Lucas Evershard had once been ordinary: a son in a loving, unremarkable family, quick-witted in a way that made teachers smile and neighbors shrug. That ordinary life shattered in a single night.
They came without warning. Men in dark coats battered their way through the front door, voices like stones. "Your father took something from us," one of them hissed. Lucas laughed once, half in disbelief, half in nervousness. His father couldn't even swat a fly properly. The idea that he had stolen a crucial secret from a dangerous organization felt like a fever dream.
"Merissa, take Lucas and run," his father said before Lucas could speak. There was no bark of command in him only a desperate plea.
"No way Not without you," Merissa answered, and Lucas had never seen his mother so scared.
It was over in minutes. The men overwhelmed them: tackle, hands, tape. Lucas thrashed, small and furious, until a cold sting crawled across his vision and the world folded inward.
He woke tied to a cot in a white room, his mouth glued to the taste of bleach and fear. His throat rasped for a sound and gave him nothing. Through a curtain a second room opened like a stage. His parents were there, bound. The men were clinical and cruel; pity had no place in the space between them and Lucas.
They tortured them slowly, as if there were time enough for Lucas to take in every detail: the way his father's jaw clenched, the sound of his mother's voice thinning into a plea. Then the executions, cold and efficient, obliterated the last of the life Lucas had known. He did not cry. His lungs had learned to hold everything.
A final, hoarse plea left his mother. "Please spare my son. I beg of you."
The executioner's answer was quiet. "Your final wish shall be fulfilled."
Darkness came for him again. When Lucas opened his eyes, he lay on a filthy street with strangers' boots crunching past and his heart a stone. Blood and salt streaked together on his face. He whispered an oath through cracked lips: they would pay. Fifty times over, in blood if he had to.
Found days later by officials, he went to an orphanage and then to school, mute except for the three words he would say until he was old enough to do as he chose: "My family's dead." The caretakers noticed his intelligence—an unnatural, hungry sharpness—and, seeing advantage, paraded him into classrooms and interviews like a prized curiosity.
Lucas let them parade him, and watched. He learned how the system bent for applause and donations. He learned where reputations could be shredded. He learned patience.
When he was old enough, he began to gather the small things no one thought to guard: receipts, an offhand confession, a file left unlocked, a camera angle that had captured too much. He fed rumors slowly — first a whisper, then an edited clip, then incontrovertible evidence. The orphanage could not survive the collapse. Those who had treated him like spectacle were ruined, their careers and sanctimonious charities dismantled with a surgeon's precision. No one traced the work back to him.
He finished his honors at a ridiculously young age. Offers poured in from companies that wanted his brain; he turned them down. Instead he built a company of his own — not for fame, but to build things that would change what it meant to be human. Devices that had been dreams in textbooks became instruments of a new era: propulsion that reached farther, machines that altered matter at a molecular scale. Lucas's name came to mean progress. He grew rich, then older, then more isolated — untouchable, and yet haunted.
Every breakthrough carried the same hollow victory: someone who had the resources to hide could erase any paper trail. He searched for the men who took his parents and the organization that ordered the deed. Records ran clean where he expected dirt. Decades of resources, of power and influence, folded away like a magician's trick. His vengeance was a map with no coordinates.
Lucas kept trying. He built better sensors, created algorithms that sifted the globe's smallest anomalies. He employed the best minds, then closed the blinds and worked alone. The world called him a savior; he thought of chains and empty chairs. He refused to augment himself — perhaps from stubbornness, perhaps from a last, human refusal to let his parents' killers own even that.
At one hundred and ten, he died in a quiet room, breath fading like a candle. His final words were small and private. "I'm sorry," he thought, not for his failures but for the life he never lived beyond the hunt. "I'm sorry, Mom and Dad. I couldn't finish it for you."
He had changed the world yet he had not avenged the ones who taught him how to be human.