Zay

I had been trapped in this city for a long time.

Not by walls or borders, but by patience.

Waiting had become a discipline. A ritual. I learned the rhythm of the streets by heart—the way the lights flickered when it rained, the hour when the trains screamed beneath the pavement, the exact moment the city pretended to sleep. I waited through all of it. Years of breathing the same air that had choked my family to death.

I was tired of waiting.

Father used to say that no empire was eternal. He said it calmly, like a man discussing the weather, even while our name was still carved into towers of glass and steel. Even empires fall, he’d told me. I hadn’t understood then.

I understood now.

The Arlec empire collapsed in whispers and headlines, lawsuits and fires, friends who suddenly forgot our name. One by one, they disappeared. By the end, there was no one left to forget me.

I was the last Arlec.

The city moved on, of course. It always does. It rebuilt over our bones, paved over the scars, sold the ruins as luxury apartments. I watched it happen from the inside, smiling when it smiled, learning how it breathed. I learned where to cut.

Now I stood above it, the skyline spread out like a diagram of everything I hated.

The device was warm beneath my fingers. The remote hummed softly, obedient, alive. My hands moved without hesitation; I had rehearsed this moment so many times it no longer felt real. One press. One small, almost gentle motion. Towers would fold in on themselves. Streets would vanish. History would end in fire.

All of it had led here.

I raised my eyes, already tasting the silence that would follow.

That was when I felt him.

“I knew you’d come,” I said, without turning. My voice didn’t shake. I’d imagined this, too. “I was hoping to see you.”

The wind shifted behind me. A presence, familiar as a scar.

“I wanted you to be with me while we all die.”

I turned then.

There he was.

The city’s hero. Its last lie.