New Detroit, July 3, 2047
11:47 p.m.
Elijah Kane was seventeen and still believed the city could be outrun.
He had the route memorized: cut through the Packard Plant, hop the chain-link by the missing panel, follow the riverwalk until the sirens gave up. Every Black boy in the neighborhood ever lost had tried that route. None of them made it past twenty-five. Elijah figured he'd be different because he still had a brother who laughed like tomorrow was guaranteed.
Marcus was twenty-two, loud, beautiful, and currently winning thirty-seven dollars in a dice game on the corner of Orleans and Kercheval. Elijah could hear him from half a block away that big, reckless laugh bouncing off boarded-up houses like it could scare the rot away.
Elijah was coming back from the store with two warm grape Faygos sweating in a plastic bag and a half-eaten bag of Better Made barbecue chips. He was going to split the chips, let Marcus have the soda with the good pull-tab. Little brother privileges.
He never got the chance.
The Tahoe rolled up slow, no plates, windows already down. Three pops sharp, flat, wrong. The sound didn't even echo; the heat swallowed it.
Marcus hit the sidewalk like someone had yanked the strings out of him.
Elijah dropped everything. The bottles shattered. Purple soda ran into the cracks in the concrete like cheap blood.
He ran toward the gunfire because that's what you do when it's your brother. Because seventeen is still stupid enough to believe love can outrun bullets.
The shooter in the passenger seat saw him coming. Raised the pistol again, casual, the way you'd swat a mosquito.
Elijah opened his mouth to scream Marcus's name and the world went black.
Not dark but totally black.
It came from everywhere at once: from the busted streetlights, from the open mouths of alleys, from the spaces between his own ribs. A living, hungry black that tasted like ozone and grief. It wrapped the Tahoe the way a fist wraps a throat.
Thirty seconds. Maybe less.
When the darkness let go, the truck was gone. The men were gone. Only the smell of burnt wiring and the sudden, impossible quiet.
Marcus was bleeding out three feet away, eyes already glazing.
Elijah fell to his knees. Pressed both hands over the hole in his brother's chest like he could shove the life back in. Blood soaked his palms, hot and slick.
"Stay, man. Stay. Mom's making gumbo tomorrow, remember? You promised you'd eat two bowls."
Marcus tried to laugh. It came out wet. "Tell her… one was enough."
Then he was looking past Elijah at the same stars that never helped anybody down here, and the light in his eyes went out like somebody flipped a switch.
Sirens, finally. Red and blue strobing off broken glass.
Elijah stared at his red-black hands and understood, with the perfect, brutal clarity that only comes once in a lifetime:
Something inside him had just killed three men without asking permission.
And the city would never, ever let him keep it.
So he ran.
Three blocks to the Packard Plant. Past the murals of forgotten Motown legends, past the homeless vets who didn't even look up anymore. He climbed the fence, tore his jeans, didn't feel it. Slipped through the hole everyone knew about and let the shadows close behind him like a mouth.
Inside, he curled up on a pile of rusted engine blocks and cried the way only seventeen-year-olds can ugly, snotty, world-ending tears that taste like metal. When the crying stopped, he stared at the dark pooling around his sneakers and whispered the only promise left.
"Never again."
July 3, 2057 –
same heat, same smell
Twenty-seven-year-old Elijah Kane stands on the roof of the Packard Plant and watches fireworks lie to the city below.
Ten years. The hoodie is the same one threadbare, sleeves cut off, hem unraveling,
because some scars you wear on the outside so the ones inside don't kill you.
He no longer believes the city can be outrun.
He believes it can be outlasted.
His phone buzzes once.
Unknown number: They're moving the kids tonight. East side depot. Midnight.
Elijah pulls the hood up. The darkness rises to meet him like an old friend who never learned how to knock.
Never again, he thinks, and steps backward off the roof.
The fall lasts less than a heartbeat.
The shadows catch him before gravity remembers its job.