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Wes held his breath, watching the upload bar slowly increase.
Uploading 94%
Anxious energy buzzed in his veins, but he was still. Frozen. As if a single muscle twitch would bring this all crashing down.
Uploading 95%
It wouldn’t have been the first time his plans were thwarted at the last minute. Just last week he had been on his way home, camera in hand, when suddenly he felt the familiar chill of intangibility pass over him and his camera swiped from his clutches. He looked up to see Phantom, in all his egotistical glory, reach inside the camera, grab the memory card, and melt it in his palms.
Uploading 96%
But with each failure, months of countless iterations of the same plan, he had grown. He had learned. He had become more cunning, more discrete.
It really was only a matter of time before this day would come.
Uploading 97%
He was so close.
So close.
Uploading 98%
His mouth was a dessert. His hands clutched the edge of his desk, shaking. He couldn’t remember when the last time he blinked was, but it didn’t matter, nothing else mattered right now except how close he was he was so close.
Uploading 99%
So close.
Finally.
After all this time.
It was happening.
Upload complete
A breath escaped his lips. And then another. And another. Until the breaths quickened, and sound followed. A laugh. A breathy, weightless laugh.
He leaned back in his chair, allowing hilarity to overtake his body. This was bliss, it was pure bliss.
Wes stretched his arms out and stared up at the ceiling.
He had won.
After months of trying, he finally caught the perfect video showcasing the tail end of Phantom’s fight today with the infamous mecha ghost Skulker. Phantom sucked the ghost into his ghost thermos, flew behind a tree, and glanced around suspiciously for a brief moment before triggering his transformation sequence. Then, like icing on the cake, Foley and Manson appeared and had a conversation with Danny Fenton about the fight that Danny Phantom had just gone through. Fenton displayed the ecto-thermos and uttered the perfect lines about needing to “get him back to the Ghost Zone,” before turning his hand and the thermos intangible and shoving the object into his backpack.
The video was, by all accounts, perfect. Simply perfect. It was the exact undeniable proof that Wes had spent months trying to capture.
Now it was online for the world to see.
All he had to do now was share the link to the popular Phantom fan forum, sit back, and watch the internet work its magic.
If Wes was right, Phantom would be trending in an hour. News sites would be covering him by tonight. By tomorrow, everyone would know who—or what—Fenton really was.
A liar. An abomination. A danger to society.
All because of Wes.
He was victorious.
This was—
---
—wrong.
Wes pressed a hand against the glass, his eyes wide as he watched as red streaked against the green splatters dotting the panel.
This was all wrong.
“Come to gloat?” an icy voice sounded from beyond the glass wall.
“I never wanted this,” Wes whispered. He couldn’t take his eyes off the green stains on the glass, on the wall, on the floor. It popped against the otherwise barren room, painting the bleached scene with a terrifying story.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” The voice coughed, and then groaned. “You did this to me, Wes. This is your fault.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up.”
Wes’s eyes snapped over to the figure beyond the glass. It was sallow, decrepit. Nothing more than a bony mess of black, white, and green in a torn jumpsuit.
And it finally connected in Wes’s brain where he’d seen Phantom’s uniform before. It looked exactly like the suits worn in ecto-science labs.
Because when he saw the ghost now, Phantom looked right at home. He looked like he was made to be a lab rat.
And that made Wes nauseous.
“I didn’t ask to be this way. I didn’t want to be—to be a freak.” Phantom’s head lolled back against the wall. A trickle of ectoplasm dripped from his chin, peppering the floor with even more green, but he made no move to clean his face.
Wes’s hand fell to his side. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’m gonna get you out of here.” His voice didn’t sound too convincing. It sounded pathetic, weak.
Phantom snorted, but otherwise didn’t respond.
“I will,” Wes reiterated.
“Whatever you say.”
His pulse quickened, and before he could stop himself he choked out, “I just need to know. I need to know. What—what are you?”
Phantom’s eyes narrowed, snapping onto Wes.
Wes could have forgotten how to breathe. “Please, I need to know. Are you dead?”
“No.”
Wes’s blood ran cold.
“As in no, you don’t get to know what I am.” Phantom said. “You don’t get that privilege. Do you understand, Weston? You posted that video knowing that everyone, everyone, would see it, including the federal organization established to capture me. You knew deep down that this was going to happen. You just didn’t care because the only thing that mattered was that you were right and everyone else was just in too deep denial to see it, am I right?”
It was so hard to breathe.
Phantom leaned forward, his head drooping down to his chest. “You took away everything. I have nothing left. So now you can just sit there for the rest of your life and think about the fact that you have no idea if the person who you condemned to a lifetime of imprisonment was human, or ghost, or something in between.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing, you know,” Wes said, frustration seeping into his tone. “I just threw away my life too by doing this. I can’t exactly go home either.”
“Oh what, am I supposed to thank you now? For ruining my life but then coming back to ‘save’ me?” Phantom snapped. “Shut the fuck up.”
He could have left. He could have just turned around and left Phantom to rot in this compound for the rest of his afterlife.
But no, he’d come so far. And as today, he was officially a criminal.
He could never go home now. He couldn’t waste this trip.
And besides, he knew that he needed Phantom’s help in escaping the compound. This plan was a one way trip, put together after months of planning. Months of working with one of the most notorious hackers Wes knew online.
This was the best plan he had. But it wasn’t foolproof.
“I can get you in,” the hacker said from the other side of the screen. “After that? You’re on your own.”
Wes nodded. “That’s all I need.”
Silas was silent for a moment. “You know, when you reached out to me on Reddit, I thought you were delusional at first. I thought that this plan would never work, that you were out of your mind. But I figured I’d entertain you for a minute. At least hear you out before I wrote you off completely.”
“And I’m grateful.”
“But now, Wes? Now I just think you have a death wish.”
“You don’t understand,” Wes said bitterly. “This is my fault. I need to get Phantom out.”
“You’ll kill yourself before you make it out of there.”
“Please, just tell me what I need to know.”
There was a fingerprint scanner mounted on the wall next to the glass pane. Wes approached it cautiously, trying to ignore Phantom’s eyes that tracked his every move, and stopped before the wall.
“The hacker I’ve been working with programmed my thumb into this lock,” Wes said. “I’ll unlock it, then we run. Once we clear the door, you phase us out of here. Okay?”
Phantom didn’t say anything, but Wes didn’t need him to. There was no alternative plan, no other way to make it out of here intact. It was either this, or they both die.
Wes lifted his trembling hand, pressing his thumb to the scanner. The scanner came to life, lighting up green as it read his finger print.
For a moment, nothing happened. Deafening silence permeated the room, the mounting pressure slowly suffocating Wes’s lungs. Each millisecond that the scanner spent on his thumb felt like an eternity.
And then, just when he felt like he was about to collapse, the scanner turned red.
Time stopped. Wes’s eyes widened, and he drew in a short, shuddering breath.
No.
The blaring started.
NO!
The room filled with red light and high-pitched wailing. Wes’s legs cemented to the ground, and all he could do was turn his head and watch in horror as Phantom’s terrified eyes rolled to the back of his head before the ghost collapsed on the ground.
This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t have been real.
How did their plan fail?
Wes heard the door open, and the sounds of footsteps filled surrounded him. He couldn’t turn around, he couldn’t watch as his worst fears unfolded in front of him.
“So you were the rogue fingerprint,” a deep voice from behind him said. “You know, we thought it was odd when all of the sudden one day, a twenty seventh fingerprint suddenly was logged into the scanner seemingly overnight.”
No…
“Teenager, huh? Always think you’re invincible.”
Wes opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
His body was numb. He couldn’t feel his limbs. His brain was screaming at him to run, get out of here, but he couldn’t move. He was frozen, not because of anything the government had done to him.
No. It was fear.
“Too bad for you, you’re not as invincible as you think you are.”