CHAPTER 11: "THE GAMBLE"

That was the first sign that something was wrong—not seriously wrong, not call-an-ambulance wrong, just weird wrong. He pushed himself up from the chair, his arms taking most of his weight, trying to get to his feet. His thighs should have responded. They didn't. They just sat there, heavy and uncooperative, like they belonged to someone else's body.

"Whoa, okay," Speed muttered, sinking back into the chair. "That's fast."

He looked down at his hands. They seemed normal. They seemed fine. But there was a faint tremor in them, a subtle shaking that might have been exhaustion or might have been something else. Speed couldn't tell anymore. The lines between normal and abnormal had gotten blurry somewhere between the dreams and the pills and the void behind his eyelids.

His eyes were heavy. Really heavy. The kind of heavy that made the world look like it was being viewed through water. The fluorescent light overhead seemed dimmer than it had been before, or maybe his eyes were just getting better at perceiving darkness. Either way, things were getting softer. Less defined. Less real.

Speed tried to stand again.

His legs still didn't work. They were there—he could see them, could feel them distantly like they belonged to someone sleeping in another room—but they weren't his anymore. Not right now. Right now they belonged to the pills, belonged to the cure, belonged to whatever was happening inside his body that was making the world start to spin.

His vision was getting blurry. Not in a drunk way—he'd never been drunk, had never had much reason to try—but in a way that suggested his eyes were closing even though he was pretty sure they were still open. The edges of his sight were darkening, narrowing down to a tunnel, and at the end of that tunnel was his computer monitor displaying nothing but black.

"What the... hell..." Speed muttered, his voice already starting to slur.

The effect was kicking in fast. Way faster than he'd expected. The chat had said his mom did this every night. His auntie swore by it. Seven people had confirmed it worked. Nobody had mentioned that it would feel like someone had flipped a switch inside his body and turned everything down to low.

Speed's head was getting heavy too. His neck was having trouble holding it up. He let his head drop slightly, chin almost touching his chest, and the motion made the room spin a little faster.

His hands were shaking more now. The tremor had gotten worse, turned into something that looked almost rhythmic, like his body was vibrating at a frequency just below what normal vision could register.

"Oh man... I feel dizzy..." Speed said, his tongue thick, his words coming out slower than they should have.

He tried to get up again. This time he actually made it onto his feet, his body swaying like he was standing on a ship in rough seas. The world tilted to the left. Then to the right. Then it did something impossible where it tilted in both directions at once and Speed realized his sense of balance had logged off without leaving a forwarding address.

He took two stumbling steps toward his bed.

The third step was the problem.

Speed's feet got tangled—not with anything real, just with the concept of walking, with the idea that his legs should move in any kind of coordinated fashion. His body pitched forward. For a moment, he was suspended between falling and not falling, caught in that impossible space where gravity was still thinking about whether it wanted to claim him.

Gravity decided yes.

Speed crashed to the floor, face-first, landing with enough force that his breath whooshed out of his lungs. His arms didn't come up to catch himself. They were useless. Everything was useless. He was just lying there on the carpet, ass in the air, head down, looking absolutely ridiculous and not caring because caring required energy and energy was no longer available.

"What... the... hell..." Speed whispered, barely audible.

His vision was going now. Not fading to black, but fading to something else—something red, something that started somewhere in the back of his skull and was spreading outward, consuming his sight from the inside out. Red and gold. Red and—

The sigil.

His back.

A pulse of light so bright it burned, so intense it felt like lightning was racing across his skin. Red flare turning gold, burning, pulsing—once, twice, three times like a heartbeat made of divine fire. The mark that had flickered in the mirror, that had pulsed quietly while he was moving through his day, was fully awake now. Fully alive.

Speed's eyes rolled back.

"What... is..." he started to say, but the words never finished. They got caught somewhere between his brain and his mouth and died in the space between intention and action.

The light consumed him.

The red turned white. The white turned black. And Speed Darren, the King of Ohio, the neighborhood legend, the exhausted teenager who just wanted to sleep without dreaming, disappeared into the nothing.