Pre-dawn Texas smelled like nothing at all. No hydrocarbons, no factory runoff, no ozone. Just empty air under an empty sky.

  I gripped the door handle of Dad’s utility vehicle tight enough that my knuckles ached. The dash clock read 4:17 AM. We’d been driving for three hours and seventeen minutes exactly. Neither of us had spoken for the last forty.

  Dad kept the headlights dimmed to half capacity. The less attention, the better.

  Road signs flashed by, most stripped of text, others defaced beyond recognition. The few intact ones pointed to places that probably didn’t exist anymore. Not with the names they once had, anyway.

  “We don’t go through check zones,” Dad finally said, breaking the silence. “We head to the ghost lanes.”

  I nodded, not fully understanding but unwilling to admit it. Three hours ago, I’d been a high school senior with college prospects and a missing history assignment. Now I was… what? A fugitive? A crosser?

  “What about Elisa? Diego?” I asked, my voice rough from disuse.

  Dad’s eyes stayed fixed on the road. “We’ll find them. That’s the plan.”

  “What plan? Since when was there a plan?”

  “Since your mother disappeared.”

  I swallowed hard, turning away. The highway stretched before us, a dark ribbon cutting through darker fields. Familiar and wrong at the same time.

  There was space in the back. A seat no one took. But I kept looking anyway.

  The first hints of sunrise touched the eastern horizon, the barest suggestion of color. I realized I was holding the small key Dad had hidden in the drawer. I didn’t remember taking it out of my pocket.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “East,” Dad said. “To the Line. Then past it.”

  “What’s past it?”

  Dad’s hands tightened on the wheel. “People who remember.”

  The sun was high enough to hurt by the time we reached the overpass. Dad cut the engine three hundred yards out and we coasted the rest, gravel crunching under the tires.

  What had once been a UED checkpoint was now a blackened skeleton—concrete slumped in fire-slagged shapes, metal peeled back like split fruit. Dad scanned it in silence.

  “Stay in the vehicle,” he said, reaching beneath his seat. He pulled out something matte black and short-barreled, unfamiliar. “Count to fifty. If I whistle, you come.”

  He was gone before I could argue, slipping out of the cab like a man who’d done this a hundred times. I counted to twenty-three, then opened my door.

  The air smelled like melted rubber and swamp water. Insects screamed from the brush. I climbed the slope after him, placing my feet where his boots had pressed.

  Movement.

  A flutter beneath the overpass—a tarp, but not wind-driven. I crouched low. Someone was under it.

  The tarp shifted again, and Elisa emerged, bolt gun clutched tight. Her hair was back in a tie, her uniform replaced with scavenged greys. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

  “Nero,” she said, lowering the gun.

  My name in her voice nearly undid me. I didn’t say hers—just nodded.

  Dad stepped out from behind a scorched pillar, weapon raised. He held it level for half a breath, then let it lower slowly.

  “Where’s Diego?” I asked.

  Elisa’s face changed. “He went ahead. Said it was safer not to move together.”

  Dad’s eyes swept the ruin. “Anyone follow you?”

  “No. I took ghost lanes. Like my father taught us.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Before school. Yesterday morning.” She paused. “He said he’d meet me here after. But I don’t know if he made it.”

  I stepped closer. “What happened? How’d you get dragged into this?”

  She leaned back against the pylon, bolt gun slipping from her hands. “Marcus found us three days ago. Said he needed a favor.”

  Dad stiffened.

  “A ride,” she added. “Two people needed extraction across the Correction Line. That’s all he said. No IDs. No scans. He told us not to ask names.”

  “You didn’t see them?” Dad asked.

  She shook her head. “We dropped the car by an old irrigation plant. Left the keys and walked away like Marcus told us. I never even saw them. I thought… I thought maybe it was just a woman. Maybe with a kid.”

  Dad went still.

  “A child?” he asked.

  “That’s what Marcus hinted. But I didn’t..” She stopped. “We thought we were doing something good. Helping someone disappear.”

  Dad’s voice dropped. “Mexico Site Four isn’t a refugee camp. It’s a quarantine zone.”

  Elisa looked between us, confused. “What does that mean?”

  “It means if someone escaped from there,” Dad said, “and you helped them get out, you didn’t smuggle civilians. You smuggled evidence.”

  Elisa flinched. “Evidence of what?”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  He stared at the wreckage like it might give him the answer he didn’t want to say aloud.

  “If it was a child,” he said slowly, “and that child wasn’t fully human… If she was part–Firstborn—”

  He didn’t finish.

  Elisa paled. “Marcus didn’t say that. He just said it mattered. That they had to make it through.”

  Dad turned his back, swore under his breath. “He used you both. Diego’s probably already tagged. If they haven’t taken him, they’ve marked him for it.”

  “No,” she said, voice rising. “He’s smart. He knows how to disappear.”

  “Not from them,” Dad said.

  Elisa looked to me then. Not for answers just to be believed.

  “I thought we were just helping people,” she said.

  Dad didn’t look at her when he answered.

  “You were.”

  Night fell hard in the wasteland. No city glow, no transitional lavender between day and sky black. Just there, then gone.

  We’d pushed east for hours after the overpass, following roads that weren’t on any official maps, until Dad found what he was looking for: an abandoned ranger station, half its roof blown away, walls still standing. Far enough from everything that not even UED drones bothered to patrol.

  Elisa had fallen asleep near the truck, wrapped in a thermal blanket Dad kept behind the seat, the bolt gun within arm’s reach. Her face in sleep looked younger, untroubled by whatever she’d seen in the past twenty four hours.

  Dad and I sat by a small fire in what had once been the station’s common room. The ash in the fire pit wasn’t ours. Someone else had been here, maybe days ago, maybe longer. Dad said that was good. Ghost routes worked when people kept using them.

  The quiet wasn’t peaceful. It was hollow, like the minutes after a thunderclap when your ears still ring.

  I stared at the flames, watching them curl and flicker. I’d been silent for nearly ten minutes, but Dad didn’t try to fill it. He was whittling something from a piece of pine, knife strokes careful and measured.

  “There’s something wrong,” I finally said. “I keep thinking there should be one more bowl. One more blanket. One more voice.”

  Dad’s knife paused mid stroke. He didn’t look up.

  “Did I have a brother?”

  Dad went still. Then, without meeting my eyes:

  “You did.”

  The words hit me like a physical blow, a weight pressing on my chest that made it hard to breathe.

  “Why don’t I remember?”

  Dad set down his carving, wiped the blade clean on his pant leg.

  “Because that’s what they do when someone matters too much.”

  I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I pressed:

  “What does that mean?”

  He sighed, a sound so heavy with exhaustion it seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his lungs.

  “Correction doesn’t kill the body. It kills connections.” Dad poked at the fire with a stick. “They take names out of official records. Photos get degraded or confiscated. But that’s just paper. The worse part is what they do to your mind.”

  He tossed the stick into the flames.

  “People stop feeling the shape of that person in their head. Stop noticing the gaps. You don’t even mourn. You just… adapt.”

  I processed this, turning it over in my mind.

  “So I lost him. And then I lost the fact that I’d lost him.”

  Dad nodded. “And you were lucky. You were young. The younger you are, the faster it fades.”

  Something cold settled in my stomach. A feeling of violation I couldn’t name.

  “What was his name?”

  Dad looked directly at me then, something ancient and lost in his eyes.

  “I don’t remember.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. The fire popped and hissed, sending sparks upward into the night.

  “Was Mom corrected too?” I asked finally.

  Dad stared into the flames. “No. She was taken. We buried a box. That’s all we were allowed.”

  He didn’t say what was inside.

  I stood, legs stiff from sitting too long. I needed to move, to think, to feel the weight of what he’d told me.

  I walked away from the firelight, into the shadows of the old structure. In what might have been an office, I found an empty folding chair, sunbleached and broken. One leg bent outward like a broken bone.

  I sank to the floor across from it, sitting in the dirt. Tried to imagine what my brother might have said. What he looked like. Tried to feel the space his memory should occupy.

  There was someone else. I didn’t forget him. They did it for me.

  Morning came with fog and insects. We moved east again, Dad driving in stretches, stopping to scan frequencies on a small black box he pulled from beneath the seat.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Signal mapper,” he said. “Lets us know what frequencies are getting traffic. Big spikes mean UED.”

  Elisa huddled in the back, cleaning the bolt gun with a piece of cloth. She hadn’t spoken much since the fire. None of us had.

  The landscape changed as we drove. Fewer buildings, more dense patches of scrub pine and twisted oak. The ghost roads narrowed, sometimes disappearing altogether before reemerging as twin tire tracks through tall grass.

  “We’re following his route,” Dad explained when he caught me looking at the crude map he’d sketched on a scrap of paper. “Diego would have had to pass through one of the checkpoints. This one,” he pointed at a circle marked with an X, “is the least monitored.”

  “What is it?” Elisa asked, leaning forward between the seats.

  “Old transport depot. Supply station before the Unified Directive took over. Resistance uses it sometimes as a waypoint.”

  We reached it by mid afternoon, a cluster of dilapidated buildings half hidden by trees. Rusted buses and trucks sat in rows, their paint blistered and peeling. Dad cut the engine and we rolled to a stop behind a collapsed service bay.

  “Stay alert,” he said. “This close to the Line, Labs patrol regularly.”

  We moved between the vehicles, keeping low. Dad led, weapon ready, eyes constantly scanning. Elisa followed him, bolt gun raised. I brought up the rear, watching our backs.

  “There,” Elisa whispered, pointing.

  A scrap of blue fabric fluttered from a tree branch near the edge of the clearing. Diego’s jacket, tied like a marker.

  “He made it this far,” she said, hope breaking through her voice for the first time.

  Dad squinted at the jacket. “Or he wanted us to think he did.”

  A sound cut through the stillness. Footsteps, shuffling through dried leaves.

  We froze.

  A figure moved from behind a broken bus. Tall, lean.

  Diego.

  At first glance, he seemed unharmed. He was walking upright, his clothes the same as the day before. But there was something wrong about how he moved, like his joints weren’t quite right.

  “Nero,” I heard Elisa whisper beside me. “Something’s wrong with his eyes.”

  She was right. Even from here, I could see it. His face was blank, his gaze unfocused. And he was smiling, a too even expression that never changed.

  “Diego!” Elisa called, breaking cover.

  “Elisa, no!” Dad hissed, but she was already running toward him.

  I followed, dread settling in my stomach.

  Diego turned toward us, his movements mechanical. The smile never wavered.

  “Hello, Elisa. Hello, Nero,” he said, his voice flat and inflectionless. “You are not authorized for this zone.”

  Then he collapsed, like someone had cut his strings.

  Elisa reached him first, falling to her knees beside him. “Diego! Diego, wake up!”

  Dad grabbed my arm, pulling me back. His eyes scanned the tree line. “It’s a trap,” he said. “Move now.”

  Too late.

  They emerged from the trees like shadows made solid. Labs, five of them, their enhanced bodies moving with unnatural coordination. Black uniforms, correction rifles raised.

  Dad shoved me toward Elisa. “Get down!”

  He raised his weapon and fired, three rapid shots. One of the Labs staggered, a dark stain spreading across its shoulder.

  The others returned fire.

  Dad threw himself over Elisa and me, his body a shield.

  “Dad!” I shouted.

  I saw the impact before I heard the sound, a wet thud as the round hit him. He grunted, staggered. Blood blossomed across his side.

  “Run,” he gasped, shoving me toward the depot. “Now!”

  Elisa grabbed Diego under the arms. I moved to help, but Dad pushed me away.

  “Leave him!” he ordered, voice strained with pain. “He’s gone. They have him.”

  “No!” Elisa cried.

  More shots. A Lab fell. Dad had hit it square in the chest.

  “Don’t stop,” Dad said, reloading with bloody hands. “Don’t stay. You run. Get her out.”

  I seized Elisa’s arm, dragging her away from Diego. She fought me, tears streaming down her face.

  “We can’t leave them!” she screamed.

  “We have to,” I said, pulling her harder.

  We ran, crashing through underbrush, branches whipping our faces. I looked back once.

  Diego was convulsing on the ground, his back arching in unnatural angles. A Lab stood over him, a long needle in its hand, pressing it to his neck.

  They were correcting him again. Or maybe just making sure it took this time.

  Dad stood between them and us, firing methodically, buying seconds with his blood.

  Then the trees swallowed us, and I couldn’t see anymore.

  There were three of us yesterday. Now it’s just me and her. And someone else’s name I still can’t remember.

  This wasn’t escape. It was inheritance.