Chapter One – The First Day
2020
The jungle felt uneasy that night. The thick, wet heat made the leaves sweat, fat drops sliding down tree trunks and sinking into the black earth. The cicadas had fallen silent. The frogs had stopped croaking. The only sound was the careful crunch of boots pressing into the damp soil.
Ana gripped her flashlight, its weight grounding her. Behind her, Ícaro hunched over a tablet, scanning the readings. The sensors had detected something—something that shouldn't be there. The soil, the air, the very pulse of the rainforest—something had changed.
“We're close,” Ícaro murmured.
Ana didn't answer. The closer they got, the heavier the air became. The jungle was watching. It held its breath.
Ahead, nestled between the exposed roots of a towering kapok tree, stood a beige tent. The fabric rippled slightly in the breeze. But inside, there was no movement.
Ícaro hesitated before unzipping the flap.
Then, they heard it.
A sound, soft at first—a whimper. Then another. And a third. Small, fragile, barely more than the jungle whispering.
Ana lunged forward and pulled the flap open.
Inside the tent, three newborns lay in perfect unison. Crying.
2025 – The Second Term of Hit-her
The name No Nation (NN) had not been given lightly. The country had collapsed—shattered into fear, into hatred, into something unrecognizable.
It had begun on the very first day of Hit-her’s presidency. A press conference. A question he didn’t like. A journalist who stood her ground. And then, a slap. Broadcast live, in high definition. The moment his palm struck her face, the headlines wrote themselves.
The president who ruled with his fists.
Now, five years later, the world was no longer what it had been. The pandemic was over, but something had lingered in its wake. Something inside people had changed.
First, the elderly began to die—not of sickness, but of something slower, something unexplainable. Next came the children, their minds altered in ways no one could predict. And then there were the young—the ones who walked away from the plague with something else entirely.
No one knew when it started. Or how.
But one day, minds began to whisper to each other.
The press called it the Federated Network, a silent web of thoughts linking the scattered survivors. At first, it was dismissed as conspiracy, the kind of nonsense that spreads in dark corners of the internet. But when the first cases of “anomalies” were confirmed, the disappearances began.
If they found you, you were taken.
That was why Httoq was built.
That was why the three of them began to recruit.
Httoq – Fortress of Ice, Eastern Greenland
Remo shrugged off his coat and tossed it onto a chair. The underground city groaned above them, its frozen bones shifting as the wind howled over the ice.
A tray sat on the table beside him, steam curling from two thick slices of chocolate cake. He pushed one toward the man across from him.
“Eat slowly,” he said.
Romulus picked up his fork, cutting off a small bite. The moment he swallowed, the lights in the room flickered, and somewhere in the depths of Httoq, the generators rumbled back to life.
Remo watched him carefully. It was still strange to think about—his brother, the engine of the city, his body an unseen current pulsing beneath the ice. All he needed was food. Not just any food, but the kind that made him feel… safe. Nostalgic.
Comfort food.
Remo leaned back, rubbing his temples. The last mission had been messy. He’d brought someone here by accident. A baker—just some guy who had no business in Httoq. A mistake.
But mistakes had a way of revealing things.
The door creaked open, and Lupa stepped inside, brushing snow from her coat. She trailed her fingers over a dried seed pod in her palm, and as she moved, tiny green sprouts curled out from its edges, drinking in the air.
Romulus finished his cake, wiped his mouth, and met Remo’s eyes.
“We have a target,” he said.
The weight in the room shifted.
“The boy.”
Remo didn’t need to ask who that was. He already knew. The president’s son.
Across the room, the television buzzed softly. Hit-her stood at the podium, his stone-carved face catching the harsh light. The crowd didn’t cheer. They only feared.
And then, in the background—a shadow, a boy.
Boris.
To most, the broadcast had been ordinary.
But the three of them were not most people. They saw more than others did.
And there—just for a second—in Boris’s eyes…
There had been sparks.
