Chapter 26: The Trip
The air in the Central Airlines cabin was a recirculated ghost of itself—cold, sterile, and smelling faintly of disinfectant and crushed pretzels. It was the breath of nowhere. In seat 12B, a man who thought of himself as Justin, though the name felt like a borrowed coat, stared at the seatback screen in front of him without seeing it. He was a study in calculated anonymity: dark, full-sleeved clothing that absorbed the wan cabin light, a simple black mask covering the lower half of his face. The only identity he had presented at check-in was a digital phantom—a driver's license for a Justin M. with a blurry photo and an address that didn't exist, accepted by an overworked agent with a thousand-yard stare. It was all he needed. Identity, aesthetics, history—these were constraints for people who believed their story mattered. For him, there was only the function, the next task, and the quiet, humming frequency of fun.
The screen flickered to life, not with the promised in-flight movie, but with a breaking news alert hijacking the system. A sharply dressed presenter, her face a mask of grave concern, leaned into the camera.
'Hey, guys, so recently there has been a significant escalation in public sentiment regarding the individuals known as Luna and Noah Carter,' she began, her tone a bizarre cocktail of news-anchor solemnity and viral-video cadence. 'Following last night's gathering in Dallas, their names have been central to online discourse. And now, some reports have…' she glanced down at a tablet, a flicker of performative unease crossing her features, '…have leaked their personal contact information. We must stress, sharing this is irresponsible, but in the interest of transparency against this alleged corruption, the number circulating is—'
The screen went black. The soft hum of the engines filled the sudden silence.
In the quiet, dark living room of the Carter home in Eldridge, Noah's thumb was pressed hard against the remote's power button, his knuckle white. The afterimage of the news graphic burned on the darkened television screen. The room was still, holding its breath. The only light came from a single floor lamp, casting long, deep shadows that seemed to pool in the corners like spilled ink.
So, the thought formed in his mind, clean and cold as a scalpel. The plan worked. Just as expected.
He didn't feel triumph. He felt the satisfaction of a complex lock clicking open. A geometric proof completing itself. He had walked into the mechanism, and the gears had turned, precisely as predicted. The public outrage, the dehumanizing scrutiny—it was all part of the design. A design he had, in some fundamental way, consented to.
I sacrificed myself for him.
A strange, private smile touched his lips. It wasn't joyful. It was the smile of a man who has just confirmed the universe obeys a certain, terrible math. It was a smile of recognition.
The creak of the floorboard behind him was soft, but in the silence, it was as loud as a gunshot. He didn't startle. He let the smile linger for a half-second too long before beginning to consciously dissolve it.
"Hey, Noah," Luna's voice was sleep-thickened, wary. "What's on?" She stood in the doorway to the hallway, her robe pulled tight around her. Her eyes, still puffy from another night of fractured sleep, were fixed on his face, on the ghost of that expression he hadn't quite erased.
He turned, the movement slow, deliberately casual. He gestured with the remote at the dark TV. "Nothing. Just… noise." He manufactured a sigh, aiming for weary distraction. "I was thinking about John. His thirteenth birthday. Remember? Those kids from the neighboring school pushed him into the lockers. He came home with a split lip and fire in his eyes." Noah's voice softened, painting the memory in warm, deliberate strokes. "We marched down to that principal's office. You were like a thunderstorm. Got every one of them suspended. He looked at us after, like we'd moved a mountain for him." He looked at her, his eyes searching hers for a reflection of the warmth he was projecting. "Some happy moments, isn't it, Luna?"
Luna didn't blink. She watched him, her gaze stripping away the layers of the performance. She saw the tension in his shoulders that the nostalgic tone couldn't disguise, the hollow affect behind the remembered smile. The memory was real, but its use here was a tool. A distraction.
"Yeah," she said, the word flat and final. It wasn't agreement; it was a period. A full stop to a sentence she refused to read. "Whatever."
She walked past him towards the kitchen, the dismissal in her tone leaving a chill in the air. Noah watched her go, the fabricated warmth cooling on his face. She knew. Not the truth, but the lie. The crack in the façade was widening, and he could feel the cold draft of reality seeping in.
His phone, face-down on the arm of the sofa, chose that moment to erupt.
It didn't ring. It vibrated with a frantic, epileptic intensity, skittering on the fabric like a dying insect. Then another buzz. And another. In seconds, it was a continuous, angry purr. Notification chimes—Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, SMS—overlapped into a single, dissonant symphony of digital intrusion.
A cold knot, distinct from the earlier satisfaction, tightened in Noah's stomach. He picked up the device. The screen was a cascading waterfall of alerts. Preview lines scrolled past too fast to read, but the language was a blur of venom: FRAUD… LIARS… ARCHITECT… KILL…
His thumb, suddenly clumsy, fumbled to unlock it. He opened his main messaging app.
The screen froze for a second, overwhelmed. Then it populated.
He wasn't looking at dozens of messages. He was looking at thousands. A tsunami of hate in digital form. The sender names were a chaotic mix of obviously fake profiles—'TruthSeeker88', 'JusticeForTheChildren', 'EyesOpen2022'—and a few chillingly normal ones—'Sarah M., 'Mike from PDX'.
His eyes darted, snagging on fragments:
how could u dismantle the strategy of the architect u biased cock
we will kill u pieces of trash
u think ur smart? ur dead. we know where u live
architect sees all. u r finished
the childrens blood is on ur hands carter
Each one was a small, sharp hammer blow. The sheer volume was an assault. It was noise, but a noise with a terrifying, unified premise: he and Luna were enemies of a truth, obstructors of a figure called 'the Architect'. And they deserved annihilation.
"Oh shit," Noah whispered. The words were dry, airless. The clinical satisfaction from moments before was gone, vaporized by the raw, human terror of being so profoundly, personally targeted. "What the hell is this?"
Luna was back in the doorway, a glass of water forgotten in her hand. "What happened?" Her voice was sharp, cutting through his daze.
He couldn't speak. He just turned the phone screen towards her, his hand trembling slightly. The gesture was an abdication. He was showing her the fire, admitting he couldn't put it out.
Luna took the phone. Her eyes scanned the screen, her face hardening into a mask of pale horror as she scrolled, the messages blurring into a streak of malice. The color drained from her cheeks. "It isn't… this isn't just some troll," she said, her voice thin. "There are thousands. They all keep saying… the same things. Who… who is the Architect?"
She looked up at him, her eyes wide, searching his for an answer he didn't have—or wouldn't give. The name was now a entity, a focal point for this ocean of hate.
Noah took a shaky breath, forcing his hand to still. The trembling was a betrayal of the control he needed to project. "I don't know," he said. The lie was easier this time, camouflaged by genuine confusion. He knew of the Architect—the voice on the phone, the master of the game—but the 'who' was still a silhouette. "Who is he?"
---
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was a cathedral of damp, Pacific Northwest light. Rain streaked the vast windows, distorting the view of grey runways and evergreen hills. The air smelled of wet concrete, coffee, and a faint, briny tang from the distant Sound.
Among the disembarking passengers, one figure moved with a fluid, unhurried grace. He wore a long, black coat over dark clothing, a simple mask obscuring the lower part of his face. He carried no checked luggage, only a slim, black carry-on. He was a null point in the crowd, absorbing attention without garnering it. The Architect had arrived.
His hotel room was not in a glittering downtown tower, but in a discreet, boutique establishment in the historic Pioneer Square district. The room was all exposed brick, polished dark wood, and muted, modern furnishings. It felt like a cell in a very expensive monastery. He stood at the window, watching the rain glaze the cobblestone square below, where a few determined tourists huddled under awnings. The spectacle of the riot was absent here. The violence in this city, he mused, would need to be of a different taxonomy.
His phone, a secure, encrypted device, chimed once. A text from an unknown number, relayed through three proxy servers.
Unknown: which place are you in Seattle?
A faint, almost imperceptible flicker of amusement touched his eyes. The eager acolyte. The need for proximity to the source. A predictable, human weakness. His fingers moved over the screen, precise and swift.
Architect: I am in pioneer square.
The reply was almost instantaneous, buzzing with excitement.
Unknown: what luck brother, I was in Pioneer square too! We will be both friends of destruction :)
The Architect's lip curled behind the mask. Brother. Friends. Such sentimental, binding words. So… small. He saved the contact, not with the sender's chosen nickname, but with a clinical, accurate label: Dependant Coward. The man was not a partner. He was a symptom—a person so devoid of internal conviction that he latched onto the nearest powerful ideology, mistaking obedience for purpose. He was a tool that believed it had a soul.
A new message appeared from Dependant Coward.
Dependant Coward: there are around 4000-4500 people and just us, how can we do it all?
The question reeked of limitation. Of thinking in terms of bodies, of manpower. The Architect saw systems, pressure points, vectors of influence. One mind, correctly applied, could move millions. This dependent was thinking like a foot soldier when the war was one of memes and metaphysics.
He typed back, his answer a study in absolute, chilling assurance.
Architect: just handle everything on me.
Four words. A sentence that was both an order and a vacuum. It offered no plan, no reassurance, only the transfer of total responsibility onto the infinite, unknowable scale of his own will. It was the perfect answer. It would either paralyze the dependent with the weight of its ambiguity or inflame him with the promise of its boundlessness. Either reaction was useful.
---
Dallas. The Axiom Grand.
Justin paced the length of the lavish, empty suite. The silence was a physical presence, heavy with the ghost of his master's departure. On the massive television, muted, news channels replayed the same few seconds of aerial footage from Miami—the smoke, the crater, the newscasters' stunned faces. It played in a silent loop, a monument to a finished chapter.
But Justin's mind wasn't on Florida. It was on Seattle. On the Architect's final, cryptic declaration: "A new type of destruction."
He stopped, staring at his own reflection in the dark TV screen. His mind, a sharp instrument honed by the Architect's teachings, turned the problem over and over, searching for the shape of it.
A terrorist attack? No. Too crude. The Architect had graduated from mere terrorism. The Capitol bombing was terrorism. Miami was… something else. A statement written in physics.
A psychological attack? Closer. But the Architect had called that "old stuff." The gaslighting of the Carters, the turning of a city against itself—that was psychological warfare of a high order. To call it "old" meant Seattle was a new paradigm entirely.
Defame Luna and Noah? That was ongoing, a background radiation. But it didn't fit the scope of "a new type of destruction." It served a purpose, but it wasn't the main event. It didn't align with the grandiosity of his pride, his greed for a new, fundamental proof.
He ran a hand through his hair, frustration tightening his features. He was trying to think like the Architect, to follow the soaring, ice-cold logic, but he kept hitting the ceiling of his own humanity. The Architect thought in dimensions Justin could only glimpse.
"What could be the reason?" he muttered to the empty room. The silence offered no answer.
He slumped into a sleek armchair, the leather sighing beneath him. The thinking expression—a furrowed brow, eyes narrowed in concentration—was fixed on his face. He was the most informed person on the planet about the Architect's methods, and he was utterly in the dark.
"I don't fricking know, bro," he said aloud, the informal word a stark contrast to the sterile elegance of the room. The admission was a release of pressure, an acceptance of his own subordinate, waiting role. He was not the architect of the next move. He was the one left to guard the empty workshop, listening for the distant sound of the next world breaking.
---
Eldridge. The Carter Home.
The digital onslaught had paused, leaving a silence that rang louder than the notifications. The phone lay on the coffee table between Noah and Luna like a live grenade. The sheer, hateful energy it had channeled seemed to have seeped into the very air of the room, making it hard to breathe.
Noah finally broke the silence. His voice was low, stripped of pretense, vibrating with a raw, bedrock conviction. "Whoever this Architect is," he said, each word a stone dropped into the quiet, "I will beat the hell out of him."
He looked at Luna, his gaze intense. It was a primal vow, spoken from the part of him that was still just a father, violated and enraged. It could be read as pure, honest promise—the next, inevitable step in his grieving fury. But in the shadow of his private smile, his secret satisfaction at the 'plan working,' it could also be the most deceptive strategy of all: playing the part of the avenging victim to perfection.
Luna studied his face. She saw the anger, the tension in his jaw, the fire in his eyes that had been missing in his forced nostalgia. She saw the man who had vowed vengeance in a steam-filled bathroom. The man who had carried their son's coffin through the rain. The architecture of deception was complex, but this pillar—his love for John, his fury at his loss—felt real. It was the one load-bearing wall in the collapsing house of their lives. If that was a lie, then nothing was true. She had to believe it wasn't.
"I will help you at all costs," she said. Her voice wasn't loud, but it had a density to it, a finality that filled the room. She reached across the space between them, not for the phone, but for his hand. Her fingers closed around his, her grip strong and cool. "I will protect you." She held his gaze, her own eyes clear and unwavering. "I swear, I will not let you be injured."
It was more than a promise of alliance. It was an absolution and a shield. She was addressing the doubt, the unspoken fracture. She was saying she believed in the honesty of his rage, and in response, she would become his guardian. The failure to protect John was the black sun around which her universe now orbited; she would not let its gravity claim Noah too.
Noah felt the weight of her promise, the iron in her tone. He saw the resolve there, and for a fleeting second, it scared him more than the hate messages. Her protection was a form of scrutiny, a love so fierce it might shine a light into corners he needed to keep dark.
They sat there, hands clasped over the silenced phone, in a room haunted by the ghost of their child and the specter of a thousand strangers' hatred. The grief for John was a settled fact, a landscape they now inhabited. But the killer was not a settled fact. The killer was a voice on a phone, a name in a hateful tweet, a phantom stirring a nation to violence. And the killer was running.
That, they would not accept.
The fear was still there, cold in their guts. The confusion was a fog. But beneath it, something harder was crystallizing. The trip—the journey from victims to hunters to targets—had taken another irrevocable turn. They were no longer just chasing a ghost for answers.
They were now being pursued by a monster, and in the face of that, a new, desperate eagerness was born. They would find the Architect. No matter the cost. No matter what they had to become to do it. The hunt had turned into a war, and they had just dug their trench in the living room floor.
Chapter 26 ends
To be continued