Free Sample Chapters

Paris. January, gray and wet. The light outside the tall windows of Sciences Po is the color of cold ash. A fine mist hangs over the Seine, turning the city’s sound into a hum — traffic, distant sirens, the heartbeat of a civilization unsure of itself.

Inside Lecture Hall C, Political Theory and the Future of Democracy is already standing-room only. Students lean over railings, clutching coffee cups, eyes fixed on their tablets. The room buzzes with alerts — snippets of American news feeds flashing headlines in a dozen languages.

“Trump confirmed dead—”
“JD Vance succumbs to injuries—”
“White House security lockdown continues—”

Professor Hassan El-Mansouri steps onto the podium, expression unreadable. Mid-40s, dark hair dusted with gray, wire-rimmed glasses. His jacket is rumpled, his mind not. He surveys the crowd like a man counting witnesses at a trial.

He taps the microphone. Silence.

“Assassination,” he begins softly, “is democracy’s confession — the moment persuasion fails and passion takes up arms.”

A ripple runs through the students — some startled, some delighted.

In the third row, a girl with a rainbow lanyard raises her hand without waiting to be called. “Professor, with respect, America brought this on itself. They elected fascists, empowered corporations, and now the violence they exported has come home.”

Murmurs of agreement. Hassan smiles thinly. “An interesting thesis. You believe evil is geographical — that bullets only cross oceans when they’ve been invited?”

A boy near the back — long hair, tattoos of Greta Thunberg and Che Guevara — shouts, “Capitalism breeds extremism! This is the inevitable collapse of an unjust system!”

Laughter and applause.

Hassan’s reply is quiet, measured — almost tender. “Capitalism breeds extremism, yes. But socialism breeds corpses. I’ve seen both — one on screens, the other in my father’s empty shop.”

A few chuckles, a few gasps. Someone in the back begins filming on their phone.

“You see,” he continues, “your generation thinks history began the day you were born. You mistake slogans for ideas. Equity for virtue. Censorship for compassion. We used to conquer worlds with faith, then with science. Now we conquer hashtags. Perhaps the next war will be fought in comment sections.”

The hall erupts — laughter, outrage, applause all at once. Hassan lets it swell, then simply raises a hand. The silence that follows feels electric.

“If democracy dies, it will not be at the hands of dictators,” he says. “It will be strangled by applause.”

He pauses, scanning the room. The air feels charged. Then, slowly, a smile creeps across his face.

“Let’s play a game, shall we?”

A few nervous laughs ripple through the hall.

“Nuria,” he says, pointing his chalk like a conductor’s baton toward a blue-haired student near the front. “You seem certain billionaires could solve all our problems. Let’s test your theory. Who’s first on your list for confiscation?”

A boy blurts out, “Elon Musk!”

“Good. Musk.” Hassan writes it in bold chalk. “Five hundred billion? Half a trillion.”

He scrawls it on the board: Musk – $500B (0.5T).

“Next?”

“Ellison!” another student yells. “He owns Oracle and wants to control TikTok — tells us what to think!”

“Excellent,” Hassan replies, jotting it down. “Ellison — three hundred eighty billion? That’s point-three eight trillion.”

Soon the classroom is alive with voices. Names fly like confetti — “Bezos! Zuckerberg! Buffett! Page! Brin! Arnault!” Hassan keeps pace, chalk dust clouding the air. One by one, he lists each billionaire and their fraction of a trillion. Twelve names later, he draws a line under the column.

“Total: 2.6 trillion.” He taps the chalk against the board. “Right — so we’re not quite there yet.”

The class titters. Hassan pulls out his phone, thumbs flying with the speed of a teenager gaming online.

“Let’s consult our modern oracle — ChatGPT.”

He types quickly, then turns the screen toward the class. “Ah, here we are.” He turns to the board and writes in clean, sharp strokes:

‘13–15 trillion = 3,192 billionaires = 6% of U.S. obligations (≈ $237T)’

A surprised murmur ripples through the room.

“So even if we seized every billionaire’s wealth,” Hassan says, “we’d fix six percent of the problem — once. And then the capital would vanish: no reinvestment, no innovation, no jobs, no tax base.”

He changes chalk colors — red now — and writes: Tesla. Neuralink. X.com. SpaceX. Grok. Nvidia. OpenAI. Then, with swift, decisive strokes, he slashes a crimson X through each one.

“Take their money, and these die with it,” he says evenly. “We’d erase electric vehicles, AI, brain–spinal repair, space travel, quantum computing, and energy breakthroughs. We’d trade progress for a headline.”

He steps back, crosses his arms. “Fair trade?”

For a moment there is only silence. Then the room erupts — students shouting over one another, ideology colliding with arithmetic. Hassan watches, faintly amused, his point made.

“Utopia,” he says quietly, almost to himself, “is easy — until you have to balance its books.”

Outside, the air smells of wet stone and exhaust. Hassan lights a cigarette he no longer pretends to have quit. Behind him, a student murmurs, “He’s brilliant. And impossible.” Another whispers, “He’s canceled.”

By evening, the first clip appears online: “Professor Destroys Woke Students on Trump Assassination.” By morning, it has twelve million views.

Within a week, Le Professeur Manqué is born.

In a dim Paris apartment, Hassan begins typing his first post.

“France taught me to reason, but not to believe. America taught me to dream, but not to doubt. Perhaps the next civilization will need both.”

He clicks Publish.

Across the city, somewhere in Vienna, an older man named Victor Czabo reads the post — and smiles.

Two minds had just found each other across a dying West.

Rain streaked the studio windows, smearing Washington into red and white lines. Sarah Reynolds didn’t look up from the frozen frame. Gray hoodie over silk blouse—her version of armor.

Hassan El-Mansouri stood mid-gesture on screen, calm as a man lighting a fuse.

“…it will be strangled by applause.”

Cy leaned back in the director’s chair, chewing a pen. “Twelve million views in twenty-four hours. You’re getting owned by a French professor with chalk.”

Sarah hit play. The lecture hall detonated. She muted it before the cheering could crawl inside her chest.

“Arrogant,” she muttered.

“Effective,” Cy said. “He doesn’t flatter them. He cuts them. That’s why they can’t look away.”

She felt the shift before she named it—an unwelcome respect, sharp as heartburn. I used to do that.

Cy tapped the screen. “You invite him on, you either expose him… or he exposes you.”

Her phone buzzed. Cy had already drafted the message.

Get him. Numbers go nuclear.

Sarah stared at it. Two million subscribers—and drifting. Sponsors who expected the right tone. And beneath it all, a quiet exhaustion she refused to name.

She picked up the phone. Set it down. Picked it up again.

“Live,” she said. “No scripts. No edits.”

Cy’s grin was slow. “Now you’re not inviting a guest. You’re inviting a collision.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Professor El-Mansouri—join me live. One week. No scripts. No edits.

Sent.

✦ ✦ ✦

Two nights later, the red light blinked.

Sarah leaned into the mic, voice velvet over steel.

“Good evening, fractured America. Roberts. Nugent. DeSantis. Gabbard. Four candidates auditioning for a country that may not exist in its present form by November.

Some of you call the crash divine justice. Others call it murder.

And the rest of us are refreshing feeds, waiting for the next video that tells us who to hate.”

She let the silence stretch just long enough for the comments to explode.

“We don’t need more martyrs,” she said softly. “We need adults. We’ll be right back.”

Cy killed the mic. “You’re bleeding Blue tonight. Comments are feral.”

“Good,” Sarah said, though her stomach tightened. If I lose the base, the brand dies. If I keep pandering, I become everything I claim to fight.

She glanced at the live feed. One comment had already rocketed to the top.

— H. El-Mansouri

A slow, dangerous smile spread across her face.

“Well, Professor,” she whispered, pulse quickening, “let’s see who breaks.”

Cy looked over. “He accepted?”

“One week. Live. No net.”

He let out a low whistle. “This either saves the channel… or burns it to the ground.”

Sarah closed her laptop, steadying her breath.

“Sometimes it burns either way.”

Rain hammered the studio windows like it had a personal vendetta. The air reeked of burnt coffee, ozone from overheating electronics, and the particular desperation of a live broadcast at 11 p.m. on the edge of history. Sarah Reynolds sat at the mic, shoulders tight, pretending her hands weren’t shaking.

She told herself it was energy.

Cy, slouched in the producer chair, called it something less flattering.

“You sure about this French guy?” he asked, spinning a cracked mug between his palms. “He made half his students cry last week. Trending everywhere.”

“Good,” Sarah said, adjusting her headset with a sharp tug. “Maybe he’ll make me sweat. Or think. Or both. We need voices that cut through the noise.”

Cy grinned. “There she is. Saint Sarah of the Just Cause.”

“Fuck off,” she shot back, but she was smiling.

The red light blinked on.

Sarah leaned in, voice smooth—trained, controlled.

“Good evening. This is The Moral Arc. Tonight we step into history’s turbulence. Joining us from Paris is Professor Hassan El-Mansouri—political theorist, writer, and known online as Le Professeur Manqué. Professor El-Mansouri, can you hear me?”

His voice came through warm, amused, lightly accented. “Loud and clear, Sarah. Though I’m not sure if I should be honored… or interrogated.”

“That depends on your answers,” she said. “And please—call me Sarah. ‘Ms. Reynolds’ makes me sound like I’m grading essays.”

A soft chuckle. “Then Hassan it is. And manqué? It’s a warning label. A professor who noticed teaching stopped being enough when everyone just wanted to be told they were right.”

“Convenient positioning,” Sarah said lightly. “You get to criticize everyone.”

“Or disappoint everyone,” he replied.

She smiled—then pivoted.

“Let’s talk about the event. Two of America’s most polarizing figures are dead. Officials call it an accident. The public doesn’t believe it. What are we actually looking at?”

“A moment of transition,” El-Mansouri said. “When a system reveals what it was always dependent on. Not institutions. Belief.”

“So the myth collapses?”

“The myth weakens,” he corrected. “Collapse comes later.”

Sarah leaned forward slightly.

“Let’s not pretend this is symmetrical. One side spent years building a cult around a man who treated the Constitution like a suggestion.”

Cy’s head snapped up behind the glass.

El-Mansouri didn’t answer immediately.

“And yet,” he said, quieter now, “half your country voted for him. Twice. Are they delusional… or unconvinced by your side’s moral superiority?”

Sarah felt the shift.

Not debate.

Pressure.

“They were manipulated,” she said. “Fed lies, conspiracy, fear—”

“By whom?” El-Mansouri cut in.

A beat.

“By the same systems your side now uses,” he continued. “Different slogans. Same machinery.”

“That’s not even remotely true.”

“It is inconvenient,” he said.

Sarah leaned closer, heat rising.

“No, what’s inconvenient is this lazy ‘both sides’ posture that lets people like you sit above the mess while the rest of us are trying to fix it.”

“Fix it,” El-Mansouri repeated. “By deciding which speech is allowed? Which opinions are safe? Which citizens are still redeemable?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It is what you practice.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It was loaded.

And suddenly Sarah wasn’t thinking about El-Mansouri.

She was thinking about the audience. There were millions listening, waiting and judging. Her next words wouldn’t just be hers alone. They’d be clipped. Shared. Weaponized.

Cy was making a slicing motion across his throat.

Wrap it.

She didn’t.

“You want to talk about danger?” she said, voice tightening. “Fine. The danger is pretending tolerance includes people actively dismantling democracy. At some point, you stop debating and you draw a line.”

“And who draws it?” El-Mansouri asked.

“You?”

It landed harder than she expected.

For a fraction of a second—she had nothing.

Sarah opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Just a flicker of breath, small but real.

Say something. Anything.

A faint knock came through El-Mansouri’s microphone. A child’s voice, distant: “Papa, c’est l’heure du dîner.”

The tension cracked.

“My son,” El-Mansouri said. “History can wait. Dinner cannot.”

A ripple of laughter escaped Sarah—too quick, too grateful.

“Tell him we’re almost done rewriting civilization.”

“I’ll let him know it’s taking longer than expected.”

The air shifted. Not lighter—just different.

Controlled again.

“One last question,” Sarah said. “Do you really think America could fall into civil war?”

“I think it already has,” El-Mansouri replied. “It simply hasn’t admitted it yet.”

Silence filled the studio.

“Final thought?”

“Be careful what you call justice,” he said.

“It has a way of asking for more than you intended to give.”

The red light clicked off. Sarah pulled off her headphones and exhaled slowly, like she’d been underwater.

Cy stared at her. “Well,” he said. “That’s going to explode.”

“Good,” she replied.

“You almost lost him.”

“I didn’t.”

“You hesitated.”

Sarah didn’t answer. Instead she stood, flexing her fingers, already feeling the adrenaline drain into something colder.

“What now?” Cy asked.

“Now we clip it. Post it. And wait to see who decides I’m the enemy.”

She grabbed her coat and walked outside. The rain hadn’t let up. The city glowed in fractured reflections—screens, signals, arguments multiplying in real time.

Somewhere out there, the reaction had already begun.

Sarah stepped into the storm.

This time, she felt it. It wasn’t excitement, not even fear, but rather something closer to exposure. For the first time that night, she wasn’t entirely sure she still controlled the narrative.

✦ ✦ ✦

A week later, the doorbell hammered like it had a personal grudge.

Sarah didn’t move.

She sat hunched over her laptop, thumb flicking upward in a steady rhythm—protests, pundits, outrage, applause, collapse packaged into bite-sized certainty. The glow washed her face pale.

Tubby cracked one eye from the windowsill. Your move, human.

The bell rang again.

She groaned, dragged herself up, and buzzed Cy in.

He stepped inside, took one look at her, and winced. “Jesus, Reynolds. You’ve been fermenting in here.”

“I’ve been working.”

“You’ve been scrolling.” He pointed at her boots. “Put those on. We’re going out.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Exactly why we’re going.”

She hesitated—then grabbed her coat.

✦ ✦ ✦

Rain slicked the streets, turning the city into smeared light and reflections. The Tavern of the Soul pulsed from the inside out—warm, loud, alive in a way her apartment wasn’t.

Inside, the air hit her: beer, wet wool, fryer grease.

Daisy was behind the bar.

Sarah noticed her immediately.

Not just the tattoos—though they were there, climbing her arms in fragments—but the way she moved. Efficient. Unhurried. Like she belonged exactly where she was.

Cy saw Sarah see her.

“There it is,” he murmured.

“What.”

“That look.”

“Shut up.”

They slid into a table by the window. Daisy brought their drinks without asking.

Their fingers brushed.

Just for a second.

It was enough.

Sarah held the contact a fraction too long—then broke it, eyes dropping to the glass. Heart already doing that stupid, familiar thing.

Too fast.

Too real.

Abort.

Cy watched the whole exchange like a man enjoying a show. “Three weeks,” he said quietly. “That’s your over-under.”

“Go to hell.”

“You meet someone, you spark, you vanish. It’s basically your brand.”

Sarah took a long drink instead of answering.

✦ ✦ ✦

The TVs above the bar churned through election coverage.

“Tight race,” Cy said.

Sarah snorted. “That’s what they always say when they don’t know what’s happening.”

A couple at the next table chimed in, casual, not confrontational. A few lines traded. Nothing sharp. Nothing new.

It died quickly.

No one here was looking for a fight.

That surprised her.

✦ ✦ ✦

Daisy drifted past again, refilling glasses.

“You always this serious?” she asked Sarah.

“Only when I’m trying to relax.”

Daisy smirked. “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Teach me, then.”

There it was.

A door.

Daisy leaned on the table slightly, close enough that Sarah could smell citrus and something warmer underneath.

“Step one,” she said, “stop thinking you’re in control of everything.”

Sarah held her gaze.

For a moment—just a moment—she considered it.

Going home with her.

Letting the night go somewhere unscripted.

No audience. No performance.

Just… something real.

And immediately—the recoil.

What if she stays?

What if she asks questions?

What if this turns into something that doesn’t have an exit?

Sarah smiled instead. Safe. Deflecting.

“Sounds risky.”

“Everything worth doing is.”

Daisy pushed off the table. “Let me know if you get brave.”

And just like that, it was gone.

Sarah watched her walk away.

Didn’t follow.

✦ ✦ ✦

Later, outside, the rain had thinned into a cold mist.

Cy caught a ride. Sarah waved him off and started walking.

The quiet hit differently after the bar. No noise. No buffer.

Just her thoughts again.

Halfway down the block, a man shifted under a slab of cardboard.

“Hey,” he said, voice careful. “Sorry. Any chance you could help me out? Just trying to get something to eat.”

Sarah stopped and examined him. He had clean eyes with no visible damage. His clothes were folded beside him like he still remembered another life.

Her hand went to her pocket, but came up empty.

Right. She ran the math automatically. The ATM was ten blocks back. But the rain was picking up again and her shoes were already soaked.

You talk about helping people. This is helping people.

But her body didn’t move.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have anything on me.”

It was true. But it was also… not the whole truth.

He nodded. No anger. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Maybe next time,” she added.

He gave a small shrug. “Sure. Next time.”

She walked on, now at a brisker pace, but the words followed her anyway.

Next time.

✦ ✦ ✦

Her apartment was dark and Tubby didn’t bother getting up.

Sarah peeled off her coat, dropped it on the floor. Boots, sweater, jeans—one piece at a time, a trail leading to the bed.

She sat for a second on the edge and thought about Daisy. Then she thought about the guy on the street. She thought about the version of herself that sounded so certain on air.

Then she lay back. The light stayed off. She didn’t check her phone. She just lay there and sleep took her quickly.

Outside, the city kept arguing with itself. Inside, for a few hours at least—Sarah Reynolds had nothing left to say.