Swish. Swish. Swish.
The harsh scrape of the broom against the rough concrete was the only sound in the dim light. Kevin, a thirteen-year-old with a deep scowl and a clear look of annoyance, was fighting a losing war against the dirt.
The old garage was a monumental disaster. He had been sweeping for over half an hour, but every time he dragged the worn bristles across the floor, the dust seemed to mock him, multiplying instead of vanishing.
"I hate this place..." he muttered under his breath, his grip tightening on the wooden handle.
Frustration began to boil in his chest. He picked up the pace. His methodical sweeping turned into violent, erratic strikes. Swish, swish, swish! He swept with such speed and force that years of accumulated dust lifted off the ground, creating a thick, suffocating gray cloud that swallowed him whole.
"Cough, cough, cough!"
Kevin dropped the broom—letting it hit the ground with a hollow thud—and buried his mouth and nose in his forearm. Yielding to the tension, he stumbled backward, desperate to escape the dirt cloud.
But the coughing was just the beginning.
Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks. Both hands shot up to his temples as he squeezed his eyes shut. A sharp, stabbing pain flared at the base of his skull, pounding like a bass drum. It was a familiar agony, one he despised with every fiber of his being.
"How's it going in there?"
A calm, slightly raspy voice echoed from the garage entrance.
Kevin cracked one eye open, enduring the throb of pain, and saw his dad, Arthur Mercer. The blond man was casually leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, taking in the disaster his son had just created.
"How do you think it's going?" Kevin groaned, rubbing his head. "This place is a freaking pigsty, Dad! I swear there's more dirt in this garage than in a damn quarry."
Arthur let out a quiet huff of laughter, completely unfazed by the kid's tantrum. "If you stopped complaining so much and just took a breath, your head wouldn't hurt so bad, Kevin."
Kevin glared at him, but the pounding in his temples intensified, forcing him to wince. Catching this, Arthur's relaxed demeanor shifted into a sharp, scrutinizing look.
"Hey... you haven't taken your pills today, have you?" the man asked, standing up straight.
"I ran out last night," Kevin replied, leaning heavily against a stack of cardboard boxes, his breathing shallow. "And I couldn't go get more because I haven't left this cave since we got here. I've spent two days moving heavy furniture, hauling boxes, sweeping dirt..."
"All you do is complain," Arthur cut in, rolling his eyes. "Do you know how to do anything else? You sound like a broken record."
The blond man stepped away from the doorframe and pointed toward the street, bathed in the morning sunlight. "When you head to school today, stop by a pharmacy first. Get your painkillers and anti-inflammatories. There's cash in your backpack."
Kevin's eyes went wide, the headache forgotten for a split second. "Go to school? Are you serious?!" the kid blew up, throwing his arms in the air. "Dad, I barely speak a word of French! How the hell do you expect me to go to school and ask for meds at a pharmacy when I can't even say 'my head hurts' without sounding like an idiot tourist?"
Arthur looked at him with that trademark, unshakable dad-patience that took zero excuses. "Well, locking yourself in here eating dust isn't gonna magically fix your accent. So get out there, go to school, and talk to people. It's the only way you're going to adjust."
Kevin opened his mouth to argue, locked and loaded with a hundred logical reasons why staying in the garage was a way better idea than facing French teenagers. But one look at his dad's stern expression told him the battle was already lost.
His head delivered another vicious throb, a harsh reminder of how badly he needed those pills. Finally, he caved, letting out a defeated sigh that slumped his shoulders.
"FINE, DAD, I'M GOING!" Kevin yelled.
Without turning around, he started moonwalking toward the back exit of the garage, snatching his backpack off a box with a quick, pissed-off swipe.
Arthur watched him step out into the daylight. Just as Kevin was about to cross the threshold and vanish into his first, terrifying day of school in a foreign country, his dad's voice stopped him.
It wasn't a casual scolding about skipping school anymore. Arthur's tone had dropped—heavy, serious, and laced with an absolute warning.
"And Kevin..." Arthur locked eyes with him, making damn sure the kid understood the gravity of it.
"Remember," his dad commanded. "No powers."
As Kevin walked down the sidewalk, putting distance between himself and his dad's dusty workshop, a fairly logical thought crossed his mind: Maybe I should've asked him where the pharmacy was. Or, I don't know, the address of my new school.
Too late to turn back now. Kevin dragged his feet through the streets of Paris, desperately hunting for any useful sign.
A glowing green cross, a school zone sign, anything. But for a thirteen-year-old foreigner nursing a killer migraine, the streets of the City of Love were an unbearable maze. Every building looked identical to him: pale stone, gray roofs, and wrought-iron balconies. Great for a postcard, an absolute nightmare for directions.
Kevin pulled his phone out of his jeans pocket. Seeing the time on the screen, he let out a loud groan.
"Awesome. Already late for my first day," he muttered, shoving the device away without a single ounce of panic. "Whatever. It is what it is. Not like I'd understand a word they're saying anyway."
He reached a busy intersection and stopped at the edge of the curb, waiting for the walk signal to turn green. The roar of engines, blaring horns, and chatter in a language he couldn't grasp made the throbbing in his skull feel like a jackhammer. He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to massage the pain away.
When he opened his eyes again, the exhaustion vanished in a flash, overridden by a pure, unadulterated shot of adrenaline.
Right in front of him, halfway across the street, a girl with blue hair tied in pigtails had just rushed onto the asphalt to help a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing old man who was moving at a snail's pace.
Kevin processed the entire scene in a fraction of a second. The girl. The old man. And a black car barreling toward them at full speed with zero intention of braking.
In that exact moment, the crushing pressure in Kevin's brain dropped to zero. His vision sharpened. Time seemed to crawl to a halt.
Kevin shot his arm out. His hand clamped down like a steel vice around one of the blue-haired girl's pigtails. With a harsh, violent yank, he pulled her backward, dragging her and the old man back onto the safety of the sidewalk.
VROOOOOOM!
The car blew past them by sheer millimeters, kicking up a gust of wind that whipped their clothes around, the driver never even touching the brakes.
"Ow!" the girl cried out, grabbing her head after the sudden, painful hair-pull as she landed flat on her butt.
Kevin ignored her. Boiling with rage, he took a step into the street and screamed at the fleeing car. "Hey, jackass! Don't you know how to use a freaking brake pedal, you moron?!" he roared at the top of his lungs in flawless, furious English, flipping the bird at the vehicle's rear bumper.
Still panting, Kevin spun around to face the two almost-roadkill pedestrians. First, he locked eyes with the old man, who was leaning on his cane and opening his mouth—probably to thank him in the local tongue.
Noticing this, Kevin clicked his tongue. He figured they wouldn't understand a word of his native English. He flipped the switch in his brain, pulling up the forced vocabulary lessons he had to suffer through before the move.
"Ne dis rien (Don't say anything)," Kevin cut him off.
His French was rough, slurred, and tainted by a heavy, grating foreign accent that completely butchered the Parisian pronunciation. He held up a hand to silence the old man before he could get another word out.
"Listen, old man," he continued in his broken French, scowling as he fished for the right words, "I don't care if you're senile or if you think cars are gonna magically stop for you. But next time, at least cross the street with someone who's paying attention, get some thicker glasses, or buy a guide dog. Figure something out before you get yourself killed!"
Without waiting for a response from the bewildered old man—who was giving him a highly enigmatic look—Kevin snapped his attention to the girl.
The blue-haired teen was still sitting on the ground, rubbing the roots of her pigtail and blinking in shock at the boy's atrocious accent. Next to her, a delicate little cardboard box lay open, its contents—a bunch of colorful, crushed macarons—scattered across the filthy pavement.
"And you..." Kevin pointed an accusing finger at her, stumbling over the grammar but making his point loud and clear. "Who do you think you are? Indestructible? Risking your own life by running out blind like that is just stupid. The light was red."
Marinette, still reeling from the near-death experience and the guy's awful French, felt a spike of pure indignation flare in her chest. She jumped to her feet, cheeks burning bright red with anger.
"For your information, I had the situation completely under control!" Marinette fired back in her fluent, native tongue, crossing her arms and shooting daggers at him with her large blue eyes. "And you didn't have to yank my hair like a caveman! Plus, you have no right to be so rude to this gentleman or to me!"
Kevin looked her up and down, his lips pressing into a thin line as he processed her rapid-fire French, completely unbothered by her yelling. Suddenly, the spike of pain at the base of his skull came roaring back.
The adrenaline crash had hit, and his head was screaming for those pills again.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Kevin dismissed her, rubbing his temple again and turning his back on them. "Don't worry about it. You don't have to thank me for saving your life. You're welcome."
Without a backward glance, leaving them both completely speechless, Kevin walked away down the sidewalk, ditching the chaos to resume his hunt for the pharmacy.
Marinette stood rooted to the spot, her jaw slightly dropped, practically shooting sparks from her eyes. She glared at his back until the incredibly rude, weird foreigner disappeared around the corner.
Letting out an exasperated huff, Marinette slowly knelt down, gathered what was left of her macarons, and turned to the old man, asking in a gentle voice if he was alright.
Kevin walked at a brisk pace, rubbing the back of his neck to ease the tension. He'd been marching aimlessly for about ten minutes when he started to notice something seriously weird about the atmosphere:
The bustling streets of Paris were emptying out. The people who had just been crowding the sidewalks seemed to have slowly vanished, leaving an eerie, unsettling silence in their wake.
But the stabbing pain at the base of his skull was so blinding he couldn't even focus on the mystery. It was right then that his migraine-addled brain finally rubbed two brain cells together.
"Google Maps..." Kevin muttered out loud.
Smack! He facepalmed hard. It was so painfully obvious. The headache had made him stupid, but he was literally carrying a GPS-enabled computer in his pocket that could find the nearest pharmacy in seconds.
He pulled his phone out triumphantly, opened the app, and typed in "Pharmacy." However, his tiny victory crumbled instantly. The screen loaded endlessly, eventually serving up the dreaded pixelated dinosaur icon and the message: No Internet Connection.
"Of course. Dad didn't pay for the international data plan," he complained bitterly, grinding his teeth. "Five-star service, Arthur. Really."
He tried to pull up the offline map, but without a network connection, the little blue location arrow just spun in circles, totally unable to plot a route or even figure out which way was north.
He sighed, shoved the useless slab of glass back in his pocket, and kept walking the old-fashioned way: trusting his absolute garbage instincts.
What should have been a quick stroll turned into absolute torture. After two agonizing hours of walking in circles, sweating, and feeling like an invisible power drill was boring into his brain, he finally saw it. A neon green cross glowing at the end of the street. A pharmacy.
The little bell above the door chimed softly as Kevin stepped inside. The blast of air conditioning was a godsend, but his vision was swimming from the sheer exhaustion. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed an older woman stocking boxes behind the counter.
Not paying her much mind, Kevin made a beeline for the aisles in the back, desperately scanning the shelves for familiar boxes of ibuprofen or any anti-inflammatory he could recognize by the packaging colors.
He grabbed a couple of rectangular boxes and dragged his feet toward the register.
When he reached the counter, he blinked in confusion. The person standing there wasn't the older woman from a minute ago. It was a tall man, dressed in a spotless white lab coat, staring dead at him.
Kevin frowned for a microsecond. When did the shift change? he thought. But the pain was clouding his judgment so badly he decided to just ignore the weirdness. He was way too wiped out to ask questions. He slapped the medicine boxes onto the glass counter and dug into his backpack for cash.
"Will that be all, Mr. Kevin?"
The man's voice was smooth, carrying a perfectly pronounced, flawless English accent.
Kevin froze. His hands stopped dead inside his backpack. The headache seemed to evaporate instantly, replaced by a massive spike of fight-or-flight adrenaline that iced its way down his spine. He slowly looked up, locking eyes with the so-called pharmacist.
"How do you know my name?" Kevin asked, raising an eyebrow, every muscle in his body instinctively coiling tight.
The man didn't answer with words. Instead, his lips stretched into an unnatural, grotesque smile.
Before Kevin could even take a step back, a wet, sickening sound sliced through the air. The skin on the man's wrists ripped wide open. A torrent of thick, dark blood erupted under high pressure, but it never hit the floor;
Defying every law of physics, the blood solidified in a fraction of a second, forging itself into a razor-sharp crimson spear.
SQUELCH!
Kevin didn't even have a split second to react. The hardened blood spear tore through the air and drove itself deep into his left shoulder with brutal, crushing force, lifting him inches off the floor from the sheer impact.
A choked gasp tore from the kid's lips as blood stained his jacket. His first day in Paris had just turned into a waking nightmare.