The blue light from the monitor was the only sun in the world. Ace's phone, facedown on the desk, glowed briefly: 11:34 AM. They had burned through the night on a futile campaign—Carl, the patient tactician, teaching Ace to hold angles, control sprays, breathe between shots. Ace had died, again and again, his digital corpse piling up in a dozen different pixelated alleys. It felt like a metaphor he was too tired to decode.
With a long sigh that came from his bones, Ace pushed back from the desk. "I should get going. It's late."
Carl nodded, not taking his eyes off the high-score screen, a private monument to a victory no one else would see. "Yeah. I've got school tomorrow. Gotta wake up early." The word school hung in the air, a bland euphemism for the seven-hour prison sentence waiting for him.
Ace opened the bedroom door. The darkened hallway of the Ames house stretched out, a tunnel of sleeping normalcy. He took one step out.
And stopped.
His hunter's instinct, the one that prickled at the silence between heartbeats, fired a single, urgent warning shot. If you walk out now, you are leaving the perimeter. He'd spent the whole night trying to be a friend, a cousin, a gaming buddy. It was a good disguise. But the note in the desk drawer was the target, and the target was still live.
He slowly turned back. Carl was shutting down his PC, the fan whirring into silence.
"Carl."
Carl looked up. "What's wrong? Forget something?"
Ace took a deep breath, not for courage, but for control. The direct approach. The Eldren way. Identify the threat and confront it. "You're seriously not gonna tell me about it?"
Confusion, genuine and flat, settled on Carl's face. "What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about." Ace's voice was low, a blade being drawn slowly from its sheath.
"No," Carl said, a faint edge of frustration creeping in. "I have no idea, Ace. What's wrong?"
The calm snapped. In two swift strides, Ace was at the desk. He yanked the drawer open. The paper was there, folded with that same terrible neatness. He snatched it up, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet room. He held it out, a prosecutor presenting incontrovertible evidence.
"I'm talking about this, Carl."
The change was instantaneous and total. Carl's face didn't crumple; it emptied. All the soft focus from the gaming session vanished, leaving behind a pale, rigid mask. His breath hitched, audibly. For a second, Ace thought he might simply cease to exist right there, vanishing not in a puff of magic, but in a final, silent exhalation of shame.
"Give..." Carl's voice was a rustle of dry leaves. "Give me that."
He lunged, not with a fighter's grace, but with the desperate, clumsy physics of a falling body. His fingers scrabbled for the paper. Ace, annoyed by the grab—a reflex from a life of defending against grabs that had claws—shoved him back. It wasn't a hard push, but Carl was off-balance, a column of brittle kindling. He fell backward onto his bed, bouncing once.
He didn't get up. He just sat there, eyes wide, reddening at the rims as he fought a war against the tears threatening to breach. "It's none of your business," he choked out, the words messy, distorted by the pressure in his throat.
"Oh yeah?" Ace's anger was hot and frustrated, a tool he knew how to use. "You trying to kill yourself is not my business?"
"Yes. It isn't."
"Are you even hearing yourself? This is absurd." Ace waved the note, the paper snapping in the air. "Suicide is never the answer!"
Carl let out a sound—a bitter, broken chuckle that held no humor. "You don't even know what I've been through," he whispered, each word sandpapered raw. "So what gives you the right to question my life decisions?"
The question hung there.
"You're a coward, Carl," Ace said, the words leaving his mouth before he could filter them. They felt true, in the simplistic logic of battle: facing death was brave; fleeing it was cowardice. He didn't yet understand that for Carl, this was facing it. "That's what you are. A fucking coward."
He folded the note, a sharp, angry crease, and shoved it into his jeans pocket. It felt like carrying a live coal. He turned for the door.
"Wait."
Ace paused, hand on the doorknob.
Carl's voice came from behind him, cold and clear now, all the distortion gone, replaced by a terrifying finality. "If you show that note to your mom... you're dead to me."
Ace didn't turn around. He lowered his head, staring at the worn carpet. The choice was suddenly, perfectly simple. It was the kind of clear, brutal calculus his father must have faced a thousand times.
He spoke to the door, his voice barely a murmur, but carrying every ounce of his resolved, hunter's heart.
"I'd rather be dead to you than you actually being dead."
The living room felt like a staged set for a tragedy in which no one knew their lines. The overhead light was too bright, exposing every worn thread in the rug, every dust mote hanging in the air, every strained face. They had assembled with a quiet, panicked urgency: Sophie perched on the arm of the sofa, the folded note held delicately in her hands as if it were a wounded bird. Simon and Samuel sat stiffly in armchairs, still in their sleep pants and t-shirts, summoned from their beds. In the corner, Rose, Ace's grandmother, was wrapped in a shawl, her eyes wide and watery, not fully comprehending the crisis but absorbing its fear.
Ace stood by the archway, a sentry who had failed to prevent the invasion. He watched his mother.
Sophie was the first to speak. Her voice was soft, a bare whisper that somehow filled the room. "Carl… no." She looked at the paper, then at her nephew, her eyes pleading with him to take the words back, to make them untrue. "This… this isn't the way."
Carl stood in the center of the room, an island. He didn't look at her. He didn't look at anyone. His gaze was fixed on a point on the floor near his feet, his shoulders hunched as if against a physical weight. He said nothing. His silence was louder than any shout.
Samuel cleared his throat, the sound awkward and too loud. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, adopting the posture of a reasonable man. "Yes, Carl. You could have talked to us. You should always talk to us. We can make this work, you know that." He offered a weak, encouraging smile that died before it reached his eyes. "There's nothing wrong with taking help from your family."
At the word family, Carl's head snapped up. A sound escaped him—a short, sharp, bitter laugh that had no joy in it, only acid.
"Family?"
The word dropped like a stone into the still room. He slowly turned his head, looking at each of them in turn: his weary aunt, his uncomfortable uncles, his confused grandmother, his rigid cousin. His eyes were dry and terribly clear.
"Yeah, right." His voice was flat. "Do any of you even know where my father is right now?"
He let the question hang. No one moved. The silence was an answer. Simon looked away, studying his own hands. Samuel's mouth opened, then closed.
Carl nodded, a slow, final motion. "Let me guess," he said, his tone conversational, slicing through the pretense. "He's probably at The Rusty Nail, drinking himself till he passes out. Or," he added, the words chillingly precise, "till he fucking dies in a ditch. That's where he is. That's my family."
He took a step back, creating more distance. "You sit here and talk about help and talking." He spat the words. "You don't want to help. You just want the problem to be quiet. You want me to be quiet."
Sophie made a small, pained noise. "Carl, that's not true—"
"Isn't it?" He cut her off, not with anger, but with a devastating certainty. "If I talked, what would you do? Tell me it'll be okay? Tell me to ignore them? Tell my dad?" He let the absurdity of the last option hang in the air. "You can't fix this. You can't even see it."
He was trembling now, a fine, almost invisible shake that spoke of adrenaline and despair. "I don't want your help. I don't want your speeches. I don't want anything." His voice broke on the last word, the control finally fracturing. "Just… just leave me alone!"
As the final word tore from him, he turned and bolted for the stairs, a blur of motion in the too-bright room.
Ace moved on instinct, a lunge to intercept, to grab an arm, to do something—anything but let him vanish back into that silent room with the countdown still ticking.
A heavy hand landed on his chest. Samuel. His uncle's face was a mask of strained paternal authority, of a man applying the only rulebook he knew. "Leave him alone, Ace," he said, his voice low and firm. "Let him cool off. Let him think."
Ace stared at the empty staircase, then at his uncle's hand, which felt less like a restraint and more like a wall of willful ignorance. The hunter in him screamed that this was wrong, that you never left wounded prey alone, that the perimeter had just been breached. But he was surrounded by civilians, by the rules of a world that believed time and silence could heal a bullet wound.
He forced the tension from his shoulders. The fight drained out of him, replaced by a cold, hollow understanding. He gave a single, stiff nod.
"Yeah," Ace muttered, the word tasting like ash. "Okay."
He had obeyed the rule. He had stayed within the lines of normal, human protocol.
And as he stood there in the devastatingly bright light, listening to the faint, definitive click of Carl's bedroom door locking upstairs, he knew, with absolute certainty, that he had just made the gravest mistake of his life.