The Proxies — Beginning
Chapter 1: The Burn
A glance was all it took.
My curiosity had won over as soon as I’d spotted him in the corner of my field of vision. I was drawn to him, to the movement, even though I knew I should look elsewhere. When our eyes met, I was already in too deep.
It was burning on the inside of his brain and his entire body, making him twitch, forcing him to shake both his legs just to tolerate the heat. It was eating him up from the inside out, turning his guts into a fiery stew and picking at his skin with millions of little needles.
He was trying not to look at the other passengers, he knew what they thought. Just a drug addict, a loser. Nobody knew that it wasn’t his fault, and nobody would have cared.
The burn was talking to him now. It had stayed quiet for a long time, burning up little by little and gathering strength for hours. It had been just a tingle somewhere in his spine, hardly noticeable but still real. He had thought he’d had it suppressed already, but it had taken full control now. Why had it chosen him, out of all people? Why was he too weak to resist it?
Now the burn was more vicious than before. It was demanding him to act.
That metallic noise that had been ringing in his head was getting intolerable. Pain was shooting…
