Syntaxes

The Front of the Line

Gary, Indiana — Letter L

The freezing rain slices sideways across my face. Old motor oil, sulfur, and dead iron choke the mud of this Gary scrapyard.

I’m on my knees in the sludge between two crushed shipping containers, pressing my shredded sleeve against the hole in my shoulder. Blood leaks out, hot and thick between my fingers. Numbness creeps down my left arm, cold and heavy like wet sand.

Ten feet away in the dirt lies my Cipher.

He’s twisted up against a stack of bald truck tires. His neck is bent at a wrong angle. His eyes stare blankly into the gray sleet. He never even got his pistol out of the holster under his arm.

I hear them coming.

I hear only the wet, slow crunch of boots grinding through gravel and broken glass. I look up through the dark and see two of them.

They are tall. Bone-thin. Long coats drink in the yellow glare of the yard’s floodlights like holes cut out of the air. They approach through the sleet at a steady walk, unhurried enough to make running feel pointless.

The brand on my ribs burns hot enough to make me want to vomit. Letter K died in July. I felt K die when we were hiding in Chicago. For five months, every single morning I woke up, I knew I was at the front of the line.

I wonder where M is right now. Are they asleep in some warm bed, oblivious? Or are they staring at a ceiling somewhere, waiting for the punch in the gut they know is coming? And N, and O, and the rest of them stretched all the way down to Z—thirteen kids scattered across this miserable, wet rock, living on borrowed time. We never got to meet. We never got to stand in the same room. We’re just names on an execution list, ticking down in alphabetical order.

I’m sorry,I think, the thought raw and useless in my chest.I couldn’t hold them longer.

I see a rusted steel I-beam lying in the muck five yards away. It’s eight feet long, caked in orange rust and wet grease.

I reach out with my mind. I grab the mass of it with everything I have left.

Move,I scream inside my skull.Move!

A blinding spike of heat drives through my temples. I hear a wet pop behind my nose, and hot blood drips down my upper lip, washing into my mouth. The iron beam groans. It drags three inches through the muck, throwing up a wet spray of gravel, and then my grip shatters. The pain in my head explodes into white spots. The beam crashes back into the sludge with a dead, heavy splash.

I’m too weak. I can’t lift it. I can’t fight them.

The first one steps in front of me. His pale, flat eyes give me nothing—no anger I can understand, no satisfaction. He looks down at me like I’m a broken tool that needs to be cleared off the workbench.

The dull black blade slides out from the sleeve of his coat. It doesn’t reflect the work lights, looking instead like a piece of solid shadow.

The wet puncture echoes in the dark before my brain registers the blow.

The blade punches straight through the center of my sternum. It crunches through cartilage and bone without slowing down.

At first, I feel only cold. Impossible, arctic cold floods my veins and seems to freeze the blood inside my heart. Under my skin, I feel the glowing geometry of theLfracture like cracked glass.

The lock snaps.

I feel my chest blow open from the inside out, and a flare of white, blinding heat swallows the yard, the rain, and the dark.

Suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — Nico

The price tag on the generic cornflakes reads: three dollars and twenty cents.

I’m standing in Aisle 4 of a Save-A-Lot twenty miles outside Pittsburgh, holding the faded cardboard box in both hands. The store is mostly empty. Fluorescent tubes buzz over my head—that high, thin rattle that grates against my teeth, the kind of sound normal humans seem deaf to.

Something invisible slams straight into the center of my chest with the force of a freight train. For a split second, I think I’ve been hit from behind.

The air tears out of my lungs in one choked gasp. My knees give out, hitting the cracked floor tiles hard enough to vibrate through my jaw.

I can’t draw breath. My heart stammers against my ribs in frantic, irregular bursts.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the floor tiles. In the dark behind my eyelids, I see it.

A jagged, blinding white L.

It flares across my retinas, pulses once—a raw, agonized beat—then shatters into white static.

No. God, please, no.

My control rips apart. My biology can’t hold the shockwave; the resonance tears through my nervous system and blows every mental circuit I have.

Beneath my black cotton hoodie, I feel the brand on my sternum wake up like an iron pulled fresh out of a furnace. I see the light before I can move to hide it—a fierce, pure white glow that bleeds straight through my shirt, illuminating my chin, my neck, and casting hard shadows across the metal shelves. I open my eyes, gasping for air, and I see twin circles of pale geometric light projecting from my own pupils onto the linoleum floor.

I hear a metal shopping cart rattle violently.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” an old woman whispers.

I look up. She’s five feet away, clutching her purse to her coat, backing away from me with wide, horrified eyes.

Down the aisle, by the canned vegetables, I see a guy in a grease-stained Carhartt jacket freeze. His jaw drops. I see his hand dive into his pocket and yank out a smartphone, angling the camera lens right at my chest.

“Hey!” the guy yells, taking a step forward. “Kid! What the hell is that on your chest? Are you on fire?”

Before the phone screen can light up, a hand clamps onto the back of my neck like an iron vise.

I get hauled backward off my knees. Silas doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t look shocked. With one hard, vicious jerk of his arm, he yanks my coat zipper all the way to my throat, smothering the light under the heavy nylon fabric. In the same motion, his other hand slams my hood forward over my brow, burying my glowing eyes in shadow.

“Grand mal seizure!” Silas roars down the aisle. His voice is loud, harsh, and totally steady—the voice of an off-duty cop barking orders at a street corner. “Back off! Back the hell away from him! He needs air!”

He doesn’t give them time to think. I feel his arm wrap under my ribs, lifting half my weight and dragging me backward through the spilled cereal. My boot heels scrape uselessly across the linoleum as he hauls me past the empty checkout registers, through the automatic sliding doors, and out into the biting Pennsylvania sleet.

The freezing air hits my face, but my chest is still burning.

Silas doesn’t say a word. He shoves me into the passenger side of our rusted ’93 Ford F-150, slams the door, and runs around to the driver’s side. The engine roars to life with a cough of exhaust, and the tires spin on wet asphalt as he rips out of the grocery store lot.

Three minutes later, the front door of our rental house bangs open against the interior wall.

We don’t talk. We don’t have to. We’ve done this four times in two years, and the panic has long since hardened into cold, mechanical habit.

Silas drops me onto the cracked linoleum of the kitchen. His footsteps cross the room. He reaches behind the front door and picks up the four-pound shop hammer from the floorboards.

Crack.

I see the plastic casing of our offline laptop split down the center.

Crack.

He hits it again, and again, until the circuit board is crushed green glass and the magnetic platters of the hard drive are bent into ruined metal curls. He drops our two prepaid flip-phones onto the counter and brings the hammer down twice, turning the screens into gray powder.

I pull myself up against the kitchen counter, my legs shaking under me. I reach for the sink, turn the faucet handle, and hear the pipes groan before freezing well-water gushes out. I cup my hands, splashing the water over my face, trying to wash the cold sweat from my skin and rinse out the metallic taste of copper and blood coating my tongue. Under my hoodie, my sternum throbs with a dull, bruised ache.

Drywall tears behind me.

I turn and watch Silas plunge his arm into the square hole cut behind the pantry shelves. He yanks out the canvas tool bag stuffed with silver clips and rolled twenties. He drops it on the floor, walks to the hall closet, and kicks our two pre-packed duffel bags out into the middle of the room.

“Ten seconds, Nico.” Silas is already wearing his coat, his eyes sweeping the small kitchen, checking every corner for anything that could tie us to this town. “The truck is idling.”

The box of glazed donuts we bought yesterday sits on the counter, grease soaking into the white paper bag. My blue school binder lies open on the kitchen table, filled with three weeks of half-finished history notes. Across the front, scrawled in black permanent marker, is the nameNico Miller. Beside the salt shaker rests the forged Pennsylvania student ID.Nico Miller. Grade 10. Valley High.

He’s dead now. Killed in thirty seconds by a broken box of cornflakes.

Silas grabs the identity packet from the table—the forged birth certificate, the fake immunization records, the social security card, and the student ID. He pops the iron door of the wood stove open. I see the orange embers glowing inside.

He shoves the papers and the plastic card straight into the heat.

I watch the edges curl. The paper turns black in seconds, catching fire with a sharp hiss. The plastic ID bubbles, the face of “Nico Miller” melting into a smear of black toxic sludge before the flames consume it completely.

He slams the iron door shut with a loud clatter of the latch.

“Move,” Silas says.

I grab my duffel bag by the strap, pull my hood tight over my head, and step out the back door into the dark.

Ten seconds later, the truck’s engine roars back to life, tires spitting wet gravel as Silas pulls onto the empty blacktop, turning west into the dark.

I press my forehead against the passenger glass. The truck’s unsteady rumble vibrates through the passenger glass and into my head.

In the side mirror, I see the distant yellow glow of the Pittsburgh suburb shrinking behind us, blurring out under the sleet that’s beginning to freeze against the glass. We’ve been driving west for two hours. Silas hasn’t turned the radio on.

I liked being Nico Miller.

I really, truly liked it. Four months. That was the longest we’d stayed in one town since I turned fourteen. I had a desk in the back of third-period history right next to the radiator that didn’t rattle, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t completely invisible by choice.

I was actually starting to make a couple of friends—quietly, carefully, keeping the edges soft so nobody looked too close. There was a kid named Marcus who worked on rusted Honda Civics behind the auto shop and let me hand him wrenches without asking about my past, and a girl from track who split her bag of salty fries with me behind the bleachers during fifth period just to complain about the geometry teacher. They didn’t pry. They didn’t ask why I never invited anyone over to the drafty house by the rail yard, or why I always paid for corner-store soda with wrinkled dollar bills. To them, I was just a quiet transfer who listened well and kept his head down.

For four months, I got to pretend that my biggest problem in existence was passing my permit test. I got to pretend I was normal.

Now Nico Miller is a ghost, Marcus and the girl behind the bleachers are gone forever, and I’m just a fugitive again.

A cold weight sinks into my gut. I’m angry, but the anger is buried under the thought of starting over. A new dying town. A new last name. Another classroom where I’ll know the exits before I know anyone’s name.

I turn my head and look at Silas in the faint green glow of the dashboard gauges.

He looks like any tired, weathered human getting off a shift at a steel mill. He’s shivering slightly. His hands are locked on the steering wheel at ten and two, his knuckles white and stiff as he fights the icy vibration of the road.

He feels the cold. I don’t.

Silas is a Cipher. Back in our home dimension—in Orivos, before the Vael tore through to strip-mine Orivos for resources—that was the title for his kind. He is a powerless Orivian guardian. He doesn’t have super senses, and he can’t move a pebble with his mind.

If this rusted truck hit a patch of black ice right now and rolled down a ravine, the steering column would crush his ribs to splinters. I would just kick the crumpled door off its hinges, brush the shattered safety glass off my jacket, and walk away. My bones are too dense to care about a car wreck.

Yet I have to spend every single day pretending to be just as fragile as he is. I have to pretend a shoulder-check in a high school hallway hurts. I have to pretend I can’t hear a dog barking two miles away, or the high, irritating whine of a bad lightbulb. I am so tired of the act.

I don’t remember Orivos. I was just a baby when the elders smuggled twenty-six of us across the dimensional divide to Earth to hide. I only have broken, jagged flashes: the smell of copper in the air, a violent drop in air pressure, and a sky burning so bright it hurt to look at. Everything else I know, I know because Silas told me.

He is the one keeping me alive. Because Silas has no powers, he has no energy signature. The Vael’s scanners can’t pick him up at all. He is an invisible man, moving us around in the dark, paying for food with pawned silver, and burying every trace we leave behind.

And lately, he has been terrified.

Every Letter has natural telekinesis. Mine is dangerously weak for my age, and my Syntax still hasn’t awakened. I can shove a guy back a few feet or rattle a window, but if I try to lift anything heavy, my head feels like it’s splitting open. My nose bleeds, the air smells like ozone, and I pass out cold.

Because I’m so vulnerable, Silas treats my life as a broken weapon. He pushes me through brutal, freezing drills out in the woods, trying to force my abilities awake before the hunters find us.

I reach up and press my palm against the center of my chest.

Beneath my shirt, theNglyph is still throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache.

The rule is simple: we can only be killed in alphabetical order.AthroughLare gone.

Now only one person in this entire dimension stands between me and the black blades: Letter M, a stranger somewhere out in the dark acting as my living shield.

The secondMslips up, the shield breaks.

Around three in the morning, Silas pulls the truck off the two-lane highway into the cracked lot of a twenty-four-hour diner. The neon sign over the gravel flickers half-dead in the sleet, buzzing loud enough to set my teeth on edge.

We don’t sit in a booth. Silas doesn’t do diner booths anymore—too many windows, too many sightlines. He walks in, pays cash for a grease-stained brown bag stuffed with double cheeseburgers and limp fries, and walks right back out.

He kills the truck’s engine, keeping the cab dark.

I tear into a burger. It tastes like salt and burnt fat, but my stomach is hollow. Using even a fraction of my biology burns through calories like a furnace. I hear Silas pull an olive-drab canvas kit from under his seat. He unzips it on the dashboard, clicking on a tiny red-beam penlight that barely casts a glow past the windshield.

Inside the kit are blank birth certificate stock, state seal stamps, forged immunization sheets, and an analog card embosser.

“Time to build a new ghost.” Silas rolls a blank West Virginia transfer transcript onto the clipboard. “What’s the name?”

I chew the mouthful of burger, looking down at my hands. My knuckles are scraped, and my chest still throbs with that dull, rhythmic pulse. The letterN. It’s the only real thing I have left.

“Nico,” I say. “Nico Night.”

Silas stops. The penlight freezes against the blank cardstock.

He turns his head, and I see a strange, unreadable look in his eyes. It’s not his usual cold scowl. It’s something older, heavier, like he just saw a ghost walk across the dashboard. He stares at my face for five full seconds, completely silent.

“What?” I ask, wiping grease from my chin. “Nico starts with N. Night starts with N. Double initial. It’s easy to remember.”

Silas blinks, the mask snapping back over his face. He lets out a dry, breathy chuckle that has zero humor in it.

“Nico Night,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Right. Because that’s definitely a normal, inconspicuous human name. Why not just wear a flashing sign on your forehead that saysExtraterrestrial Fugitive? It sounds like a bad comic book character.”

“Nobody looks twice at a weird name,” I counter, staring him dead in the eye. “If I call myself Nico Smith, people think I’m lying because it’s fake. If I say Nico Night, they just think my parents were idiots who made bad life choices. Besides, Miller was boring. Let me have one cool syllable before I get stabbed in a ditch.”

Silas stares at me for a beat, his jaw tight. Then he looks back down at the clipboard.

“Fine,” he says quietly. “Nico Night.”

He grabs a fine-point drafting pen. The metal nib scratches against cardstock as he writes it down, his strokes practiced, precise, and completely steady. He stamps a blue seal in the corner, lines up the transfer stamp, and presses a clean laminate seal over the forged student ID card.

He slides the finished card across the cracked vinyl seat to me.

I pick it up. My own face stares back under the faint red light.

Nico Night. Grade 10. Valley Consolidated High School.

“Memorize your birthday, your mother’s maiden name, and the address on that card by daybreak,” Silas says, zipping the kit shut and shoving it back under the floorboards. “You’re my nephew now. Your parents died in a house fire in Morgantown. You don’t talk about them because it upsets you. Understood?”

“Understood.”

He turns the ignition key. The starter grinds, catches, and the truck rumbles back to life.

An hour later, the highway drops down into a deep, jagged hollow cut between two black mountain ridges.

Mid-October still clings to the ridges in burnt orange and rust beneath a low gray sky. Sleet thins into fog as the highway drops between the limestone bluffs.

My ears pop with the elevation shift. The high-voltage lines along the shoulder are faint here, their hum smothered by stone. There’s no cell service.

For the first time since Pittsburgh, the electromagnetic noise around me starts to thin.

The truck rattles across a rusted iron bridge over a black, rushing creek. On the other side, leaning half-crooked in the weeds under a solitary halogen streetlight, is a dented green road sign.

WELCOME TO BLACKWOOD CREEK. POPULATION 1,842.

Past the sign, the town looks half-abandoned in the pre-dawn gloom. A closed diner with a flickering neonOPENsign that someone forgot to shut off three nights ago. Boarded-up bait shops. Rows of narrow clapboard houses tucked into the hillside with steep metal roofs meant to shed heavy winter snow, their chimneys coughing thin ribbons of woodsmoke into the freezing dark. A single municipal utility truck sits parked at the pump of an unlit gas station, its engine off, dead silent.

Silas downshifts, the transmission whining as we turn off the main strip onto a rutted, unpaved logging route. Black mud and crushed shale spit against the wheel wells.

I press my hand flat against my sternum. TheNis quiet for now, but I can feel it waiting beneath the surface of my skin.

We’re here. Another town. Another life. And the clock is running.