The house was a tomb.
Thomas had moved with the efficiency of a raiding party. He didn't just "ground" Lucas; he demilitarized the zone.
The power cables to the high-end gaming PC—the one Maggie had bought for Lucas's fifteenth birthday—were gone. The router in the hallway had been locked inside a steel fireproof cabinet in Thomas's office. The smartphone, Lucas's only tether to the outside world, sat in the top drawer of Thomas's desk, alongside his service pistol and his passport.
"You want to act like a primitive?" Thomas had said that morning, standing in the doorway of Lucas's room. "Then live like one."
Lucas sat on his bed, naked again. It was the only thing his father couldn't take—his skin. He stared at the empty space on his desk where the triple-monitor setup used to sit. The silence of the room was deafening. No hum of fans. No discordant pings of chat messages. Just the sound of his own breathing.
But Lucas wasn't bored. He was a gamer; his mind was built for systems, for patterns, for finding exploits in the code. If he couldn't play Elden Ring, he would play the room.
He reached under his bed and pulled out a stack of books his father had always dismissed as "cartoon trash." The Art of War (the illustrated manga version), Lone Wolf and Cub, and a thick, tattered copy of a survivalist manual he'd found in a charity shop titled *SAS Survival Handbook.
He opened the manual. He started to read about shelter construction. He started to memorize the diagrams for trapping small game.
In the corner, a small, battery-operated radio—the only electronic Thomas had missed in his sweep—hummed with the static of a distant AM station. A news anchor was speaking, his voice clipped and urgent.
"...reports from Bangkok General Hospital indicate a rapid deterioration in patients exhibiting the 'Neuro-Flu.' Doctors describe symptoms including hyper-aggression, necrosis of the ocular tissue, and a complete loss of higher cognitive function..."
Lucas turned the volume up a notch. He looked at a drawing in his manga of a lone samurai facing a horde of demons. He didn't feel afraid. For the first time in months, he felt a spark of curiosity. A thrill that wasn't digital.
"Hyper-aggression," Lucas whispered, his eyes narrowing. He looked at the closed door, imagining his father on the other side. "Sounds like someone I know."
He traced the line of a trap snare in the survival book. He realized that while his father was busy fighting the last war—the war for discipline and grades—Lucas was preparing for a new one. And this time, he wasn't going to quit.