Bna Zero Novels & Stories

the fat manager smiled coldly and said. Fiona counted carefully as her face darkened. “Why, why is it five zeros? This is really two hundred thousand per bottle?”

Zero. I stood still, staring at the empty steel chair in the center of the dim basement. The last time we spoke, I had drawn a gun on him at the canal bank, furious that he had hidden his initial contract with Victoria. But over the last few days, as the pieces of the Vance conspiracy fully aligned, I realized the truth. Zero had been handed a death sentence contract to extract me—and instead, he had risked his own life to train me, protect me, and turn me into someone who could fight back. He had lied about how we met, but he hadn't lied about wanting me free. "Can you bypass the secondary server at the venue, Zero?" I asked, my voice softer than it had been in months.

His organs were unruptured. He had survived the anvil. Baraka rolled onto his back, staring up at the clear blue sky, a ragged, exhausted laugh escaping his lips. Back in the Deep Warren, the radio crackled to life. "Command, this is Zero," Baraka’s voice came through, weary but triumphant. "The artillery is functional. Tell Malik to bring his iron. I’ll break it." The Free North had its weapon. Patient Zero had leveled up.

I can’t imagine the kind of joy of all three of those things working out. As we pull up to the house we bought for Nova and the driver shows our ID to the guards I feel a bot more relaxed knowing he is doing what we told him. Everyone, even us, needs to be checked before they enter. We all had to place our thumbs on a print scanner before he could let us in.

“Look at your wrists.” Zero's wrists were chaffed from friction with the cuffs, and his knees and ankles were not any better. “It's nothing,” he said. Beryl turned to Zero and lifted his shirt. His back was crisscrossed with whip marks. “I need to look at you too.” “I'll be fine,” he said stubbornly. “Anna is the one who needs your help.” “You won't be much use to anyone here if you come down with an infection,” she told him

They stepped back, wondering how a child had managed to crawl all the way out despite the layers of concrete weighing them down. “1…” Momo whispered in my ear. He was intelligent and loved counting gifts, but he had never once counted without a reason. Was it Pastor Timothy? “2…” His voice came again, this time deeper. I wanted to gaze at him, but the sound of concrete crumbling made me lose focus. Anderson was out also, and his broken bones had been amended. He was barely standing, his back lowered to the ground like he was going to crash. “This isn’t good, Pope Timothy; the girl has also recovered.” A man said, brandishing his pocket knife.

The year I started middle school, my parents solemnly handed my sister and me each a bank card. "This is your college fund. There's 100,000 dollars in each one. The password is your birthday. Don't touch it unless it's truly an emergency." I listened. I treated that card like a treasure. I never bought a single new piece of clothing. Even my worn-out canvas shoes got patched with glue and worn again. I thought that if I was just responsible enough, I'd live up to my parents' idea of "fairness." Then, after the SATs ended, I wanted to use the money on the card for a graduation trip with my classmates. Instead, the ATM screen flashed a number that burned my eyes: [Balance: $0.00]. At th

My company let employees clock paid hours while petting the office cats, take unlimited vacation, and skip the time clock altogether. For a while, people called us a dream company. Then one of my employees posted online and accused the whole thing of being a kindness trap. He filmed the office as if it were paradise, but the caption told a different story: [Don't envy us. All of this was bought with our low pay and our youth.] The post went viral, and overnight, I became the fake-nice boss who bled his employees dry behind a mask of small kindnesses. The entire internet told my employees to run. Fine. I let them. I rolled out a new policy. Effective immediately, every flexible benefit