Lily looked at my outstretched hand. For a second, just a fraction of a second, I saw a glimpse of my little girl—the one who cried when she scraped her knee, the one who loved to paint. Her lip quivered.
“There is nowhere to run, Mom,” she whispered. “They are already everywhere.”
Before I could reply, a sudden, violent pounding echoed from downstairs. It wasn’t the polite knock of a neighbor. It was a heavy, rhythmic, shattering strike against the front door, slamming against the wood so hard that the entire house shook.
BAM. BAM. BAM.
“Prime!” a distorted, synthesized voice boomed from the front porch, amplified through some kind of loudspeaker. “The mother’s personal device just pinged a localized security alert before it was neutralized. The perimeter has been compromised. Open the door or we initiate a hard purge!”
I looked at Lily in sheer panic. “Is that the police?!”
“No,” Lily’s face drained of all color, her hazel eyes instantly snapping back into solid, terrifying black. The veins on her face pulsed wildly. “That’s the Oversight Committee. They think we’ve been compromised by an adult.”
“What do we do?” I screamed as the sound of splintering wood echoed from the floor below. The front door was giving way.
Lily looked at me, her black eyes unreadable, then looked down at the floorboards where the hidden hatch lay.
“If they find you here, they kill us both,” Lily said, her voice suddenly distorted, layered with a strange, echoing resonance. She grabbed my wrist with a grip so impossibly tight it felt like a steel vise. “There’s only one way out.”
She dragged me toward the closet. With her free hand, she slammed her palm against the floorboards. The hatch flew open instantly, the blinding, hypnotic blue light exploding into the room, accompanied by a roaring, deafening sound like a subterranean hurricane.
Downstairs, the front door crashed open. Heavy, armored footsteps—not children’s feet, but something massive and metallic—flooded into our hallway, charging up the stairs with terrifying speed.
“Jump, Mom!” Lily yelled over the roaring blue vortex, pulling me toward the edge of the glowing, bottomless abyss in her closet floor. “Jump, or we die right here!”
I looked down into the swirling, roaring blue void, then looked back at the bedroom door as it was violently kicked off its hinges, revealing a towering, shadow-clad figure holding a weapon that gleamed with lethal, crackling energy.
Lily pulled me forward, and my feet left the ground.
