Patient Zero

The lemon-bleach fumes in the air mix with the dust of the apartment, and Delaney moves from the bathroom to her bedroom like a ghost seeking a familiar haunt.

Delaney closes the door to her bedroom, shutting out the silence of the hallway and the weight of Viktor's judgment. The room is dark, save for a single, low-wattage lamp that casts long, distorted shadows across the walls.

She moves toward the far corner, her eyes fixed on the one thing that has never lied to her.

Tackled to the wall is a vintage poster of Jim Morrison. He is shirtless, eyes half-closed in a trance-like state, a necklace of beads resting against his skin. To the world, it's a relic of classic rock. To Delaney, it is the only icon she has ever truly worshipped.

She stands before it, her breathing finally slowing. She reaches out, her fingertips tracing the edge of the paper with a reverence that borders on the erotic. She doesn't just look at him; she drinks him in. Her gaze is wide, glazed—almost drooling—as she loses herself in the curve of his lip and the wildness of his hair.

For a moment, she isn't a forty-year-old journalist in a cold apartment. She is sixteen again, sitting in a locked closet with a stolen Walkman, the forbidden baritone of The End vibrating through her skull while her mother shouted scripture in the kitchen.

Delaney's hand drops from the poster. The memory of the "Prophet"—a man with soft hands and a voice like honey who broke families for sport—makes her stomach turn.

She realizes now why she hates the "Fighter" and Elena so much. It isn't because they are corrupt; it's because they have the one thing she was never allowed to have: a chosen narrative. They get to be "gods" to their fans. They get to be icons.

She looks back at Jim.

She thinks of Viktor. She had tried to be a "Prophet" to him tonight. She had tried to dictate his truth, to scrub his memories until they bled, just like Martha used to scrub the floors.

But as she looks at the scattered research on her bed—the files on Elena's biological father, the stolen Bulgarian records—she sees the truth. She hasn't broken the idols. She's just trying to tear down everyone else's so that hers is the only one left standing.

The chemical smell of the broken sanitizer bottle wafts in from under the door. It's a sharp reminder of her mother's lye.

Delaney sinks onto her bed, her eyes never leaving Morrison's face. She is caught between two worlds: the cult she escaped and the cult of her own making. And in the middle, a sixteen-year-old boy is breathing in the ash of her past.

The room holds its breath with her. Shadows deepen in the corners, swallowing the weak lamplight. The poster seems to watch back, the half-closed eyes knowing too much.

She remembers the first time she heard his voice. Not through speakers, but through the static of a forbidden radio station, late at night under blankets. A sound that felt like rebellion itself. A voice that promised there were other worlds beyond the compound's walls, beyond her mother's scripture, beyond the Prophet's honeyed lies.

That voice had been her escape. Her salvation.

She thinks of the files. The evidence. The story she's chasing. It was supposed to be about corruption, about exposing a fraud. But somewhere along the line, it became about proving her god was better than theirs. Proving that her chosen icon—the truth-seeker, the poet, the broken beautiful man on her wall—was purer than their plastic idols.

The scent of lemon and bleach grows stronger. It's in her hair, on her skin. She can still feel the sticky residue of the sanitizer on her fingers. The frantic scrubbing. The panic.

But memory has a stain. It seeps into the grain of things. Her mother knew that. That's why she scrubbed everything—floors, counters, her daughter's mind—with religious fervor. To erase the stain of the world.

Delaney closes her eyes. When she opens them, Jim is still there. Silent. Unjudging.

A dead king for a broken queen.

Patient zero of her own private pandemic of devotion.