CHAPTER 34: THE WEIGHT OF CHOICE
Morning arrived over Chicago with the strange softness that follows a storm that never fully happened. The city still stood. The streets still breathed with ordinary life. Cars moved, trains groaned across their tracks, cafés reopened, and people returned to work carrying yesterday’s fear like a secret they were not ready to name. The protest downtown had not become war, but it had changed something permanent. Silence had been broken. Humans now stood closer than ever to the truth of what lived beside them in the shadows, and shadows, once named, never returned to being harmless. Kevin walked through the city with that thought pressing heavily on him. He passed familiar corners where he had once hidden his nature and wondered how long hiding had truly bee
