It began with numbers lying, yes, the fire.
Henry adjusted a valve by two degrees well within tolerance. He rerouted a sensor through a redundant loop so it reported averages instead of spikes.
Heat rose slowly, politely, like a guest who removed his shoes at the door. The system nodded and logged Normal.
A coolant relay was delayed by a fraction of a second. A conveyor belt stuttered once every hundred rotations.
Power draw redistributed itself just slightly off-balance. Nothing any single technician could accuse. Everything a fire would adore.
He left no fingerprints.
No unusual access pings. Every interaction rode the back of an authorized process already in motion. To the ship, it felt like aging. To Henry, it felt like patience paying interest.
Flames ran the solvent mist like it had been waiting for permission. Heat bloomed sideways, pressure chasing it through vents and seams.
Smoke surged upward, thick and oily, swallowing light and turning distance into rumor.
Men shouted. Masks were dragged on. Heavy caps snapped into place, faces hidden behind filters and dull visors.
Boots pounded steel as procedures kicked in very clumsy. Suppression foam sprayed blindly, missing the real heart of the burn.
Henry was already gone from there.
He stood above it all, watching through a maintenance grate as chaos assembled itself.
Across the ship, Admiral Ferguson stiffened.
He smelled it before the alerts. Old officer instincts—trained before automation, before trust in machines. He turned sharply, eyes narrowing as partial alarms began arguing with each other.
"This isn't an accident!" he said coldly.
An aide opened his mouth. Ferguson cut him off. "Fires don't lie like that."
He straightened, voice snapping across the deck. "Lock internal sectors. Full sweep! There's someone on my ship."
Search teams fanned out immediately, silhouettes bulky with masks and helmets, rifles raised, vision narrowed by smoke and certainty. They searched where a person would be.
Henry moved where an idea would. As men hunted shadows, the fire grew. Contained enough to spread fear, precise enough to survive suppression.
Out of the smoke, unseen and uncounted, Henry Ford adjusted his cloak and whispered to himself, almost kindly,
"Now you are listening."
Because now, Henry Ford sat on the cold deck among the trapped people, cloak dulled with soot.
His white wrap looked like bandaging now, his brown shirt just another stain in the crowd. He breathed shallow, synced to the fear around him.
To cameras, another victim. To guards, another number. Above, boots thundered past. Henry waited patiently, gently smiling to himself. The safest place, he knew, was where no one imagined danger could think.
He had only one chance. It did worked. Creating a rumble on the lower part and distract everyone. But that wasn't it, there were two cameras in this hall.
That was the biggest problem but he had already calculated the angles from security room when thugs were busy stripping women. That in which position of the both camera angles, going is safe. He had only 3 seconds in hand, it worked.
He sat in second last row.
Admiral Ferguson's gaze swept the room again. Something felt… off. The fire had shut down to smoldering edges, yet the panic in the hall wasn't purely from smoke.
It didn't belong to the trapped.
The intruder might be here, Ferguson thought, tightening his fists.
But where? Could he have… blended in? Impossible. And then it happened.
A small figure stood abruptly in the center of the group—cap pulled low, face masked. Ferguson's heart skipped.
The voice was slightly altered, higher, soft, almost childish. Yet the way it cut through the room, calm and controlled, made the hair on his neck rise.
"You!" Ferguson growled, instinct flaring, "stop right there!"
The admiral lunged, fury and authority in every step. But the figure didn't dodge or resist. He yielded, sinking back slightly as if inviting the attack and then laughed. A dry, quiet laugh that twisted the room still.
"You are mad." the voice said, playful but dangerous. "Furious, even. But mad is… temporary."
Ferguson stopped, hand half-raised. "Who… what—?"
"I know you," the voice said. "I know more than you want me to."
The figure straightened, posture small yet unnervingly commanding. "You think you are something big, huh? You think rules, medals, your so-called discipline protect you. But I have walked inside you before you knew how to fear."
The admiral froze. "Inside me?"
"Yes. Step by step," the voice said, deliberate. "And now, so will you. First… you will panic. Then you will question every decision, every order you've ever given. Next… you will realize the people you relied on, the crew you trained to obey, will doubt you. And finally… you will see exactly how lonely and powerless you have been your entire life."
Ferguson's face paled. "What… who are you? How do you know—"
"You remember it?" Henry continued, tone low, venomous, "Being only eight. You begged to write stories with your immeasurable talent and creativity. You dreamed of being an author. But your parents, those towering idiots—looked down their noses at your hands instead of lifting them. They wanted you 'great,' meaningful by society's standard. Not happy or fulfilled. Not you."
Ferguson's jaw slackened. "H-how… how do you—?"
"I watched you fold under their weights." Henry said, moving closer, scalping each word.
"Every time you tried to claim your own life, your own voice, it was crushed for their pride. For their image. Their definition of worth and it's still there, simmering, even now. You are still the scared little boy they shaped."
The admiral staggered, thoughts spiraling. Memories he hadn't spoken aloud in decades surged. His father's sharp laughter, his mother's disappointed frown, the blank pages he never filled. How could this… who is this kid?
"You will die, Ferguson." Henry said tenderly, "step by step, in a way that reminds you of every time you felt powerless. Every time they told you no. Every time they forced you to obey. You will beg for control, but it will slip through your fingers until nothing is left but… you."
The room felt smaller. The fire, the smoke, the chaos... it all receded, leaving Ferguson stunned, the words sank into him like ice water.
He stared at the figure. Masked. Cap low. Innocent yet impossibly dangerous.
"How… how do you know that?" he whispered, panic creeping into his voice.
Henry's laugh resounded through the hall, quiet and cruel.
"Because, Ferguson… I have been listening your whole life."
The masked figure in the center of the hall tugged at his cap. No...
Ferguson's eyes widened—what should have been Henry's face was… not. A child, maybe ten or eleven, grinning with innocence, staring up at him.
"Impossible… A kid!?" Ferguson whispered, panic twisting his voice.
Above, in the shadows, RealHenry Ford hung upside down from a maintenance beam, cloak wrapped tight, hair hanging like ink. Two knives balanced perfectly under Ferguson's throat, almost invisible against the atmosphere.
Ferguson didn't understand or feel that.
Henry's grin was calm, patient.
"Goodnight." he murmured.
The knives pressed slightly, a whisper of pressure, precision absolute. Ferguson's eyes darted, frantic but his hands couldn't reach, his mind couldn't process.
And then Henry pulled the knives back, slow, deliberate, the kind of movement that carved fear into memory.
Ferguson gasped, trembling, trapped between disbelief and terror. The child in the hall? A distraction. The predator had always been above.