Marx lived in a place where the walls peeled their own skin in agony, where the pipes whispered threats in the night, and where the air carried a scent of resigned decay. The tenement was a cathedral of misery—its congregation a mass of derelicts, discarded by the world. But Marx held onto something they had lost: clarity. He walked through the corridors, his footsteps echoing like a death knell. The others watched from shadows, hollow eyes blinking in the dim light. They hated him—not for what he had done, but for what he was. In the pit of their despair, he remained unbroken. "Why do you act like you're better than us?" a figure rasped, emerging from the filth. The others stirred, their resentment pooling into something sharp. "I'm not better," Marx said. "Just awake." The word rippled through them like an insult. Awake. It meant choice. It meant seeing beyond survival—beyond the rot they had grown comfortable in. He saw them for what they were...
Elena had always been perceptive—too perceptive, some would say. At just sixteen, she saw details others overlooked: the way Mr. Grayson always seemed to be standing at his window when she passed, the hurried whispers of her neighbors that stopped when she entered a room, the feeling of unseen eyes crawling over her skin. She cared about people, even those she didn’t know, perhaps too much. She was always the first to ask if someone needed help, always the last to give up on someone who seemed lost. But lately, the weight of her concern had begun to crush her. There was something wrong with her neighborhood, something unsettling in the way her street functioned like an intricate web—and she, the unsuspecting prey caught in its center. It started subtly. The sudden hush when she stepped outside, the eerie way people turned away as soon as she made eye contact. Then, one evening, she overheard a fragment of conversation between two neighbors. “She knows.” Elena had frozen in pl...