“Your father,” Martha interrupted softly, “will be looking for a new line of work very soon.”
Her thumb pressed down on the hidden seam of the key.
There was a tiny, sharp mechanical click.
No alarm sounded. No sirens blared. The key simply pulsed with a faint, microscopic red light near the engraving. It was an ultrasonic frequency—inaudible to human ears, but instantly picked up by a global satellite network that had been lying dormant, waiting for a single ping for ten long years.
Carter stared at the key. He waited for an explosion. He waited for an army. When nothing immediately happened, his confidence falsely surged again.
“A clicker?” Carter scoffed, though his chest was heaving. He pointed at her. “You pressed a button. Ooh, I’m terrified. What’s going to happen? Are the garbage trucks going to come and get me?”
He looked around at the crowd of students, trying to rally them to his side. A few nervous chuckles rippled through the onlookers, but they quickly died.
The atmosphere in the parking lot had fundamentally shifted. The birds in the surrounding palm trees had suddenly taken flight. The air felt heavy, charged with a strange, metallic static.
Martha did not move. She simply stood holding the key, a grim, sad expression on her weathered face. She looked at Carter not with anger, but with the profound pity one gives to a dying animal.
“You should have picked up your watch, Carter,” she whispered.
Then, the first red dot appeared.
It was faint at first, a small crimson speck of light resting perfectly in the center of Carter’s forehead.
Carter blinked, confused by the sudden red hue in his peripheral vision. He reached up, touching his forehead.
Before he could pull his hand away, a second red dot appeared directly over his heart.
Then a third on his throat.
Viktor let out a muffled sob against the wet pavement. “Mercy,” he whispered to the ground.
Carter slowly lowered his head, looking down at his expensive t-shirt. The red dots were perfectly still.
He turned around in a slow, panicked circle.