It’s the present day back at the hospital. The emergency situation had died down and khan and other survivors that were not present in the class but in close vicinity are now in stable condition.
The hospital room buzzed with the cold, sterile rhythm of life preservation, machines hissing, beeping, humming. Wires snaked from Khan's body that didn’t look as terrible as it did just some hours ago which surprised doctors a-bit. Oxygen hissed through the mask strapped to his face. Yet beneath the blinking chaos of the trauma ward, Khan smiled.
Not the smile of someone grateful to be alive.
This was something else.
It was the faint curl of a man who had finally solved an impossible riddle. Like a dying scientist who, in his last moments, cracked the formula that had haunted him for years. A kind of euphoria danced just behind his half-lidded eyes, shimmering in his dazed expression. One of the nurses mistook it for pain, leaning in to adjust his morphine levels, unaware that what she was witnessing was Khan’s moment of private revelation.
Because now, everything made sense.
Khan’s mind slipped backward through time like a reel snapping into reverse. Memories, vivid and raw, began to play.
He remembered the basket.
The chicks.
He wasn’t staring at the drowned chicks that day. He was watching them drown.
He was the one who placed the basket in the trough.
At six years old, he had quietly tested something, emotion, reaction, weight. He hadn’t felt guilt. He hadn’t felt anything. Just… observation. When James stumbled upon him, screaming for their mother, it wasn’t panic that flared in Khan, it was disappointment. Disappointment that the death of the chicks and how they died did not spark the feeling he was hoping for.
Later, in New York, Khan volunteered at the animal shelter, he hadn’t done it to help. He hadn’t done it out of remorse. It was research. He remembered holding trembling dogs, wiping them down, feeding them by hand. People thought he was kind. But Khan remembered how mechanical it had felt. His hands moved, his face smiled. But inside? He was measuring again. Still searching for something that stirred him, and never finding it.He thought maybe if he had developed interest in animals it might have helped him in getting something out of what he did at the chicken farm.
His brow tightened faintly on the hospital bed, drawing the attention of a nurse.
“Pain spiking, he needs more sedation,” she muttered, prepping another shot.
But Khan wasn’t in pain. Not physically.
His thoughts shifted.
That day in Riverdale. The game of tag. The black sedan.
It was supposed to be just another day. But when James broke into the open street, everything slowed. The car barreled toward them, and Khan… he remembered the moment clearly now. The part no one else saw. No one else felt.
He had extended his arm, not to save James.
To stop him.
Just for a second.
He wanted to know what would happen.
There had been enough space, enough time. James could’ve dodged it. But Khan’s hand blocked the motion. He’d stalled his brother’s movement just long enough for death to reach its tipping point. But at the last second, something pulled him back. Khan’s own hand, yanking James away. Saving him. Regretting it?
No.
It wasn’t guilt that followed.
It was dissatisfaction.
He remembered imagining James being hit, and unlike the farm incident the feeling he battled with was not an underwhemling feeling or lack or satisfaction but something esle he couldnt understand. Was it brotherly love? He thought of it as a hinderance. He played it out in his head that night.
His eyes opened.
The present came rushing back.
Family filled the hospital room now. His mother, Itohan, clutched his hand, weeping silently. His father, Gana, stood close behind her, eyes rimmed with exhaustion and pride. Zara, Mark’s younger sister, was seated beside him, her soft fingers brushing his wrist. James stood at the foot of the bed, tired, pale, and relieved.
Khan offered them all a smile. A mask.
They believed it.
James stepped forward, voice cracking with emotion.
“I’m so happy you’re alive,” he said. “Doctor said it was a miracle. I heard the police are investigating the explosion… but no one’s claimed responsibility yet.”
Gana, Khan's father added, “My son… be strong. You’re alive. That’s all that matters.”
Khan nodded faintly. His body was playing along. But inside, another memory surfaced.
James leaned in.
“I’ve been trying to reach Lanre and Amie all day,” he whispered in a crackling voice reddened with sadness. “Did they… were they in class?”
Khan didn’t blink. His voice was a dead echo.
“Yes.”
James stepped back. His face broke, tears spilling freely.
“I, I’m sure the police will find them…” he muttered, half-delusional.
Khan replied softly. “They wouldn’t.”
James collapsed to the floor, sobbing. His phone trembled in his hand as he scrolled through missed calls. Thirty to Lanre. Fifteen to Amie. Three to Khan.
Zara gripped Khan’s hand tighter.
Khan turned to her slowly… and the next memory flooded in.
The party.
Mark, slumped beside him. Breathing ragged.
“I don’t feel good,” Mark had whispered. “Khan, something’s wrong. We need to go.”
Khan had looked at him. Calm. Clear.
“No.”
He remembered the setup. Days before the party, he had driven to a house owned by his family. Left the car engine running. Hooked the exhaust into rigged up machine he built. He’d pieced together the rig using supplies bought in parts from hardware stores, auto shops, and online science surplus sites, tubing, metal fittings, a salvaged catalytic unit, and a small compressor system, each item innocent enough on its own. But together, they allowed him to extract the odourless carbon monoxide from the car’s exhaust and channel it silently into heavy-duty storage tanks. He dissasembled the riiged machine after and dumbed all the parts in different land fills and large dumb sites acorss the city. Replaced the normal gas cylinders in the party housewith his new rigged and larger cylinder.
The weed cake was a distraction. he had aquired so as to dull the senses of the guest so as not to make anyone panic unnessarily.
The windows had been closed.
The high would mask the gas.
He had watched them fall—one by one. Bodies slumped in chairs, curled on rugs, passed out in corners. He remembered their faces twisting in sleep. He remembered feeling… nothing.
That was the disappointment.
Even as his own vision blurred, his lungs gasping for clean air, he hadn’t felt anything. No achievement. No meaning.
But James hadn’t come. And Khan had felt something flicker, relief? Or the same twisted emotion he felt back in Riverdale? He had laced James’s food to keep him away from the party, crafting the excuse of food poisoning to keep James from the party. He had smiled, watching James eat it. Knowing.
Back in the hospital, Khan looked up again.
He smiled.
A genuine one.
Zara returned the smile. His mother cried harder. His father stood proudly.
They had no idea.
And then came the ecstasy.
Pure.
Absolute.
The memory of the blast.
It began as a flicker. A pulse of light, warm and golden, blooming from the very center of Khan’s desk, his original seat, like a heartbeat made of flame. In that frozen instant, time fractured into fragments, and Khan’s mind shattered the moment into nanoseconds, pulling every detail into sharp, breathtaking focus.
From the back of the class where he now sat, where faith had reluctantly placed him, he watched it unfold.
The fire didn't explode outward. It breathed. First in silence, then with a rolling growl that shook the windows. The desk itself was gone in a blink, splintered into sparks and shrapnel as a brilliant white-hot orb of gas expanded like a supernova. Light bent, shadows danced. Heat warped the air into a liquid shimmer.
Lanre sat directly in front of the blast, mid-laugh, his lips just parting around a joke Khan would never hear the end of. In a single instant, the front of his shirt disintegrated, followed by his skin, bone, and soul. His eyes, wide with surprise and something almost serene, locked with Khan’s, then vanished in a stream of embers.
Amie turned toward the blast too late, her blonde hair lifting with the air pressure. Her eyes caught his—soft, puzzled, blinking once as if unsure whether she was still awake. Then the flames kissed her face, curling her features in molten bloom before she was swept away in orange light.
They both smiled.
In that final frame before the fire consumed them, they smiled at him. As if they knew.
The fire danced around them like an artist’s brushstroke, then moved on, hungry, elegant, precise. The explosion surged outward, engulfing three students seated nearby. One threw up his hands too late, his voice caught in his throat as the fire bit through his desk and swallowed his torso. Another stood, but the wave of heat shattered her limbs before neurons from her body could tell her brain what’s happening. Her silhouette burned against the whiteboard behind her for a split second, then disappeared.
Next was Professor Robbin with his big smile facing the class as the fire ball approached was slowly in Khans eyes incinerated. Khan saw him show no sign of pain, movement or even awareness of what was happening to him. This was a euphoric moment for Khan.
On to the next one, four students near the windows, were tossed like rag dolls as glass shattered in a brilliant chorus. Their bodies slammed into the wall, hair and clothes ignited mid-air like meteors. Flames curled around them as the room filled with the flame.
Chairs flew. Desks became shrapnel. One student near the door clutched the handle, trying to open it, but the wood itself had caught fire, and his skin fused to the metal before he crumpled. Another, crawling beneath a desk, was caught in the rising surge.
Khan saw it all.
Saw the bones, the ash, the tears evaporating off cheeks before they could fall. Saw fingers stretching out mid-reach, mid-scream. A constellation of death unfolding around him.
He felt no panic. Only rapture.
The blast wave rolled toward him in slow motion, a monstrous, golden tsunami. It painted the classroom in fire, layer by layer, first light, then heat, then devastation. And he, the happy spectator at the edge of the world, absorbed it all through wide, unblinking eyes.
The air turned into blades, hurling glass and steel. The floor buckled beneath him, groaning as its core was torn apart. Bodies flung against the ceiling collapsed in flames. Blood vaporized before it could hit the ground.
And then the fire reached him.
It kissed his skin, peeled away the first layer like silk. Pain should have come, but it didn’t. All he felt was light, burning, beautiful light, as his body arched back, arms wide open, as if welcoming it. Welcoming the conclusion of the symphony he had composed.
In that final moment, as the fire crowned around him, folding him into its embrace like a god returning to the stars, he smiled. Not from joy. Not from relief. But from a deep, perfect knowing, like a truth that had eluded him all his life had finally unveiled itself in that consuming blaze.
It was not chaos.
It was art. a beutiful art months in preperation.
And he was the artist, lost in the masterpiece he had painted with flesh and fire.
Back in the room, he sat up slightly. Reached for Zara. Pulled James from the floor and embraced him too. His family leaned in, surrounding him with warmth and relief.
Then Khan lay back, whispered:
“I can do this again.”
A single tear rolled from his eye. The first his parents had ever seen from him.
And they smiled.
They thought he was healing.
They had no idea.
