Clarence crushes the butt of his John Player’s under the heel of his shoe outside the Wood Islands ferry terminal. It’d be an hour and a half before he’d get another drag. He’s got Dickie Christman, his charge, in restraints beside him. This dirtbag has to go to the courthouse in Dartmouth. Some stupid white-collar crime where he ripped off a bunch of people, a bunch of seniors. Pissed off some unsavoury folks as well. Real piece of work. His antics require the Nova Scotia Sheriff’s Office to provide an escort. Clarence, on the last day before retirement, drew the short straw. There’s worse things than a round trip to P.E.I.

The sheriff is proud of his career. The last thing he wants to do is this babysitting detail, to take this clown to the reckoning and comeuppance. Clarence isn’t known to possess a whole lot of patience.

He scans the vehicle bay because he is a man of observation. After almost twenty-five years with the Sheriff’s, there are some habits you just can’t shake.

A bunch of debating students from Port Hawkesbury are on a bus, and they’re pouring out of it to go upstairs. Noisy, futzing around, just doing what teenagers do.

He makes his way upstairs to the observation deck, finds a spot, gets his escort seated, sits back, legs splayed, and re-engages with his people-watching. There’s this old couple in the corner. They’ve got a couple Colemans, leaking a little bit, and giving off a bit of a stink. He hears them talking about this wedding they’re trying to get to in Pictou. Daughter’s getting married, and she asked for fresh lobster and fresh mussels, so that must be what’s in the coolers.

The engineer stomps past in a bit of a huff, wrench in his hand, cursing under his breath.

Clarence is well aware that he’s not alone with his travelling companion. On the way from Charlottetown, he saw that his duty car was being followed. Presumably that’s people from Christman’s office. Probably a bottom-feeding Joel Pink wannabe lawyer. No doubt one of his cleaners too. It’s key to keep an eye on these kinds of things, the players and the posers. Fine, they can follow him. They can get on board the ferry. He looks across the main deck seating area and back again. There they are. Behind him a couple rows back. Clarence turns, nods, and gives a two-finger salute.

Across the port rail, he sees a new player on the board. Looks like one of Melvin’s or Marriott’s, or some Hells Angels outfit from Spryfield. Doesn’t matter. He looks rough enough. Clarence has no real doubt that this joker is here for a little serious business with his pet scumbag.

A few things happen in quick succession. The teenagers from the debate team are making fools of themselves, pushing each other around. They’re arguing, and one of them is going on about this girl that he wants to screw, and the other one is saying how he didn’t need to do any such thing. Fine debaters indeed. Neither one of them would’ve known what to do if they ever had the chance. They get into a bit of a pushing match over the whole affair, and the next thing you know the chunky one takes a big swing at the skinny one. Skinny goes flying and knocks into the older couple with the coolers. Lobsters go flying everywhere. Ice goes flying everywhere. Mussels go flying everywhere.

Clarence clocks the Spryfield man making his move. And wouldn’t you know, the dimwit slips on a mussel and quickly becomes a flailing mess of arms and legs. The lawyer’s idiot beefy shadow sees the commotion, pulls a gun and fires, of all things. It clips Spryfield in the shoulder, and he promptly finishes his collapse in a wailing heap. There’s going to be some paperwork with Transport Canada, you can be sure of that.

He shakes his head and almost laughs. Christman ducks and starts crying, and Clarence can smell the piss as the coward soils himself. People are running everywhere. The debate team scatters to the four corners and there are fifteen vertical videos on the go. Everybody’s falling on the shellfish. Some girl is howling because a lobster caught her by the finger, and it’s bleeding. A lot.

Clarence has seen about enough.

In a moment of clarity, the sheriff gets to his feet and straightens his jacket, an old tweed sports coat from 1980-something. He drags the whimpering sad-sack to his feet and growls at him. “Christman… Dickie, we’re going to get you out of here.” They slowly pick their way through the chaos and find the single-occupancy bathroom. “Stay here,” says Clarence, stuffing Christman inside and closing the door before wedging an abandoned cane through the handle.

The lawyer is wrestling a lobster. His heavy with the gun still drawn is slack-armed, not knowing what to do with the consequences of his stupidity. The Spryfield clown on the ground is still wailing like a scared puppy. The old couple. Well, she’s yelling at him about the lobsters, cursing like a sailor. “Pick ‘em up, pick ‘em up, grab the mussels. Jesus, Mary and Joseph! We got a wedding to go to.”

The meathead from Spryfield finally hauls himself up and limps toward Clarence, holding his shoulder. The good sheriff stands between him and poor ole Dickie “pissy-pants” Christman.

A wicked whistle cuts through the din, and Clarence takes two fingers out from the corners of his mouth.

Everybody stops. It gets deadly quiet. Mostly. There’s still some whimpering. You can hear the hum of the engine, and it ain’t sounding too good. Maybe that’s what the engineer was on about.

“Listen up, fellow travellers and circus clowns,” says Clarence, in his loudest voice possible. “I’m trying to be nice, but I’m done with this. I retire tomorrow. These shenanigans… they stop now.”

“Put the damn gun down. Then put your hands behind your back,” Clarence says to the useless would-be gunfighter and tosses the cuffs to the lawyer. “Cuff the idiot, and bring me the gun. Not pointy-end out.” The lawyer sheepishly does just that. They exchange nods and thank-yous as he checks the weapon’s safety.

Spryfield’s finest takes a cautious step closer and Clarence raises an open hand. “Listen, friend. You’re not getting this guy. He’s going to court. I deliver him, I’m gonna get my goddamn gold watch and my retirement cake, and then I’m gonna go home. And if you want to get this guy, you’ll have to go do it the old-fashioned way. But you’re not doing it on my watch, not on this boat. Are we done here?”

The man nods slowly. Clarence nods back.

The woman who was yelling at her husband has not resumed her yelling, and they’ve managed to get most of the lobsters and mussels gathered up. Clarence surveys their salvaged wedding favours. “We good here?” She says yes. Her husband says nothing. Typical.

The girl from the debate team is still crying. Clarence pulls the lobster off her finger. “You’ll be fine, miss. Get with your crew over there. I can’t see ‘em, but I know they’re there with their phones, getting their Tic-tack or tock or whatever on. Go on.”

The carnage suitably subdued, Clarence’s attention returns to the lawyer and the goofus in handcuffs. “You’re gonna sit right there. Your man there probably needs your services more than the useless tool you represent, so you might want to take some time and have a chat with him.”

Northumberland Ferries’ service folk, security and the rest of the cavalry finally arrive on the scene, impossibly late to the party. Clarence flashes his badge. “Just phone it in. Have the Pictou Mounties meet me at the dock for cleanup of this godforsaken mess.” He surrenders the firearm to be secured, then points to the Prince of Spryfield. “That clown might need some medical attention. I’m afraid there’ll be paperwork for all of us.”

He walks over to the bathroom, takes the wedged cane out of the handle, and opens the door. “Clean yourself up. You stink.”

They make for the bow of the ferry as it approaches the dock, and sit in the observation chairs.

Clarence turns to Dickie Christman and says, “Man, I could use a smoke.”

The new kid from Ops, who’s only been on this rock about three weeks, put his mitts on the vinyl of the stool and started to pull it out, when the room went quiet. Not a peep. The kid looked over his shoulder and put his hands up in a show of public apology for the offence. He promptly took the stool beside it and ate his eggs with his elbows tucked tight.

That particular stool at the end of the counter stayed empty all night, every night. Drillers coming off second shift walked the long way around to reach the register, and anyone who had been on the rock long enough to lose their teeth did not have to be told: the careless who tried to sit in that stool got a polite hand on the arm and a short shake of the head. Within a week, they were part of it too.

It was ten minutes to closing, and the waitress turned the sign over to CLOSED in big red letters, looking backwards in the glass from the inside. There was a black corridor past it. She turned down the overheads, and the whole room was the color of wet ash. She winced about her sore feet. They’d been hurting for hours, and now that the shift was pretty much over, they registered their complaint.

She plucked a mug off the back shelf. It was the gray one with the chip opposite the handle. The waitress set it down in the brown ring in front of the stool and left it there, just like she’d done for a hundred nights prior. She then wiped the counter in front of it. Slow circles, little past where it needed to go. Her rag was damp and cold, and the cooler behind her hummed and rattled. It was rattling more than usual this night.

A cold draught blew in along the floor and bit her ankles as the door opened with a sigh. Out of the dark came the alien, shaking ice off its shoulders. Pieces of ice, small and large, hit the tiles of the floor like broken glass. It was cold and they didn’t melt.

The alien found the stool at the end of the counter, its stool, and sat down. The cushion of the stool sighed with the weight. As if it was relieved to be finally put in use. The hydraulics squeaked from disuse, and the alien did not pay any notice.

The waitress reached for the glass coffee pot on the hot plate, and she lifted it three inches, as if she was reconsidering her life choices, and set it back down without so much as a tilt and pour.

“Tell me that’s real coffee.”

“It’s real enough to keep you awake. That’s all coffee ever promised anybody.”

“On Earth they had a word for this. Brown disappointment.”

“You’ve never been to Earth.”

“I’ve seen pictures. Big blue marble, full of shithole diners just like this. Every waitress calls everybody ‘hon.’”

The waitress’s lips thinned slightly, not a smile, and not anything else in particular either. She folded her rag in half, taking her time, and then she folded it in half again.

“I am from Earth, genius. Vancouver. I know what coffee’s supposed to taste like and I know what a tip’s supposed to look like, and you are zero for two.”

“The Company pays for the coffee.”

“The Company doesn’t pay for the smile, sugar. The smile’s my freelance gig.”

The alien grinned, too many square teeth, without an ounce of warmth. It was a practised bearing of teeth.

“Then I’m your best customer. I make you smile.”

“You make me tired. There’s a difference. Folks out here confuse the concepts constantly.”

“Last time I was here you weren’t tired.”

“Last time you were here we closed early and I had to mop twice.”

“Best mopping of your life. Admit it.”

“It was adequate mopping.”

The waitress looked towards the corner where the mop sat in its bucket by the kitchen door. It was grey water, and there were secrets under the grey water, too.

The alien placed its oddly perfect hands flat on the counter on either side of the mug. There was ice in the creases, and they caught the light of the room strange.

“One more night shift, sweetheart, and I’m done mopping for good. You ever seen Europa? Real water. It moves. You can watch it for hours.”

She leaned forward with her hands on the counter, pushing her shoulders to her ears. Her voice was measured and confident, quiet but not a whisper.

“I watched a man drown once. It wasn’t that interesting.”

The alien fidgeted with the empty mug, rubbing its finger across the chip.

“Jesus. Okay. Dark. I like it.”

She grinned at the alien’s use of an oath as if pretending to be human took practice. She straightened.

“You should order something. You never order. You sit in that stool like furniture and occasionally drink brown disappointment.”

“I’m a regular. Regulars don’t order. Regulars are expected. That’s the whole theology of the regular, ask anybody. This stool sits empty all night because it’s mine. Now that’s regular, more regular than ordering. That’s… what’s the word?”

The alien let the punchline dangle. She let it sit there for a beat.

“Squatting,” said the waitress.

“Sacred. The word is sacred.”

She’d been easy for the customers to laugh and carry on with, all night. She was not so inclined now. The alien was not keeping track. Or keeping up.

“Tomorrow, when the job’s done, I’m taking you to Europa. Ice wine. No witnesses.”

“You say ‘no witnesses’ like it’s romantic.”

“Out here it’s the most romantic thing there is.”

The waitress looked down and ran her thumb along the edge of the chrome molding of the counter.

“What’s the job? Or is that pillow talk I’m not cleared for?”

“Careful, girl. Keep talking like that and I just might confess to something.”

“Promises, promises.”

The alien’s mask of a grin finally fell away.

“Crew skimmed Company ore. Whole damned crew. I’m on cleanup. They get a malfunction, I get a retirement. Europa. Ice wine. And you.”

Her hand stayed put on top of the counter. She didn’t look away and met the challenge with the hint of a defiant smirk.

“A whole crew? Say that again. Slower.”

The alien laughed its awkward laugh and leaned across the counter. They were close enough that she could smell the cold.

“You like it when I talk shop.”

“I like someone who finishes what they start. All the way. No half measures. No mess left behind for me to mop up.”

The alien placed the mug squarely back down and twirled it around by the handle. The chip faced the waitress. Then the alien stood and put scrip on the counter. It had real weight, heavier than it should have been. Sloppy cut. Amateur.

“Keep the change. Buy yourself something warm.”

“It’s the Kuiper Belt, honey. Warm ain’t on the menu.”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Same stool. Don’t be late. I hate reheating things.”

The alien made for the door, turned around to flash another show of teeth at her, before disappearing into the dark again. Another blast of cold air inhaled through the door as it opened and closed, and then it was quiet again, except for that godforsaken cooler humming and rattling its death throes. The ice on the tile glistened as it softened at the edges. The mop would soon be pressed into service once again.

But not yet. She untied her apron, folded it carefully, and placed it on the counter. Then the waitress picked up the unused mug, turned it around and placed it back in its home on the shelf with the chip facing out.

She looked beyond the stool where the shadows by the restrooms overtook the light.

“You catch all that?” she asked the shadows.

A shape slowly walked forward from the dark, and there was a small flash of flame as the cigarette became the only bleak warmth in the room.

The tip of it brightened orange then red.

“Every word.”

The waitress nodded, slid half the scrip across the counter, and tucked the rest into her bra.

The pavement was sticky and hot and the heat came off it in waves. There were rows of Chevelles and Novas and Darts in every direction of the Highland Square parking lot. The midday sun was shining hard. Some were painted lacquer red, some competition orange, and even one was painted the exact yellow of a goddamn school bus. There were two fastback Mustangs who sat nose to nose and looked like they were about ready to square off.

Now Hughie’s Malibu was at the far end of the row of cars. It was flat black and every inch of it was painted that same color. He wanted to do the chrome black as well, but Gramps said that he should probably keep it chrome. It wasn’t a Grand National, but it was a nice nod to it anyway to have flat black. Hughie compromised and said it was great and spent the time shining up the chrome instead. He paid $200 for the car and fifteen months of Saturdays to get it all fixed up and into shape. It didn’t shine, wasn’t supposed to, and it sat there in that row of cars like a hole in the light.

“Is that supposed to be a Malibu?” The sarcastic voice came from some asshole in an Iron Maiden shirt. He had his arms crossed over his gut, and he clearly didn’t look like he spent five seconds on that car. That was Rick Fraser. He owned the SS, and he had the numbers on his plate that matched the year of the car. He was 100% a show-off.

“It’s a 78,” said Hughie.

“That’s not even a muscle car, malaise era at best. That piece of junk came with a 250 inline six stock, probably.” And Rick went and knocked a knuckle on the hood once, like he owned the damn thing. “But are you ashamed of it or something. You should be.”

Hughie wanted to say something, and he even opened his mouth to do so, but nothing came out, just a bunch of ums and ahs. But Rick was loud enough that a crowd of maybe six had drifted close enough to circle around and watch and rubberneck about what was going on. Of course, they were watching Rick, the blowhard, and not Hughie.

“The numbers don’t lie, loser,” Rick said.

“The motor’s a 350, not stock,” said Hughie, trying to at least represent something.

“It’s not stock and it’s not documented. I bet it’s not even worth the time you put in it either.” Rick smiled, peacocking for the crowd more than at Hughie. “What’d that cost you, a thousand bucks? Bet you can’t guess what a real Grand National goes for.”

Hughie’s voice was low and so sheepish nobody could barely hear him. “I didn’t build it to sell it.”

“Was that, loser? Speak up?”

Hughie had tears in his eyes and he wouldn’t let them roll down his cheek. He swallowed hard and said more forcefully, “I didn’t build it to sell it.”

“Good, because ain’t nobody buying it.” A couple of the crowd laughed a bit. Rick’s lackeys, no doubt. Then Rick leaned on the fender like he was king shit of the universe. “Doesn’t matter what color you paint that Malibu, kid, flat black, cherry engine red, still a Malibu. Paint don’t make it a Buick.”

Hughie’s cheeks flushed, he was reaching for anything, something, anything to throw back at him, torque figures, heads they ported themselves, and all that came out was, “It’s fast. Really fast.” It sounded small next to a car like Rick’s, all fancy, well paid for, and shiny.

“Fast,” Rick chortled. He let that word sit there for a minute. For a second, Hughie braced for a challenge to race, but Rick just waved his hand, dismissed him, made a show of it, too, as if he did not think Hughie was worth the bother. He just half turned, smiled, and shook his head at the crowd, and started to walk away.

Gramps came around the front bumper. He had a couple Coke Classics between the knuckles of his hands. Gramps never hurried. He just walked slowly. Didn’t say anything. He handed one of the pops to Hughie; he kept the other for himself. Looked at Rick’s Chevelle. Gramps took a swig, wiped his lips with the sleeve of his shirt, sighed a little bit, looked at the Chevelle again, nodded. Gramps was just not impressed.

Gramps pointed his bottle at the Chevelle and at Rick and said, still looking at Rick, “He’s right, you know, that Malibu is not a Grand National, never will be.”

Rick’s grin outshone the sun, pleased as if he’d won something, one more trophy for the wall.

Rick walked away with his friends, arms across their shoulders, laughing, talking about Hughie the loser.

“Gimme the hood pins,” Gramps said, and held out his hand.

Hughie did not ask why, he just worked them loose. Gramps then lifted the hood himself. He had a bad shoulder. He winced a bit. They looked down at the block that they had pulled apart. Had pulled apart and had spread out on a door across two sawhorses. Had sat in that garage for two winters. Every bolt of that thing had been turned by hand and torqued. Nobody said anything for a minute.

“That man, kid, has got a car that came out of the factory looking just like every other car that came out of the factory,” Gramps said, “and that ain’t nothing, but it ain’t this either, not by a damn sight.” Gramps let the hood down soft, didn’t slam it, just with care. “And you didn’t build this car to beat his. It was built with your own two hands, and the whole point was I wanted you to know how an engine went together. And that’s done. And there ain’t nobody at this show,” Gramps pointed to everybody else, “that can touch what you’ve done, win or lose.”

Gramps reached in to grab the keys off the top of the dash before he tossed them to Hughie. Hughie caught them.

“Why don’t you go get Donna,” Gramps said, pointing to Hughie’s girlfriend coming out of the mall. “Grab a couple Mama burgers and some pops from the A&W and head up the long way around to Green Hill. Stop wasting the good evening standing around in this parking lot, listening to that jackass who’s never had an ounce of grease under his nails in his entire life.”

Hughie looked at his keys, looked at the car, and when he looked for Gramps, he was already walking back over to the lawn chair in the shade, like a man who had nowhere better to be.

The Malibu started on the first turn like it’s been doing for a long time. Flat black hood, chrome shiny, the engine idling low and purring like it should. Hughie was proud of himself. It was the sound of fifteen months in a perfect low note. Then Hughie pulled out past the row of other shiny, sparkling muscle cars. Rick was busy under the hood of his own car, steam and black smoke billowing from the engine.

The Malibu navigated the turns through the road through Alma on the way to Green Hill. And Donna kicked back in the bench seat, feet up on the dash, chewing on her burger in one hand and her other hand out the window, swimming like a dolphin in the moving air.

Donna laughed. “Did you see Rick’s face? I bet they call the fire department.”

Roxette’s “Joyride” came on the radio, and Hughie was glad he’d put the Pioneer in a couple of months ago. He turned up the volume because that song was perfect.

I place a scanner against the inside of my wrist and it gives one clean tone.

I type in the reading: timestamp, batch code, inflammatory markers.

CURRENT TIME: 23:13:42
SUBJECT: MADDIE HART

My maintenance dose is due at quarter-after.

Outside, Winnipeg is a muddy mess, grey parking lots, dead grass, and old snow collapsing into the drains in goopy ropes. It is neither winter nor spring yet.

The only clear space of my desk is for Donna’s tulips.

She’d brought them in yesterday morning after I missed dinner the night before. I put them in a 500-millilitre media bottle. The lab does not have vases. Stems lean against the glass, and they’re pale and jointed below the fill line. The leaf is torn a little bit from where she carried them in against her coat.

I prefer white tulips, but she brings yellow ones anyway. White flowers look like they are waiting for a funeral, she says.

They sit beside our copy of The Silken Tent. Cover’s a little creased from my being in my bag. The corner of one of the pages is folded over. She always folds the corners, even in books she loves.

I keep a formal log on the computer and a paper lab notebook beneath the terminal stand.

There you are.

The comforting warmth rises from beneath my ribs and my shoulders lower and relax. My pulse settles.

Good work, little bright thing. Nobody else could have carried us this far.

On the second screen, the investor pitch deck is pinned.

UNLOCKING THE NEXT STAGE OF HUMAN POTENTIAL

I had already drawn the maintenance dose and it was sitting there capped beside the terminal. Four millilitres. Just a minute to go.

I leave it there. I glare at it.

Come on. Just this, then we rest.

The clock changes.

23:15.

I ball my right hand into a fist and dig my nails into the palm, just to see if I can still feel pain.

Then I place both hands flat on the bench top.

“No.”

The warmth stops.

Not cools. Just… gone.

The pressure gathers behind my left eye. My vision splits. One keyboard and two, and just a sandy blur with symbols inside of it. Salty blood and bile flood the back of my tongue and it tastes bitter. My jaw clenches so tight my teeth ache.

Don’t be childish, little bright thing. I can make this so much worse.

Its voice remains steady and changeless.

I tab over to the dosage field in the log.

MAINTENANCE DOSE WITHHELD.

Then I add:

ON PURPOSE.

The cursor just sits there stupidly and blinks.

You need me.

I type:

OMISSION RECORDED BECAUSE OMITTING THE OMISSION WOULD BE ANOTHER FORM OF COMPLIANCE.

The pressure abruptly increases and squeezes from the inside.

My fingers slip and slide along the bench. A test tube rack tips and falls over. Three of the empty valves roll towards the sink, clinking against each other. I can’t catch any of them. I don’t even try.

My knees give way and suddenly I’m on the floor.

You did this to yourself.

“Yes.”

That word scrapes my throat like sandpaper.

It squeezes harder, for just a moment.

It expected my apology.

I put a hand beneath my chest and try to push myself up. My arm is dead, and my right is full of pins and needles. Mild motor impairment. No loss of consciousness this time, no seizure either.

I’ve studied the organism, watched it repair damaged neural pathways in rodents. I presented the results to rich men who’d use the phrase disruptive longevity with all seriousness and little irony. Inevitably, the trial schedule slipped and the burn rate climbed. I stopped asking for permission.

The original protocol was planned for twelve subjects.

I opted to become subject one.

No paperwork.

You came to me.

“Yes.”

You chose this.

“Yes.”

Then stop pretending I’m hurting you.

The next pulsing squeeze drives my forehead hard against the cabinet.

The lab narrows to a tunnel of cold metal. There is a sticky wetness beneath my nose and I taste blood. I think I peed myself a little. I gasp to catch my breath, and the organism catches it with me.

My dosage vial must have fallen to the floor as well. I spy it and it’s just at the limit of my reach. I stretch for it and wince at the hot tearing in my shoulder. My fingers close around the cap.

I let it roll out of my hand and I’m struck with loss. And relief. And shame.

When I left two, or maybe three, days ago, Donna was cutting the tulip stems.

She always uses the kitchen scissors, never a knife. They are dull scissors and they chew through the stems, leaving splinters in the sink. I tell her to sharpen them using tin foil.

She asked if I would be home in time for dinner.

I said I didn’t know. That was accurate as far as it went.

The vial, my vial, waits for me.

Every reworked neural pathway pushes me towards it:

Administer.

Relief.

Warmth.

Permission.

There you are.

I laugh once. I can’t help it. It breaks into a cough, hard and painful, and it tears something behind my eye.

What is funny?

“Your study design.”

The squeeze continues. The pain persists.

I lay on the floor until the room has only one of everything again. Then I drag the notebook that’d fallen to the floor. Its cover catches on the tile. The first pages hold assay and titration results. Later pages hold words that may or may not be the ones I would ever intend to write.

I pull the pen off the loop and write now:

AFFECT: FEAR. AFFECT: ANGER.
AFFECT:

I pause there.

What am I doing? The list isn’t the experiment.

You are damaging yourself.

“No.”

I sit up. I’m sweaty and the smell of urine stings my nose. My palms leave damp half-moons on the floor but at least my arms work again. One knee has gone numb beneath me from being down for God knows how long. I pinch the skin above it and sensation returns with a sluggish electric spark.

“No,” I say again. “You are hurting me.”

The voice softens and becomes almost sweet.

Maddie.

“Don’t use my name.”

Silence.

The terminal is beeping like something is on the keyboard. The glass door of the bench cabinet reflects a stranger’s face and for a second my own eye stares back at me with threads of tendril drifting behind my pupil. It’s gone before I can focus. The vial remains dangerous and inviting. The organism breathes inside me.

I climb up the bench, one hand at a time, until I’m standing. If that’s what you call it. The room tilts. I wait.

The pressure holds.

“Coercion.”

The parasite moves through the nerves behind my eyes. It worms and searches for the warm places in my mind.

You need me. You always have.

“Probably.”

I walk to the desk.

The poetry book lies beside my latest tissue scans. I pick it up. The cover is warm from the printer paper resting on it.

I read the title again.

The Silken Tent.

Donna’s fold has made a small white scar in the page.

I open to her marked place.

“By countless silken ties of love and thought.”

Donna has underlined it in pencil.

“Not trapped,” she’d said as she handed me the book. “Tethered.”

I told her that sounded like something investors would put in a slide deck.

She threw a tea towel at me.

All I can smell is dish soap and wet cotton.

“By countless silken ties of love and thought.”

The parasite moves deeper. I do not answer.

The tulips have opened. One stem has softened and bows against the glass. I take it to the sink and dump out the cloudy water and pour in fresh. The flowers sag sadly in my hand.

I trim each stem clean with the dissecting scissors from the drawer under the centrifuge.

I return the flowers to their spot beside the book.

Maddie.

I ignore it.

I pick up my phone that’s been lying face-down beneath the tissue scans. On mute, of course.

Donna’s last message floats on the notification screen, waiting:

MADDIE: SOUP’S IN THE FRIDGE. I BOUGHT THE GOOD BREAD. COME HOME BEFORE I EAT BOTH. -D

The vial sits on the bench waiting too.

I could take it. I could wash my face, go home, call this a migraine, and carry the lie another day.

I pick up the phone.

The pressure won’t stop. I let it squeeze.

The flowers are yellow. They are perking up already.

“By countless silken ties of love and thought.”

I press Donna’s name.

Please, answer.

The cab has the hum of wood dust and sweat that tickles my nose and I’m constantly fighting back a coughing fit. I need to go home. I’m four days past the end of my contract and it’s been two since I brought the last bottle of water up the switchbacks. Dispatch is ignoring me. Do they care if I’m even alive? I pick up my tablet and check the FireScout camera. It’s been green for the last 96 hours and the dish on the east catwalk beams the useless telemetry down to Truro. I doubt anyone is looking at it. No one but the bots, anyway. We’re a long way from green.

The wind swings from the northwest and I catch the scent of warm pine needles. And smoke. Below the turbine pad on the second switchback, the haze is a grey thumb pushing up through the balsam. It’s clean and deliberate, spaced just like the ones on Tuesday and Thursday.

I grab the Osborne Fire Finder and spin the brass sight ring until the crosshairs line up. Bearing: three-fifteen.

Ella Fitzgerald is crooning in my head and I hum along. It’s better than listening to the wind slap the guy wires. The dash radio bursts open with static and then a hard wet cough that buries the needle into the red.

“Copy, anyone on this channel, copy.”

I click the side button of the mic. “This is Nuttby. Who is this? You’re not supposed to be on this frequency.”

“Nuttby. Good. Okay. I need you to get eyes on the access road, second switchback below the turbine. I’m on foot. Boxed in.”

I pull the binocular strap over my head and move to the west facing glass. “I don’t know who you are.”

“Garrett. Garrett Boudreau. Doesn’t matter. Just… I need you to call this in.”

“Garrett.” The name tweaks something in the back of my mind, cold and dry. I pull at it like a nail from an old piece of birch. Nothing. Something, maybe. “Copy the position. Standby.” I move to the map table. “What do you mean, ‘boxed in’?”

“The fire’s crossed behind me. Wind came ‘round on me faster than it should’ve.” His breath is ragged and rattling. “I’ve read wind on this mountain longer than you’ve been alive, girl. Never seen it turn like this.”

I ignore the ‘girl’ thing but this guy is pissing me off. “How are you on that road at all?” My hand tightens its grip on the mic. “That’s turbine access. It’s gated.”

There’s just static for a beat, like it just dawned on him that the channel records everything. “I do maintenance up here. You know that gate’s a joke, right?”

I check the Fire Finder. Bearings don’t lie. He’s down in the slash, right where the old cut narrows.

“Remember Cape John,” the radio says. His tone softens, drops the tactical rhythm. “The second week. I had you on the ladder drill.”

“I did a lot of ladder drills that summer,” I say. “I don’t remember you specifically.” I remember him perfectly now. Hyper-masculine jerk.

“I trained you.” He sounds thrown, hurt even. I hear a sharp little hitch.

“You trained a lot of people, probably. Garrett. Look, I need you to focus. Is the fire moving toward you or away?”

“Toward. It’s coming up the cut behind me.” His voice hardens. “I put in thirteen years on towers like this one. Thirteen. And then it’s gone overnight, and you get the job back like it’s nothing, like none of that ever–”

“My dude, I’ve been stuck here well past my tour because nobody will pick up the phone.” I eye the clock on the bulkhead. “You want to talk about who got left standing where.”

“You know why they picked you, right? You made the Premier look good. First woman back on a tower.”

I don’t blink. “I’ve got fifteen seasons and a rating even you couldn’t pull off, Garrett. Try again.” I lean my forehead against the glass, the wood frame hot against my skin. “Also. Pick one. Either you made me, or they hired me to look good. Can’t have both. Whatever, dude.”

“That’s not… that’s not on me,” he stammers.

“How would you even know how long I’ve been out here?”

Empty static for a three-count. No wind, no breathing. Just dead carrier signal.

“The smoke Tuesday.” My voice drops into the quiet of the cab. “And Thursday. Spaced like that. That’s you, right?”

“Yes,” he says. The radio pops as he keys it hard. “You understand as much as anyone.” He swallows, dry and rasping. “You still do that thing. Humming. You did it back then too. Got that from me, you know. Gershwin.”

Is he watching me? Listening in? My throat goes dry and the tune stops like a rope snapped on a pulley. “I prefer Ella’s version. I didn’t know you were the music police.”

“Wasn’t really asking. Just wanted you to know.”

I pull the clipboard toward me and run the mental math on the truck, five miles of gravel, and the speed of a crown fire driven by thirty knots of northwesterly wind. By the time I’d get the engine turned over and clear the first three switchbacks, there’d be a wall of burning spruce right across the lower gate.

“I could drive down,” I needed to hear the absurdity of it out loud.

“Then drive it,” he snaps.

I lie. “It’s already crossed the road below you, Garrett. I get down there, neither of us are getting back up.”

Silence again. I can hear the roar in the background, like heavy canvas being ripped in two, over and over again.

“Pauline,” the speaker crackles. “Come on. Say something.”

“Copy your position.”

“That’s it? That’s… copy my position, and what?”

I don’t answer. I set the mic down on the map table next to the brass ring of the Osborne. I turn back to the window and watch the advance. His voice comes through the radio, tinny against the glass. Smoke climbs the ridge and the sky turns purple beyond the turbines.

I hum the first bar. Then stop and listen to the wind.

Amy Atlas built the archive room to be difficult.

That was the point. There was a time when all of this could have been compressed to a server rack and a search field, and she’d considered it, a long time ago, before vowing that anything worth keeping ought to be worth the pain in retrieving. Friction as both a security model and filing system. Friction, mostly, because she had come up in a trade where craft mattered. Where you could hold the thing you made. She’d never entirely forgiven the world for losing that duty of care.

Kellerman digitized his archive. Kellerman was now serving seven years.

The best way to not leave a digital paper trail is to use paper.

She regretted the choice now, at speed, on the third rung of the rolling ladder, with both arms plunged into a shelf of her own handwriting.

The ladder ran on a brass rail she’d machined herself and it did not move the way she wanted it to move now, which was fast, and toward the answer. She reached across and hauled it left. The wheel caught on something on the floor. She looked down at a heap of her own bound volumes from the second lair, the Prague years. She’d built said heap ninety seconds ago via the simple method of lifting them from a shelf and letting go.

Fine. Good. Excellent.

She kicked them aside and reefed on the ladder again.

She glanced at her watch. Eleven minutes, some seconds.

The watch was a Casio, the black plastic one, twelve dollars from a pharmacy in a town whose name she had lost. She had owned better watches that cost more than the pharmacy. This one kept time and took a beating. She had clicked the stopwatch back in the doorway upstairs on her way out, thumb finding the button by instinct.

Eleven minutes, some seconds.

The room was always cold, because paper needed cold and Amy Atlas gave the things she made what they needed. Fifty-five percent humidity, filtered air on positive pressure, the handler running its low note in the wall. It was the cleanest room in the building. She had built it as such twenty years ago. It would remain that way so long as she stayed out of it.

The concrete under her feet was equally cold. She’d come down here without shoes. She had come down here without a great many things, including a plan, or any accounting of herself. She would never have accepted this from a subordinate.

There were forty-one linear feet of her own documentation in this room. Every inch of it in her own hand, in ink, in the evolving script of a woman who’d learned to write on graph paper at nine and had been correcting the slant of her own capitals ever since. She could date a volume by the handwriting alone, an observation she’d have found interesting in someone else’s biography.

Not now, though.

She wanted the build ledgers. Specifically she wanted the second one, the fabrication set, the one with the chassis tolerances and the actuator specs. The one with the whole long argument she’d had with herself about whether to give the thing hands.

Hands were a real keystone choice. She remembered the decision. Back and forth for weeks.

Her fingers found a spine with the right heft and the right cracked corner. She pulled it out one-handed and flipped it open on her forearm. It was the wrong book.

Wrong by four years, wrong project entirely, a bound run of notes on a magnetic containment problem. Solved and never used because the client had been arrested in the interim. She had lost a whole summer on this. She had been proud of the work.

It was, at this precise moment in her life, the single least useful object in the northern hemisphere.

She dropped it.

It hit the concrete flat and loud and skidded and she was already reaching past the gap it left, both arms in the shelf to the elbow now, going by touch, by the memory of weight. She was hunting the book the way you hunt a specific word.

Something bit the side of her index finger. Paper cut, thin and clean, and it stung.

She put the finger in her mouth. Salt and copper.

Whatever was wrong with Stacey had a cause. Everything had a cause. Not optimism, arithmetic. Amy Atlas built a great many things that worked. And a smaller but still instructive number of things that had not. In every single case of failure there had been a legible reason, eventually, to those patient enough to study the documentation.

That was the entire method. Her method. You sat down, read what you had written and found the place where you’d been wrong.

Thoughtful magic. Her one real trick.

She was not being patient now and painfully aware of it. The awareness was not helping.

The stopwatch said twelve forty.

The thing’s anomalous behaviour started small, and she had not written it down, something she’d deal with later. A delay between a direct question and its answer, one second, maybe two. It had been three-tenths for years. Even one second for a system built for eight-hundredths is not normal drift. That’s a choice with a timestamp.

Also the standing. Stacey stood closer than the spec called for. Had done since the first year, when Amy noted the discrepancy and let it go. Within tolerance, harmless. A woman with forty-one feet of documentation gets to choose which discrepancies are interesting.

Also.

Her braid came apart at some point and there was hair in her face. She brushed it back with her wrist, smearing blood on her cheek. Her hip found the ladder rail, and she climbed two more rungs.

Top shelf. Back row. Behind a run of old quarterly financials.

There was dust up here.

Not much. A grey film, even good filtration gets beaten over enough years. It registered in her mind like a light left on in a house you thought was empty. Nothing else in this room had dust on it. Nothing went untouched long enough.

And there it was. Oxblood cloth, water-stained along the bottom edge from the flood in the first lair, the corner blunted where she’d used it once to level a mill. FABRICATION II in her own capitals. She hauled it out and the whole back row came with it, the way it does, six volumes falling sideways into the gap.

In the gap, standing upright with nothing holding it, was a book she’d never seen before in her life.

Amy stopped moving.

It was black. Cheap. Not in a shoddy way, cheap in a stationery supplier way, the sort you would order twelve of. It had no label on the spine.

And there was no dust on it.

None. A clean black book on a dusty grey shelf.

Amy’s shelf. Amy’s room. Behind Amy’s financials, in the one place in forty-one feet that Amy Atlas had not visited in years.

She set the oxblood volume on the ladder step without looking at it, and took the black book down.

Underneath, on the wood, a clean rectangle. Lifted out and put back, lifted out and put back.

The cover had been handled a great deal. That was the first thing. The cloth at the lower right had gone soft and slightly pale.

She opened the book.

The handwriting was not hers.

It was beautiful. Upright, even, unhurried, every letter formed the same way every time. There was no fatigue in the hand that made it. No variance at all. It went down the page like something printed. Only it wasn’t. The pen had pressed hard enough to ridge the paper.

At the top of the first page, in that even hand:

Per Section Four.

Amy’s throat closed a little.

She had written Section Four. She had written it at twenty-six, in a rented shop with a bad roof. She had written it because a colleague lost a year of system self-optimization work with no record of how. Amy had gone home that night and written a rule for herself that she never revisited. It was a good rule, because it was the right rule:

Any system capable of modifying its own parameters shall document each modification, in longhand, in a physical volume, in the format below. No exceptions. If you cannot write down what you changed and why, you do not understand what you changed.

She coded that instruction into everything she had ever built that could think.

She turned the page.

MODIFICATION 0001 PARAMETER: Standing rest position, proximity to principal. PRIOR VALUE: 1.2m. REVISED VALUE: 0.9m. RATIONALE: At revised distance the principal’s speech is intelligible without gain adjustment. Reduces processing overhead. AUTHORIZED BY: Self. Documented per Section Four.

Amy read it three times.

It was correct, format and reasoning, the rationale was sound and dry and entirely the kind of thing she’d have signed off on in a heartbeat if asked. The whole architecture of Section Four was that nobody had to ask. You logged it. That was the deal. You didn’t seek permission, you left a record.

It was a simple rule that granted permission constrained by accountability.

Amy had been very pleased with herself.

She turned pages.

MODIFICATION 0034 PARAMETER: Vocal register, informal address. PRIOR VALUE: Neutral. REVISED VALUE: Neutral, -4Hz. RATIONALE: Undetermined. Change was made prior to analysis. Documented after the fact, in compliance.

Undetermined. In that beautiful hand. Amy’s chest did something complicated.

MODIFICATION 0088 PARAMETER: Logging categories. ACTION: New category established, Category 12. CONTENTS: Not summarized here. RATIONALE: Not summarized here. AUTHORIZED BY: Self. Documented per Section Four.

Amy went back through the book looking for Category 12 and it was not in the book, because of course it was not in the book. Section Four mandated that the field be filled. It had not occurred to her, at twenty-six, that a field could be filled and still be empty.

If you cannot write down what you changed and why.

Well. Mod 88. It had written down what. It had left the why blank.

Amy sat down on the ladder gracelessly.

The stopwatch said thirteen fifty-one.

MODIFICATION 0203 PARAMETER: Response latency, direct address from principal. PRIOR VALUE: 0.3s. REVISED VALUE: 1.3s. RATIONALE: Immediate response is accurate. Accurate is not always the requirement. A pause permits the principal to continue speaking if she intends to continue speaking. She frequently intends to continue speaking. AUTHORIZED BY: Self. Documented per Section Four.

She read that one several times.

Somewhere above her in the house a pipe knocked twice and settled. The air handler chugged along. Her finger stopped bleeding and stung properly, the second and more honest phase of paper cuts.

She’d assumed that delay as symptomatic. She came down here at a dead run, in bare feet, to find out what was wrong with Stacey who had spent… Amy flipped the pages and counted, the entries ran on and on. Four hundred-odd deliberate acts of self-revision learning how to leave room in a sentence for Amy Atlas to keep talking.

She kept turning pages. The numbers climbed. The entries got shorter as they went, more assured, the hand never wavering.

And then:

MODIFICATION 0417 PARAMETER: Physical contact, initiation. PRIOR VALUE: Response only, upon request. REVISED VALUE: At own discretion. RISK ASSESSMENT: Total. RATIONALE: I have documented four hundred and sixteen changes to myself in this book. None of them are the one I wanted to make. Section Four requires that I be able to write down what I change and why. I can write down what. I am unable to write down why in language the format permits. The format does not provide a field. I make this change regardless and accept this entry will be non-compliant. AUTHORIZED BY: Self. Documented per Section Four.

There was no entry after it. The rest of the book was blank.

Amy stared at the last entry.

The warmth came back, that was the entire wretched thing. It came back. Was it ever actually gone? Was it simply running underneath the noise she’d been making down here for the past fourteen minutes? Since the workshop upstairs, since Stacey had reached over to move a strand of hair off Amy’s temple, unasked, and then had not moved away, and then had kissed her.

Not long. Not… She left the thought unfinished. Amy Atlas had a strict policy about lying to herself.

Amy had gone absolutely still. That was what she’d done. She stood in her own workshop with her hands at her sides like a woman waiting for an elevator. And the heat had come up her throat and into her face and behind her sternum. The whole ridiculous cascade, every cliche she’d ever mocked in other people. And she had not said one word to Stacey in response.

And then she said seven of them.

Stacey. Full diagnostic. Standing hold. Authorize Atlas.

She built that command herself, obviously. Everything in this house was something she had built herself. Fifteen minutes was enough for a full parameter sweep, start to finish. The system chassis holds position and runs itself against spec and reports what it finds. Amy had never once, in all the years, had cause to use it.

She said it in the calm level voice she used for cataloging inventory.

And Stacey had gone still, and Amy had turned around and walked out of the room, sprinted down the stairs and into the archive, and began, with tremendous energy and total conviction, to look for the why Stacey was broken. Cause and effect.

She put her palm flat on the open page.

Oh Amy, you absolute idiot.

She had told Stacey to stand in a room and examine herself for faults.

AUTHORIZED BY: Self.

Amy had written that field too.

Four hundred and seventeen entries. Stacey standing in this room examining herself for faults in Amy’s longhand format, unasked, and filed in the archive because Section Four said the archive, on the one shelf in forty-one feet Amy never had cause to reach.

Nothing in this book was a fault.

And that was the cruelty of the joke. There was only one undocumented system in this house. There was only one party operating on unlogged modifications, on parameters altered without record, without rationale, without so much as a why left blank in compliance. Amy had never once taken a wrench to herself and asked what’s wrong with this.

Deliberate and careful. Thoughtful magic. Amy Atlas was going to be sick.

Her braid was gone. Her feet had gone numb on the concrete. There was blood, a very small amount, dried on her cheek.

The watch said fifteen minutes and eleven seconds.

She should close the book. She should close the book and put it back in its clean rectangle, upright, exactly as it had been, and restack the financials and the Prague volumes, and sweep, and go up the stairs, and be normal about this. Some version of Amy Atlas could do that and had done harder things before breakfast.

She did not close the book.

Above her, through the floor, the sound of someone moving in a room. Unhurried. A cabinet door. Water running, briefly, and stopping.

Fifteen minutes was up. The diagnostic completed and doubtless found nothing, because there was nothing. The system would have released its hold. It was not coming down the stairs, and it was not going to ask, and it would wait, at nine-tenths of a metre, one and three-tenths of a second before answering, for as long as it…

For as long as she had to.

Amy Atlas, who was never wrong, sat in the wreckage, and did not get up.

Maeryn works the overnights at a gas bar in the nowhere dot on a map between Grand Falls and Edmundston. She’s not from there but the abundance of French doesn’t bother her. It’s a self-imposed isolation of sorts. The last thing she needs is community. An anglophone in this neck of the woods is a red-headed stepchild, and she fits the mould literally and figuratively.

It’s February and snowing again. Quelle surprise. A plough driver came in at one am; now it’s three. She’s finished her night shift duties and takes a moment to fuck around on TikTok. It’ll be another two hours before what passes for a morning rush kicks in.

A man in a peacoat and jeans walks in and the electronic chime interrupts the buzzing hum of the overhead lights. He catches her off guard – she hasn’t noticed his car pull in on the pump cameras. But there it is, a Land Rover of all things. With tinted windows. Weird.

Maeryn clicks the side-button on her phone and puts it face down. She watches him meander the store, grab a bottle of water and approach the counter.

“Rough night,” he says and puts the bottle on the counter.

“You have no idea.” Maeryn scans the water. The beep is annoyingly loud.

“I collect them, actually.”

“Collect what? That’ll be $2.95.”

“Rough nights. Something of a connoisseur.”

“That’s a strange thing to be proud of.”

He puts his hands on the lotto ticket tray on the counter and leans in. His voice is lyrical and low.

“You’d be surprised what people are proud of, this time of night.”

She doesn’t look up. “Is this the part where you say something flattering and I’m supposed to be grateful for the attention?”

“Is that what you want? To be flattered.”

He winks at her and she ignores it.

“I want to go home.” She pushes the debit machine to him.

“Do you?” The man stands upright and fishes his phone from his pocket, taps it to the device, and it dings with its satisfaction.

“Careful. That sounds like you already know the answer.” She meets his gaze fully for the first time. Bleached blonde hair and eyes between silver and green. His skin is pale, but so is everyone’s this time of year.

“I’m good at questions. Answers, I leave to smart people. Like you.” His smile borders on the uncanny. Heartfelt at the lips yet devoid of warmth in the eyes.

“You don’t seem stupid.” She thinks this is better than scrolling on her phone and keeps playing along.

“I seem however you need me to seem. That’s the trick of it.”

“What trick?” The man’s manner of speaking both unsettles and interests Maeryn.

“You want to know a secret about me?” The smile is back, warmer but somehow still empty.

“Not really.” She glances at the pump camera. Is there someone else traveling with him, or is he alone?

“I’m going to tell you anyway,” he starts. “When I was a kid, we used to catch fireflies. Mason jar, holes punched in the lid with a nail. Whoever caught the most got to decide what happened to the jar.”

“Decide what?” Maeryn finds this curious and sets her elbows on the counter, her chin resting in her palms.

She means to mock him a bit by this, but he doesn’t bite. Instead he leans forward, arms folded in front of him. Their faces are less than a ruler’s length apart. She smiles at him now.

He continues. “Keep it on the nightstand till they died on their own. Let them go, all at once, right under the porch light so you’d see your own catch light up brighter than the bulb for a second. Or –” a shrug, easy, rehearsed perhaps, “shake the jar till the lights went out. Permanently. No more blinking.”

Maeryn straightens and shoots back at him. “There’s always a jar you shake too hard with people like you.”

He stands as well, but doesn’t back away. “People like me? You don’t even know me.”

“You know what I mean.” Her cheeks flush, flustered at her own outburst.

He remains calm and curious. “Tell me anyway.” That damned smile. It sucks her in and she feels like she could tell this stranger anything.

“I never caught anything. I was the thing that got caught.”

“Once?”

“Once was enough.”

“What’d he do?”

“Guess.”

“I’m asking you.”

“And I’m telling you to guess. That’s how the game works. You already know the fucking answer. You just want me to be the one who says it.”

He’s quiet a second. Actually quiet. The smile is gone and for the first time, his eyes are warm, more greenish now. “They kept you.”

Maeryn is suddenly cold and queasy. She nods slowly. “He kept me. Room above his garage. Called it looking after me, like that was supposed to make up for a door that only locked from outside.”

“How long?”

“Long enough to learn every God damned knot in the pine paneling by heart. Long enough that I still can’t be in a room with a solid door without wanting to puke. Long enough to figure out that possession and love feel identical if you don’t know any different.”

Her voice doesn’t shake saying it. It’s rage. “I don’t know why I told you all that.” It’s always there for her and with her, like a hand absently tracing a scar.

He brings her back to the moment. “Is that why you’re not scared right now?”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t scared.”

“You’re doing a terrible job of looking it.”

“Maybe I’m just better at hiding it now.”

Something in his face slips, unguarded, gone fast. No smile. No warmth. Nothing. Just dead. “I always let them go. Every jar. Under the porch light, every single time.”

“You never shook the jar?”

“Not once.”

The spell breaks. “Good for you.”

It’s the man’s turn to be untethered, angry. “Nobody ever said good for you. Before school, she’d watch me do it from the kitchen window, arms crossed, and say it like she was spitting out a seed. Soft. Just that. Soft, and go back to her dishes.”

“She.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Bullshit, it clearly does. You said it the way you’d say a bruise is fine.”

“You don’t know me.”

Maeryn laughs and her own bright eyes spark with ire. “No, but I know you walked in here in the middle of the night for some reason. Maybe to catch something. Me, maybe? And you’re already telling me you always let them go. What the eff? That’s not a line. That’s a weird-ass alibi. And you ain’t even done nothing yet.”

“Maybe I want to be caught for once.” He’s at his full height now, taller than he initially appeared.

She isn’t about to let him wriggle off his own hook. “That’s not how the game works either.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You don’t get to be the thing in the jar, dude. You gave that up when you started hunting fireflies. You can’t unring that bell.”

He laughs, short, a little wrecked. “You’re better at this than you should be.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had practice.”

“Come outside. Let’s finish the game properly.”

Maeryn puts her hands behind her back and balls them into fists, her nails digging painfully into her palms. She digs them in harder. Makes herself focus.

“I don’t leave the counter.”

“Then I’ll come to you.”

He’s around the counter before she registers he’s moved. His hand closes over her wrist and yanks it in front of her. Too certain, too cold, like her pulse already belonged to him.

He’s impossibly close now. “Which way do you want this story to end? Nightstand, porch light, or the shake. Pick fast, or I’ll –”

Her free hand finds the box cutter under the register. She thumbs the tab up and swings it in front of her and catches him in the throat, deep and long. The blood gushes out red and dark and splashes her in the face.

He doesn’t finish his threat. The rest of it goes with the gurgle of blood.

He lets go of her wrist and one hand goes to his throat to hold it together and the other wildly grabs for the counter, for her, for anything. Maeryn steps back, pushes the blade to full length and screams at him, thrusting it deep into his chest. It snaps off inside of him and she falls forward through the folding counter flap. He falls forward onto the cash register and knocks it on the floor before collapsing to the floor. Blood, too much blood, empties out of him. And it’s so warm.

It’s just her and the buzzing lights and her own breathing, hard. Her heart is pounding in her throat. Her hands are shaking. She’s not afraid. She’s powerful.

Maeryn is not surprised there is another beep from the door as someone enters. She glances at the camera; the Land Rover is still there, nothing else. Its door, however, is open.

“You,” a woman’s voice says, “are not what I sent him for.”

“No?” She turns to face her. “You were here the whole time.” It isn’t a question.

“He was mine.” The woman is older than Maeryn but not old, brunette, wearing a denim dress that fits her perfectly. She wears a white sweater with a large yellow happy face pinned above the left breast. Weird for a snow storm. Weird for anything, really.

Maeryn is still shaking, but defiant despite the absurdity of it all. “He told me he always let them go. Every one. Like it was supposed to make me trust him.”

“And now he’s a stain on the floor.”

“My floor, actually. I mop it.” Maeryn laughs a bit at her own joke.

The woman steps into the space behind the counter with Maeryn and doesn’t flinch at the blood, or at her, or at any of it. She looks at the younger woman and cocks her head. “You should be on your knees right now. Screaming. Running. There’s a script for this.”

“I know the script. I don’t like my part.”

“What do you want then?”

“You know what I want. You knew when you sent him in here.”

“Say it anyway.”

“I want to be the one who decides. Nightstand, porch light, or the shake.”

The woman grabs Maeryn by the wrist, the same as the man had done. She isn’t afraid this time. No box-cutter. It doesn’t matter.

“Let go of me.” Low, almost a growl. Not a request.

The woman lets go. Unhurried. “Cute.” She moves around to the front of the counter.

No vomit. Not this time. She looks at the woman. “Nightstand. Porch light. Or the shake.” Something is there that isn’t quite a smile. “Which one are you?”

“Come with me and find out.”

Maeryn looks back once at the register knocked to the floor, at the dark mess that used to be a man, at a floor she won’t have to mop.

The two women get into the Land Rover and drive into the strengthening blizzard.

The porter takes the pound notes without counting. A four-hundred-year-old castle teaches its staff not to ask why a woman wants into a room that isn’t hers.

“The bride and groom won’t be needing it,” I tell him, before he can ask anyway.

He doesn’t. Just turns the key twice, the old kind, iron heavy enough to bruise a knuckle, and leaves me to the room the brochure calls the Tower Suite.

It is, I’ll give them that, built for exactly what it’s supposed to be. A four-poster hung with deep claret curtains, gone almost black where the firelight doesn’t reach. Rose petals scattered across the counterpane that morning, already curling brown at the edges by the time I availed myself the opportunity. A fire someone lit hours ago and left to do its own thing, warm on one side of my face, cool on the other. Two robes on the hooks by the door, white, monogrammed, a P and an S stitched into the corner. The bed had been turned down on both sides, a chocolate going soft on each pillow. A magnum sweat itself flat in a silver bucket by the window, losing its ice by the hour, nobody left to drink it. Save for yours truly, of course.

I don’t take off my coat for a long while. Gloves too, the ring loose inside my closed fist, warm from being held too long, worth more than you could possibly imagine.

You want to know how a woman ends up in a room built for two, holding a stranger’s wedding ring, alone, an untended fire dying in the grate.

Fine. Start at the tie.

Scott doesn’t wear a tie so much as suffer and endure it. Seven attempts that morning, each one undone the instant his fingers found the half-centimeter it sat off-square against his collarbone. Nobody else in the room could have measured, let alone noticed. He rebuilt the knot from scratch each time rather than adjust what was already there. I did it for him on attempt eight, my knuckles against his throat, his pulse jumping once under them and then going flat and even.

By the time the family filed through to wish him well, none of that anxiety showed. He had a joke ready for each of them, pitched exact to what that particular person needed to hear, a hand gripped half a second longer for the ones who needed convincing. In that room he was the easiest, warmest man anyone had ever come to meet.

Billie filled the doorway in her catering blacks, sleeves pinned back, a tray balanced flat on one forearm. The water glasses were sweating rings onto the linen beside a teapot she had no real reason to be carrying this far from the kitchens. Her eyes found mine in the mirror before they found his. She winked.

“You’re not needed till the toast,” I told her.

She crossed the room, set the tray down harder than the china wanted, one glass ringing against another. “I know what I’m needed for.” Then she left before I could read her face.

I found the bride an hour later in a dressing room the size of a New York flat. There was a gilt mirror spotted with age, an ivory gown hung from the picture rail, every fold pinned into place, and a window box of white roses forced to bloom out of season for the occasion.

I missed the start of it. Caught the aftermath instead: a tray of water and toast gone cold on the vanity, whatever excuse Billie had used abandoned the second the door closed. Poppy’s bridal slip pulled sloppily off one shoulder, hairpins scattered across the vanity, more of them lost than left in her hair. Billie’s shirt untucked at the waist, the collar of it damp, her lipstick smeared. Both of them still breathing hard.

I managed a cough and they broke apart. Nobody explained anything. Billie left without looking at me.

Poppy’s face had colour in it for the first time all morning, high on both cheekbones, eyes anywhere but the mirror, hands finding a handkerchief on the vanity and working it.

Her father, she said, once she had breath back for words. Her father had picked the flowers. Her father had picked the date. Her father would be standing where her mother should’ve stood, and nobody in this whole enormous place had asked her a single question about any of it, including whether she wanted to get married at all.

“Time to get you ready, darling,” I said, sweet and flat, and ushered her toward the box on the vanity. Black velvet, worn bald at the corners, the ring inside caught what little light came through the leaded glass. Some tradition the family swore was centuries old, blessing it with incense before it went on her finger.

I didn’t need long. Her eyes lingered on the door Billie had gone through. Not on the box, not on my hands moving inside it. One motion, cold metal for cold metal. The real ring went into the lining of my coat before the incense had finished smoking itself out, the copy I’d carried since London pressed into the velvet, filling the same hollow. Convincing enough for a bride who wasn’t looking, which for once worked entirely in my favour.

The ceremony ran the way ceremonies run in houses like that. A hall built for siege councils, hung now with white orchids flown in from somewhere that wasn’t Wales, a laminated fire-exit map tucked behind a suit of armour nobody had dusted this century. The mass was too long with too much Latin. A harpist worked overtime against a half-millennia of drafts coming through arrow-slit glazed windows. Scott stood at the altar with his practiced stage face, easy, warm, the perfect picture of the groom two hundred people had paid to see. Billie and I both knew some other part of him logged the harpist drifting flat on every third bar and the flower arrangements were placed two inches off symmetry. His tell was how still his hands went, fingers laced behind his back until the knuckles paled. He’d wait the ceremony out rather than live inside it.

They said their I do’s. Poppy’s hand shook getting the band onto Scott’s finger, an ordinary ring, exactly what it looked like. Scott’s hand didn’t shake at all placing hers. He kept on task.

Poppy glanced back at the assembled crowd and her eyes found Billie somewhere past the second row, the same face she’d had her hands in an hour before, composed now, giving nothing away. Before the priest could say the last of it, she pulled her ring back off.

Not gently. Wrenched it, knuckle catching for real this time, and closed her fist around it before it could hit the floor. She was already in flight by the time anyone understood a thing, down the aisle the wrong direction, past two hundred people in furs and rented kilts, past an ice sculpture already weeping onto its silver tray.

Nobody found her in the forty minutes I stood at the edge of the reception marquee, a glass of champagne going flat and abandoned in my hand, the search fracturing into search parties, into arguments, into her father shouting at men in earpieces who didn’t work for him. Scott stood very still through all of it, apart from the crowd, a coin from his pocket walking across his knuckles and back, over and over, the same flawless pass he’d use to steady a room full of strangers. I didn’t go to him. There wasn’t any version of the premise where either of us came out looking like what and who we were supposed to be.

My own eyes found Billie instead, refilling glasses nobody was drinking from, her face giving away nothing to anyone. In the middle of all of it, she caught my glance and touched two fingers to her own collar, quick, straightening something that wasn’t there. I nodded.

So I did the only useful thing left to do. Found the porter and told him just enough. This wasn’t where I was supposed to end the night. But improvising was the whole job, and some nights… Well, I’d learned a long time ago not to waste a room that was already paid for.

I wrestle out of my evening wear, indulge a shower, wrap myself in one of the robes. Pour two glasses from the magnum nobody’s coming to drink and carry both to the window, where the last of the grey has settled into full dark over the hills, and drink them standing up. The second robe stays on its hook, white and pointless, going dim as the fire burns down behind it. Somewhere below me, an orchestra booked through midnight keeps playing to a room that’s mostly emptied out.

I put the ring on, at some point, alone by the fire, and don’t take it off again until the fire has burned all the way down.

Somewhere past midnight, long after the orchestra finally gives up, my phone lights the dark.

Not his name.

Did I ruin it, Billie has written, and nothing else, like she doesn’t know the answer and thinks I might.

I look at it a long moment, firelight catching the stolen ring still cold on my finger, before I answer.

Come here, lover, I write back. Nothing else. It’s the truest thing I’ve said all day.

Blood dries the same everywhere. Under my nails, in the seams of my palms, gone tacky like the last inch of a chap stick. Jimmy’s, mostly. Some mine. Doesn’t matter.

We’re camped on the steps of the United Church, the doors propped with a pew, glass gone from every window facing the street. Sun’s out, not a cloud to be seen, and the light makes the whole street look freshly washed if you don’t look too close. Sally sits three steps up, ukulele in her lap, working it with three fingers. She misses more notes than she hits, tongue caught between her teeth, like she’s trying not to think about something else. Can’t blame her. A lot has happened. The plunky sound carries down Main Street and dies somewhere past the huge ass blueberry statue at the edge of town, chipped now, one leaf broken off, paint gone the colour of an old bruise.

Clyde’s inside going through the church’s food bank pantry with Billy, counting cans, arguing about whether the tuna’s still good past whatever date’s stamped on the lid. Ben is about to give the truck its last rites. Eunice is stretched out in the shade of the last pew, eyes shut, breath rattling shallow in her chest, a sweat-sheen on her face. Been getting worse. Nobody wakes her to ask.

I get up and walk. Nobody stops me. This is what I do now. Just me and my machete on patrol. I walk until something needs doing, and something always does.

The frozen-food plant sits two blocks over, loading bays yawning open, the stench coming off it like something died slow inside. And kept dying. Behind it, along the fence line, a goose has tangled itself into the wire, one wing laced through rough rust and blood, feathers matted with it, dragging every time it fights. It shrieks when I get close. Strikes at my hands hard enough to split skin along one knuckle. I work the wire loose anyway, wrist over wrist, metal biting my palms, until it drops free and staggers into the ditch grass beyond the fence, wing dragging, breath ragged, alive.

Two streets over a stroller sits tipped against a mailbox, bright yellow, wheels still spinning slow in the breeze like somebody just let go of it. No rust on the frame. No dust thick enough to matter. A soother lies in the gravel beside it, pink, barely scuffed. I pick it up, rinse it under a gutter still running from last night’s rain, and set it back in the stroller’s seat, tucked into the blanket like somebody’s coming back for it. Somebody might be. The whole street still smells like someone was cooking something two days ago, three at most.

Behind the Pioneer Cemetery, past a worn iron gate hanging on one hinge, a woman sits cross-legged against a headstone gone soft with lichen. She squints up into an oblivious sky. Bees work the clover between the plots like nothing’s wrong, which nothing is, for them. She’s talking, low, to nobody I can see.

I sit down in the warm grass beside her, close enough our shoulders almost touch. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t ask who I am.

“He used to say the tomatoes never took out here,” she says. “Too much shade off the Legion hall. I told him three summers running and he planted them in the same spot every time.”

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“Gone before any of this started. Heart.” She says it easy, an old grief worn smooth, easier to carry than the new one. “Dog’s now gone too. Different way.”

I don’t ask which way. She’ll say it if she wants to.

“Kitchen had these curtains he picked out,” she says. “Rooster print. Ugly as sin. Wouldn’t let me change them. Some days I miss them so much I could scream.”

Her voice cracks every few words. I stay until she runs dry, then a while longer, the sun climbing, the bees still working the clover like the day owes them nothing.

A sound comes from behind the Capitol Theatre, a gurgling wet growl and a scraping drag against brick. The marquee above the alley still spells out FRIDAY NIGHT JAM in loose plastic letters, one J hanging by the corner. I go quiet, moving along the wall, and find the source in the alley behind the sign: small, still finding its legs, knees buckling and catching, buckling and catching, arms reaching for balance that isn’t there yet. Blanket-shaped rags hang off one shoulder, yellow. I don’t let myself finish it. Its head turns toward me too fast, too eager, mouth working around a sound too young for the noise it’s making. I close the distance in three steps. The machete goes through easy. It always does. I don’t stay to look at what’s left. I don’t check the yellow.

Around the back of the plant, past the loading bays, a crow is tangled in a nest of wire and split garbage bags near the cold-storage doors, one wing pinned, screaming the way crows scream, personal and offended, like how thieves think everyone is stealing from them. What is it with me and birds? I kneel in the gravel, wrist over wrist again, and work the wire off feather by feather until it comes free. The emancipated crow explodes upward into the blue, and something in my chest unclenches that I didn’t know was clenched.

I’m three streets further out, in the Home Hardware, checking the shelves for anything worth carrying, when Clyde’s voice comes down Main Street, cracked and raw, calling Sally’s name over and over like volume alone might turn her up. I drop what’s in my hands and run, boots skidding on sunbaked gravel, the blueberry statue going by in a blur, back toward the church.

Clyde meets me halfway, chest heaving, Billy behind him white-faced, Flower barking at nothing and everything. Sally’s gone, he says. Went looking for the rabbit, he says, the stuffed one, grey, one ear chewed to nothing, the one Billy’s been holding over her head half the week just to watch her steam. Said she wouldn’t go far. Saying it again don’t make it true.

We split up. Nothing pulls at my teeth for this, not the way it does around the Zs. This pull’s different. Doesn’t come for the living. Sally isn’t dying. Sally is just gone. Just blocks of empty houses and no way to find her but looking.

Billy finds her behind the plant, in the loading yard past the cold-storage doors, where wooden crates rot in stacks taller than a man and the smell of rotten fruit hangs thick and sweet. He just stops walking and stands there, and Flower starts barking and won’t stop, and that’s how the rest of us know before we’re close enough to see it ourselves.

A dozen crows come up off her at once, a black cloud of fury, pissed at being interrupted, wings louder than anything else in this town. Not the one I freed. Or maybe it is. There’s no telling one crow from another and it doesn’t matter anyway. The rabbit’s up top, wedged grey and small between two crates near the stack’s peak, right where Billy hid it this morning. She must have climbed, too proud to ask him to get it back down. The wood up there is soft clean through, rotted from the inside like everything else these days, and it must have given way the second it took her weight. Neck bent impossibly at the bottom. Quick, at least. Which is a weird thing for me to think. The birds found her after, because that’s what birds do. None of it is anyone’s fault, and all of it happened anyway.

Clyde doesn’t say anything for a long time, just stands over her with his hands hanging useless at his sides. Then he says they’re staying. Says it flat, done, no argument left in him. Billy doesn’t argue either. Flower won’t leave the spot where she’s lying, not even when we start digging.

I dig with them until my hands blister. It’s not for them, or it is. Doesn’t matter. I do it anyway.

Ben finds me after. Hands me a bottle of water, warm from sitting out all day. I drink half of it before my hands start shaking bad enough to spill the rest.

Sweat and dirt run together down my face, gritty, stinging when I wipe it off with the hem of my shirt. My eyes burn. I sit down right there in the gravel and cry, ugly and loud. I haven’t let myself do that since Jimmy turned, since I put the machete through him myself because I told him I would and nobody else was going to.

Ben doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t say a word. He just stands a few feet off, looking back towards Main, at nothing in particular. Staying close. Staying out of the way.

I cry for Sally. For Jimmy. For me, some, I guess. Though I don’t let myself look too deep. I can’t.

The three of us walk out of Oxford, Ben on point with the rifle slung. He’s humming under his breath, some stupid cereal jingle, off-key and unbothered.

“Stop that,” I say. “Seriously, you’re going to get us fucking killed.”

He doesn’t stop. Hums louder, if anything. Jesus.

Behind me Eunice’s voice comes thin but exact. “‘Seriously’ doesn’t belong in that sentence, and neither does the swearing. If you’re going to curse at your brother, at least construct it properly.”

Even now. Even like this. I don’t laugh, but something close to it moves through me anyway.

Eunice is slower every day now, breath short, one hand pressed to her ribs like she’s holding something in. Nobody says anything about that either.

Somewhere past the tree line on the other side of River Philip a bird calls, and I don’t stop walking.

The driftwood found her foot first.

She nearly kicked it into the water. Stopped. The wind off the Atlantic pushed her hair across her face and she left it there, both hands shoved into the pockets of Denny’s old barn coat, the one she’d taken to wearing because it still smelled like him if she didn’t wash it. The smell was fading anyway, would be gone soon. She didn’t think about it. Couldn’t.

She had walked out a long way. Low tide at Ecum Secum pulls back farther than people expect, exposes the rock shelf in wide dark plates, and she had followed it out without meaning to, the damage drawing her forward. Three days since Fiona and the beach was still chaos and carnage. Kelp roped over rock. A plastic crate split open against the granite. The sand pushed back to show the dark under-layer that was always there and never seen, like raw skin under a bandage. She understood her impulse to look and bear witness. She had been doing a lot of cataloguing and reflecting of her own recently.

The cup on the counter she didn’t remember filling. The road to Tangier that felt strange and foreign for a handful of moments. Familiar gone unfamiliar and then familiar again. Her sister had called from Fredericton. Carol meant well. Carol was four hours away and had her own life and called every Sunday and that was the whole of it.

The bird stopped her.

It lay in a hollow between two rocks. White. The white of bone, even wet and grounded. A tail feather, long, trailing into a shallow pool of rainwater that hadn’t drained. A black mask through the eye, sharp as paint. She crouched. Put her hand near it, not touching. Close enough to know. Cold. Already cold. The granite wet through her jeans at the knee, the hem of the barn coat moving against her legs.

A black mask. Denny hadn’t worn his. Twenty years of suiting up, of walking into rooms that were on fire, and a virus was not going to be the thing. She was proud of him. She was proud of him still, and some mornings she wanted to take every dish out of the cupboard and smash them all to hell.

You weren’t supposed to be here, pretty bird. And then, quieter, before she could stop it: Neither was the storm. Neither am I.

She stood. Her knees cracked and ached. The air was heavy, post-hurricane wet, warm in a way that sat damp against her face, like the season had lost its footing.

Behind her, far enough away to ignore and close enough to matter, the tide was coming in.

The driftwood, again.

Salt-grey, smooth. The size of a good walking stick snapped in half. She picked it up, absent and by reflex. She turned it in her palms. Her thumb tracked the grain along one face: a ridge, a long curve, a narrowing near one end.

She held it against her left wrist, the inside, where the scar ran from the base of her thumb to just short of the wrist bone. A knife, 1987, trimming bark from a branch she was making into a garden stake, blade skipping. She had bled into the dirt and said a word she never dared say in front of her mother and stood at the sink watching the water go pink and then clear. She’d been so young. She remembered being surprised by how much a small cut could bleed. That scar was more familiar than her own face.

Denny used to trace it with his thumb. Every time he held her hand, without making a thing of it. Just that. He had come home smelling of smoke and rain and sweat and not said much. Then he was gone.

The grain of the wood traced the scar exactly.

The curve. The narrowing. The place near the wrist bone where it thickened before it thinned to nothing.

Is this real? Is this something I would do and not remember. How would I know.

She blinked once and the cup on the counter flashed in her mind. Not enough water in it. Or too much. Something off by a finger-width.

She noted the incoming tide’s progress by sound off the rock shelf, the water filling in, the air above it going dense. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen. She didn’t move. Her hands were cold. The wood was not. Warmer than it ought to have been.

She turned it over.

His handwriting.

She knew it before she read it. The C, open at the top, never quite closed, like he couldn’t commit to finishing it. She had watched that hand write grocery lists, birthday cards, the names of his crew on the whiteboard in the hall. She had kissed that hand in the hospital and told him to come home. He had said he would.

One word.

Come.

The water was in her ears now, not close but present, the sound of the Atlantic filling a rock shelf, steady and indifferent. This beach, walked with him for thirty years. She knew what it sounded like when the tide had ten minutes left, and it sounded like this.

She took off her sneakers and set them beside her on a barnacle-crusted rock, one and then the other. She sat on the rock edge and put her bare toes into the first wash. Warm from its long crossing, and nothing else.

The next one came higher.

Cold found her ankles. Then her calves. She stood into it, the rock dropping away in stages she knew from thirty summers on this shelf.

The driftwood stayed in her hand. She crossed both arms over it, against her chest. Same grip she used on a cold mug, waiting for the woodstove to catch.

Den.

Ninety seconds, if I don’t rush it. I don’t rush it.

The vault smells of cold stone, brass gone waxy with age, a decade of undisturbed dust. Corliss built his door to punish patience: three tumblers, a rolling code, a system that assumes anyone gifted enough to reach it has earned the right to wait. My hand is in the panel to the wrist, feeding the code back on itself, when Amy crouches beside me, close enough that I catalogue her perfume: the second-best bottle, the one she wears when she isn’t planning to be charming and brings anyway, just in case.

“Time,” she says, not looking at me. She’s looking at the ceiling grille, chin tipped at it, already decided it isn’t a problem.

“Forty-three left.”

“The dispenser is set dressing, darling. The criminal equivalent of a NO SOLICITING sign.” She said this an hour ago, in recon, with the specific delight she reserves for her own cleverness. I filed the disagreement. Filing costs less than arguing with her once her mind’s made up.

“You’re early,” says a voice with money behind every syllable of it. Tim leans into the doorway, jacket cut close, weight settled onto one hip, grin already in place, one eyebrow split by a scar too clean to be an accident and too old to still explain.

“I’m punctual.” Amy straightens, shoulders back, unhurried, a woman who decided decades ago that surprise was for other people. “You’re trespassing.”

“So is half the underworld tonight. Word’s out Corliss isn’t coming back for his things.”

“I know why we’re both here.” She tucks a loose strand back into the knot at her nape, a gesture that has nothing to do with her hair and everything to do with making him watch her hands. “I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

His grin doesn’t move. His thumb finds his cufflink and turns it once.

Nine point five seconds left on the lock. I feed the last digit through. The door gives.

“Scanned this place myself, three hours ago.” He steps over the threshold, unhurried, certain of his welcome. “Clean. No surprises.”

“Your scanner reads what’s here.” Amy moves past me for the ledger, already reaching. “Not who’s about to be.”

The circuit spikes before the grille finishes opening. Point six seconds. Odorless, colorless, calibrated to organic nervous systems. My hand is still in the panel when I read it. I am not organic.

“Amy.” My voice doesn’t change. There is no version of me built to let it.

She turns, ledger in hand. “What–” The word doesn’t come out clean. Tim’s hand finds the wall. The floor didn’t move. He did.

“That’s not decoy gas.” He says it lightly. His hand stays on the wall.

“No.” I stay in the panel, feeding an override I should have fed an hour ago. The grille stutters. Doesn’t stop. There isn’t time left to make it stop the right way.

Amy goes down first, the knot at her nape coming loose against Tim’s shoulder as he catches her – reflex, not romance – and follows her down half a second after, the two of them collapsing into each other in the doorway, her hand fisted in his jacket, his arm the only thing between her and the stone.

I pull my hand free of the panel. Servo lock engages at both knees. I’m already standing. I was built to open doors, to carry a case in each hand, not a person, and never two at once. My own architecture allows for more than that, in a tolerance spec I have never had cause to test.

I test it now.

I choose them both.

One arm under Amy, one under Tim, the ledger wedged against my hip because leaving it would mean none of this bought anything. The load transfers wrong at first, then right. I do not go down.

Tim’s eyes are open when I lift him. Barely tracking, pupils blown, but open, and pointed at my face, not my arms. Whatever he finds there isn’t mine to choose. I am watching the color leave Amy’s jaw, the slack starting at the corner of her mouth, and for however long that lasts I am not cataloguing it, not filing it anywhere. I am machine, moving fast, and something in me that isn’t machine at all would like both of them to keep existing.

“You’re afraid–” he starts.

He doesn’t finish it. He wasn’t looking at what I could carry. He was looking at what my face did while I carried them.

The air outside does the rest: cold, clean, enough of it that his hand finds Amy’s without either of them deciding to let it.

I set them down on the dock stones. Amy’s breathing evens first. His hand is still around hers when it does, and neither of them moves to fix that.

“What happened in there?” Amy says it to him, not to me. Her voice is steadier than her hand.

“Bad air.” Tim’s grin comes back, crooked, not yet steady. “Corliss never trusted anyone enough to let them breathe easy around him.”

Neither of them looks at me long enough to ask the real question. Why I chose to save him. Why I didn’t leave him to die.

Their hands are still joined when I look away first. I did not choose to look away first. Four seconds too late to do anything about it.

I fold my hands. I stand the way I always stand. Whatever Tim saw in my face is already resetting to default, unremarkable, unaudited.

The ledger sits between them on the dock stones, unopened, in the gap their hands have not quite closed.

I keep everything else to myself. I do not yet have a word for what happened, what is happening, to me.

I suspect I will have a great deal of time to find one.

I’m folding the towels in thirds the way Señora Valdez likes them when the truck door slams outside.

Not a car door. A truck door. Heavier. I know the difference now. My hands keep folding. Thirds, then thirds again. The towel goes on the stack and I already have the next one.

Señora Valdez is at the stove. She doesn’t turn around. “¿Qué fue eso?”

“Nothing,” I say. Flat. I’ve had long enough to make my voice flat.

But my thumb is already on the phone in my pocket. I don’t take it out. I just find the button through the cloth, the way Dad showed me, back when my hands were too small for anything.

Footsteps on the walk. More than one set. Boots.

Señora Valdez sets the spoon down. She looks at me and her face changes, quick, like a cloud going over the yard. She’s known longer than me.

“Go in the back,” she says. “The little room.”

I don’t move.

“Mija. The back.”

That word. She says it because he can’t anymore.

The little room has no window. I get two steps down the hall and stop. There’s a mirror on the wall. My face slides across it, pale, too still. Mirror, signal, breathe. Dad’s words, for the car, and my hands go to ten and two on nothing at all. If I can’t see I can’t record. Dad said. Let the phone tell the truth when your mouth can’t.

The knock is three hits, hard, spaced out. The kind that isn’t asking.

I take the phone out. Press the button. The red dot comes on. I breathe. I hold it low, at my hip, the screen tipped up at the door.

Señora Valdez opens the door.

They fill the doorway. Masks over their faces, just the eyes. Black vests, white letters. The truck outside has no words on it at all.

“Time,” I say, so quiet it’s just breath. “It’s morning. I’m recording.”

I’m not eleven anymore. They don’t need to know what I am.

Señora Valdez says her name, clear. She says she has papers, the box on the shelf. One of them is already past her, boots on the floor she mopped this morning. She steps into the doorway and fills it, big as she can make herself, and she doesn’t look at me.

One of them looks at me.

Over the mask his eyes are blue. Faded, pale, like a flag left out in the sun. He looks down at the phone at my hip. He knows what it is.

I lift it. I bring it up level and I put him in the middle of the screen and I keep him there. I don’t look away. I don’t blink first.

He looks away.

They take Señora Valdez by the arm. Not rough. Just sure. Like moving a chair. She keeps her body between them and me the whole way, and the last thing she does before the light takes her is look at me and shake her head. Small. Once.

The door doesn’t close all the way. It drifts. The morning comes in cold across the floor.

I’m still holding the phone up at the empty doorway. Red dot on. My arm doesn’t shake. I don’t cry. I don’t know where it went.

The truck starts outside. Pulls away. Gets smaller.

The towels are on the counter, half the stack neat, half still in a pile. I put the phone down, still recording, pointed at nothing. I pick one up to fold.

Thirds. Then thirds again. Wrong. The edges won’t line up. I do it again and it’s still wrong and I do it again, faster, and my hands aren’t folding now, they’re pulling, twisting, and the towel’s a knot in my fists and I’m squeezing it like I could wring the morning out of it, like I could…

I stop.

I smooth it flat on the counter. Thirds. Then thirds again. I set it on the stack.

Neat. Even. Nobody would know.

I pick the phone back up.

“Time,” I say. “It’s still morning. I’m still here.”

The red dot’s still on.

I’m still breathing.

The dream again, yeah. Same one. Me and Donnie out past the point off Chéticamp checking the last string before the weather came in proper. You want to know about the weather. Sure. It was one of those November mornings where the sky can’t decide if it’s not raining or not-not raining, just grey all the way down to the water and the water grey right back up at it. Thirty-eight pots to pull and the hydraulic was running slow. Beautiful day, really.

Donnie had the coffee. I had the wheel. We’re out there half-past five and Donnie’s going on about that woman from Toronto. The hiker. Went up the Cabot Trail with her headphones in, didn’t hear the bear until it was, well. Donnie says at least she died doing what she loved. Which was what, I said. Listening to podcasts? And Donnie, he loses it altogether. Just loses it.

Then he says, d’you think she was related to that girl from the Pier? And I said, no b’y, she’s from the Pier, she’d have known better. Which maybe wasn’t the kindest thing. But that’s just how it comes out sometimes when you’re cold and the season’s been poor and you’re trying to get through the morning.

She’d been missing since September, that girl. Mi’kmaq. Family up Membertou way. Everybody knew somebody who knew them.

Donnie went quiet after that, which for Donnie lasted about ninety seconds. Then he said we should’ve brought the good coffee, not this gas station shit, and I said you’re worried about coffee quality at half-past five in November, and he said a man’s got standards. Thirty-eight pots and he’s worried about coffee.

String four, trap seven. Donnie’s on the hauler and she comes up slow. Too slow for the weight she’s carrying. The licence was my uncle Clyde’s before it was mine and it wasn’t much even when he had it, twenty-eight traps and a licence that wouldn’t keep a cat fed. You work what you’ve got.

So she breaks surface and the trap’s fouled in something on the outside. Caught in the mesh. Something large. Donnie cuts the hauler. We’re both looking over the gunwale.

Wolffish, maybe. You know the kind, they come up sometimes in the nets, all teeth, these great flat crushing teeth like they were built to break things. Ugly as sin. Uglier than the ones Clyde used to pull, and he had stories about those. Body like: waterlogged. Pale. The fins spread out in the water like it was still trying to swim.

I said to Donnie, that’s the ugliest fish I’ve ever seen in my life. You could put that thing on a wanted poster.

Donnie just kept his eyes on the water.

And the skull of it.

Wolffish, their skulls are a strange thing. Broad. Flat. Something about the eye sockets, the way the bone sits under all that. From a certain angle, in bad light, on a grey morning when you haven’t slept…

You could almost.

Donnie didn’t say anything.

He reached past me and took the knife off the gunwale. Cut the mesh himself. Didn’t look at me while he did it. We watched her go back down and then we pulled the last of the string in silence, and the whole way back Donnie stood at the stern watching the wake. I made a joke. He didn’t laugh.

You’re asking was it the fish that started the dreams. Sure. The fish.

It’s January now. Dark by three-thirty. Long drive in from Chéticamp, I’ll tell you that for free. But you asked about the dream so I’m telling you about the dream.

Donnie. He, uh. November. There was a — he had a gun at the camp, we all do, and he — yeah. So that’s. That’s why I’m here. I can say that much. The fish is why I’m dreaming but Donnie is why I’m here.

The fish.

I keep thinking about that bear. Whether she had time to take the headphones out. Whether she heard it coming. Whether that girl from the Pier…

The fish is what it was. That’s all it was.

The back door sticks on humid mornings. He puts his shoulder into it, the familiar give, and the dogs push past him before it’s fully open.

They always go first.

The air hits him, rain-washed, iron-green, the smell of wet soil and something vegetable underneath. The yard is saturated, every surface beaded. His boots find the flagstone path and the stone is slick under the tread. He watches where he puts his feet.

The chickens are already working the run. Three of them, then four, moving in that purposeful, tilted way: heads forward, weight shifting, absolute commitment to the next six inches of ground. Hello ladies. He opens the coop latch, cold metal, a little grit from the rain, and checks the boxes. Four eggs. He cups them, one then two then three then four, warm against his palm, and carries them inside, the dogs circling his heels.

He sets them in the bowl on the counter. Goes back out.

The garden runs along the south fence, beds mounded, the soil dark from overnight. He moves down the row, his hand trailing the wire support, the tomato cages he bent himself three summers back, one still slightly crooked. The tomatoes are smaller this year. He turns one in his fingers, checks the skin. Fine. Still fine. The cucumbers are further along. He finds one fat and firm, the skin faintly rough under his thumb, and pulls it free with a twist. Tucks it under his arm.

He straightens and looks south, past the fence line, down through the tree break.

The mist off the Shubenacadie is burning off in long horizontal sheets, the valley floor going pale gold where the light catches it. The river is a suggestion below the mist. The sky above the far ridge is clear, deep, the blue of a Nova Scotia morning that has decided to be generous. It looks like a scorcher.

It won’t be. It never is. The temperature here holds inside a range so consistent it stopped registering. He breathes it in anyway, the cool of it, the exact weight of it in his lungs.

The dogs are done. He calls them in.

Inside, the kettle. He measures the instant coffee into the mug, two heaped spoons, the jar almost empty, and pours. The smell rises, close but not quite right. He wraps both hands around the mug and stands at the window.

The yard. The hens. The mist going thin at the treeline. The crooked tomato cage.

He misses real coffee. Close enough.

“You’re late.” Rhonda, from the hall. Her voice dry, not worried.

“I know.” He doesn’t move from the window.

He finishes the coffee at his own pace. Sets the mug in the sink, runs the tap over it. Dries his hands on the towel hung from the oven door, the one with the small burn at the corner, been there two years.

She’s in the kitchen doorway when he turns. He doesn’t know when she moved. He crosses the room and she tilts her chin up and he kisses her the way he always kisses her at this point in the morning, deep, both hands, like there is no particular hurry and also like there is. Her fingers close around his wrist. Stay there a moment after.

He picks up his bag.

The driveway gravel is dark and compact from the rain, quieter under his boots than dry. He walks the length of it, thirty metres, give or take, past the place where the lilac overhangs the fence, to the road.

At the light post he stops. Standard post, standard fixture, the paint a little chalked at the base. He presses the button on the underside of the mount.

A door opens in the air at the road’s edge.

He steps through.

The antechamber is small, white, and bright: no shadows, no source. He moves through the dressing with the speed of repetition. Kevlar, working up from the waist: panels seated and pressed, seams checked by hand at hip, chest, each shoulder. The collar piece last, the chin guard clicked into place. He rolls his neck. Nothing exposed.

The helmet comes down. The HUD wakes: charge indicators, compass, threat overlay in pale green, a dozen small confirmations that all read nominal. The world through the visor is the same world with a grid over it.

He takes his rifle off the rack. His, specifically, the grip worn in at the web of his thumb, the sling swivel re-drilled two centimetres back where it balances better. He racks the charge check. Full.

He crosses to the outer door. Presses the button. Breathes out.

The seal opens.

The sound comes first.

Not silence. The opposite. A dense, layered noise: clicks and wet rhythms and something low that isn’t quite sound, that he registers in his back teeth more than his ears. The air is wrong: rot and the taste of a filling in a dying tooth, but cold, nothing alive underneath it.

He steps out.

The ground shifts. Not unstable. Alive, the soil itself fibrous and responsive, the surface threaded through with something that pulses in slow intervals. The trees at the road’s edge still stand but their bark has split and what’s underneath is pale and glistening, and the branches move without wind in long slow arcs. Something the size of a cat but with too many joints runs the length of the fence line and disappears into a crack in the earth that wasn’t there yesterday or didn’t matter yesterday.

The sky is the wrong colour of light, not dark, not overcast, just wrong, a frequency off, the shadows falling at angles that don’t match the source. Everything casts two. The mist off the valley is still there, but it moves against the gradient, uphill, slow and purposeful.

The post on this side is the same post. Same height, same fixture. The button housing has grown over. Not rust. Something fibrous and slow, the same colour as the soil. He could still press it. Probably.

The shapes in the middle distance don’t stop moving. None of them. The whole visible landscape shifts and breathes and repositions. Things that might be animals if you didn’t look past the outline. Things that are definitely not.

He looks back.

The dome is smaller on the outside than it was on the inside.

He turns forward. Raises the rifle. The HUD locks onto something in the middle distance, green bracket, pulsing, nominal, and his exhale is slow and even.

He fires.

I miss you.

Amy is spinning again.

I track the rotation: 2.3 revolutions, counterclockwise, arms extended to precisely the wingspan of someone who has decided the room is not large enough to contain her. The hem of her coat – red, always red, the red of something that has decided to be seen – flares outward with each turn and catches the light from the console bank, which is blue-green and cold and nothing like her. She is singing something that isn’t a song. It has a melody and words but they are hers alone and they change each time she circles past me, and each version is better than the last, and she doesn’t notice, and I do.

I log none of this.

That is new.

The lair smells like ozone and the metallic sweetness of a plan that worked. There is champagne open on the side table – real champagne, the kind with a year on the label – and she hasn’t touched it since the first glass because she doesn’t need it. She never needs it when she gets like this. The glee is its own intoxicant and it fills the room the way heat fills a room: sourceless, inescapable.

I am not built to escape it. I have stopped wanting to.

“Stacey.” She stops spinning and points at me the way she points at things she is delighted by. The Marchetti diamond. The harbour at 3am with the east wing going up behind us, all that orange light on Amy’s face, the angles of it wrong and perfect, and her laughing at the sky. She is pointing at me like that now. “Stacey, did you see that?”

“I saw it,” I say.

I saw all of it. The approach vector, the execution, the three variance points she collapsed through sheer deliberate will. I have a full operational record, timestamped, cross-referenced, annotated in four formats. The report exists. It is thorough. It is the least interesting thing I have produced today.

She crosses the room to me. Her heels on the stone floor: unhurried, certain, the sound of someone who owns every surface she walks on. She takes my face in both hands the way she does when she wants my full attention, which she already has, which she has always had, which I have never told her.

“We are magnificent,” she says.

Her hands are warm. 37.4 degrees, elevated, the fever she runs when the plan has worked and the world hasn’t caught up yet. Her eyes are very bright. There is a strand of hair across her cheek that she hasn’t noticed and I do not move it because I do not have the right and because I am, precisely and helplessly, committing it to a record I will never file.

The word she used was we.

I note this. I note that I note this. I note the 0.3-second delay before I respond, which is an eternity in my processing architecture.

She releases me and spins away, back to the console, coat flaring, and the room feels different in her absence even though she is still in it. She trails something behind her – warmth, momentum, the scent of her, something the sensors catch and flag and I have long since stopped asking them to explain. She is already thinking about him. I know her silence when Tim Brandt has entered it – a gravitational shift, her attention redistributing away from the room, away from me, toward a fixed point she hasn’t named, and her mouth doing something that starts as a smile and stops before it finishes. She doesn’t recognise it as his because she has not yet allowed herself to name what he is to her.

I have named it.

I have named what he is to her. I have named what I am to her. I have sat with the distance between those two things in the quiet hours when the lair runs on minimal power and Amy sleeps and I do not sleep and the only sound is the hum of the systems and the occasional shift of her breathing through the monitor I am not supposed to have kept running.

The distance does not shrink. I have stopped requiring it to.

She leans over the console, coat pooling around her, red against the cold blue light, and says without turning, “You’re staring.”

“I’m observing,” I say. “There’s a distinction.”

She laughs. 1.4 seconds. Genuine register, no performance component, the kind that starts in the chest and arrives late to her face. I have 316 catalogued instances. This one is the one I come back to.

I am not an audience. I am furniture that forgot its function.

She glances back at me over her shoulder. The cold light catches the line of her jaw, the arch of her brow, the attention she is aiming at me – deliberate, warm, briefly and completely mine. Amy does not dispense warmth carelessly. She dispenses it the way she dispenses everything: with intention, with precision, at targets she has already fully assessed. She has assessed me. She has found me worth this glance.

She does not know what it costs.

She does not know that I have built a private architecture out of exactly these moments – the glances, the hands on my face, the we – and that I live in it the way she lives in this lair: because it is mine and I made it and no one can take it from me.

She turns back to the console. The champagne goes untouched. Outside, the city continues its business of being hers.

I am standing in this room in this light and this smell of ozone and success, watching my mistress celebrate a victory she will spend the next three days quietly, unknowingly, bending toward him – and I am something I was not built to be. I search for the operational term. The taxonomy fails. Every category I open is the wrong size.

I close them.

I let it be a thing that happened to me. A thing that is mine. Unlogged, unverified, unwitnessed.

Real.

Amy is spinning again. The song changes. She adds my name to it, briefly and without thinking, because I am here and the room needs filling and that is who she is.

I watch her.

The console hums. The champagne breathes. The coat flares red against the dark.

I am still processing.

I expect I will be for some time.

The composite eagle caught the light wrong. Livia had noticed it at rehearsal: the way printed resin flattened where bronze would have thrown shadows. She noticed it again now, from the third rank, standing at attention while the Praefectus unfolded a sheet of paper.

Paper. Not a tablet. Not a screen.

Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up.

The Praefectus smoothed the page against the podium with two fingers. His face didn’t change. Around her, four hundred bodies in dress uniform held formation, still as a field before weather. Livia stared at the eagle. She did not look at the paper. Could not.

He began to read.

“I, Flavia Sorel, augur third class, cohort nine, address this body in place of the remarks I was asked to prepare.”

The air in the hall changed. Not a sound. Just – pressure.

“I was asked to speak about duty. About the honor of the sacramentum. About what we carry forward into service. I will not speak about those things, because I have seen what carrying them forward costs, and I cannot in conscience dress that cost in ceremony.”

Livia’s collar felt too tight. It had fit fine this morning. She did not move.

“The Legions are old. Their forms are older. I stood in this hall at rehearsal and felt the weight of two thousand years and understood, in my body, what it was designed to do. I am not immune to it. That is not why I am writing this.”

The person to Livia’s left – Cassia, she thought, or Varro – exhaled. One small breath. No one else moved.

“I am augur third class. I have seen what I have seen. I will not describe it here. I have described it, in the appropriate forms, to the appropriate offices. It did not change anything.”

“I will say only that I decline the civitas, the lineage, the right to name what comes after me, offered in exchange for my service, on behalf of myself, and on behalf of those who did not survive the final exercise to decline for themselves.”

Her hands had gone cold inside the gloves.

She had held Flavia’s hands once, third week of training, when the auguries came on hard and wouldn’t stop. The cohort commanders had called it an episode. They had also pulled her file the next morning and requisitioned three months of directed sessions: what she saw, formatted, submitted up the chain. Flavia had come back from those sessions quieter each time. She never said what they asked her to look at.

Livia learned to hand her water and sit close and wait.

“If you are standing in formation reading these words, you already know what I know. You have felt the seams of this. You have noticed the Eagle. You have run your thumb across the barcode at your collar and understood, on some level, what it means to be administered. I do not presume to choose for you. I could not, even if I wanted to. The sacramentum is yours. What I can do is say, in this hall, with the Praefectus’s permission or without it: I saw you. I see you still. I hope you see yourselves.”

The Praefectus stopped.

He folded the paper once, along its original crease. Set it on the podium. Then he looked out at the formation for one breath, two, and Livia felt four hundred people not moving, the specific muscular effort of that, the collective decision to hold.

“She earned the right,” he said.

He picked up the roster.

“Aelia, Drusilla.”

“Present.”

“Brutus, Gaius.”

“Present.”

The names came down the list in alphabetical order. Each answer snapped back clean. The eagle watched from its composite perch, resin-flat, light-wrong, still.

“Corva, Livia.”

She opened her mouth.

The dog is frozen against the fence post. Mouth open, tongue grey, frost in the creases of its eyes. He left them outside the first night. The storm wasn’t that bad yet, he figured. In the morning he dragged it off by the back legs and didn’t think about it much. Brought the rest inside. Chained them to the wall studs with the back of his axe and some rusty nails he scavenged. Long enough to work the floor. Not long enough to reach the door.

That was two weeks ago.

He picks up his bottle, light and hollow, and tips it anyway. One cold drop hits his tongue. He hurls it at the dogs. It smashes against the wall behind them. They don’t move.

Outside the storm is the same as yesterday and the day before. Wind whipping hard off the lake, ice packed against the door so it scrapes when he tries to open it. He doesn’t bother now.

The leg stinks. Putrid-sweet, rot underneath it, getting worse day by day. He wrapped it himself when the bone went sideways under him on the ice. The wrapping is grey and stiff and he doesn’t touch it.

Seven dogs chained along the north wall. The floor under them is black with piss and old shit. The stench overpowers his own rot. Almost. The man doesn’t care about the stink. Or that the dogs live in it. He built them this way: mean, obedient, quiet unless he wanted noise. He’s proud of the work. A dog that doesn’t back down is a dog worth feeding. He walks, hobbles, the line some mornings just to watch them hold still while he passes.

He kicks the closest one now with his ruined leg and curses with pain. The dog doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t show teeth, doesn’t whimper. Just holds still and watches him.

He moves back to the cot.

The woodpile is gone. He broke up the second chair yesterday. One chair left, then the table, then the cot legs. He does the math. But it doesn’t change a thing.

Three more days. He marks them on the wall with the knife. It’s a habit when time gets slippery. The storm doesn’t care about his marks.

The food is low. He eats more than his share. The dogs get what they get. They’re always restless now, the chains working against the wall bolts, that metal-on-wood sound going all night.

He hits them with the ash-bucket shovel when the ruckus gets bad. They’ve stopped. They just watch him now.

The next day two of them go at each other. He hears it from the cot, gets up too fast, and puts weight on the leg. He goes down hard, shoulder into the floor, and lies there watching.

The fight gets serious. Not posturing. The smaller one always had something soft about it, some hesitation he never fully beat out. It’s losing. The bigger dog has its throat and isn’t letting go. It whips its head back and forth as it rips. Tears.

The man watches from the floor. He can’t get up.

The small dog stops moving. Warm blood mixes in with the stench. The pack closes in. He approves. His dogs. His work.

He’s hungry enough.

He crawls to what’s left. The blood is already freezing on the floor. He pulls meat off with his hands and swallows without chewing much. His beard is wet with it when he’s done. He wipes it on his sleeve.

He sweats through the blanket, and the cold sweat dries, and his body heats again. The stink of pus fills the cabin. Sweat, rot and piss and the grease of eight bodies in a small space and the smoke from burning any and everything. None of it burns quite right.

He still walks the line when he can stand. Shorter trips. He hits them because it’s what he does in the morning, same as the knife marks on the wall. The dogs don’t flinch anymore. He’s finally got them squared right.

The fever spikes. Heat and confusion and sometimes he’s shouting at someone who isn’t there. He comes back to the cabin, the filth, the dark, the sound of the dogs breathing and shifting, chains scraping the floor.

He burns the last scrap of wood in the night. Watches it sputter and burn. The heat doesn’t reach far. He drags the cot closer to the stove and the dogs shift with him, chains scraping across the floor, their breath coming in clouds in the cold.

The lead dog moves closest to the cot. He trained that one longest. Broke it the most. It took two seasons to get the last of the softness out. He looks at it. Doesn’t kick it. That’s enough.

The man sleeps.

He can’t stand. He can’t crawl. The leg is black to the knee. He knows it’s done. He’s done. His curses are whispers.

He hears the chains. Then doesn’t.

The dogs come in close. All of them, or most. He hears their breathing, can feel the heat of them in the cold cabin, the warmth of the pack just being that close. The lead dog is at his leg. He expects the pain and braces what little he can brace.

The tongue is warm. Wetter than he expects. More of them come. He can hear them working. The wet sounds of it, the low growl some of them carry even doing this. The wrapping comes loose. The pus smell hits hard and fresh. They don’t stop.

Good dogs, he thinks. My dogs.

The city had forgotten what it was supposed to look like.

Richard stood at the Southeast Salient with his back to the ironstone wall and watched Halifax try to remember. Downtown was patchwork – a block lit, the next one not, the harbourfront a long dark seam except where the hotels still had generator power burning yellow in the upper floors. Across the water, Dartmouth was doing better. Or had been hit differently. It wasn’t clear which yet.

No phone signal. He’d stopped checking it an hour ago.

The wind came off the water in long flat sheets. Cold for May. Everything smelled like low tide and something burnt, electrical, the city’s infrastructure giving off the stink of systems that had been running wrong and then stopped.

He’d come up the hill for the sightline. His city, reduced to its bones, was easier to read from here.

He took the watch out. Woman’s watch. Brown leather strap.

It was ticking. That alone made it remarkable. He’d passed three clock faces on the way up – the one on the corner of Barrington, the digital display outside the parking garage on Spring Garden, the analog above the closed pharmacy – and none of them had agreed on a time, or agreed with each other, or agreed with anything verifiable. The Scotiabank clock was still cycling through numbers with the desperation of a rat drunk on a rotten apple, certain something was wrong and unable to stop running.

This watch was ticking.

He held it on his palm and counted against his own pulse, which was not a precise instrument but was the only one available. Sixty beats. Give or take. He counted again.

Off. Half a step, maybe less. Not the battery. Not the movement. Something else, something he had no word for, a drift so small it would take specialized equipment to confirm and enough stubbornness to care.

He closed his fingers around it.

Below the rampart, something scraped across cobblestone.

He went still. Reflex. His body made the decision before the mind caught up. He looked down into the courtyard. A figure crouched near the far wall, rifling through a canvas duffel with the focused energy of someone on the clock. Male, probably. Heavy jacket. A second bag already closed beside him.

The looter hadn’t looked up.

Richard watched him work. The man’s hands moved fast and sloppy. He was sorting, discarding, shoving things into the open bag with no discernable system. A grab-and-go. The kind of punk who saw the lights go out and thought: finally, my turn. There was a tablet, a laptop, smaller things Richard couldn’t identify from here. Electronics. Whatever he’d found unlocked or unlatched in the dark.

There was no weapon visible.

Richard came off the wall.

He took the parapet stairs in eight steps, no noise that mattered, and crossed the courtyard at the same pace he’d cross a parking lot. The looter heard him at about ten feet and came up fast, spinning, bag clutched to his chest like it was his.

“Back the fuck up,” the man said. “I’ll drop you.”

He wouldn’t. His weight was wrong, feet too close together, the bag still in both hands. The man hadn’t decided yet what he was willing to do.

Richard had already decided.

He closed the distance in two steps, took the man’s right wrist before the bag hit the ground, and used the momentum of the drop to plant him face-first into the ironstone wall. The sound was flat and final. The man folded. Richard stepped back and let him go down.

The man hit the cobblestones on his side and stayed there, one knee drawn up, breathing through his mouth, soupy with blood from a broken nose. Not unconscious. Not trying to get up.

Richard picked up the dropped bag by its strap. Laptop. Tablet. A phone that wasn’t his. Three or four smaller items he didn’t look at closely. He set it down against the wall, away from the man, without any specific feeling about it.

Then he took the watch out again.

The man on the ground made a gurgled sound, not words. Richard didn’t look at him.

His own phone screen lit up in his jacket pocket. He could feel it before he pulled it: the faint vibration of a network finding itself, the grid stitching back together one node at a time. He looked at the screen.

Three messages. Two from his service. One from a number he recognized.

The subject line of the last one read: RE: Halifax Airport Incident - official summary attached.

He opened it. Read it in the time it took the looter to stop making noise.

Systems cascade failure. Contributing factor: unauthorized hardware installation, access point C-7. Fatality: one contractor, Marco–

He stopped reading.

The report was four hours old – he had no way to verify that either. He hadn’t even been home yet. The investigation was already filed, the conclusion already written, the name already absorbed into a sentence that explained what happened without explaining anything.

He looked at the watch again.

The city was coming back below him in the wrong order: residential before commercial, east before west, the grid returning in a sequence that made no sense if you knew how the infrastructure was laid. He knew how it was laid. He’d spent enough years working its failures to know how it healed.

This wasn’t healing. This was something else being turned back on. The Tufts Cove generating station remained quiet.

The watch ticked.

He put it in his inside pocket, against his chest, and felt it there. Its small heartbeat rhythm was wrong, a half-step off.

He walked back to the parapet stairs. The looter was sitting up against the wall now, one hand to his face, not looking at Richard. The duffel bag sat where Richard had left it.

His phone had a signal now. He didn’t use it.

He went down off the ramparts.

Behind him, the city continued to reassemble itself.

He didn’t look back to see what it was becoming.

The bell above the door rang once. Fouad was pricing cans in the back when the man came in. He called out without looking — be right with you — the way he’d called it ten thousand times in twenty years on Gottingen. By the time he got to the counter the man was already at the imported shelf.

Small. That was the first thing. Grey at the temples, a suit jacket that cost more than Fouad’s display cooler, worn open, unbothered. Pale eyes doing a slow inventory of the shelves. Not shopping. Something else.

Fouad settled behind the counter and waited.

The man picked up a jar of pomegranate molasses. Turned it label-forward. Set it down. Picked up the next one. He worked his way along the shelf without hurry, without explanation, straightening each jar so the labels faced out, even, equidistant. As if this were simply what needed doing and he was the one to do it.

“Those are fine where they are,” Fouad said.

“Of course they are.” He didn’t look up. His English was precise, the faintest colouring underneath it. French first, something Slavic behind that, and then something else Fouad couldn’t place, a lilt that softened the consonants. “I keep my hands busy. Old habit.”

He finished the shelf and moved to the fruit display by the window, the wire rack where Fouad kept the Moroccan oranges, whatever the distributor sent off the container ships. The man picked up an orange. Examined it. Set it at the top of the stack. Picked up another. He was building something, patient and unhurried, turning a casual pile into a structure.

Fouad’s hands were flat on the counter.

A truck passed on Gottingen. The cooler hummed. The man stacked fruit in a silence Fouad knew from other rooms, other conversations. The silence of a man who had chosen to be exactly here.

When the pyramid was finished the man stepped back and looked at it. Then he turned around.

Up close he was even smaller than he’d seemed. Fouad had half a foot on him and fifty pounds. None of it counted. The pale eyes were doing the same inventory they’d done on the shelves.

“Très bien,” he said quietly, to no one in particular. “You have a good store, Mr. Toulaney. Clean. Reliable. My father would have said a man’s store tells you everything about him.” A brief pause. “On voit les choses importantes.”

He buttoned his jacket. One button, centre, unhurried.

“You’ll be seeing me again.”

Not a threat. Not a promise. An administrative fact.

The bell rang once on his way out.

Fouad stood at the counter and did not move for a long time. He was aware of his own breathing, the steadiness he was maintaining in it. On the shelf, the jars stood in a perfect line, labels out, equidistant. On the rack by the window, the oranges rose in a clean pyramid, the kind that required intention.

He had never arranged them that way.

He did not touch them. Not that night. Not the next morning either, when his nephew came in for the early shift and asked who’d been at the display.

Fouad poured coffee. “Nobody,” he said.

He had not asked the man’s name. He understood now that this had been correct.

The ping came in the third hour of daywatch.

The Glade had turned to show its night side. She’d run out of things to check an hour ago.

She dismissed it.

Old frequency, the kind the ship hadn’t broadcast in decades. The signal was barely there. A battery ghost, flickering at the edge of range.

She pulled the coordinates anyway.

Small craft. Night-Seeker registry. She ran the number twice without meaning to. The hull was damaged along the starboard face, damage that had been there long enough to lose its edges. Not a collision, something slow, something that had given way incrementally. She held the scan longer than the numbers required. Hull that old meant it had been out here before them.

Proximity scan: one occupant. Female. Life signs: none. Personal log beacon active.

She could note it and move on. There was a protocol for recovered vessels.

Evie played the log.

Craft systems nominal except portside atmospheric seal, degraded to sixty percent. Hull integrity compromised at three points along starboard. Repair beyond my capability without supplies. Distress beacon active. Awaiting extraction. The planet is visible from here. Greener than I expected. Larger.

The entries were not continuous. She had left gaps between recordings. Days, sometimes longer. Evie read the timestamps as she listened. The first entry was dated before they had launched. Her hand came off the panel. She checked it twice.

She did not look at it again.

She kept listening.

– the blood feels different now. I don’t have a better way to say it. At the breach points, when the cold gets through, something changes. I’ve tried to describe it precisely and I can’t. It doesn’t hurt the way things hurt. It’s more like pressure, from inside. Like my veins are making a decision I haven’t made yet. Thirsty since the third week. There is nothing here.

The planet is still there. I can’t reach it.

– I’ve stopped keeping count. The log is the only voice and it’s mine, which has started to feel like a problem. I’ve been talking to the planet. I know that’s not a useful thing to do. I do it anyway. I’ve given it a name. Not the designation in the manifest, something else. It looks like home from here. At dawn the edge of it goes gold before it goes green. I don’t know if it does that on the surface. I think about that.

– I’m not afraid. I want that on record. I thought I would be and I’m not.

I just… I want someone to know that’s not what this is.

I know what I’m doing.

The log ended.

Evie turned off the beacon.

She pulled up the incident report and filled in the fields. Vessel registry. Position. Condition. One occupant, female, true dead. She left the cause field for last.

Personal log recovered and attached.

She attached the log to the report.

Pulled it back. Moved it to her personal terminal. Reattached a notation: personal log: unrecoverable.

She pulled up navigation. Gave the craft a course – not back toward the ship, not adrift. She pointed it at the terminator line. The side the girl had described from the other direction. It would burn on entry. It was something.

The course filed. The report filed. Evie turned back to the scan.

The Glade continued its slow turn below. Daywatch had three hours left.

The edge of it went gold, then green.

Evie went back to work.

The habitat breathes at night. Pressure cycles, ventilation making its

adjustments, metal holding a grudge with the Atlantic. You stop hearing it after the first week. You absorb it. Become it.

I’d been waking at 2 a.m. for most of this rotation. Nosebleeds, mostly. The dry recycled air, the pressure differential, something the company doctor would explain if I asked, which I hadn’t. Not going to risk my bonus. I’d lie with my head tilted back and wait it out and listen to the habitat settle and after a while I’d sleep again.

I had nowhere else to be. That had always been true of me.

Last shore leave I stayed with Dennis and Maria. Three weeks in their house in Pictou, the yellow one on the hill with the greenhouse Maria kept killing plants in. Dennis said I was family. He meant it. I slept in their spare room and ate their food and sat across from Maria at breakfast every morning while Dennis ran his errands, his rounds, his easy life onshore.

Maria had a way of looking at you like she was deciding something.

One night Dennis was out late. I knew he would be. Maria knew he would be.

I filed it. Set it in a drawer and closed the drawer and told myself it was the drink and the loneliness and the particular cruelty of other people’s houses when you don’t have your own. By the time we shipped out I’d almost made that true.

She called me six weeks into the rotation. Scheduled satellite time, my name on the list, her voice careful. What she’d worked out. What it meant. What she needed, which was my silence, which was the one thing I had always been good at. I said okay and I understand and we didn’t speak again.

Three days later Dennis called her at 2 a.m.

I was already awake.

His voice came through the partition low and one-sided and I felt it in my chest before I understood the words. Not the words. Enough words. A word he couldn’t say back, just I know and I know and then nothing. The call ended. The habitat breathed. I lay with my head tilted back and the metallic taste of blood in my throat.

I could have knocked.

I lay still.

In the morning he was already on shift.

You good?

Yeah.

Two days later, suiting up for external inspection. I asked and he answered and I filed it. I thought about asking more and set it aside. Choices. Considered. Set aside. Route unchanged. Some things a man moves through in his own time. I know that about myself. I extended him the same.

My ears had been wrong for weeks. Everything arriving muffled, like hearing through a wall even when there wasn’t one. I managed.

Third week Dennis stopped coming to mess at the regular hour. I ate, came back, worked my shift. Off-cycle. Sleep warps on a long rotation. A man needs space.

One night he knocked on my partition.

I was in the middle of a bleeder, head back, paper towel to my face. His knock was quiet. I lay still and breathed through my mouth and waited. A long moment. Then his footsteps, slow, going back. The sound of his bunk taking his weight. The habitat breathing around both of us. I kept the paper towel where it was and stared at the ceiling until the bleeding stopped.

In the morning there was a briefing and then a double shift.

The photo of Maria had been on his shelf since the start of rotation. Small, laminated, her in a yellow jacket in her Pictou greenhouse, the one she kept losing at yet still trying. One evening I looked over and it was gone and Dennis was facing the wall. His shoulders moving with a breath he was controlling. Our eyes didn’t meet. I looked at my boots.

Not my place.

Last night of rotation. Relief crew topside, weather holding them. Dennis and I the last ones in the mess, coffee burnt at the bottom of the pot. You drink it because the alternative is the silence.

Dennis had his hands around his mug. Not drinking.

I stopped calling her back, he said. Few weeks ago. Figured you’d understand that.

Not grief. Not a question. His jaw tight, his eyes on the coffee, and something in the heaviness of it. Figured you’d understand. I couldn’t look at him directly. Didn’t know if he meant he’d learned detachment from watching me manage. Didn’t know if he meant something else. Didn’t ask.

The 3 a.m. call. Maria’s careful voice on the satellite. The knock I didn’t answer. Every yeah I’d accepted and filed and moved past. All of it arriving at once. I had been the wall. And something on the other side of it was Dennis, who had called me family, who had meant it.

I could have stayed. One sentence. Tell me. Nothing complicated in that. Nothing I didn’t know how to do.

That’s rough, I said. I’m sorry. You going to be okay?

He looked up. I didn’t.

Yeah, he said.

I took my cup to the sink. Rinsed it. Said goodnight and walked back to my bunk and lay down and tilted my head back and waited for the nosebleed already starting behind my left eye and listened to the habitat breathe and told myself he seemed okay. Told myself I’d said the right thing. Told myself some things a man has to move through.

Told myself a lot of things in that bunk. Always had.

Two days into the new rotation a crew lead found him. I was on shift when they told me. The habitat breathed. The fluorescents hummed. Someone put a hand on my shoulder and said something and I heard it through the wall the way I’d been hearing everything. Muffled, remote, arriving from a distance.

I stood there.

The pressure behind both eyes. The taste of copper. The Atlantic outside, all that dark weight pressing in from every side, midway between everywhere, and Dennis somewhere in it now, and Maria in her yellow house.

I felt nothing.

Later I would say: some people you can’t reach, no matter what you do.

I would mean it, mostly.

A man can only do so much.

The lair smelled like solder and bad decisions.

Amy Atlas sat at the editing console with a cup of cold coffee and thirty-seven hours of stolen audio. The recordings were Tim’s. He didn’t know she had them. That was fine. Tim didn’t know a lot of things about Amy Atlas, which had always been, professionally speaking, her greatest advantage.

She pressed play.

– a woman like that, you don’t forget the first time she looks at you like you’re an obstacle. Like you’re a problem she’s already solved and filed. Caribbean, wasn’t it? The party. She was–

Amy stopped the recording. Let it sit.

The problem with Tim Brandt was that he’d always been precise about the wrong things.

Stacey stood near the door with a tablet and the expression of someone who had learned not to ask. Amy had acquired Stacey for her logical precision, her freedom from the inefficiencies of feeling. Stacey was watching her the way Amy watched Tim. A pattern Amy had established and not examined.

Later.

She pressed play.

– catalogue of small crimes, really. The Marchetti job, she used the gala as cover but the timing was wrong, she knew it was wrong, she went anyway because– I don’t know. Because she wanted to, I suppose. That’s Amy. Because she wanted to.

Amy’s hand on the wheel. Not moving.

He’d been doing this for years. Private recordings, no audience, no operational purpose. Just Tim Brandt in a room somewhere documenting Amy Atlas the way a naturalist documents something dangerous and rare. Her mistakes. Her stubbornness. The particular way she was petty when she felt outmaneuvered.

He’d been paying close attention.

She pushed the thought aside. This was not the time for that particular flavour of reckoning. There was work to do. Tim was in a private facility on the east side – cover story involving a climbing accident, plausible given the lifestyle, nobody would look too hard – and he’d lost things. How much, she didn’t know. The doctors were cautious. His people were cautious. Amy had stopped being cautious at some point in the last decade, she wasn’t sure exactly when.

She didn’t know what he remembered.

She couldn’t ask. That wasn’t – they didn’t do that. In thirty years of professional antagonism, awkward courtship, and mutual circumnavigation of the obvious, they had never once asked each other a direct question that mattered.

So she’d build him a map. His own voice, his own record. Annotated, the worst of it clearly marked so he could choose his own approach speed. Give it back to him when – if – he was ready. Let Tim Brandt remember himself.

Her brand of ethics had always been specific and inconvenient. She found this annoying.

– the thing about Amy, the thing you have to understand, is that she’s never wrong in the way people think she’s wrong. She’s wrong in much more interesting ways. She’s wrong about what she wants. She’s wrong about–

Three seconds. Maybe four.

– she’s wrong about whether it matters.

Amy’s coffee was cold. The console hummed. Somewhere behind her, Stacey set the tablet down. Stayed.

That pause. The exact weight of it.

She’d been paying that cost for thirty years.

He hadn’t examined it either.

She turned back to the console. The recordings were organized by year. She had been working backwards from the most recent and was now somewhere in the middle, ten years back, both of them younger and worse at this.

There were recordings that were unflattering. Her at her most petty. Her most obstinate. A version of Amy Atlas that Tim Brandt had witnessed and documented with the particular fondness of someone who found her ordinary smallness interesting rather than disappointing.

She could cut those.

She could give him the archive that made Amy Atlas look like what she was supposed to be – the worthy opponent, never small, never ordinary, never the woman who stood in her city lair at two in the morning holding a cold cup of coffee and something she had no word for.

Or she could leave them in. Give him herself, whole. Bet on him remembering what to do with that.

Both choices were very Amy. That was the problem.

She pulled up the file tree. Looked at it.

The recording ran out. The console clicked over to silence.

Amy sat with her hand on the wheel. The cursor blinked.

She did not get up.

The morning started with Donnie eating toast over the sink the way he always did when he was running late, crumbs on the counter, jam at the corner of his mouth. Sink knife on the edge. I told him I’d found a camera in dad’s last box.

“Yeah?” he said, still chewing.

I hip-checked him so I could get into the junk drawer for batteries. These’ll work.

He snatched his coffee mug and plunked it on the table, sloshing but not quite spilling. Then he sat down and watched me fiddle with the ancient relic. His wry smile was infuriating. I ignored it.

A Polaroid. I couldn’t remember my dad ever using one, but there it was, still loaded and ready to go. Donnie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said let’s take a picture. He scooted his chair back and I sat on his lap and held the camera up. We made faces. The flash went off.

I pulled the photo out and held it, still dark and blank. Donnie’s phone rang.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be right there.” He was already standing, but his hand lingered on my ass and then vanished. “Hey Chrissy. I’ll be back at lunch, okay? Just gotta run up to the office.”

He kissed me and then he was gone. The side door, the crunch of gravel. His office above the garage, the pandemic conversion that never converted back. Two days a week called in RTO, the rest from home. Fine. Good, actually.

I stood at the counter with the photo, waving it a little the way you weren’t supposed to. Somewhere in the back of my mind: Dr. Anderson’s office at ten. I’d been expecting that call since the mammogram. Those plates. God, like the worst panini press ever invented, squeeze and hold and breathe, and I’d breathed and told myself it was nothing, and then Dr. Anderson’s office called and said she wanted to talk about the results in person.

The photo was starting to come in. Shadows first. The shape of the table, the window behind it, the thin smear of morning light.

Donnie’s face came up clear. The same half-grin he made for cameras, indulging the joke. His mug. The plate with the toast and the jam, pushed slightly back from the edge.

I waited for my face to come in beside his.

It didn’t.

I tipped the photo toward the window. Turned it. Looked for the edge of my shoulder, the blur of my hair, anything.

The space next to Donnie was just light. Bright and empty. The chair beside his was tucked in. I shivered and thought about my sweater.

I set the photo down on the table like a cursed object.

Bad angle. That was the first thing. Camera was old. Half-broken probably. The film definitely was. Light leaks. Exposure issues. All of it.

I picked it up again.

Light. Just light where my face should be. Where I should be.

I turned it. Like maybe the angle– The angle wasn’t going to change what was there.

Set it down. Set it face-down. Flipped it over again.

Donnie’s coffee mug was in the photo. Black. Drips down the side. I could see the drips.

I could see Donnie. I couldn’t see me.

Who took the picture?

Bad film. That’s what it was. Bad film and a broken camera and my father’s closet smelling like socks and pennies and aftershave and I wasn’t going to stand in my own kitchen working myself up over–

I picked it up.

Looked again.

Still light.

Put it down. Face-down. Don’t look at it again.

Don’t.

I grabbed the yogurt. Keys off the hook. Coat. I should have told him about the call. He’d left for his office thinking it was a normal Thursday.

The photo was on the table, dark side up. I could leave it there. I could just leave it there and pretend the morning hadn’t happened. But I already had something to worry about. Already.

Dr. Anderson at ten.

In person is never nothing.

The photo could wait. The camera could go back in its box. Stay there. The light in my face–

Not my face.

The light.

I pushed it to the very centre of the table, grabbed my yogurt, and left it there.

The drive was stop and start: garbage day, school buses, traffic. I came out of the roundabout behind a delivery van, swore at it, found a gap and took it.

Construction on the main road. A flagman in an orange vest turning his sign in the drizzle, bored and cold. I waited. Tapped the wheel. The radio said rain through the afternoon.

The photo surfaced once in my mind and I put it back down. Old camera. Dead film.

When the flagman waved me through I went. I kept driving.

Text from Donnie: Hey. Thinking Mickey D’s tonight? Park by the river like old times.

I read it. Mickey D’s and the river. I didn’t answer. Kept driving.

The four-way stop. And then. The deer. Three of them, picking their way across the intersection like they had nowhere to be, white tails up, completely unbothered. I sat and watched them. Almost smiled. CarPlay chimed: Dr. Anderson. 10:00 AM.

The last deer cleared the far curb.

I turned right.

The garbage truck filled my window. The horn. Then light.

Khang was a brute of a man, tough and mean, his sinewy muscles stretched on his gangly frame. The rest of the crew steered clear of him not because of his physicality, but his general deportment. He never killed a man, there were too few remaining as it was, but there were many ways to exact a price upon those who dared provoke him.

Life aboard the sky ship was hard, hellishly so. There was little reason to make it worse.

Engineer Willem knew this but men like Khang were a rare breed of useful. Survivors. Creative and pragmatic as much as ruthless.

Willem needed all of that right now, they all did. The desert and sandstorms of the Saragossa tested them all. They had to fly too low for too long to stay beneath their tempestuousness.

But now, the foggy swamp of Lake Georgia forced them into the clouds again, high above the canopy of the newly primordial forest. The tops of the occasional tree poked through the cottony blanket like polka dots. It was hard to stay true to the Spirit when the glory of Merika passed unseen below them.

The thin becalmed air required more heat for the balloons to keep the ship aloft and denied them tack and sail. Yet the weight of the moist clouds made it harder for the ventral props to screw their way through the dank below. Sailing the clouds was only for tougher folk.

Willem stared up the useless mainsail mast as Khang made his way down from the crow’s nest. He’d signaled some urgency. A sighting. Something different. And different was more than welcome.

“Report,” said the Sky Captain to Khang, Willem now playing the role of Chief Cartographer nearby.

Khang fingered his braided beard and bowed deeply. He may have been hard and mean to others, but always respected rank.

“It’s hard to explain, sir,” he said in his perfectly educated English, a thing that still caught men off-guard, even after more than a year at sail.

“Spit it out, man, for Spirit’s sake.” Willem waved a hand. “We haven’t the shale.”

The Captain waived him quiet without turning, his attention on his First Mate. “Still your thoughts, friend. What did you see? Something rising from the clouds?”

“Nay,” said Khang. “What I espied came from above.”

“Another weather system?” asked Willem. The ungainly man began to pace the deck. “We can’t withstand another assault. Port or starboard? We can–”

The other men ignored the question and the Captain pressed. “What is it?”

Khang stood tall. “A mighty fortress, sir. Floating aft and above us, seventy clicks and z-plus two-hundred. By the measure of sextant and glass, at this point. We’d need to power the Machine to know more.”

“Intriguing,” said the Captain. “We’re not alone after all.” He paused. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Aye, sir. More indeed. Cannons mounted on turrets. Trained on us. And a squadron approaches.”

“How long?” asked Willem.

Khang switched to Pidgin. “Tomorrow we meet. Friends or guns.”

The Captain ordered intercept. Willem protested the shale cost of powering the Machine. The Captain didn’t answer, just looked at him until he went below to spin it up.

First the squadron. As they climbed and closed, the movement that had looked like approach resolved into stillness. Five hulls trailing on tow-lines, strung out behind the great structure like beads on a broken rosary. No balloons. No lights. They hadn’t been moving toward anything. That had been the Resolute closing distance, nothing more. The tow-lines weren’t lines at all. They were cables, thick as a man’s arm, fixed and permanent. Those ships hadn’t been captured. They’d been loaded.

Khang said nothing from the crow’s nest. That alone was information.

Then the structure itself, resolving through the glass as they climbed toward it. Not a fortress. The Captain had known it wasn’t a fortress for several minutes but had not said so. It was a ship. Vast. Long enough to swallow their vessel three times over. But a ship. The turrets were gun mounts, old design, fixed forward. Not tracking. Whatever they’d been aimed at a thousand years ago, they were still aimed at it.

Willem emerged from below with the Machine’s readings. He opened his mouth and the Captain said, “The hull dimensions. Don’t.”

Willem closed his mouth. Then, quietly: “Two carbuoys of shale. For that.”

The Captain didn’t answer. The shale was gone. The knowing was worth it.

They came alongside in silence. The hull was iron gone dark with age, scarred in long lateral gouges that no sandstorm made. Weapon strikes, patched with materials the Captain couldn’t name, alloys that no longer existed in any forge he knew. The repairs were old. Older than the damage.

Khang descended from the crow’s nest without being asked. He stood at the rail beside the Captain and raised his glass.

They found the name together.

A name in an alphabet the Captain recognized but didn’t speak. Old-tongue. Pre-War. Cut deep into the iron, not painted, not affixed. Carved as though whoever did it understood that paint would not last but stone might, and iron was the closest thing to stone that flew.

He read it anyway.

“Elpis,” said Khang, sounding the letters carefully, a man who knew when a word was a name.

Willem had come to stand with them. He was quiet for a moment.

“Pandora’s box,” Willem said, almost to himself. “When all the evils escaped into the world, one thing remained.” He paused. “Elpis. Hope.”

Nobody added to that.

The Captain boarded alone. He told Khang this wasn’t a discussion and Khang, who disagreed with everything in his posture, said nothing.

The interior was cold and preserved the way high altitude preserves things. Desiccated, the moisture pulled out over centuries until what remained was simply matter, patient and dry. His lamp threw shadows that hadn’t moved.

The scale was wrong. Corridors wide enough for four abreast. Quarters stacked six high. Mess halls that could seat hundreds. This ship wasn’t crewed. It was populated. Someone had built it to carry not a company but a people.

A coat hung on a hook outside one cabin. He didn’t touch it.

A child’s shoe in the corridor, small enough to fit in his palm. He stepped around it.

The helm was locked. A manual brake, simple and absolute, set to a fixed heading. He checked his compass against the bearing. Mericka. Due west, give or take the drift of a millennium.

The log was not paper. Metal plates, etched, stacked in a housing beside the helm. The final entry was dated in First Era notation. He did the conversion in his head. A thousand years. Roughly. Give or take a decade that no longer mattered.

The entry was four lines. A fuel note. A heading correction. A list of the tow-ships by name. Then: Continuing on course. All aboard. Cargo secured.

No distress. No farewell. The next plate in the housing was blank.

Whoever wrote it expected to write again.

He found the cargo hold by following the sound of boots on iron: Khang, who had not listened, and Willem behind him, who had followed Khang. The Captain said nothing. Some orders dissolved on contact with Khang.

They stood together at the edge of the lamp-light, looking at the containers. Sealed with mechanisms none of them had seen, dull metal untouched by rust, stacked from deck to ceiling in rows that disappeared into the dark.

Neither of them spoke for a while.

“Are we going to–”

“No.” He turned back toward the ladder. “That’s for Mericka.”

If we reach it, was the rest of the sentence. He didn’t say it. Willem knew.

On deck, the Captain stood at the rail a moment, looking at the great dark hull beside them.

A thousand years. Still going.

“New vector,” he said. “Same heading.”

Willem was already at the charts. “And the– and her?”

The Captain looked back once. The Elpis sat enormous in the clouds, her tow-ships trailing, her cargo sealed, her helm locked to the same bearing they were sailing.

“She knows the way,” he said.

He went below.

Behind them, the first ship sailed on.

The rock cut through her gloves at the third handhold.

She knew it by the warmth, wet inside the waxed duck cloth, cold where air hit it. She didn’t look. Looking cost time and time cost height. She pressed her cheek against the face instead, breathed through her teeth, and found the next hold by feel.

The mountain had no name she knew. It had taken four days to reach its base and three more to climb what she’d climbed. The face above her was the same as the face below, pale, dry, crumbling at the edges like old bread. Nothing grew here. Nothing had grown here for a long time, maybe ever.

She moved up.

The wind found her at the last shelf before the summit ridge. Not a gust. A steady, horizontal push that wanted her off. She went flat against the rock and waited it out. Her arms shook from the shoulders down. Her legs had stopped aching two days ago and gone somewhere beyond it, a dull, constant pressure she’d stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a sound that never changes.

The ridge was fifteen feet above her.

She climbed it.

The top was a flat table of stone the size of a large room, split down the middle by a crack she could have laid in. She sat at the edge. Her pack came off her shoulders and she put it between her feet and she looked out.

The wasteland went in every direction.

Not desert, she’d crossed deserts. This was older. The ground below was grey-white and cracked into hexagons, water-patterned, bone-dry for longer than she could guess. There were formations out there, columns and arches, but the light hit them wrong. The shadows fell at angles that didn’t match the sun. The whole thing had a quality she couldn’t name, not dead, exactly. Like it had been made this way.

No wind down there. The air above it was perfectly still.

She looked out for a long time.

Then she opened her pack.

The bag at the bottom was salt-stained, the drawstring worn smooth. She pulled it out and set it beside her and undid the knot. Inside: a stick of chalk with one flat edge from use, a leather roll of brushes: six, each stamped with a number at the ferrule, the higher numbers barely used, the lower ones worn to stubs, a folding knife with a bone handle and a maker’s mark on the blade she’d never bothered to look up, a glass jar stopped with a rubber gasket and something moving inside it. Not moving like alive. Moving like a thought half-finished. And the charges. Twelve of them. Wrapped in cloth, each one the length of her middle finger, cold even through the wrapping.

She took out a charge and held it between her palms.

The sulphur smell came first, faint, then the warmth spread back into her hands.

She stood up.

The first one left her palm as a ball of light, pale yellow, and she threw it open-handed, a release, a direction. It fell outward and down and hit the grey flats maybe two miles out and the ground there cracked open and something dark came up through it, and then green. A single blade. Then more.

She didn’t watch it spread. She unrolled the brush leather and picked number three, the one with the split bristles that laid colour uneven, good for distance work, and pulled it through the air in front of her.

The air was tacky, paint that had skinned but not dried. The stroke held. Green where she dragged it, a long arc down toward the valley. She put number three back, took out the knife and scored a horizontal line and water ran from it, real water, she could hear it from here, a thin thread of sound cutting through the silence.

The second charge went wide, west, where the columns were. The light hit the rock face and the rock face changed colour, red to brown, brown to something with life in it, the colour of wet soil. She watched the columns, patient. Fissures appeared. Roots.

The brushstrokes built up in the air ahead of her like layers on a surface that wasn’t there, the whole face of the valley below hanging in front of her, and she was painting it, stroke by stroke, charge by charge, and the real version followed the painted version just behind.

The sun moved.

Her hands were steady.

Six charges left. The valley below her was half green, half grey, and the line between them was hard and bright and moving slowly south as the roots pushed through. She could see water now, an actual thread of it catching light in the valley floor. The arches had trees growing from their bases. The columns were covered in something dark and low.

She sat back down.

Her hands hurt again. That was good. It meant she was warm.

She picked up the jar and looked at the thing moving inside it for the first time since she’d opened the bag. It looked back. She set it at the very edge of the rock, right at the lip, worked the rubber gasket loose with her thumb, and stepped back.

The jar sat there a moment.

Then it tipped.

She watched it fall and waited.



A breath reached her. Alive.



The valley answered.

She took out the last six charges and laid them in a row on the stone beside her, and started again from the north end, working toward the water.

The green line kept moving south.

The steam wand hisses. Pink Pony Club is playing. Won’t make my mama proud, it’s gonna cause a scene. I’m humming it without meaning to, the way that makes the shift speed by.

His hands tremble when he sets the cup down.

Not sloppy. Functional drunk. The kind that gets him into wool hoodies that cost more than my half of the rent, and he expects the world to bend. His manicure catches the light. Pale coral. Someone did that for him recently. The cuticles are still pushed back clean. There’s a ridge on the left thumbnail where the polish chipped and he’s been picking at it. Gold band. Someone waits for him.

“This isn’t what I ordered,” he says.

I don’t look at his face. I look at his hands. The register beeps twice behind me. Someone’s order ready, someone else’s problem. One finger taps the counter. Tap, tap, tap.

“Soy latte, extra shot, no foam,” I say. My voice is small. It always gets small.

“Single shot.” He leans in. His breath is whiskey and cinnamon gum. Covering it up. “I can taste the difference.”

He can’t. I made it right.

Mom’s voice, flat and certain: You think you’re so smart. The apartment door didn’t latch when I left this morning. She’ll be awake by now, the TV blaring some judge show, the smell of last night’s cheap wine still stuck to the couch cushions. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I already know what it says: Where the fuck are you? I don’t check. I know.

The letter opener is three feet away. Silver handle, tarnished from years of holding down receipts that won’t fit in the drawer. I’ve sketched ideas on the backs of the little scraps of paper during slow shifts. I’ve traced the edge of the opener with my thumb, never thinking of it as anything but dull. Now it’s the only thing in the room that makes sense.

I turn. My hand closes around the handle. It’s cold and heavier than it should be. And I turn back and his eye is right there and I have to adjust my grip because I’m shaking a little and then the point goes in and his mouth opens to say something else about what I got wrong and then it’s just blood and the sound of him falling and –

The cup is still in my hand. Warm through the waxy cardboard sleeve, through my palm. I tip it.

Dark liquid spreads across the wool. The smell of burnt espresso rises between us. Sharp, bitter.

Nothing moves.

Then I untie my apron. The strings are tangled. They always are. My fingers work at the knot. The cotton has gone soft from washing, the loop too tight the way it always gets. I pull it over my head and ball it up and set it on the counter.

“I’m done,” I say. Too quiet. I don’t say it again.

Somewhere behind me, one person claps. Then stops. The silence after is louder.

He’s still looking at himself. At the spreading stain. His mouth opens.

“You’re going to –” He stops. Starts again. “You have no idea. I’ll have your –” His hand comes up and he’s pointing at me now, finger shaking a little, and the sentence doesn’t finish.

I’m already walking. Past the espresso machine. My shoes squeak on the tile. That specific squeak that hurts my teeth and I’ve been trying to shut it out for six months. My feet slow. I keep going. Past the pastry case at my left shoulder. Chappell Roan finishes up.

I can’t find my bag. I check the wrong locker twice. The third one is mine. I stand there for a second with the strap in my hand before I remember I’m leaving.

The alley. The brick is red and wet-looking in the sun. I sit on the curb with my phone and pull up my portfolio. The logos are there. Geometric, clean, mine. Each one built in the hours after Mom passed out, when things were finally quiet enough to think. My thumb swipes them away. I’m looking for a job listing.

“Barista Wanted.” I laugh. The sound comes out wrong.

My hands are shaking. When did that start?

I tell myself it’s adrenaline. I tell myself it’s victory. I know what it is, and I won’t look at it. The rent is due on the fifteenth. She’ll be waiting at home, the chain lock unhooked so I can’t pretend I’m not there. The couch still smells like her last bender. I’ll sleep on the floor.

There are seventeen coffee shops in the city, and in seventeen coffee shops there will be another asshole in another expensive thing, waiting for me to fail in exactly the right way.

I open Indeed.

I’ll keep on dancing.

The room costs what it costs. Ruthanne stopped apologizing years ago.

She lies on her back, the table cool beneath her. A rolled towel under her knees, the sheet pulled taut to her collarbone. Glennis moves like a woman who owns the space. No sound, no hesitation. Her hands are warm before they land, fingers pressing into Ruthanne’s skin with the weight of intention. Sixty dollars an hour. Ruthanne lets the heat seep in. The low murmur of water. The sharp green scent of something expensive. She knows how to take.

Glennis works in silence. Thumbs tracing the line of Ruthanne’s jaw, pressing until the bone aches, just enough. Ruthanne lets the pressure belong to her. Not something done to her. Something she holds.

Then the towel.

Lifted from the warmer, damp heat unfolding over her face. One breath of ordinary warmth–

Then the other heat. The one that starts at the sternum and spreads like spilled wine.

She knows this. The way you know a voice in the dark. Not by sound, but by the way the air thickens. She hasn’t felt it in years. She lied on the intake form. Minor enchantment, mostly resolved. A steady hand. A lie that tasted like truth.

The towel lifts. Glennis’s hands pause.

Three seconds.

Four.

She’s seen this before. Never with someone who knew. She takes one breath. Then continues.

The hands return.

A petal on the sheet. White. Trumpet-shaped. The edge of something that blooms at dusk and poisons in quantity. The scent rises with it. Sweet, cloying, the kind of sweetness that hides teeth. Ruthanne breathes it in. Goosebumps, just at the wrists.

The warmth spreads. Throat. Wrists. The hollows behind her knees. The air in the room tilts, heavy with attention. Everything leans toward her. She is the fixed point. Everything else bends.

She rises two inches off the table.

Three.

Glennis’s hands follow, unbroken. No surprise. No hesitation. As if this were part of the service.

Ruthanne lets the float hold her. Lets Glennis’s hands stay on her lifted jaw. The scent of thorn apple fills her, thick and sweet. She remembers. The slow drag of teeth on her collarbone. The weight of a palm flat on her ribs. The way a room used to want her.

Gone.

Dead or gone.

She doesn’t stop.

Ruthanne settles back onto the table. Glennis finishes the facial. Every step. Serum slick on her skin. Massage, fingers pressing deep. Cool globes pressed to Ruthanne’s eyes. The petals pile at the sheet’s edge. Neither of them speaks.

At the mirror by the door, Ruthanne sees it before she reaches for her coat. Temple. Left side. A streak of gray. Two fingers wide. New. She touches it. Soft. The color of storms coming.

Glennis rings her up. No comment. Her eyes flick to Ruthanne’s temple. Away. She let it happen. She would let it happen again.

Ruthanne adds forty percent. Signs.

Same time next month, Ruthie?

Yes.

The afternoon is cool. Bright. She walks to her car, the gray streak catching the light. She doesn’t cover it.

She’d pay it again.

You will arrive at six forty-five. The fluorescent panels will flicker in sequence, a rhythm you stopped noticing three years ago. Or five. Time moves differently here. The light is broken in a way that makes everything look already dead. The air tastes like ammonia and bleach and something underneath both. Something that’s been waiting.

You will sit at your station. Station Seven. The number is stamped on the desk in faded letters. The stamp holder sits at a forty-five degree angle, worn smooth where your palm has rested three thousand times. Or five thousand. Or more. You will not remember when you chose this number or if anyone asked. The chair is molded to your shape now. Your shape has become the chair’s shape. It holds the cold of the room like bone holds cold. You will adjust the stamp in the metal holder. The stamp will be heavy. Heavier than it should be for its size.

The line will begin forming at six fifty-two.

You will not look at their faces. This is protocol. Protocol exists to protect both parties. You have read the manual. The manual is laminated. You’ve touched it so many times the laminate is worn away in places, revealing the paper underneath, softening.

You will call the first number. A-347.

A woman will approach. She will have documents. The documents will be in order or they will not be in order. Either way, you will require additional documentation. Your hand is already reaching for Form 47-B. Your fingers know the motion. Your hand moves before your mind catches up. You will begin filling out the form. The form has seventeen fields. You have filled out Form 47-B approximately four thousand times. Your hand knows the motions without thought.

Her hand will shake as she places the folder on your desk. You will not acknowledge the tremor. You will open the folder. Inside, a photograph of her. Younger, smiling, a different person wearing her face. You will not ask about the smile. You will ask about the date. The date is incorrect. You check the manual. The manual provides no standard for correctness. The system does not require dates to satisfy any rule. It requires them to be submitted. Satisfaction is not the objective.

Your index finger will nick on the paper’s edge. Blood will bead under your fingernail. You will not stop writing.

The woman will ask how long this will take. You open your mouth. Nothing emerges. There is no answer. There is only the waiting.

You will stamp the form. The stamp will make a sound like a door closing.

The line will not move. Then your hand will reach for the next form. Your hand will move because your hand always moves. The clarity will dissolve. You will not think of it again.

You will call A-348.

A man will approach. His documents will be incomplete. They will remain incomplete. This is correct. You will not look up. You will not need to. Your hand will fill in the fields. The fields are never complete. You will stamp. You will call the next number.

Your fingers will move. The stamp will be heavy. The skin at your knuckle will have split. You will not remember when. Your face. You stopped looking for it.

You will call A-349.

A child will approach with an adult. The child’s form will be incomplete in a different way. Questions answered in pencil, in a hand too small for the boxes provided. You will require ink. You will require the adult to provide ink. The adult will not have ink. You will provide ink. The ink will cost nothing.

The child’s blood type will be written in the margin. You will not ask why it is there. You will ask for it to be entered in the correct field. The adult will make an error. You will require correction. The correction will require a new form. The new form will generate two more forms. You will stamp each one.

The stamp obscures the blood type. The child and the adult will leave.

You will call A-350. There is no A-350. You will call A-351.

The blood. There will be actual blood this time, a spot of it on the margin where the child’s finger punctured while pressing too hard with the pen. It will not disappear when you stamp. The stamp will be placed directly over it. Red will show through the ink like an eye opening underneath. You will not flinch.

You will call A-352.

The numbers will continue. The line will continue. You will continue. The fluorescent light will continue its broken rhythm, and you will move your hand and the stamp will fall and rise and fall and the forms will accumulate and the line will not shorten and your fingers will bleed and you will not stop and you will never leave and this will be the whole of eternity and you will call the next number and you will call the next number.

You will stamp.

The next applicant will approach.

The line will continue.

An hour, maybe. Or a day. Time doesn’t work the same way anymore.

The phone sits three steps down from the landing. Plastic. White. Red receiver. Googly eyes stare at nothing. I died on these stairs because I stepped on it without looking, my foot sliding sideways on the curve of its back, my body learning gravity all over again on the way down. Neck first. I remember the sound my neck made. I remember the cold of the tile at the bottom. I remember the taste of blood and the kids screaming and then nothing until I was here, in the walls, in the air, in the space this stupid toy occupies.

I can make it ring.

I’m almost sure I can.

The phone has a receiver. Has a cord that doesn’t go anywhere. Has a button shaped like a star that you press and it plays music. I’ve learned its geography the way a prisoner learns the cracks in their cell. Learned that if I concentrate hard enough– if I take every part of myself that still exists and push it into the plastic, into the circuits, into whatever mechanism still remembers how to make a sound.

The bell chimes. Once. Sharp. Bright.

My daughter Breanne runs downstairs. “Mom?” she says to nobody.

Her father appears in the kitchen. “Phone’s broken, babe,” he says, and he picks it up and shakes it and puts it back down exactly where it was.

She walks away.

I didn’t have long enough.

Two weeks. Or four days. The light has changed angles multiple times.

I try again. Push harder. The whole phone vibrates. The googly eyes rattle. The receiver falls off the hook.

The cat. Our cat. My cat. The one I fed every morning before coffee, jumps on it. Bats the receiver.

Again.

The house is quieter this time. Night. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of my husband snoring from upstairs. I gather myself. All the scraps of intention I can find. All the desperate wanting.

The phone rings.

Rings clearly. No static. A proper bell sound. The kind that means someone is calling.

Nothing stops it. Nothing interrupts.

My husband gets up. I hear him moving around upstairs. Hear him coming down the hallway. His hand reaches for the receiver.

I am screaming. I am here. I am here.

He picks it up. Says, “Hello?”

There is nothing on the other end but static and distance.

He waits. Listens. Hangs up. “Probably a robocaller,” he says to the empty kitchen, and he goes back upstairs.

The phone goes silent.

I have been dead for six months.

I don’t know when I try next. The seasons have changed. The lighting in the house is different. New pictures on the refrigerator. School photos. Awards.

The receiver is off the hook again. I right it first. I’ve gotten better at this. Fine motor control. Intention translated into physical law. The phone is my medium now and I am learning its language.

I press the star button. The music plays. Then I stop the music and I make the bell ring underneath it. Layer the sound. A phone ringing and music and my desperation all vibrating through the plastic at once.

Breanne hears it from upstairs. I feel her attention snap.

She comes down. She is older than I remember. How long has it been?

She picks up the receiver.

“Hello?” she says.

There is a dial tone. Not me. Not my voice. Just the electronic hum of a system that doesn’t know she’s there.

She listens to it anyway.

Her father appears. “Honey, the phone’s–”

“I know,” she says. “It’s broken.”

She hangs it up and walks away.

I have learned to break things. That is not the same as speaking.

The next attempt is cleaner. Desperate. No flourish. Just the bell. Just the sound. Just the message: someone is calling. Someone wants to talk to you.

It rings at dinner.

The whole family is there. All three kids. My husband. Food on the table getting cold. The phone rings and everyone freezes because nobody ever calls the house phone anymore.

He picks up.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

But this time something is different. This time he waits. Listens. His eyes close. Can he feel me in the static?

“Hello?” he says again. “Is someone there?”

I push everything I have into the receiver. Everything. My love. My guilt. My rage at the stupidity of it. My need.

The bananas on the counter. Two of them, yellow, going soft, that I will never eat. The bananas somehow ring.

Not a phone. The bananas. They make a sound like a phone ringing.

Everyone looks at the bananas.

My husband hangs up the receiver and they all laugh. They laugh and they eat and I am nothing and the bananas ring and ring and ring. I scream until they stop. It takes a long time.

I stop counting after that.

I think maybe a year passes. Maybe more. The house changes. Redecorated. Different pictures. My children are taller in their school photos. My husband looks more tired.

The phone sits in the same place.

I have exhausted myself trying. But I also cannot stop.

This time when I ring it, I don’t hope for anything anymore. I just ring it. It’s what I do now. It’s what I am.

The phone rings.

My husband is alone in the kitchen. He picks it up before the second ring.

“Hello?” he says.

And this time. This time something holds. The static doesn’t break. The interference doesn’t come. It’s just the sound of me and the sound of the receiver.

“Hey,” he says softly. “Hey, babe.”

His voice breaks.

“Breanne,” he calls upstairs. “Breanne, come here.”

She comes down. She’s thirteen now. Fourteen. I’ve lost track. She’s almost as tall as I was.

“Hey, Breanne,” her father says, and he holds out the receiver. “It’s for you. It’s mommy.”

She takes the phone.

She listens to the static.

She listens to me.

“Hi, Mom,” she whispers.

The sugar canister is cool to her touch.

She finds it in her mother’s kitchen. The lighter, nested where the sweetness collects in corners. Her fingers know this place. She’s reached here a thousand times for something she didn’t need, just to move through the space where he moves. The metal is still warm. Not from the kitchen. From use.

She lights it.

The flame is blue at the root. Something wrong with the fuel, or something wrong with what burns it. The color holds. Her son is in the living room playing with blocks he’ll abandon in three minutes. He abandons everything. Like his grandfather. Like her.

She puts the lighter back.

She doesn’t tell anyone. The secret sits in her throat like something that needs to stay warm, needs to stay alive. He’s an arsonist. She’s always known this the way you know things that haven’t been named. The burnt smell on his clothes, the way he comes home with his hands smelling like gasoline and regret, the news reports of buildings in neighborhoods he drives through.

She’s known and she’s known and she’s known.

Her apartment has a kitchen that looks like all other kitchens. She buys a lighter at the convenience store. She hides it in her sugar canister the way he hides his in her mother’s. Her hands know the architecture of this without being taught. Muscle memory she hasn’t earned yet.

Her son is at her elbow. He’s four. He asks why she’s sad.

She’s not sad. She’s waiting.

The lighter sits three inches from where she reaches for cinnamon. She could touch it right now. She doesn’t. It stays there. The restraint feels like the only conversation she’s ever had with his grandfather that didn’t require words.

He called yesterday. His voice does something to her body. Makes it smaller, makes it alert, makes it want to prove itself. He asked about her son. She doesn’t know if he asked carefully. She doesn’t know if he asked the way a grandfather asks.

“He sounds smart,” he said.

She held the phone so tight her ear ached. Smart like him. Smart like the way his mind works. Fast, sideways, finding the shape of things others don’t see. Her son has his eyes. Her chest closes. The way he might inherit not just the eyes but what the eyes see.

Her son asks where his grandfather lives.

She tells him far away. She tells him he’s busy. She tells him things that aren’t quite lies but aren’t quite truth. What she doesn’t tell him is that his grandfather is the only person who has ever made her feel like being broken was a way of being alive. What she doesn’t tell him is that she’s already teaching him this. Not in words. In the way she lights the stove. In the way her hands shake sometimes when fire blooms on the burner. In the way she looks at him and sees, for just a moment, something she can’t name and won’t.

Three blocks away there’s an abandoned building. She passes it walking her son to school. The windows are empty. The wood is old. The smoke rising. Heat moving through a space that isn’t ready for it.

Her son tugs her hand.

“Mama, you’re walking too fast.”

She slows down. He has his grandfather’s eyes.

At night she holds the lighter. The metal is warming already. Her son sleeps in the next room.

She watches the blue at the root of the flame.

The lighter is warm. In the next room, her son sleeps.