Revenge22 min read
The Hexagon at Midnight
ButterPicks9 views
1
"I drew a name," I said, holding the scrap of paper like it might bite. "Valentin Gonzalez?"
"Valentin Gonzalez?" the senior at my side repeated, and his laughter was half a scoff. "You got Professor Gonzalez? That's everyone’s nightmare."
"He's old," I said, and felt like I should know more than that. "They said he's... retired. Lives alone."
"Exactly," Brecken Reynolds said. "He’s exactly the kind of old professor people avoid. Just go, get the signature, don’t ask questions." He smiled with a too-wide mouth. "That’s the point, Emmaline."
"I will," I told him. "I’ll be polite."
Brecken shrugged and left with the rest of the volunteers. I folded the paper, memorized the name, and walked south across campus until the campus gaslights seemed to lean away from me.
When I knocked, the door opened from the inside before I finished my line.
"Who is it?" a small voice said through the peephole.
"Professor Gonzalez? Emmaline Jacobs, history volunteer. I—"
The door cracked open. The man who looked back at me was smaller than I expected, more frail. "Good," he said. "Come in."
"Thank you, Professor," I answered, smiling because it felt right. He did not return it.
The ground-level flat smelled faintly of old books and mildew. The living room was cluttered with stacks of papers and yellowing photographs. He moved with a cane, and when he sat, he did not slouch; he folded himself like an old map.
"Sit," he said. "You are first-year?"
"Yes. I—" I started, and then the silence filled the room. "I’m here with the volunteer service. We just need your signature."
He took the form, lifted the pen, and his hand trembled. He wrote, stopped, wrote again. He pushed the page back to me without a word.
"Thank you, Professor." I wanted to stay and talk, wanted to be kind—then the flat door opened behind me and a woman in a plain black outfit appeared. She had thin wrists and bright, careful eyes.
"Housekeeper's here," Professor Gonzalez said slowly, like each word was measured out for a clock. "She'll make me dinner. Keep the form safe, child. Don’t show it to others."
I smiled and slipped the form into my bag. As I walked past the woman she watched me with an expression I could not name. For a second, the inside of me hollowed, like a drawer left open. I blinked and left.
Outside I looked at the name he had written: not "Valentin Gonzalez" but a line of Chinese characters I knew without understanding why I knew them. I read the characters aloud once, twice—sheng shi hong mantian—"生时红漫天."
"That’s a poem," I said to myself. But the sound of it tightened something under my ribs. I had heard fragments of old spells when I was a child—my great-uncle Ibrahim Conley used to hum them as he polished a brass charm. Why would an old professor sign a volunteer form with a line that was not his name?
2
"It’s a crime scene," the dorm monitor said on the phone. "Go straight back."
"When did this happen?" I asked, breathless.
"Ten minutes ago. You better come." She hung up before I could argue. I ran north like wind, past the library, past the canal that cut the campus in half. By the time I arrived the tape had been strung and the stairwell smelled of bleach and the air had the metallic tang of something final.
"Who found him?" I asked.
"Roommate," the security guard said. "He came back from class, saw the blood. Police are here."
Brecken Reynolds—my casual, smirking senior who had told me how to approach Professor Gonzalez—lay on the cot inside a tarpaulin, his skin strangely bright where the crust had dried. The campus surgeon later called it an "unnatural stripping," but that night the word that lodged in me was the hollow, animal silence of someone taken apart without mercy. In his fist was a volunteer form.
"Emmaline?" my roommate said quietly, and I realized I was holding my bag so tight my knuckles had gone white.
I remembered the script—sheng shi hong mantian—on the form in my hand at the professor's. The same poem that had eaten at me the whole walk home. I put my hand over my mouth and did not speak.
At the police station everyone gave versions. "He had no enemies," people said. "We don't know why anyone would do this." The list of volunteers who had visited Professor Gonzalez the last year was pulled. Names were called. Faces blurred. Each time I wanted to say something I swallowed it down. My chest felt like it had been hammered.
When I finally answered, the officer squeezed my shoulder.
"Did Brecken have enemies?" he asked.
"No," I said. "But he visited Professor Gonzalez last year. He—" I stopped. I could not say why the phrase in my mind was growing teeth. I could not say I thought the old man had written a line of a curse on our volunteer sheet.
3
That night, under the lamps that hugged the campus like watchful owls, I walked back to Professor Gonzalez's flat.
He opened the door before I could knock. His face, up close, was a map of small ridges and faded constellations where age had settled. He did not look surprised to see me.
"You returned," he said quietly.
"I—" I could not pretend an ordinary errand. "Professor, Brecken—he's dead."
He did not move but his fingers tightened on the cane. "Was it violent?"
"Extremely." I told him what I had seen without pretending to be brave. He listened as if he had been waiting to hear every detail.
"Why did you write that on my form?" I asked, and the question felt foolish when it was leaving my lips.
He closed his eyes for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was low as a sermon.
"I've been waiting for someone," he said. "Thirty years."
"Thirty years?" I choked. "Professor, you're only..." I stopped. Numbers lost meaning.
He laughed once, a sound too soft to be a laugh. "You are young. You think thirty is a long time. To some of us, thirty years is only one patient breath."
"Waiting for whom?" I asked. "Who?"
"You," he said. "And the other seventeen. You are all part of something you were never told."
4
He told me then, in a handful of ash-encrusted sentences and in the pause between them, about a tombstone in a field they had disturbed when the school was first built. He told me about a set of lines carved on stone that did not write a name at all but a sequence that read like a command.
"Do you know what this says?" he asked, pointing at a tattered notebook. "It says, 'Remember the poem of eighteen. When the time comes, lives will be offered, and life will be red across the skies.'"
"Is that a poem?" I said. "It sounds like a... like instructions."
He nodded once. "Not a poem. An instruction. A ritual. They called it a 're-burial array' in the old, old pages. A tomb designed to keep the corpse and the spirit. If the arrangement is right, the spirit will not pass—they will wait. And in that waiting, a man can bend fate."
"Who would do such a thing?" I whispered.
He looked at me in a way that made me feel the floor tilt. "Someone who refused the limits of living. Someone named Franco Kraus."
"Franco Kraus?" I repeated. "The founding head—"
"—the man who stamped the campus on the land and built the hexagonal main building," he finished. "Yes."
5
"Do you know why my great-uncle taught me those lines?" I asked. "Ibrahim Conley—he used to read incantations at night. He said he learned them in his travels."
Professor Gonzalez nodded slowly. "He was a friend. They tried to stop this, once. Ibrahim—Wang Jiuping, as I knew him then—tried to break the chain. We tried to bury the stone and stop the ritual. We failed."
"Why failed?" I demanded. "Why couldn't you—"
Before he could answer the door clicked and the woman from earlier stood in the doorway—Kayleigh Ross. She was younger in daylight, not the shadow-worn figure from my first visit. She looked at me with eyes that seemed to hold a whole history.
"They were trying to bind the spirit that was held in the stone," Kayleigh said. "They barricaded it, but something else came along. Some men wanted more than rebirth. They wanted to live.
"He turned the school's blueprints into a six-sided sigil and put the heart in the fifth floor—Room 505. He made the building a stone. He made a stele of a different kind. He called it progress. He called it preservation."
"And that man is Franco Kraus?" I said.
Kayleigh gave a short bitter sound. "He works miracles with concrete and will and a pocket full of ambition. He is not a man who dies easily."
6
Over the next days, I read, hunted, and listened.
"How many are there?" I asked, leaning over a stack of brittle departmental records.
"Eighteen," Professor Gonzalez said. "Eighteen markings, and eighteen people the stone favors. The arrangement chooses them like a hand picking cards. Brecken was one. You are one. Ibrahim's blood connects to it. He bound the spells he knew, but binding is not the same as removing."
"So what happens if the arrangement completes?" I asked.
"In the old way, the dead would be raised," he said. "Now the arrangement can be perverted. Build around the stone a larger stone, and you can corral not only the one but the many. The man who did that—Franco Kraus—he dreams of immortality. He calls it a 'long-life burial array.'"
"That means what?" I asked, the words hollow in my mouth.
"It means living people get folded into the ritual," Kayleigh said. "Not as corpses. As part of the architecture of being. If eighteen people are placed into the pattern while the energy activates—"
"It eats," I said. "It takes life."
"It does," Professor Gonzalez said. "It scribes red over the sky."
7
"What can we do?" I asked.
Professor Gonzalez's eyes gleamed, and for a moment I saw the young scholar he once was. "We can hold the stone. We can keep it from joining the bigger circle. If its spirit is kept contained, the ritual cannot finish. Ibrahim tried this. He left you a book. He left you a duty."
"Why me?" I demanded.
"You are the one who knows." He tapped the volunteer form in my bag. "You recognized the line. You will be found by the pattern. You will be the knot that holds or unravels this."
"How do I keep it from finishing?" I asked.
He smiled sadly. "You bind. You bargain. You do what you must."
8
I tried to be practical.
"We call the others," I said. I looked up at the list of names they had on campus. "We warn them. We get them all in one place. We protect them."
"Yes," Kayleigh said. "Yes, but the pattern will reach. People die in ways that don't look connected. It will be slow, careful. People will die alone or in ways that seem private and ordinary."
"Then we must be faster."
We moved like pilgrims, gathering people unwillingly. Some laughed at us, some did not answer, some came because a man in authority asked them. They came to Professor Gonzalez's flat: an awkward collection of ages, lives collapsed by coincidence into a map. We kept the forms on a board, we made charms from paper and salt, we stayed awake.
9
"Have you seen the main building from the air?" I asked one late night, after we had spent hours in the library photographing plans and vandalizing campus files.
Kayleigh pulled a photograph out. She placed it on the table. "Look at this," she said. "Look at the roofline."
"It makes a hexagon," I whispered. "The shape of the stone."
"Of course," Kayleigh said. "Franco Kraus encoded his worship in stone and steel."
"Then we go to the source," I said.
"I can't move," Professor Gonzalez said. "I have been guarding this for thirty years. I cannot leave."
"Then I will go," I said.
"You are young, Emmaline." He looked at me like someone assessing a fragile clock he was about to hand to a child. "You will be tempted. You will be in danger. This is no theatre trick. This is the kind of thing that will ask you to swear and will ask you to surrender what you have."
"I swear," I said, and meant it.
10
I knocked on Room 505 like a thief. The door opened and there he was: Franco Kraus, the city's voice of progress, smiling like a man who owns the horizon.
"Can I help you?" Franco asked, eyes as bright as a file of new money.
"I'm Emmaline Jacobs from history," I said. "I want to talk about the building plans, about the main hall."
He patted the couch like an invitation. "Sit, child. Tell me what's on your mind."
I sat across from him, my heartbeat a horse. "Why is the main building shaped like a hexagon?" I asked.
"Symbolism," he said. "A hexagon is balanced. Nature loves hexagons. Bees use them. It's strong. It's efficient. You are a young person. You should study architecture, the poetry of structure. Why are you here with such agitation?"
"This is not design," I said. "This is ritual work. You converted the site into something else. You built it as a machinery for life."
He chuckled so softly it was a mouse rustling. "You have an imagination, Emmaline. It’s all very well. The building is a work of art and engineering. People say a lot. But here—" he turned and, with an odd fondness, pointed out of the window toward the sleeping campus—"we make a place that will last."
"You built a prison for people," Kayleigh said, stepping from the doorway. She had come with me, sudden and quiet. "You took a ritual and made it into a machine."
Franco's smile did not fade. "You are not the first to accuse me of hubris," he said. "But tell me—are you sure you want to make such a grave charge? It could be disastrous."
"Why would you need such a thing?" I asked. "Why would you want to live forever when others don't even get a fair life?"
"Power is not about living to keep living," he said. "It is about extending influence. It is about making sure the work you start is not undone. But you and the others—you have a role. You can be the foundation."
"You built it to be fed with lives," I said.
"I built it to be sustained," he insisted. "Words mean less than outcomes. You cannot stop advancement by shouting 'sin' in a society that trades success."
11
He flattered me. He offered money with the quiet confidence of someone offering charity. He showed me diagrams. He tried to coax the fear out of me by making his dream sound reasonable.
"Why not stop now?" I asked plainly. "You have been at this thirty years. Why finish it?"
Franco leaned forward. "Because progress is impatient," he said. "We deserve better. I deserve better. Who among us has not wished for more time?"
There was no rage in me, only a terrible, bright cold. "You will hurt people," I said.
He frowned as if the idea were hypothetical. "We all hurt to be whole. You think yourself noble. Think of what the campus will be: decades of flourishing minds, a legacy. Is that not worth a price?"
I thought of Brecken, the volunteer form cold in his fist. I thought of the scream at the last moment when his skin had been stripped. "No."
He showed a photograph of a stone, a small object, the same odd six-sided shape I had seen in Professor Gonzalez's notes. "It is only a matter of convergence," he said. "Energy needs pattern. The old stele was dormant. I made it speak with brick and beam."
"You're lying to yourself," I said.
He smiled and picked up a small brass key from his desk. "You are young," he repeated, as if I had not heard the sentence before. "And you are brave." He stood and walked to a sliding panel in the wall, pushed it. Behind it, a round black circle opened like a throat.
"Stay back!" I said.
Then the men in suits who had been leaning in the shade of the doorway stepped forward and grabbed me. Two of them; strong, impersonal.
12
I had planned for this. Before I had come I had carved the old-binding lines on the inside of my hand with a pen and put the old charm Ibrahim gave me in my palm. I started reciting the old words Ibrahim taught me—half prayer, half command—and I felt the blood in my ears thud like a drum.
"Stop it!" Franco barked, and one of his guards hit me in the face hard enough that stars bloomed.
"Hold her!" another guard said. "She’s just a child with superstition."
"She is ours," Franco said. "We take our due."
I kept reciting and the room bent inward. I felt something like a thread trying to run free through the air. The black circle at the wall breathed. Franco’s face went from amusement to concern to something like real fear.
"You lesser beings," he said, voice shaking. "You think you can meddle with my work?"
"Let him go!" Kayleigh yelled, and charged, but a guard swung and knocked her back.
I kept the words moving though my voice broke. I felt my head swim. The air tasted like iron.
At the tenth word something hit me: a pain like being pulled through glass. I saw Franco lurch, and the black circle inhaled like a mouth swallowing light. His eyes widened in a way that made me think of a trapped animal.
13
Then the emergency alarms started.
I do not know who set them off. I do know the sound of the building becoming a crowd. People poured into the corridor. Lights flashed. Students flooded in like an ocean. Cameras were turned on. The guards cried orders. Franco looked like a man on stilts who had finally met the ground.
"What's going on?" someone shouted.
"Is he trying to sacrifice students?" another voice cried.
Franco tried to laugh. "This is a calumny!" he said. "This is a—"
"—murder!" someone else cried.
A phone floated into my field of view. Someone recorded. Someone else pushed forward.
"You built a machine to eat us!" Kayleigh yelled, free now, blood on her knuckles. She spat in Franco's direction.
The crowd closed like a sea. "Expose him," someone else shouted. "Call the police. Look at these plans." Smartphones bloomed like fireworks.
Franco's face, which had once been a crafted mask, started to break. He moved from proud to angry to panicked to pleading in an instant.
"You're lying!" he screamed. "You can't—this is slander!"
"Show them the stone," I said. "Show them 505. Show them the blueprints."
Someone from maintenance, an old man with a face like a coal photograph, pushed his way to the front. "I saw it," he said. "We have been building a lattice. We put the stele under the fifth floor. There’s a pattern. It is all here."
The crowd split into a hundred currents of sound. People called for the police. A few low-level administrators who had once smiled at Franco's ribbon cuttings now took phones out of their coats. They photographed, they whispered, they turned and looked at him with eyes that had scales of trust cracking away.
Franco swore and raged and tried to push his way toward the control panel, but someone—one of the students I had warned the week before—threw himself onto the polished desk and smashed the panel with a fire extinguisher. Sparks flew. The black circle on the wall darkened as its circuit went away.
14
"Stop him!" Franco shouted. "You're destroying my work! You will ruin everything!"
"You're ruining lives!" Kayleigh said. "You made a grave of our home."
The crowd was chanting now. "Expose him! Expose him!" It was not only students; faculty had arrived in numbers, and somewhere in the back a local news van flashed a blinking light like an accusing eye.
Franco's voice thinned. He reached out, hands like pale roots trying to latch onto anything. "You don't understand," he said. "I could give you so much. I could—"
"—give us death?" a woman cried.
"I built this to save us," he murmured, pleading now. "Please. Think. Think of the work."
People began to take off their coats and they gathered around him like a ring. They circled him and began to list, loud and raw, the people who had gone missing—or suffered—since the project started: names, dates, places. Each name hit Franco like a stone.
"Brecken Reynolds," someone shouted.
"Who?" Franco stuttered.
"Brecken Reynolds!" the crowd answered as if rehearsed. "Dead in his dorm. Ripped. Who authorized the renovations near the old foundations? Who ordered the contracts with DeVere Construction that hid gas lines near the fifth floor?"
Franco's eyes were huge. "That was procurement!" he said, and then he shouted the word like it absolved him.
"You're the head of procurement. You're the head of planning. You're the face on the brochures. You're the man who signed the bids!"
He covered his face with shaking hands. "No, no. We had permits. We had council approval. You don't know—"
15
A professor I had never met put steps between Franco and the crowd and lifted his voice. "We will call the police," he said. "We will present the plans. We will arrest him if necessary."
"Arrest!" someone echoed. "Get him out. Get him out now!"
Franco's reaction changed like weather. He went from proud to furious to bewildered to a small child sobbing. He tried to speak and the words tumbled like coins. "You—you can't," he stammered. "You don't understand research. You don't understand—"
"Research?" Kayleigh spat. "You call lives research?"
People started to press in. Someone took his wrist and twisted a thin chain of office he had been wearing—an honor symbol—off his neck. It tumbled and rolled like a dropped relic. A student in a hoodie screamed at him, "How many did you think you'd pay? How many bones?"
"Twenty," Franco said before he knew he had, and the number landed like a confession. "I—I always thought—"
"Stop!" someone cried, but it was already out. "How could you?"
He bent forward, head between his hands. His voice shrank to a strangled whisper. "I didn't mean—" Then it went quieter until it was not even that; it was the sound of someone dismantling themselves in private.
16
Someone called the police properly. Two officers in dark shirts came, calm as if a storm had been waiting for them. They moved through the crowd with a book of charges in their heads. After a brief questioning in front of the press and the students, they put Franco in handcuffs.
Franco's demeanor unraveled in front of everyone. He tried to keep dignity, but his face showed every stage: disbelief, irritation, then the fragile scramble to salvage his reputation, followed by anger and finally the hollow pleading.
"You can’t—" he said, looking at me like a man demanding mercy from a god.
"Why did you do it?" I asked, and the words were more than a question; they were an accusation the weather had been forming.
He looked at the watched faces and then at the floor. The pleading edged out. "So I could do better," he said, voice now hoarse. "So I could not die in obscurity. So the university would be mine after me. So my work would continue."
"At the cost of lives," Kayleigh said. "At the cost of Brecken's skin. At the price of blood."
He fell to his knees then, and the cameras did not look away. "I didn't mean—" he whimpered. "I tried to make it safe. I tried—"
"Enough." The chief officer took off the cuff and led Franco to the van. Students shouted as he passed. Someone spat. Someone else quietly wept. The press clamored. The building's lights shone like a dozen small accusers.
17
The punishment did not stop at the arrest. The next day, legal action cascaded. The university's board convened an emergency session and Franco was suspended. They stripped him of honors in public, the plaques with his name were removed at noon. Faculty meetings that had been polite and covered in sourdough empathy turned into tribunals. A committee was formed to find every document, every signature, every contractor who worked under his authority. It was bureaucratic and public and humiliating in a way television loves.
At the board hearing, I was asked to speak.
"You knew of the danger?" asked a journalist.
"I didn't know everything," I said. "But I knew enough to act. I was one of the people who found the pieces. Eighteen lives were at stake."
Other survivors came forward. Maintenance workers produced invoices and sketches that traced the way the building had been hollowed. There were contracts with firms that no one could locate. There were late-night deliveries that had been signed for with Franco’s initials. The story widened into a spiderweb.
At the public forum Franco arrived in a gray suit and the same brittle smile. He tried to explain his motives—patronage, legacy—but the room had turned. The board read aloud the names of missing students and the families showed up in the crowd. Cameras recorded every tremble in his hand as he faced the people he had wronged.
When the judge finally pronounced a temporary restraining order and froze his assets, Franco's reaction moved in the sequence we had seen in the corridor: astonishment, then violent denial, then pleading, then a sudden, stark loneliness. When they led him out, he looked like a man who had finally learned the price of all the times he had ignored a small voice.
18
"Is it enough?" Kayleigh asked me that evening, when a small group of us stood in the quiet of the old library, which smelled of glue and lost promises.
"Not yet," I said. "The stone still exists. The stele under the fifth floor is still there. We halted the immediate activation but not the origin. Franco wanted to harness it. He will be judged; he may face prison. That is punishment. But the array—"
"—is older than him," Kayleigh finished. "It cannot be arrested."
Professor Gonzalez came in on a slow, careful cane. He dropped onto the chair and thumbed the edge of the volunteer sheet. "You did well," he said. "But the worst of it was not Franco alone."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He sighed. "The stone was never purely evil. It was a craft of people who refused to accept their end. They made a way that bent fate into a shape. People like Franco were only the latest to exploit that shape. The only thing that can truly break it is a counter-shape."
"A counter-shape?" I repeated.
"Balance," he said simply. "You bound a part of him. You saved us from the emergence he planned. But to wash the stain completely, we need to give the little stele a new story. We need to bring the old spirit into daylight and then set it loose on its own."
"How?" Kayleigh asked. "Release it? And then what? It will destroy things. It will—"
"It hates being used," he said. "It hates the concept of long life when life has been stolen. We should make it move, make it choose again."
19
Weeks passed. Trials opened. The press descended on campus like a swarm. Franco's name was a curse. Students and faculty both parsed their consciences and their resumes. New security measures were posted. The board's investigations reached into shadowy corners and the old contracts were torn apart like paper birds.
And in the middle of it all, I kept the small hexagon because Kayleigh had found it slipped into a drawer during the searches—a tiny stone on a string, the same shape as the cutout stone they had found under the first foundation. It fit in my palm like an accusation.
"Keep it," Professor Gonzalez had said. "Your three-uncle left you a lineage. You are the inheritor of a grievance and a cure."
People called us fools. They called us mad. But one night we did something simple and stubborn: we gathered the eighteen names we could find who had been marked by the pattern and we sat on the old hill by the campus with candles. We read the names out loud. We looked at the small stone in my palm.
"Do you know," Kayleigh murmured, "that when I was a child my grandmother told me stories about a woman who would not let herself be used? She died thinking small in a house like this."
"Tell me the story," I said.
She laughed softly. "She rose and walked in a starched dress and smiled at the moon."
"Did she ever take revenge?" I asked.
"She took what was owed," Kayleigh said. "She took the scale and balanced it."
20
The day Franco was formally indicted the campus organized a public assembly. It was raining, but people came in droves: students with umbrellas like a field of small black flowers, old professors with their stiff collars, maintenance men in orange jackets, parents clutching phones. The media van parked out front blinked lights like a dying insect.
When the officials announced the indictment, the crowd breathed as if a long held fever had broken.
Franco's lawyers objected angrily. The news cycles raged. But something else had happened: the stone in my palm had been placed on a small altar before the dais in the main hall. Professor Gonzalez had arranged it. Kayleigh stood behind me, steady as a rock.
I felt the weight of every gaze.
"Why are you doing this publicly?" I whispered to Kayleigh.
"Because he needs shame," she said. "Because he needs witnesses."
A hush swept the hall. The prosecutor stood, a man who spoke like a bell. When he finished reading charges—construction fraud, manslaughter, attempted ritual misconduct—there was a murmur. The families in the back nodded; some clutched tissues.
Then, as if on cue, a woman in the back of the hall rose. She was a maintenance worker, old and windburned. She had photographs of night deliveries and invoices. She put them on the podium like a vote.
"You murdered a project," she said. "You murdered children."
Franco opened his mouth.
"I built for the future," he said softly.
"You built over graves," the maintenance woman snapped. "You buried it under your office and then you put a hand on the board and said it was for art."
21
The punishment scene that followed in the assembly was not merely legal. It was theater and it was mercy and it was revenge. It lasted the better part of an afternoon.
"People want to see the man who thinks he can buy his eternity," the dean said, and there were nods in the crowd.
He did not get a theatrical whipping or public lashing—those are fantasies. Instead, he got something more searing: the slow unmaking of a public life.
They stripped him of titles first. They read aloud the minutes of meetings where he overrode safety inspections. The finance documents were displayed on screens. Heartbadgers in ties—his collaborators—stood and answered questions in front of everyone. Some lied. Some confessed. The student newspapers printed his face on page one with a headline like a gash.
Then they did something that hurt more than fines: at the behest of the families and the board, in a public ceremony, they revoked his honors and held a vote of censure. That's when his colleagues, who had once applauded him at symposiums, turned their chairs away. A professor who had defended him on television sat with his head in his hands and then rose and publicly apologized for having supported the project. The applause for the apology felt like a jury slapping him, slowly.
Franco shifted through the range: arrogance, bafflement, fury, humiliation, then imploring. "You must understand," he cried. "My life’s work—"
"It is not yours if it costs others their lives," one of the parents shouted.
"Think of your children," another voice called out.
He tried to speak to the crowd, to the press, to the cameras. He tried bargaining. "Give me time," he begged. "Let me finish the analysis—"
"Finish?" a graduate student said. "You want time to bury more things."
"Send him away," someone else demanded, and there was a soft chorus of agreement.
He dropped to his knees when they announced a temporary academic suspension and criminal inquiry and then the campus council read a long list of those affected by his permissions—contractors, subordinates, families—and Franco began to tremble.
"You're a good man with hands that have signed too many things," Kayleigh said later, on the dais, when the crowd had thinned. "But you cannot take what is not yours."
Franco's reaction in public mirrored the path his life had taken privately: he started with the look of entitlement, then moved to rage, then to gutted plea. The corners of his mouth quivered like a ruined bridge. For ten minutes he looked into the cameras and asked, "Why me?" as if the world owed him a reason for his crimes.
The onlookers recorded his unraveling and the videos went viral. The board posted their minutes. The public prosecutor announced charges. The crowd chanted the names of the victims. People wept and took selfies to evidence they were present. A student pushed close and spat into Franco's face. An older woman whispered a long prayer that sounded like a verdict.
22
For all the public cruelty, the worst punishment was not the handcuffs. It was the way his colleagues and contractors, those who once toasted his achievements, became the chorus of disgrace. They stripped him of the decorum that had clothed him. He lost the right to dine with the dignitaries. He lost the polite distance his name had bought. He became an object lesson in a thousand classrooms.
But the law would follow its slow, certain steps. He would be tried. He would argue his scientific curiosity. He would have lawyers and explanations. The assembly was the public unmasking; further punishment would be adjudicated in courts.
23
After Franco was removed, the university worked to undo what he had tried to make permanent. Specialists came in, with scanners and cranes and careful minds. They found the small stone lodged under the fifth floor and placed it into containment. They catalogued the contractors and froze projects. They apologized. But the stone hummed in my pocket each time I crossed the main hall as if remembering the word that starts a sentence and doesn't leave.
At night, when the crowd thinned and the campus grew thin with winter air, some of us would sit by the fountain and talk. We would name the dead. We would tell the story of the hexagon and the way a man had tried to make an altar of a university. We would hold the small stone between our palms.
Professor Gonzalez came less and less to the board meetings; his steps were slower, and his eyes were quieter. He looked as if someone had shown him how short one lifetime could be and asked him to make do with it.
"Did you ever imagine it would come to this?" I asked him once.
"No," he said. "I hoped we could bind and leave. I hoped to temper it. I never imagined someone would build a cathedral and call it a machine."
"Are you forgiven?" I asked.
He touched the volunteer form I kept in my journal. "Forgiveness is practical," he said. "It means doing the work to stop harm. You have done that. For now, that is enough."
24
Months later, the legal winds calmed into seasons and Franco was led into court. The public mechanism of justice took its course. He pleaded, argued, and in private he pleaded for mercy. The families were not satisfied but some small measure of closure arrived in the forms of late-night settlements and a permanent audit of building projects.
The stone under the fifth floor was kept in a glass case in a restricted archive. Experts gathered around it like biologists around a specimen. Some said it had energy; others said it was merely a symbol. I kept a small six-sided charm—Kayleigh's find—trimmed and tied at my wrist like a promise.
We never found every answer. There were gaps where the ritual had touched but not consumed. There were names we could not track. There were late-night whispers of other places where men had thought to build the world anew over burned thresholds.
But the worst had been exposed in a public place. Franco had been pulled down from his pedestal where the building had been his altar. The crowd had watched him change—pride cracked into panic, panic into imploring, imploring into shame. That sequence was the sort of punishment that left marks harder than prison bars: the loss of honor, of community trust, of the quiet right to be respected.
25
Years later, walking past the main hall in spring when students stalled between classes and pigeons took the portions of late breakfasts, I would occasionally feel the six-sided charm against my skin and remember that night.
"Do you miss him?" Kayleigh asked once, watching me watch people traverse the hexagon lawn.
"Sometimes," I said. "Not him. The idea that someone could live forever if they were brave enough. I miss the simpler illusions."
She smiled and flicked the brim of her scarf. "I miss nothing of those men."
"Do you think the stone wants anything?" I asked.
"No," she said. "Things that are made to hold grudges do not want. They only wait for a hand to set them."
I looked down at the charm in my palm. The hexagon felt warm, like a small heart. I put it back on the string and tightened the knot.
When I press it now, sometimes it gives like a tiny pulse, and I hear Professor Gonzalez's quiet voice in my memory.
"Protect it," he said once, the night Franco was under arrest and the crowd was still chanting. "It doesn't know what it will become if someone else decides to make of it a dream."
I thought of that as I walked into the evening, the campus lights like patient eyes. The hexagon in my pocket did not promise safety, nor did it ask for justice. It only fit in my hand like a small, unanswerable question—and that was enough.
The End
— Thank you for reading —