Chapter 30: Seattle Starves
The silence in the Seattle hotel room wasn't quiet. It was the hum of two different kinds of crazy. One was the calm, electric buzz of a master at his console. The other was the jittery, sweaty-palms kind of crazy that comes from holding a weapon you barely understand.
The Architect stood by the bed, laying out tools like a surgeon. Magazines of ammunition clicked onto the duvet. A sleek, matte-black pistol. A long, sinister case he unlatched with a soft thwump.
Inside, cradled in foam, was a sniper rifle. It wasn't some beat-up hunting piece; it looked like it had been engineered in a lab, all angles and cold, unforgiving metal.
"Got the magazines ready?" the Architect said, his voice muffled but casual, like he was asking about the weather. "Shoot with the grenade after the guns are finished. I have a sniper. Do you want it?"
Kyleson stared at the rifle. He'd seen them in movies. In video games. Never in a Courtyard by Marriott. The sheer wrongness of it made his stomach flip. This wasn't a Gathering. This wasn't a speech. This was… hardware.
"How the fuck," Kyleson whispered, his voice tight, "are we not being heard by the authorities? This isn't a back alley. This is a hotel."
The Architect didn't even look up. He slid a magazine into the pistol with a smooth, final click. "Oh, don't worry about that. I research more than you do." He finally glanced at Kyleson, and those blue eyes above the mask were utterly serene. "I chose this hotel for a reason. No CCTV in the hallways. Soundproofing in the walls is above code. The room below is vacant. The one above is occupied by a deaf retiree who takes heavy sedatives at noon. We are, for all intents and purposes, a ghost in the machine."
He gestured to the rifle. "So. A long-range attack or a short-range one? The tool defines the art."
Kyleson's mouth was dry. The logic was airtight. It was terrifying. The Architect didn't just plan philosophy; he planned decibels and camera blind spots. Swallowing hard, Kyleson pointed a shaky finger. "Oh. Then… then I should go with the sniper."
"Good." The Architect lifted the rifle from its case. It was heavier than Kyleson expected. The metal was cold. He was shown how to shoulder it, how to peer through the scope. The world outside the window, the drizzly grey of Pioneer Square, suddenly leapt into hyper-detailed, cross-haired clarity. He could see the pores on a construction worker's face two blocks away.
"Do your job," the Architect said, slipping the pistol into a hidden holster under his long black coat and pocketing extra mags. "I am coming." And just like that, he was gone, the hotel room door sighing shut behind him, leaving Kyleson alone with the ghost-gun and a heartbeat loud enough he was sure the deaf guy upstairs could hear it.
Kyleson stumbled to the window, using the curtain for cover. He rested the rifle's barrel on the sill, the scope digging into his brow bone. His hands were sweating. He panned across the wet square, the park, the benches.
Then he saw her.
Nicole. He knew that face. He'd followed her Instagram for months. A local indie singer with a smile that felt like sunshine breaking through Seattle cloud. She was sitting on a bench under a dripping tree, laughing at something. Next to her was a guy, his arm around her. Bryant. Her boyfriend. Kyleson had read about him in a blog interview. They were planning a winter wedding. December 21st. The winter solstice. She thought it was poetic.
Now, through the scope, she was just a target. A collection of shapes and distances. Her laugh was silent from here.
"Well," Kyleson muttered to himself, a pathetic attempt at bravado in the empty room. "At least I will kill a singer."
His finger found the trigger. It was colder than the rifle. The crosshairs wavered over her chest, then her head. He settled on center mass. The teachings of the Gathering echoed in his head—the liberation of the void, the meaninglessness of their connections. This was action. This was becoming the truth.
He held his breath.
He squeezed.
The sound wasn't the massive bang he expected. It was a sharp, precise crack, swallowed by the room's soundproofing and the city's ambient noise. The rifle kicked against his shoulder, a rude, physical shock.
In the scope, the world jerked.
One moment, Nicole was there, leaning into Bryant, a living, breathing story.
The next, she was a collapsed shape on the bench, a sudden, violent stillness where life had been.
Bryant's smile didn't even have time to fade. It just froze, then shattered into confusion, then raw, primal horror. He grabbed at her, his mouth opening in a scream Kyleson couldn't hear. Then instinct took over. He recoiled, stumbling back, his eyes wide white circles of disbelief, before turning and running, joining the sudden scatter of other people in the park who had heard the crack, seen the collapse, and now fled in a wave of panic.
It was a nice park. People played frisbee there. Kids fed ducks in the pond. Now it was a crime scene, and the first death in Seattle's new, silent war was a singer who would never see her winter wedding.
---
An ambulance came, lights flashing uselessly in the grey afternoon. They took her to Harborview Medical Center. The doctors, experts in gunshot wounds from a city with a different kind of violence, worked with grim efficiency. But the shot, fired from a calm, stable position by a man following orders, had been perfectly placed. The fate, as the Architect would say, was pre-ordained. She didn't survive.
---
The Architect moved through the streets like a shadow in the rain. The pistol under his coat was a comfort, a known weight. His destination wasn't random. It was a high-end boutique hotel a few blocks over, the kind with a discreet, polished reception desk and a concierge who knew your name.
He pushed through the rotating doors, shedding rainwater. The lobby was a temple of quiet money. A pianist played something inoffensive in the corner. Three managers in impeccable suits stood behind the marble reception, their faces masks of professional solicitousness.
The Architect walked right up, water dripping from his black coat onto the Persian rug.
"Excuse me," he said, his voice politely concerned, muffled by the mask. The nearest manager, a man with a nametag that read STALIN (his parents had a sense of humor, or none at all), looked up with a practiced smile.
"Sir? Can I help you?"
"Did you," the Architect asked, leaning in slightly as if to share a confidence, "hear a shot? Just now. Outside. It sounded quite close."
Stalin's smile tightened, just a millimeter. Unpleasant topics were not for the lobby. "A shot, sir? I'm not sure. Where did you hear it?"
The Architect's head tilted. "Oh," he said softly. "I heard it…"
He moved with a fluidity that was shocking in the staid room. The pistol was in his hand, not raised dramatically, but held low, almost casually. He didn't aim.
"...right here."
The sound inside the lush, sound-absorbing lobby was a deafening, ugly BANG.
Stalin's polished smile vanished, replaced by a look of profound, stupid surprise. He looked down at the dark, blooming flower on his crisp white shirt, then back up at the man in the mask, as if to file a complaint, before his legs buckled and he dropped behind the counter.
For one second, there was perfect silence, save for the last, discordant note from the startled pianist.
Then chaos, refined.
A woman at the concierge desk screamed. Another manager ducked. The third fumbled for a phone. The Architect didn't run. He simply stepped sideways, putting the massive stone pillar of the reception desk between himself and the main lobby entrance. He was a statue of calm in the eye of the storm he'd just created.
Security personnel, big men in suits with earpieces, came rushing from a side door. They had procedures for drunks, for thieves. Not for this. Not for a man who shot a manager and then stood there, waiting.
The Architect raised the pistol. BANG. One guard spun, crashing into a potted fern. BANG. Another cried out, clutching his thigh.
It wasn't a frenzied shootout. It was a methodical culling. The Architect would fire, then move—a step behind a sofa, a pivot around a pillar. He used the opulent furniture of the lobby as his cover. Managers and guests crawled on the polished floor, weeping, hiding behind overturned armchairs. The elegant space became a deadly maze.
He was utterly alone. No Kyleson with a sniper, no chattering followers. Just him, his gun, and the beautiful, screaming proof that all their security, their luxury, their order, was a wafer-thin veneer. It was a situation where he had to play alone. And he was a virtuoso.
---
A thousand miles away, in the tomblike quiet of the Carter house in Eldridge, the air still smelled faintly of bleach and unresolved horror. Noah stood at the living room window, phone to his ear, staring at the spot on the driveway where the police lights had strobed.
"Is the plan coming along?" he asked, his voice low.
On the other end, Justin's voice was smooth, professional. The lawyer voice. "Yes. Most certainly."
Noah's gaze was distant. News alerts flickered on a muted tablet on the coffee table. SEATTLE PARK SHOOTING. "Is it going to be successful? And what's the motive? I heard… there have been gunshots in Seattle." There was a flicker in his tone, not quite surprise, but a sharp curiosity. As if checking the pieces on a board.
"I don't know what the fuck they're trying to achieve over there," Justin said, a deliberate note of exasperation in his voice. The trustworthy confidant. "But we should hope for the best for our own situation."
"Our situation," Noah echoed. He turned from the window. "What about the case? Will you be the judge I was waiting for?" The question was heavy, layered with a meaning only he seemed to fully grasp.
"Yes," Justin said, the smoothness returning. "Don't worry about it. I know some tricks. And you know… you can do anything." He let the platitude hang, then reinforced it. "I'm saying it again, do not worry!"
Noah was silent for a long moment. He was looking at a family photo on the wall—him, Luna, John, all smiling in a sun that didn't exist anymore. "Because I want to go somewhere else," he said, finally. "Could you handle the case without me?"
"Without you?" Justin's pause was perfectly timed. A beat of professional concern, then overriding confidence. "I can handle it. Whatever this takes."
The call ended. Noah lowered the phone. In the silent house, a ghost of a smile, thin and private, touched his lips. It looked like someone, somewhere, was confident as shit.
Outside, the rain began to fall in Eldridge, too. A gentle, coast-to-coast weeping.
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Chapter 30 Ends
To be continued