Zero Aequatio

• PROLOGUE •

Gravestones stand silent, their epitaphs swathed in pale flakes. Above, the sky is a crystal blue—the sun a bright yellow—yet the snow continues its feathery dance of fragility, weaving an icy shroud where Jaydon kneels.

His gloved hand tries to scour a tombstone clean, but the flakes keep falling—an infinite deluge smothering the sound of his abrasive scrapes. Winter’s clench is a cold curtain that refuses to rise.

• 1 •

EQUATION: FORGOTTEN

Heat shimmers off the glass and metal facade of Axiom Financial Bank—a dazzling, blinding glint that cuts through the summer air. The same piercing rays that dance off rooftops are threads of a sweltering cloak enveloping the city and its streets. On these very streets, a streamlined black SUV’s tyres mark the scorching asphalt as the vehicle slows to a stop.

Doors slide open. Three men spring out. The driver hastens away, leaving the vehicle idling a block down.

They advance towards the bank. Draped in stylish three-piece suits, faces covered with mime masks that are cold resin shielding them against the heated sun. Single tears frozen within expressionless white voids, designed to blind the swarm of security cameras monitoring the city’s heart.

The Leader sweeps a calculated gaze over the city streets. His eyes focus from beneath black holes of plastic nothingness, registering a distant police siren’s wail bleeding through the urban hum. He does not flinch; the sound is merely a data point in an unfolding equation.

The glass doors' parting hiss whispers a quiet invitation.

A line they cross willingly.

The city’s sun-drenched haze is severed by the mechanical chill of the air conditioner’s artificial winter. Deep within the building, their pulses match the rhythm of the security grid, whilst questions of morality are left to melt outside in the searing blaze. They are as cold and fixed as the masks moulded to their skin.

A gun barrel tilts up, locking against a shoulder with a single, rigid snap. ‘Everybody hit the floor!’ the Leader barks. The machine gun speaks. It’s a warning burst of deafening staccato. A demonic sewing machine stitching holes into the ceiling, leaving the air tasting of cordite and pulverised drywall. The gasps are drowned out by echoing screams. ‘Heads down! Hands raised!’ His command slices through the panicked din of the hall.

A murmuring compliance falls over the room, fractured by a security guard’s desperate reach for his sidearm. Before the guard's fingers can find their mark, one of the suited mimes blurs into motion, delivering a sharp, clinical strike to the man's shoulder.

The guard crumples to the floor. His weapon now a forgotten memory.

Behind the counter, a bank teller slips her thumb onto the silent alarm before sinking out of sight onto the marble floor. Its muted scream is a desperate call to the city’s AI Central Hub. The Leader catches her act of subtle defiance, the mask’s tear reflecting the light as his head turns. Yet he offers no reprimand. He merely consults the Proximity Analyser gripped in his palm. The blinking amber against the glass pane is not a threat, but a single jigsaw piece slotting into the calculation.

A single notification—RESPONDERS: 2 MINS.

The city's emergency units are already en route.

The Leader offers a sharp, clinical nod to his colleague, who stands apart, gauging the room as a cascade of fluctuating probabilities. A panicked crowd of variables to be weighed, analysed, then solved.

He and the Analyst drift towards the vault. They leave their acquaintance to shepherd the congregation with a prayer of lead and steel in the church of currency. His word is a heavy psalm—not from the Bible, but from the cold promise of a gun.

The air inside the vault corridor is heavy with pressurised vigilance. Olfactory sensors sift the atmosphere for the chemical signature of fear, whilst shimmering LiDAR webs map their skeletons in real time. Above them, biometric scanners filter through the noise, ceaselessly combing the void for a single heartbeat out of sync.

‘Ninety seconds,’ the Leader murmurs, the words low and taut.

There is no clumsy reach for a thermal lance or a diamond drill. Instead, the Analyst produces a blackened iridium tuning fork fixed to a magnetic plinth, slapping it onto the dead centre of the vault door. A sharp, metallic clack echoes through the chamber. High-intensity magnets engage, molecularly bonding the device to the vault’s steel skin.

A twist.

The device screams at a frequency beyond the human spectrum. Its surface frosts as the molecular bond vibrates into submission.

A heavy thud. The primary bolt retracts. The vault yields.

Now inside, they hunt for only one thing: safe deposit box 409. A seamless slab of reinforced alloy with no visible keyhole.

‘Sixty seconds,’ the Leader says, his voice an intense growl. They repeat the process used on the vault. The box slot opens. ‘Is it all there?’

The Analyst doesn’t move. He remains anchored to the open vault, his eyes reflecting the contents of box 409, and the weight of information pulling at the light surrounding it.

‘Is the ledger there?’ the Leader snaps.

The Analyst nods. He scoops up the ledger—but not the remaining item in the box.

The Leader reaches into his jacket with fluid grace. He produces a sleek, minuscule obsidian disc. With a single rhythmic flick of the wrist, he launches it towards the vaulted ceiling. It finds its mark. A sharp pneumatic hiss. Like a parasite, the magnets bite into concrete and steel. The device exhales into a shimmering veil of kinetic interference. Light refracts chaotically into the gloom before settling.

Cameras go offline; footage is a distant memory. The obsidian disc is the disrupter; clinging to the ceiling, its presence is now invisible to the human eye, fading into the architecture like a bead of ink dissolving in a tumbler of water.

They storm back through the crowd of kneeling hostages who are afraid to glance their way, their gun barrels sweeping the area as they press forward. Their associate doesn’t follow their frantic rhythm. Instead, he ambles along with the deliberate, unhurried grace of a conductor approaching a silent orchestra. Stopping at the centre of the bank, he utters the words, ‘Aequatio Selah,’ a mere whisper that permeates the hall.

The crowd rises, a silent tide, in unison, smoothing the wrinkles of a panic that never was. They adjust their clothing with eyes bleached of memory. The suited mimes are now ghost digits in the bank’s history. The Conductor, the last to leave, is now a fever dream that breaks the moment they stand—leaving only the hollow ache of a thing imagined before being forgotten.

* * *

An armed police vehicle screams to a halt, its lights a ballet of red and blue. They flank the entrance, waiting for the signal. The Tactical Commander gives the word.

They breach the bank doors—charged with cold, professional adrenaline. Their weapons, sweeping the halls, are iron needles searching for threads of chaos. Instead, they find only the rhythmic hum of the mundane: the soft shuffle of feet and the blank, blinking confusion of a room that has momentarily forgotten how to scream.

• 2 •

SNOW

White.

Flakes of icy ash.

His wipers screech against the glass in a war for clarity already lost. Detective Jaydon Lynch’s unmarked car cuts through the pale flurry. Two marked vehicles tail him with a frantic ballet of red and blue. Their sirens are an agitated wail in the frosted air.

He hits speed dial. Immediately, his wife Ilana’s terrified whisper cuts through the speakers, broken with panic. ‘Jaydon, he’s in the house.’ The intruder’s heavy footsteps are in sync with the wipers’ metronome turned on its head. ‘Dylan, stay ba—’

Ilana’s scream bleeds into the sirens’ wails, then—nothing.

‘Ilana!’

Jaydon flattens the accelerator. The vehicle surges, the city becoming a blur of digital neon fractured by frozen rain. Each curve is a gamble, the car skating on the edge of a white abyss. He wrenches the wheel; the car smashes the kerb with a violent, bone-jarring shudder, crashing through rubbish bins and a skeletal street sign. It skids in a sideways arc before the tyres bite back and straighten. The sirens become an out-of-tune blur in the near distance.

The car screams to a sliding halt.

Jaydon springs out, dashing towards the house and crashing into a silence heavier than the storm.

The back door flaps in the wind.

Snow seeks to entomb the truth of the killer’s footsteps. Jaydon collapses, his knees striking the floor with hollow finality. He scoops his world into his arms.

The beating drum of his wife and child is now silent—a dual rhythm cut short. The ice on his coat weeps into the crimson staining the floor.

• 3 •

FIFTEEN-MINUTE HOLE

The whirring air conditioner is the soundtrack of mechanical chill. A faded acoustic within Axiom Financials’ main hall—no longer a bank, but a morgue, where memories lie dead. The city’s sweltering heat bids farewell to Detective Jaydon Lynch as he steps into the bank’s cold air, chilling the beads of sweat on the back of his neck. He catches the attention of Tactical Commander Evander Moss, a man of great height and a face of weathered flint. He heads Jaydon’s way. ‘Can anybody explain this?’

Moss shakes his head. He turns to the scene. ‘We breached three minutes after the silent alarm. Ready for war, landed in a garden.’ He gestures past a line of blue-and-white tape towards the back of the hall, where bank staff and customers have been corralled into a temporary holding area. ‘These civvies continued to picnic after lions tore through the grass and made off with their prey.’

Jaydon’s eyes scan the room, cataloguing the peculiar bleeding through the mundane. Then, towards the crowd on the other side of the tape, landing on a man in a tailored suit, most likely in finance. The man’s feet tap an irritated rhythm whilst his eyes dart back and forth to his platinum watch. A young woman sits in a corner with a sleek NexPlus phone glued to her hands, earphones in place, lost in a world of screens and sound. These people are bored, frustrated, yes, but show no signs of trauma, he thinks.

Further down the hall, Detective Wilson storms off in a huff, frustrated with the witness he was just questioning—getting nowhere. He moves even further away from the inner red-and-white cordon, where forensics—pale spectres drifting over marble—continue a subdued clinical dance. Their flashbulbs cannot pierce the haze of cold, forgotten memory with a burst of feigned sun; cameras echo a shuttered crack. Jaydon’s eyes widen as he stares past the shifting forms of white, catching broken glimpses that remind him of a sin he will never forget.

Mia.

The Looking Glass Killer.

His surrogate daughter.

There she stands. Amidst the crowd. Watching.

He blinks—her image shatters into the clinical silhouettes of the forensic team.

Moss’s voice breaks the splintered mirror of his subliminal curse. ‘Detective Lynch.’

Jaydon’s gaze snatches to the commander, who reflects a paused look of uncertainty. He swallows hard, then takes a steady breath before approaching the bank teller at the edge of the perimeter. Jaydon glances down at her name tag, which reads: Linda Bradshaw. He flashes his badge, ready to ask the question—still unsure what to expect. ‘Linda, tell me about the robbery.’ His voice is soft.

She lets out a breath that preludes speech, yet stops as no memory catches her tongue. Her brow creases into a frown as she glances up and away towards the bullet holes in the ceiling. She then shakes her head, a bemused smile touching the corner of her lips. There are no words, only a distant gaze, and the mind behind it reaching for a memory that will forever elude her grasp. They move away, leaving Linda continuing to stare at the bullet holes that have been tattooed on the ceiling.

Jaydon knows the answer before he asks. ‘Video footage?’

‘Wiped,’ Moss chokes.

Moss’s uncertainty now fades as he focuses on the activity around the hall. ‘The neuro-medics, one step away from a screw breaking loose.’ He gestures to a group through the crowd with pupillary scanners. ‘Different witnesses, same storybook. They remember walking into the bank, and they remember the cavalry charging in. There’s a fifteen-minute hole in thirty-three different brains.’

They cross the threshold into the vault. A lone CSI sweeps a UV scanner over the hinges of safe deposit box 409. She nods to Jaydon as he pulls on his plastic gloves, the snap of latex a sharp punctuation before she returns to her work. He moves through the space, his eidetic mind scanning the room, recording every displaced shadow. These robbers had ignored the gleam of gold and the phantom flicker of digital bonds; they had come for a single truth, sweeping away the memory of their trespass like wind over sand. Clean. Professional. Blinding the cameras. So why the memory wipe?

‘I think you want to see this,’ the CSI says, her voice echoing in the hollow vault.

Jaydon moves towards the metal laid bare. He focuses on safe deposit box 409. Inside lies a single, sleek white card. He lifts it. On its back is a modernist illustration of a spinning top, frozen in its rotation yet visibly nearing its topple. He turns it over. The typeface is sharp, an edged modern font as cold as the vault’s artificial winter.

IS THEOREM ZEUS.

Jaydon’s eyes burn through the card, and for a fractional second, the phantom weight of a mask presses against his face—cold where there was only warm air.

With her camera aimed at the box, the CSI pivots. Snap! The shutter’s crack is an echoing gunshot, a sharp intrusion in the cavernous morgue. But the flash is just one of many feigned suns, unable to shine a light on the forgotten memories stolen from the vault.