Chapter Text

The rhythmic, electronic chirp of an arcade cabinet hummed through the dimly lit back corner of Gus’s Games and Grub, buried beneath the heavier scent of melted mozzarella and old carpet foam. It was a Thursday afternoon, the awkward dead zone between the end of the school day and the dinner rush, leaving the establishment mostly populated by a few scattered elementary kids wasting their tokens on ticket-redemption cranes.

Lincoln Loud sat in a vinyl booth near the prize counter, mechanically spinning an unpeeled straw between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes were fixed on the condensation pooling around the base of a large pitcher of root beer sitting between him and the girl across the table.

Ronnie Anne Santiago looked remarkably unchanged, yet entirely different. She wore her signature purple hoodie, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, exposing wrists that looked a little leaner, a little tougher from a year of navigating the concrete skate parks of Great Lakes City. She was leaning back, one sneaker propped against the edge of the booth’s bench, idly tapping a rhythm against her knee.

“You’re staring, Loud,” she said, her voice carrying that familiar, sharp edge, though the corner of her mouth twitched upward into a small smirk. “Is there something on my face, or are you just trying to remember how to speak to humans?”

Lincoln blinked, pulling his hands back to his lap with a nervous chuckle. “Sorry. It’s just… It’s still weird seeing you here. On a weekday. Without a train ride involved.”

“The Casagrande's don’t do things by halves, Lincoln,” she replied, reaching forward to pour herself a fresh cup from the pitcher. The ice clinked sharply against the plastic. “When Abuelo decided the city market wasn’t working out, the whole moving truck got packed by sunrise. It’s been three weeks, and my mom is still finding bubble wrap in her scrubs. But… yeah. It’s weird being back. Good weird. Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Lincoln arched an eyebrow.

“Well, the skate park here has about three ramps and a single grinding rail that smells like damp pine,” she grumbled, taking a long sip. “And the school cafeteria still serves that gray meat that looks like it was harvested from an old couch. But the company isn’t terrible.”

Lincoln felt a familiar warmth rise into his cheeks, the kind that usually made him look like a tomato against his orange polo shirt. He cleared his throat, leaning his forearms on the sticky laminate table. “So… since the long-distance thing isn’t an issue anymore… I was thinking maybe we could, you know. Figure out where we left off. Before the move.”

Ronnie Anne’s expression softened, the street-smart armor dropping for just a fraction of a second. She set her cup down carefully, tracing the rim with her fingernail. “Lincoln, look. I like being back. And I like hanging out with you. You’re my best friend here. But things are chaotic right now. Moving across the state, changing schools again… I just want to keep things simple for a bit. Let’s just be friends, hang out, ride skateboards, and let things happen naturally. Okay? No pressure.”

“Right. Simple. Naturally,” Lincoln repeated, nodding quickly, trying to sound completely casual despite the tiny thud of disappointment in his chest. “No pressure at all. I can do simple. I am the master of simple.”

“Sure you are, man with the plan,” she teased, punching his shoulder lightly. It didn’t hurt, but she hit harder than she used to. “Now pass the napkins before this pizza grease ruins the table.”

As Lincoln reached for the metal dispenser, his eyes drifted past Ronnie Anne’s shoulder toward the neon-lit entrance of the arcade.

Sitting in a wider booth near the prize redemption center was Chandler McCann. He wasn’t playing any games. He was surrounded by two of his usual middle-school lackeys—older, heavier boys named Trent and Tyler—but Chandler’s attention was entirely focused on the back corner booth.

Chandler’s jaw was set tight, his eyes narrowed into a venomous stare that traveled from Lincoln’s orange shirt directly to Ronnie Anne’s face. He had a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza in his hand, but he wasn’t chewing. When he noticed Lincoln looking back at him, Chandler didn’t break eye contact. Instead, he slowly let the pizza drop back onto the paper plate, leaning forward until his elbows rested on the table, his fingers interlocking into a cold, deliberate gesture of pure hostility.

Lincoln felt the back of his neck go cold. He knew Chandler was a bully, an attention-seeking brat who ruled the middle school hallways through sheer social intimidation, but this look felt different. It wasn’t the usual smug arrogance of a kid trying to steal lunch money or demand a homework assignment. It was personal. It was quiet, resentful, and completely focused on the fact that Ronnie Anne was sitting across from Lincoln, laughing at a joke he hadn’t heard.

“Lincoln?” Ronnie Anne asked, her brow furrowing as she followed his gaze.

Before she could turn around fully, Chandler abruptly stood up, kicking his legs out from under his booth with a loud scrape against the tile. He muttered something to Trent and Tyler, who immediately smirked, before the three of them turned and walked out the glass double doors into the bright afternoon sunlight, leaving their trash on the table.

“What was that about?” Ronnie Anne asked, turning back to Lincoln, her fingers tightening around her cup.

“Nothing,” Lincoln lied, swallowing the dry lump in his throat. He forced a smile, though his hands were slightly shaking as he tore a napkin in half. “Just Chandler being Chandler. Come on, let’s finish the pizza before it gets cold. Clyde said he’d meet us back at my house in an hour.”

The morning sun filtered through the mature oak trees lining the Royal Woods Elementary School courtyard, casting long, geometric shadows across the asphalt playground. It was a crisp Friday morning, that brief window before the first bell rang when the outdoor area belonged entirely to the students. Normally, the space was a sanctuary of uncoordinated chaos—kids playing four-square, trading cards on the concrete steps, or hanging upside down from the monkey bars.

Tucked into a relatively quiet alcove near the brick facade of the science wing, two of the younger Loud sisters were completely absorbed in their respective morning routines. Lana Loud was on her hands and knees in the dirt patch bordering the foundation bushes, her blue overalls already smudged with dark earth. She was carefully adjusting the wire mesh of an improvised wooden enclosure she had spent the previous evening building for a three-legged bullfrog she had rescued from the park drainage ditch.

A few feet away, sitting cross-legged on a concrete bench with her back to the wall, Lucy Loud was hunched over a battered, black-composition notebook. Her long, ink-black bangs completely obscured her eyes as her pen scratched rhythmic, low-key verses onto the lined paper, her small voice occasionally whispering a line to test its cadence against the wind.

“Hold still, Seymour,” Lana muttered, gently nudging the frog back into the shade of a damp piece of bark. “If Lisa sees you out here, she’s gonna try to swab your tongue for bacteria again. You’re safe here. Just gotta get the latch fixed before class.”

“The shadow grows long upon the stone,” Lucy murmured softly from the bench, her voice a monotone drone that barely carried past her own knees. “The ink runs cold, the spirit flown. A solitary crow upon the wire…”

“Hey. Look what we got here.”

The harsh, mocking voice shattered the morning peace like a stone through a windowpane. Lana snapped her head up, her dirt-stained fingers freezing against the wire mesh. Lucy’s pen stopped mid-stroke, though she didn’t raise her head.

Chandler McCann stood at the entrance of the alcove, flanked closely by Trent and Tyler. Because they were middle schoolers, their physical presence in the elementary courtyard was an immediate violation of campus rules, but the lack of active teacher supervision gave them free rein. Chandler had his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his posture slouched into a practiced expression of supreme boredom, but his eyes were sharp, calculating, and cold.

“Ain’t you Loud kids supposed to be inside or something?” Chandler sneered, stepping forward until the toe of his sneaker rested inches from Lana’s improvised frog habitat. “The middle school hall was getting boring, so we figured we’d come down here and see what kind of garbage Lincoln’s family is playing with today.”

“Get away from here, Chandler,” Lana barked, standing up quickly and wiping her hands on her thighs. She didn’t back down an inch, her small chest puffing out defensively in front of the wooden box. “This is elementary territory. Go back to your own building before I tell the yard duty.”

Chandler laughed, a dry, grating sound that made Trent and Tyler chuckle on cue. “Oh, no. I’m so scared of the third-grade hall monitor.”

“Oh yeah?” questioned Lana, quickly thinking of another strategy. “I’ll just tell Lincoln then!”

“What’s your brother gonna do? Write a plan about it in his little notebook?” He leaned down, his eyes locking onto the composition notebook in Lucy’s lap. “What’s that, the freak show’s diary?”

Before Lucy could react, Trent lunged forward with practiced cruelty, snatching the notebook right out of her small fingers. Lucy remained perfectly still, though her shoulders tensed significantly as her hands gripped the empty air where her poetry had been.

“Hey! Give that back!” Lana yelled, lunging toward Trent, but Tyler shifted his heavy frame, blocking her path with a solid shoulder that sent the smaller girl stumbling backward into the dirt.

“Let’s see what we got,” Chandler said, grabbing the notebook from Trent and flipping through the pages with deliberate sloppiness. “‘The ink runs cold, the spirit flown.’ Man, this is pathetic. It’s bad enough your brother spends all his time trying to impress the new girl from the city, but the rest of you are just a bunch of weirdos.”

He stopped flipping, his thumb pressing down on the binding. With a cold, deliberate smirk, Chandler twisted his wrists. The cheap glue in the composition notebook groaned, and the cover and the first ten pages ripped completely free of the threads, scattering into the damp dirt patch.

“Oops,” Chandler said, his voice entirely devoid of remorse. “Slippery hands.”

While Lana was distracted by the flying paper, Chandler shifted his weight and brought the heel of his heavy skate shoe directly down onto the top of the wooden frog enclosure. The thin plywood cracked violently under his weight. The wire mesh crumpled inward into a tangled mess of sharp metal and splintered pine.

“Seymour!” Lana screamed.

Lana dove into the dirt, her fingers frantically clawing at the wreckage to see if the frog had been crushed, her eyes wide with sudden terror. Fortunately, a small, dark shape leaped out from the broken side, scrambling frantically into the dense safety of the foundation bushes, but the habitat she had spent hours building was completely ruined.

Chandler stepped back, wiping a smudge of dirt off the edge of his shoe against the grass. He looked down at the two girls—Lana on her knees in the dirt, her lower lip trembling with a mixture of rage and sorrow, and Lucy slowly kneeling to pick up her torn, mud-stained poetry pages one by one.

“Tell Lincoln I said hi,” Chandler whispered, his voice dropping into a low, venomous tone that carried a very specific, personal malice. “Tell him he needs to start paying closer attention to his own house instead of hanging around places he doesn’t belong. See ya around, losers.”

The three middle schoolers turned on their heels, laughing loudly as they strolled back toward the breezeway connecting the two buildings, leaving the alcove in absolute silence save for the rustle of paper in the morning breeze.

The final bell of the school day had barely stopped echoing through the brick corridors before Lola Loud marched out the heavy double doors of the elementary wing. Unlike the rest of the student body, who spilled out into the afternoon air in a chaotic, shouting mass of unzipped backpacks, Lola moved with absolute, rigid precision.

In her small arms, she carried a large, tri-fold presentation board made of thick white foam, its header adorned with glittering, hand-painted letters that read: How to be a Pageant Princess. Taped to the center was a meticulously sketched costume blueprint, and pinned to the bottom rim was her absolute pride and joy—a custom-tailored, silk pageant sash woven with deep blue threads that caught the sunlight. She had brought it for an after-school review session with her faculty adviser, and she was currently glowing with the fierce, unshakeable perfectionism that defined her.

She was halfway down the concrete steps when a shadow fell across her path.

“Out of the way, little queen,” Chandler’s voice dripped with immediate, grating arrogance.

Lola snapped her head up, her eyes narrowing instantly into a terrifying glare. “Chandler. You are blocking my path. Move aside before I make your life an absolute nightmare.”

Chandler didn’t move. He stood on the bottom step, blocking the handrail, flanked by Trent and Tyler. He looked down at the foam board, his eyes scanning the glitter and the silk sash. A cold, ugly sneer crossed his face. “Man, look at this garbage. You really think you’re some kind of royalty, don’t you? Just like your brother thinks he’s a big shot because he’s hanging around Ronnie Anne.”

“Do not speak to me about my brother, and do not look at my presentation board,” Lola hissed, tightening her grip on the foam edges. “You’re a middle-school nobody. Move.”

“Let’s see how royal you look after this,” Chandler whispered.

Before Lola could step back, Chandler lunged forward. His fingers gripped the satin material of her prized pageant sash. With a sharp, violent downward jerk, he ripped the sash completely off the foam board. The delicate pins snapped, and the silk tore down the center seam, the blue threads fraying instantly into a ruined mess.

“My sash!” Lola shrieked, her voice cracking with sudden, overwhelming shock.

“And your little project needs some texture,” Chandler sneered.

He didn’t use chocolate milk or janitorial water this time. He stepped directly to the edge of the school’s landscaped garden bed, bent down, and scooped up a massive, heavy handful of dry, dark flowerbed dirt mixed with mulch and wood chips. With a cruel, sweeping motion, he slammed the dirt directly onto the front of her immaculate presentation board. The rough wood chips gouged the foam, and the dark soil smeared heavily across her hand-painted glittering letters, completely obliterating weeks of flawless, meticulous layout work.

Chandler dropped the torn sash into the dirt at his feet, grinding his heel into the blue silk for good measure. “There. Now it matches the rest of your family. Tell Lincoln to keep his eyes on his own business.”

The three older boys turned and sprinted toward the parking lot, laughing wildly as they disappeared past the school buses. Lola stood frozen on the steps, the heavy foam board shaking in her hands. She looked down at the ruined, mud-smeared letters, then at the torn silk sash lying in the dirt. Her small chest heaved, her fierce composure shattering completely. For the first time all year, she didn’t yell; she didn’t threaten vengeance. She just dropped her head against the dirt-stained foam and began to quietly, bitterly weep from pure, helpless humiliation.

An hour later, the front door of the Louds’ house swung open with its usual creak. Lincoln stepped into the foyer, his backpack slung over one shoulder, chatting animatedly with Ronnie Anne, who was leaning against the doorframe behind him.

“I’m just saying, the skate park layout could be fixed if we just—” Lincoln started, but the words died instantly in his throat.

The living room was completely devoid of its usual roaring chaos. There was no television blaring, no sports equipment flying, no musical instruments shaking the drywall. Instead, a heavy, suffocating silence hung over the furniture.

Sitting in a tight circle on the living room rug were Lucy, Lana, and Lola. Lana was huddled in the corner, her knees pulled to her chest, her face red and streaked with tears as she clutched the broken pieces of her wooden frog habitat. Lucy sat perfectly still next to her, her hands resting on a pile of torn, mud-stained composition pages that looked completely unsalvageable. And in the center of the sofa, Lola was curled into a small, weeping ball, her face buried in a throw pillow, her ruined presentation board and torn pageant sash cast carelessly onto the coffee table.

Lincoln’s backpack slipped from his hand, hitting the hardwood floor with a heavy thud. “What… what happened? Who did this?”

Lana looked up, her lower lip trembling violently. “It… it was Chandler, Lincoln. He came to the elementary school. He broke Seymour’s cage and ripped Lucy’s poetry book…”

Lola pulled her face from the pillow, her eyes red, her voice cracking with a raw, broken pride that Lincoln had never heard from her before. “He ripped my sash, Lincoln. He threw dirt all over my pageant board. He said… he said you were spending too much time with Ronnie Anne and that our family was garbage.”

Lincoln stood completely frozen, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He looked at the torn silk, the shattered wood, the muddy paper, and then at the tears on his younger sisters’ faces. A cold, suffocating wave of pure, unadulterated fury rose from his stomach, turning his vision sharp at the edges.

Behind him, Ronnie Anne’s face went entirely dark. Her fists clenched so tightly her knuckles turned white. “That’s it,” she growled, her voice dropping into a dangerous, street-level register. “I’m going to find him right now. He wants to act tough against little girls? Let’s see how he handles a real fight. Come on, Lincoln.”

“No,” Lincoln whispered. His voice was flat, hollow, and completely devoid of his usual nervous energy.

“What do you mean, no?” Ronnie Anne snapped, turning to look at him. “He targeted your family, Loud! We go out there, and we break him!”

“Normal tactics aren’t going to stop him, Ronnie Anne,” Lincoln said, his eyes fixed on Lola’s ruined sash. He was overwhelmed by the sudden, crushing weight of being the older brother, the man with the plan who had completely failed to protect his house. “If you hit him, he just brings more guys. He’ll keep coming back. He’ll keep hurting them. I need something definitive. I need a real edge.”

Without waiting for her reply, Lincoln turned on his heel and marched straight through the kitchen toward the back door. The fury in his mind was a blinding, singular line. He didn’t want a long-term plan anymore. He wanted a solution that Chandler couldn’t fight back against.

He stepped out onto the back porch, his eyes locking instantly onto the heavy, reinforced steel hatch of Lisa’s backyard bunker glowing beneath the afternoon shadows. Thinking smaller, expecting to find one of her classic, cartoonish strength serums, an adrenaline potion, or a high-tech deterrent gadget to give him a temporary upper hand, he broke into a frantic, desperate sprint across the grass.

The heavy, industrial steel hatch of Lisa Loud’s backyard bunker groaned as Lincoln pulled it upward, its hydraulic seals protesting with a sharp hiss that died instantly in the quiet evening air. The rest of the house was occupied by the heavy, somber aftermath of Chandler’s attack, the older sisters trying to comfort the younger ones in the living room. Lincoln hadn’t waited around for the discussion. He slipped out through the mudroom, his sneakers cutting a silent path across the dew-slicked grass until he reached the bunker entrance.

He descended the cold concrete steps into the subterranean laboratory, pulling the heavy hatch shut behind him. The space plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness.

Lincoln didn’t turn on the overhead fluorescent lights. He knew that if the bunker illuminated fully, the bright white glow would be visible through the small ground-level ventilation slits, alerting Lisa on her bedroom monitors that someone was tampering with her domain. Instead, he pulled his smartphone from his pocket, clicking on the low-intensity flashlight beam. The narrow cone of white light cut through the dark, reflecting off rows of stainless-steel counters, pressurized glass beakers, and humongous wall-mounted diagnostic terminals.

His heart was still hammering against his ribs, the raw, toxic heat of his protective fury refusing to cool down. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Lola’s torn sash and the mud smeared across her presentation board.

“Think, Lincoln, think,” he whispered to himself, his voice echoing hollowly off the reinforced concrete walls. “She’s got to have something here. A deterrent gadget. A localized stun baton. Some kind of defensive serum. Anything to make a guy like Chandler back off for good.”

He frantically began to rummage through the nearest storage cabinets. His flashlight beam danced wildly across neatly labeled containers: Experimental Isotopes, Mutagenic Polymers, High-density composites. He ignored the complex formulas, bypassing her standard radioactive samples and biological swabs. He was thinking small-scale, hoping to stumble across one of her classic, slightly absurd chemical potions or an adrenaline-boosting prototype that he could slip into his backpack before school resumed.

He moved deeper into the laboratory, his shoes clicking softly against the treated floorboards. He pulled open a heavy, specialized drawer beneath a master mainframe console, tossing aside prototype laser levels and magnetic grip gloves. The chaos of his search grew more frantic as his frustration mounted. Everything was too complicated, too deeply theoretical, or safely locked behind biometric digital keypads that required Lisa’s handprint to open.

“Come on, Lisa,” he muttered, wiping a bead of nervous sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Give me an edge. Just something to protect them.”

He stepped backward, his heel catching on a heavy bundle of thick, insulated power cables snake-crawling across the floor. Lincoln stumbled, his flashlight slipping from his grip and clattering across the steel surface of a primary control desk.

In his desperate scramble to regain his balance and retrieve the phone, his outstretched hand hit the smooth vertical face of the bunker’s central power distribution pillar. His palm slammed directly into a heavy, guarded safety mechanism, his weight forcing the plastic protective cover to snap cleanly off its hinges.

Before he could pull his arm back, his fingers buried deep into the recessed control pocket, firmly catching and tripping a massive, bright red master breaker toggle switch.

Deep within the bunker's structural walls, a heavy mechanical contactor slammed shut with a sound like a gunshot.

The low-intensity darkness of the laboratory was instantly shattered. A low, rhythmic power hum began to vibrate through the very concrete beneath his feet, starting as a barely audible drone before rapidly rising into a high-pitched, pressurized whine that made his teeth ache. Around the perimeter of the room, banks of hidden status lights began to cascade in a frantic, automated sequence, shifting from steady amber to a flashing, warning crimson.

Lincoln scrambled to his feet, grabbing his phone off the desk as the laboratory around him began to wake up into a terrifying, automated routine. “No, no, no! Turn off! Undo!”

He lunged back toward the breaker panel, frantically slamming his hand against the red toggle switch, trying to force it back into the vertical ‘off’ position. But the breaker remained completely locked, held in place by an automated digital override loop that had already initialized the bunker’s main experimental grid.

Directly behind him, a massive, circular chamber that he had assumed was just an empty structural support column began to glow with an intense, internal golden luminescence. It was Lisa’s crowning scientific achievement, completed only days prior—the fully operational, high-voltage quantum particle accelerator. And Lincoln was standing directly in the center of its unshielded containment perimeter.

The air inside the subterranean laboratory changed instantly, turning thick, heavy, and metallic. A scent like ozone and scorched copper flooded Lincoln’s senses as the circular chamber of the particle accelerator began to hum with terrifying, unchecked velocity. The walls of the bunker seemed to vibrate, a low-frequency rumble that rattled the glass beakers on the countertops and sent a violent tremor through the soles of Lincoln’s sneakers.

He backed away from the locked power panel, his eyes wide with sudden, absolute panic. The central containment core—a massive ring of supercooled electromagnetic coils—glowed with a brilliant, blinding violet light that rapidly shifted to a fierce, incandescent gold.

“Lisa!” Lincoln screamed, but his voice was completely swallowed by the roaring crescendo of the machine.

He turned to run toward the exit stairs, but his legs felt unnaturally heavy, as if the local gravity within the room had suddenly doubled. The ambient air pressure spiked, popping his ears as a visible distortion—a rippling, watery wave of sheer quantum energy—began to expand outward from the accelerator’s core. It wasn’t an explosion of fire or shrapnel; it was a localized tear in the fabric of mass and velocity, a pristine, scientific reaction functioning exactly as Lisa had designed it, but completely uncontained.

Lincoln reached the bottom step of the concrete staircase, his fingers frantically clawing at the handrail.

Then, the accelerator reached critical density.

A singular, blinding flash of silent golden light erupted from the core, instantly illuminating every corner of the bunker with the intensity of a dying star. The raw, unfiltered wave of quantum particles washed over Lincoln’s body, cutting through his clothing, his skin, and his cellular matrix in a microsecond of time. There was no physical pain, only a sudden, absolute numbing sensation that locked his muscles and seized his lungs. The sheer kinetic back-pressure launched him backward off the steps, his body spinning helplessly through the air before colliding heavily with the padded reinforcing wall.

He hit the floorboards face down, the golden light rapidly fading from the air as the machine’s automated failsafes kicked in, drawing the power back into the subterranean capacitors with a dying, mechanical groan. Lincoln’s smartphone lay two feet away, its screen cracked, the flashlight beam flickering weakly against the dark concrete. He didn’t move. His breathing slowed to a faint, shallow rhythm, his consciousness slipping instantly into a deep, unresponsive void.

Inside the living room, the atmosphere was still heavy with the somber quiet of the afternoon’s events. Lori and Leni were sitting on the floor, trying to help Lola sort through the usable pieces of her presentation board, while Rita and Lynn Sr. stood by the kitchen counter, speaking in hushed, worried tones about how to handle Chandler’s parents.

Suddenly, a sharp, piercing electronic klaxon shattered the silence.

The noise didn’t come from the smoke detectors or the security system. It erupted directly from the pocket of Lisa’s lab coat.

Lisa pulled her high-tech tablet from her pocket, her thumb swiping rapidly across the glass screen to silence the alarm. Her usual detached, analytical expression evaporated in an instant, replaced by a rare, striking mask of pure, unadulterated horror. The digital display was flashing a brilliant, demanding crimson, accompanied by text that read: CRITICAL CONTAINMENT BREACH: CORE INITIATION TRIGGERED BY ANOMALOUS MASS SPECIMEN.

“By the calculations of the cosmos…” Lisa whispered, her voice uncharacteristically small, her fingers trembling against the edge of the tablet.

“Lisa? What is it?” Rita asked, stepping forward, her brow furrowing at the look on her youngest daughter’s face.

“My backyard bunker,” Lisa blurted out, her academic vocabulary failing her as raw panic took over. “The quantum particle accelerator. It was fully operational and locked. Someone just bypassed the safety protocols and initiated a manual core flare. And according to the bio-scanners… there is a human life form trapped inside the primary radiation perimeter.”

Ronnie Anne, who had been pacing near the front door, snapped her head toward the kitchen. Her heart dropped into her stomach as she realized what Lincoln had meant when he said he needed a definitive edge. “Lincoln,” she gasped, her voice choked with a sudden, icy terror. “He went out there to find something to use against Chandler.”

“Oh my gosh, Lincoln!” Leni shrieked, dropping Lola’s ruined presentation board onto the carpet.

Before anyone else could move, Ronnie Anne turned on her heel and lunged out the back door, her sneakers tearing across the grass toward the heavy steel hatch in the dark yard. Rita and Lynn Sr. were right behind her, their parental instincts overriding the sheer confusion of the moment, while Lisa sprinted with her tablet held tight against her chest, her mind frantically calculating the radioactive fallout thresholds of her own creation.

They reached the hatch, the distant, metallic whine of the dying accelerator echoing weakly from the subterranean depths below, signaling the start of a nightmare that would forever alter the fabric of Royal Woods.