms, eyes narrowing with the dangerous calculation of a person who had been taught to see leverage in every demand. “We have to,” she said simply. “If we refuse, the punishment is… worse than anything we’ve had. Dreams that never end. Pain that lasts a month. What kind of life is that? If approval from Zola gives us room to rise, to be safer later, maybe it’s worth—”
“Stop,” Luna whispered, a small, sharp sound. “We can’t make a life on a promise from a man who wants to reshape people. We’re… we’re not him.”
They argued in the small language of people who had been forced to make impossible bargains before—half-answers, bravado, the glint of excuse. In the end, it was neither courage nor stubbornness that decided them but a practical, terrible logic: the nearest hospital lay three kilometers from their house, and the girls, for better or worse, understood how to move unseen. If anyone could satisfy Zola’s fragmentary demands without making the world bleed more openly, perhaps they could.
Luna’s eyes filled then, a hot, frightened sheen appearing unbidden. “If we do this, Dad will never forgive us,” she said. “And I don’t know if I can forgive myself.”
Sabrina’s face softened for a single, dangerous moment. “We’ll make it look like we did what they wanted. We’ll take what we can and make it seem like it came from somewhere else. Bullseye’s side-mission—ruining three days—will happen anyway, because we’ll be in the hospital. People will be delayed, inconvenienced; two birds. One stone.”
As they talked, both girls kept the conversation clinical, rehearsed. They catalogued possibilities without describing actions: times when the hospital was busiest, familiar staff who had predictable routes, supply vans that came at certain hours. Denis, who had always been a careful man, would never have known what specifics they considered; if he had overheard phrases like “shift change” or “supply corridor” he would have taken them as the flotsam of adolescent planning. He did not yet know the new gravity that a single night could carry.
That afternoon, they tucked their devices into deep pockets and moved through the house with the composure of people who wore their guilt like a second skin. Denis noticed only that they were quieter than usual, that Luna clutched her bag as if it was folded around something fragile, but he said nothing. When he kissed the top of Sabrina’s head as she left for an afternoon errand, he felt the small, lurching fear again—an unnameable tug that told him to watch closer; but his investigations had not yet produced the proof he needed.
That evening, as the city clouded and the neon lights came alive, the girls met briefly on the stairwell. Their faces were set in lines that had been drawn too long. They didn’t say words of comfort; they exchanged the small nods of conspirators and stepped out into a night that felt older than either of them.
Behind them, a small third light on each device kept pulsing red, watching like the world’s cold eye: rewards listed; punishments hinted; approval dangling like a coin above a hungry mouth.
The chapter closed on a quiet, taut image: Denis in his kitchen, turning a photograph in his hand—the three of them, happier once—while down the street, two girls crossed a bridge into the part of the city where answers and monsters were never easily told apart.
