I stay frozen by the pie display case, waiting for the reflection to glitch again. My lungs feel like they’re trying to pull air through a straw.

Designer coat.

For one impossible second, the universe had tried to dress me in something I could never afford, overwriting my thrifted yellow wool with a reality that doesn’t exist. I wait, counting my heartbeats. Five. Ten. Fifteen.

The glass stays normal. The lagging shadow stays normal—well, normal for our new, broken reality. When I lift my hand, the reflection in the glass waits a painful three seconds before lifting its own hand to match.

“Nessa! Fries are dying in the window!” Jerry yells from the grill, his voice snapping the spell.

“Coming!”

I grab the red plastic basket of fries and force my legs to move back toward the corner booth. My mind is sprinting in a dozen directions at once. The anomaly. The lag. The glitch. I set the basket down on the laminate table between Atlas and Kevin.

“Finally,” Kevin says, immediately stealing a fry. “Your weird cousin from upstate was just explaining the concept of ‘nutritional efficiency.’ I think he’s in a cult, Ness. I’m calling it right now.”

I slide into the booth next to Atlas. His thigh brushes against mine, and a jolt of static electricity arcs through my jeans. The touch grounds me, pulling me out of the spiral of panic.

“He’s not in a cult,” I say, though I keep my eyes glued to the table, watching our shadows cast by the overhead pendant light. I subtly shift my water glass. Three seconds later, the shadow of the glass moves across the wood.

I look up at Kevin. He’s chewing, totally oblivious.

“Kevin, look at my hand,” I say softly. I wave it back and forth over the table.

Kevin tracks my hand. He blinks, his thick eyeliner crinkling. “Okay. I’m looking. Are we doing magic tricks now?”

“Look at the shadow,” I press.

He looks at the table. He looks back at me. “It’s a shadow, Nessa. It’s doing shadow things. Did you inhale too much grease smoke by the fryers?”

He can’t see it. A cold thrill of terror and relief washes over me. The lag, the glitches—they are invisible to the rest of the world. Only the people who passed through the anomaly are suffering the consequences.

“Never mind,” I murmur.

Atlas is staring at me, his dark eyes entirely too perceptive. He leans in closer, his voice dropping to a frequency only I can hear. “The temporal dissonance. It is increasing?”

“I saw myself in a different coat,” I whisper back. “And the shadows...”

Before Atlas can answer, a sound bleeds into my ears. It sounds like someone has turned up the volume on a radio, static and sharp.

“Whoops, slippery handles today. Sorry about the mess, Jerry.”

It’s Old Pete’s voice, raspy and distinct, right behind me.

I whip around in the booth. Old Pete is sitting at the counter, calmly reading his newspaper, both hands resting on the laminate. He isn’t speaking. He isn’t moving.

I frown, turning back to the table. “Did you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?” Kevin asks.

Atlas’s posture goes rigid. He heard it. I can tell by the slight widening of his eyes, the absolute stillness of his breathing.

Crash.

The sharp, violently loud sound of shattering ceramic cuts through the diner’s country music. I flinch, spinning around again.

By the counter, Old Pete is looking down at a shattered white coffee mug on the linoleum floor, hot brown liquid pooling around his boots.

“Whoops,” Old Pete rasps, his voice perfectly matching the ghostly echo I heard three seconds ago. “Slippery handles today. Sorry about the mess, Jerry.”

My stomach drops into my shoes. Temporal echoes. We aren’t just out of sync with light. We are falling out of sync with sound. We are experiencing time before it actually hits us.

“I’ll get the mop,” I say, my voice sounding incredibly far away. I slide out of the booth, desperate for an excuse to move, to burn off the adrenaline spiking in my veins.

But as I step into the aisle, the bell above the front door chimes.

The diner goes quiet. Even the grease popping on the grill seems to hush.

Standing in the entryway, looking entirely too polished and expensive for Murphy’s Diner, is Chloe Madison. She’s flanked by Brad, the linebacker who threw the dollar bill at me, and another girl from our AP History class. Chloe is wearing a cream-colored cashmere sweater that probably costs more than my family’s mortgage.

She surveys the scuffed linoleum, the faded neon beer signs, and the duct-taped stools with exaggerated disgust. Then, her eyes land on me.

Her lips curl into a smirk that I have dreaded every day since freshman year.

“Well, well,” Chloe says, her voice carrying across the quiet room. “If it isn’t the Poverty Princess holding court in her castle.”

Kevin stiffens in the booth, half-rising, his protective instincts flaring instantly. Behind him, Atlas turns his head, his expression intensely analytical as he locks onto Chloe.

Normally, this is the part where my throat closes up. This is the part where I look at the floor, apologize for existing, and retreat to the kitchen while the heat of humiliation burns my cheeks. This morning, I literally ran out of school crying because of them.

But today is not this morning.

This morning, I hadn’t jumped across a century. I hadn’t survived a sterilization drone. And I hadn’t looked at my own life through the eyes of a boy who would trade a perfect, painless world just for the freedom to eat a plate of greasy fries.

I stand in the middle of the aisle, my thrift-store coat hanging off my shoulders, and I don’t shrink.

“Hi, Chloe,” I say, keeping my voice perfectly level. “Are you lost? The country club is about five miles that way.”

Chloe blinks, momentarily derailed by my lack of panic. She recovers quickly, stepping deeper into the diner. Brad trails behind her like an overgrown guard dog.

“We were just driving by,” Chloe says, pulling out her phone. “I realized I didn’t get enough footage for my documentary on minimum-wage tragedies. Though I see you’ve already found an audience.” She points her phone toward the booth. “Who’s the stray? Did you pick him up at the Salvation Army with that coat?”

Atlas stands up.

He doesn’t scramble out of the booth like a normal teenager. He rises with the fluid, calculated efficiency of a machine, his gray tunic contrasting sharply with the loud colors of the diner. He steps out to stand beside me.

“I am not a stray,” Atlas states, his voice a smooth, calm baritone that completely lacks the defensive edge Chloe expects. “I am Atlas. And this coat,” he reaches out, gently brushing the mustard-yellow wool on my shoulder, “was selected by Vanessa. It is a manifestation of her personal autonomy. It is beautiful.”

Brad snorts. “What a freak.”

Chloe lowers her phone a fraction, her perfectly manicured eyebrows knitting together. “Are you serious right now? Are you actually defending her garbage?”

“I do not understand your hostility,” Atlas says, tilting his head slightly. He examines Chloe the same way he examined the rust in the boiler room—fascinated by the decay. “Your clothing is pristine. Your nutritional intake appears optimal. Yet your verbal outputs are highly aggressive and inefficient. Why do you expend so much energy attempting to degrade someone who provides sustenance to others?”

He looks around the diner, gesturing to the counter, to Old Pete, to me. “Vanessa performs noble work. She connects with her community. What do you provide?”

The silence in the diner is absolute.

Chloe’s mouth opens, but no words come out. Her face flushes a dark, furious red. She’s used to dealing with anger. She’s used to tears. She has absolutely no defense against Atlas’s genuine, clinical bewilderment at her cruelty.

“Are you psycho?” Brad growls, stepping forward, trying to salvage Chloe’s pride.

“Leave it, Brad,” Kevin says loudly, finally stepping out of the booth. He stands on my other side, his arms crossed, the black eyeliner giving him a fierce, feral look. “Unless you want me to remind you what happened to your protein shake before the playoffs last year?”

Brad freezes, turning slightly pale.

I look at Chloe. The absolute power she held over me just hours ago has evaporated. Stripped of my own shame, her bullying just looks... sad. She’s a girl trying to build a throne out of other people’s insecurities.

“I’m working, Chloe,” I say, my voice calm and grounded. “What are you doing? Did you really drive thirty minutes to a rundown diner in the rain just to make fun of me? Because honestly, I’m flattered by the obsession, but I have a mess to clean up.”

I turn my back on her. It is the most terrifying and exhilarating thing I have ever done. I walk to the utility closet, grab the mop, and head over to Old Pete.

“Don’t worry about it, Pete,” I smile at him. “I’ve got it.”

I hear the diner door chime violently as it swings open.

“Whatever,” Chloe’s voice echoes thinly from the entrance. “Have fun in the grease trap, losers.”

The door slams.

I exhale a long, shaking breath, my hands gripping the wooden mop handle to hide their trembling. It wasn’t movie-perfect. My heart is still beating out of my chest. But I did it. I didn’t run.

Atlas steps up beside me. He doesn’t say anything, but he carefully takes one of my trembling hands off the mop handle and laces his fingers through mine. His skin is warm.

“You did not retreat,” Atlas says softly. “You defended your space. You are very strong.”

I look up at him, a genuine smile breaking across my face. “I had a little perspective.”

“Hey,” Kevin says, breaking the moment. He’s standing a few feet away, his arms still crossed, but the fierce look has faded into something much more serious. “Nessa. We need to talk. Outside.”

Ten minutes later, Jerry lets me off early. The diner is dead anyway, and the shattered mug killed what little vibe was left.

The November air is biting as the three of us walk across the cracked asphalt of the diner parking lot. The sky is the color of a bruised plum, the streetlights buzzing to life overhead.

Atlas is entranced by the sky. He keeps looking up, occasionally stumbling over parking blocks because he refuses to look down. “The atmosphere is untethered,” he murmurs to himself. “No containment dome. Beautiful chaos.”

Kevin grabs my elbow, pulling me a few steps behind Atlas.

“Talk to me,” Kevin says, his voice stripped of all its usual sarcasm. “And don’t give me the ‘I’m fine’ crap. Because you are distinctly not fine.”

“I just stood up to Chloe Madison,” I whisper back, pulling my coat tighter against the wind. “I’m great.”

“Yeah, you did, and it was awesome,” Kevin says, his eyes darting to Atlas, then back to me. “But that’s my point, Ness. You’re acting entirely different. You disappeared for an hour, your phone was dead, and then you show up with... him.”

He points at Atlas, who is currently inspecting a crushed soda can on the ground like it’s a rare artifact.

“I told you, he’s—”

“If you say ‘exchange student cousin’ again, I’m going to scream,” Kevin interrupts. “He doesn’t know what french fries are, Nessa. He talks like a robot that read a dictionary, he’s wearing clothes that look like they’re made out of yoga mats, and he’s looking at a Pepsi can like it holds the secrets of the universe.”

Kevin stops walking. He turns to me, his dark eyes filled with genuine, terrifying worry.

“Nessa, this isn’t sustainable,” Kevin says softly. “Something’s wrong. Really wrong. Are you in trouble? Are you... running away or something?”

My heart aches. Kevin has been my rock since we were eleven. He’s the only one who knows how bad things get at my house, how empty my fridge usually is. Lying to him feels like swallowing glass.

“I’m not in trouble, Kev,” I say, forcing myself to hold his gaze. “I’m not running away. Actually, for the first time today, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Kevin searches my face. The wind whips his hair across his forehead. Finally, he sighs, his shoulders slumping.

“Okay,” Kevin says. “Okay. I’m not going to push. But if you’re keeping a secret, you better be careful, Ness. Because whatever high you’re riding right now... gravity always kicks in eventually.”

He gives me a tight hug. “Text me when you get home. I mean it.”

“I will,” I promise.

Kevin turns and walks toward the bus stop, his vintage blazer flapping in the wind. I watch him go, feeling a twinge of guilt. He doesn’t know how right he is about gravity. He doesn’t know that our shadows are currently dragging three seconds behind us on the pavement.

“He is highly protective of you,” Atlas says, stepping back to my side. “It is an admirable trait. In my sector, lateral allegiance is discouraged to prevent mutiny.”

“He’s my best friend,” I say. “He’s just worried.”

“He perceives the instability,” Atlas observes quietly.

“Well, he can’t see the lag,” I say, trying to sound confident. “As long as we keep our heads down, we’ll be okay.”

We start walking down Route 9 toward my neighborhood. The street is lined with abandoned storefronts and flickering neon signs. It’s a depressing stretch of road, but with Atlas beside me, it feels like an adventure. We walk in silence for a few blocks, our shoulders bumping.

“Vanessa,” Atlas says suddenly.

Something in his voice makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It’s tight. Strained.

I look at him. He has stopped walking entirely. He is standing in front of the dark, reflective glass of an old, abandoned electronics store.

I step up beside him, following his gaze to the window.

My breath catches in my throat.

In the reflection of the glass, I am standing in my yellow coat, looking terrified.

But the boy standing next to me in the glass isn’t the Atlas of right now.

The reflection shows Atlas, but his face is pale and sunken, his eyes wide with a quiet, desperate panic. He is wearing his pristine, matte-gray Sector 4 tunic. But worse than that—the background behind him in the reflection isn’t the dark, rainy street of my town.

It’s the blinding, seamless white walls of the holding cube where I first met him.

Temporal echoes.

It’s not just objects flickering anymore. The timeline is trying to pull him back.

I reach out and grab his hand. “Atlas?”

In the reflection, the ghostly, gray-clad Atlas looks down at his hand. He can’t feel my touch. In the window, he is completely alone.

He opens his mouth in the reflection, and a second later, the audio bleed hits my ears—a static-laced, panicked whisper from a future that is fighting to reclaim him.

“Vanessa... where are you?”

I squeeze his real hand, the one standing right next to me on the pavement. “I’m right here. I’m here.”

We stare at the glass for what feels like an eternity. Ten seconds pass. Then twenty. The reflection isn’t snapping back. It’s holding.

“Atlas,” I whisper, genuine terror finally breaking through my new confidence. “Why isn’t it stopping?”

The Atlas standing next to me on the street grips my hand so hard it hurts. He watches his ghostly, trapped counterpart in the glass, his jaw clenched tight.

“Because,” Atlas says, his voice shaking for the first time since I met him. “I think... I think my timeline is noticing that I am gone.”

Then, like a rubber band snapping, the glass violently shatters the illusion.

The white walls vanish. The gray tunic disappears. The reflection normalizes, showing the two of us standing in the cold November rain.

But the crack in our paradise has already been formed. Kevin was right.

This isn’t sustainable.

We burst through the heavy metal doors of the school’s side exit, and the November wind hits us like a physical blow.

I gasp, pulling my mustard-yellow coat tighter around myself, shivering from the sudden drop in temperature. But Atlas doesn’t just shiver. He completely stops walking.

“Atlas?” I whisper, my heart pounding as I check the empty parking lot for witnesses. “We have to keep moving.”

He doesn’t answer. He is staring up at the sky.

In Sector 4, the sky was a violet-tinged ceiling of smog, perfectly still and eternally gray. Here, it’s late afternoon. Heavy, bruised clouds are rolling over the horizon, fracturing the sunlight into sharp rays of gold and orange. The wind howls through the bare branches of the oak trees lining the lot, sending a chaotic flurry of brown leaves swirling across the asphalt.

Atlas reaches out, his soot-stained hand trembling, and catches a dead leaf out of the air.

“The atmosphere,” he says, his voice entirely stripped of its usual analytical calm. “It is… untethered.”

“It’s just the wind. And autumn,” I say, grabbing his wrist. Three seconds later, on the brick wall of the school behind us, my shadow finally reaches out and grabs his shadow. The sight makes my stomach twist with vertigo. “Please, we need to get out of the open. If someone sees the lag – ”

“There are no transport tubes,” Atlas murmurs, his dark eyes wide as a beat-up Honda Civic rattles past the school on Route 9, its radio blasting bass so loud it vibrates in my teeth. He flinches at the sound, instinctively stepping half in front of me as if the noise is a physical threat. “Unregulated transport vehicles. They operate on their own distinct trajectories. The noise is… immense.”

“Yeah, that’s just Todd from my math class,” I say, pulling him toward the edge of the school grounds. “Come on. We need to go somewhere I can think.”

We walk the half-mile down Route 9 to Murphy’s Diner. It’s the most nerve-wracking walk of my life. Every time a car passes, I rigidly lock my arms to my sides, terrified someone will notice that the shadows trailing on the pavement are three seconds late to the party.

Atlas, on the other hand, looks like a man walking through a vivid hallucination. He stares at a crushed soda can in the gutter like it’s a modern art masterpiece. He watches a squirrel dart up a telephone pole with a look of absolute, breathless wonder. Everything that I consider ugly, run-down, and depressing about my town, Atlas looks at with pure reverence.

Because it’s not uniform. Because it’s not gray.

We reach the diner. The neon Murphy’s sign is buzzing with a frantic, defective bzzzt sound, the ‘R’ completely burnt out.

“Okay,” I say, stopping outside the glass door. “My boss, Jerry, is probably going to yell at me. I sort of ran out on my shift right before… everything happened. Just let me do the talking. Try not to sound like a robot from the future.”

“I will attempt to calibrate my dialect to your century’s colloquialisms,” Atlas says perfectly straight-faced.

“Right. Good start,” I mutter, and push the door open.

The bell chimes overhead. Instantly, the sensory assault of Murphy’s hits us. It smells like burnt coffee, bacon grease, maple syrup, and the lemon bleach Jerry uses on the counters. It sounds like clattering silverware, the low murmur of town gossip, and the faint, tinny hum of a country song playing from the jukebox in the corner.

Atlas physically staggers.

He grabs the edge of the nearest booth, his knuckles turning white. His eyes dart rapidly from the red vinyl seats to the spinning dessert case displaying cherry pies, and finally to the ceiling fans lazily cutting through the thick, warm air. In his world, there was only silence, white light, and flavorless nutrient paste. Murphy’s Diner is loud, messy, and violently alive.

“Vanessa!”

Jerry storms out from behind the counter, a stained rag in his hand. His face is the color of a ripe tomato. “You disappear for half an hour, leave the front completely unstaffed, and now you stroll back in? What is this, a vacation resort?”

“I’m sorry, Jerry,” I say quickly, slipping into my best placating customer-service voice. “I had a… family emergency. A bad one. And this is my cousin, Atlas. He’s an exchange student. He got totally lost and I had to go find him.”

Jerry narrows his eyes, looking Atlas up and down. Atlas is wearing his matte-gray futuristic tunic, which is now smeared with boiler-room soot, and his posture is as rigid as a military cadet.

“He looks like he joined a cult,” Jerry grunts.

“It’s European fashion,” I lie seamlessly. “I just need to grab my backpack from the breakroom and then I can finish my shift. Please, Jerry. I really need the hours.”

Jerry sighs, the anger deflating out of him. He knows I need the money. He knows about my parents’ situation. “Fine. But you’re cleaning the grease traps tonight. Put your cousin in a booth and get an apron on.”

“Thank you,” I breathe.

I guide a stunned Atlas to the furthest corner booth, sliding him into the red vinyl seat. The beauty of the booth is that the high back completely blocks the light from the windows. Our shadows are hidden in the dark corner. No lag to worry about as long as we stay seated.

I grab a menu from behind the sugar dispenser and slide it across the table to him.

“Just look at this and don’t talk to anyone,” I whisper. “I’ll be right back.”

I rush to the back room, splash cold water on my face, and tie my polyester uniform apron over my jeans. When I return to the floor with a fresh pot of coffee in my hand, I stop dead in my tracks.

Atlas stares at the Murphy’s menu like it’s a treasure map, running his finger down laminated pages of choices he’s never had.

He is tracing the pictures of pancakes, burgers, and milkshakes with an intensity that is almost heartbreaking. When I step up to the table, he looks up at me, his eyes wide.

“Nessa,” he whispers, his voice thick with disbelief. “Are these… options?”

“Yeah,” I say softly, pouring a glass of water and setting it in front of him. “It’s a menu.”

“But how do you know what to optimize?” he asks, pointing to the breakfast section. “Eggs. You can have them scrambled, fried, poached, or boiled. Why are there so many variations of the exact same protein? How does the State determine which preparation is most efficient for the citizen?”

“There is no State here, Atlas,” I remind him gently. “You just pick what you want. What tastes good to you.”

“What tastes good to me,” he repeats the concept like it’s a foreign language. He looks back down at the menu, shaking his head in slow amazement. “It is overwhelming. The sheer volume of freedom contained in this one document… it is staggering.”

Before I can respond, a raspy voice calls out from the counter. “Nessa! You gonna let an old man starve?”

I turn and smile. “Coming, Pete!”

Old Pete is sitting at his usual stool at the counter, his weathered hands wrapped around a porcelain mug. I walk over, pulling my order pad from my apron, though I don’t need it.

“Hey, Pete. Sorry I’m late today,” I say, pouring his coffee just the way he likes it – leaving exactly an inch at the top for milk. “You want the usual?”

“You know it, kiddo,” Pete smiles, the deep lines around his eyes crinkling. “Meatloaf, mashed potatoes. And don’t skimp on the brown gravy. My doctor says I need to watch my sodium, but my doctor doesn’t have to eat my cooking.”

“Extra gravy, extra hot,” I say with a wink. “I’ll tell the kitchen.”

I put the order in at the window and turn back to check on Atlas.

He is staring at me. Not just looking – staring, with a quiet, intense reverence that makes the breath catch in my throat. I walk back over to his booth, suddenly hyper-aware of the grease stains on my apron and the frizz in my hair.

“What?” I ask defensively, crossing my arms. “Did I spill coffee on myself?”

“You know his nutritional requirements,” Atlas says softly.

“I know his order,” I correct him. “Pete comes in every Tuesday and Thursday. His wife passed away a few years ago. She used to make him meatloaf on Thursdays, so now he comes here for it. It makes him feel a little less lonely.”

Atlas processes this information, his dark eyes studying my face. “You do not just provide calories. You provide comfort. You remember their histories. You facilitate their emotional well-being.”

I laugh, a harsh, self-deprecating sound. “Atlas, I wait tables. I make minimum wage and smell like fried onions. The kids at my school literally threw money at me today as a joke because my job is considered so pathetic.”

“Then the youth at your educational facility are fundamentally defective,” Atlas says, his tone suddenly sharp and fiercely protective. He leans forward across the sticky Formica table, his gaze locking onto mine. “In my time, comfort is heavily regulated. Sustenance is a liquid assigned by a machine. Human connection is considered an inefficiency.”

He reaches across the table. His fingertips lightly brush against the cheap polyester of my diner uniform. A shiver races up my arm at his touch.

“You look at them, and you see what they need,” Atlas says quietly. “You provide comfort and sustenance. This is noble work, Nessa. You are vital to this ecosystem.”

I stare at him. The ambient noise of the diner – the clattering plates, the country music, the sizzle of the grill – fades into the background.

For the last two years, this uniform has been my greatest source of shame. It was the reason Chloe Madison mocked me. It was the physical proof that my family was failing, that I was the poor girl who had to scrub tables while my classmates went to parties and took AP prep courses.

But looking at myself through Atlas’s eyes… everything shifts.

He doesn’t see a poor girl counting change. He sees someone who chooses her own clothes, who works for her survival, who feeds the lonely and remembers the forgotten. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel ashamed of my stained apron or my calloused hands.

I feel proud.

The moment is so intense, so unexpectedly beautiful, that I’m entirely unprepared for the voice that shatters it.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Kevin says, sliding into the booth next to Atlas without invitation. “Who the hell is this, and why is he looking at you like you just invented the concept of oxygen?”

I jump back, nearly knocking over Atlas’s water glass.

Kevin is glaring at Atlas, his arms crossed over his vintage corduroy blazer. Kevin’s eyeliner is slightly smudged from the rain, giving him a raccoon-like glare of intense suspicion. He looks at me, then at Atlas’s bizarre gray clothes.

“Kev,” I stammer. “I thought you left.”

“I was waiting in my car out back to make sure Jerry didn’t fire you,” Kevin says, not taking his eyes off Atlas. “Then I see you sneaking back into town with a guy wearing dystopian loungewear. You ran out of here crying two hours ago, Nessa. I’ve been texting you non-stop. Your phone is off. Care to explain?”

I swallow hard. Kevin is my best friend. He’s the only person who knows how bad my home life is. But I can’t exactly tell him I jumped through a tear in the space-time continuum in the school boiler room.

“Kevin, this is Atlas,” I say carefully. “He’s… a friend.”

“A friend,” Kevin repeats flatly. “Funny, we’ve been best friends since seventh grade, and I’ve never seen him. Where are you from, Atlas? A cult in upstate New York?”

Atlas sits perfectly straight, analyzing Kevin with calm precision. “I am from Sector 4.”

“Never heard of it,” Kevin says. “Is that a gated community?”

“It is a highly regulated habitation zone,” Atlas replies smoothly, though his eyes dart to the heavy black eyeliner circling Kevin’s eyes. “Your ocular markings are inefficient. However, they are aesthetically striking. Did you choose to apply the pigment yourself?”

Kevin blinks, utterly thrown. He touches his eyelid defensively. “Uh. Yeah. Obviously.”

“Fascinating,” Atlas murmurs, leaning in closer to inspect Kevin’s face. “The freedom to alter your biological presentation simply for visual impact. You are very brave.”

Kevin’s mouth opens, but no sound comes out. He looks at me, his hostility completely derailed by the strange, formal compliment. For a second, the defensive armor Kevin constantly wears – the sarcasm, the detachment – cracks.

“I… thanks,” Kevin mumbles, suddenly looking flustered. He clears his throat and turns back to me. “Okay, he’s weird. I like him, but he’s deeply weird. Are you okay, though? Seriously. After the video Chloe posted…”

“I’m okay,” I say, and to my shock, I realize it’s the truth. The humiliation of the morning feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like it happened to a different girl entirely. “Really, Kev. I’m fine.”

Kevin studies my face, looking for the lie. Whatever he sees there, it convinces him. He nods slowly. “Alright. But if Jerry asks, I’m ordering fries, so you have to bring me fries.”

“Coming right up,” I smile.

I turn to walk back to the kitchen, my chest feeling lighter than it has in months. I have a secret. A terrifying, impossible, universe-breaking secret. But as I walk past the large pie-display case next to the register, I catch sight of my reflection in the curved glass.

The lightness in my chest vanishes.

My reflection is walking. But it’s three seconds behind me.

I stop, watching my ghostly image in the glass finally catch up to my current position. It’s a chilling reminder of the reality we’ve fractured.

But then, as I’m watching, the reflection does something worse.

For a fraction of a second, the glass doesn’t show me wearing my yellow coat and diner apron. It glitches, like a corrupted video file. For one single heartbeat, the reflection in the pie case shows me wearing a perfectly pristine, high-end designer coat – something Chloe Madison would wear.

I blink, and it’s gone. My thrifted yellow coat is back.

I grip the edge of the counter, my heart hammering against my ribs. Object flickering. The timeline isn’t just lagging anymore. It’s trying to rewrite itself.

I look back at the booth. Atlas is listening intently as Kevin explains the concept of french fries, completely unaware of the temporal landmine we are sitting on. I brought a piece of the future to fix my present.

But I’m starting to realize that the present might shatter under the weight of it.

We don’t fall down. We fall apart.

The shimmering air swallows us, and the sterile white walls and choking gas of 2157 vanish. There is no up or down anymore. There is only a roaring vacuum of indigo light and shattered glass, a slipstream of pure, terrifying momentum. It feels like being caught in the center of a hurricane, except the wind isn’t blowing air – it’s blowing time.

I am completely blind, but my senses are turned up to a deafening volume. I hear the sound of my parents arguing about the electric bill, looping in my ears like a broken record. I hear the mechanical hum of sterilization drones. I see flashes of silver needle-towers collapsing into rusted construction scaffolding.

The only solid thing in the universe is Atlas’s hand gripping mine.

But then, his fingers start to slip.

I open my eyes against the blinding blue storm. Atlas is floating beside me in the chaos, but something is violently wrong. The edges of his gray tunic are blurring, fraying into white static. His pale skin looks translucent, like a photograph left out in the sun. The anomaly is acting like a filter, and it’s violently rejecting him.

“Atlas!” I scream, the sound ripped from my throat by the temporal wind.

He looks down at his hand. The fingers intertwined with mine are flickering. He tries to pull me closer, but the vortex pushes back, a physical pressure wedging itself between our chests.

“It is the timeline!” he shouts, his voice echoing as if he’s speaking from underwater. “It knows I do not belong in the past! It is trying to correct the error!”

“No! Hold on!” I dig my nails into his skin, desperate to anchor him, but it feels like I’m trying to grab a handful of lightning. A jolt of agonizing static travels up my arm, making my teeth ache.

“Nessa, let go!” His dark eyes are wide with a sudden, horrible realization. “If you hold on to a displaced mass, it will tear you apart too! You have to drop me!”

“I am not leaving you behind to be gassed by your own world!”

“My world is my designation! I am Unit 7!” He pulls back, trying to sacrifice himself, trying to pry his glitching fingers from my grip. “Go home, Nessa! Let me go!”

“Stop it! Stop fighting me!”

I yank him toward me with everything I have. The vortex surges, howling in protest, sending a wave of crushing pressure against my ribs. It feels like swimming against a tsunami. The anomaly doesn’t want him. The universe doesn’t want him crossing the boundary.

And for a split second, I feel the terrifying, paralyzing grip of doubt.

What if it doesn’t work? What if the physics of the universe simply won’t allow a boy from 2157 to exist in 2024? What if holding onto him means we both get shredded into cosmic dust, scattered across a century of empty space?

But then I think about letting go. I think about landing in that dark, damp school basement entirely alone. I think about waking up tomorrow to the broken water heater, to the third foreclosure notice sitting on the kitchen counter, to Chloe Madison’s mocking smirk, to the crumpled dollar bill hitting my desk. I think about returning to a world where I am nothing but a tragedy, a charity case, a joke.

I can’t go back to that. Not after this. Not after someone finally looked at my messy, broken life and saw something beautiful in it.

Atlas looks at me, and the stoic, analytical mask of Unit 7 shatters completely. The boy who has never made a choice in his life, who has never tasted anything but nutrient paste until five minutes ago, stares into the terrifying void of the breach and makes his first demand.

“Take me with you,” he begs, his voice cracking, raw and desperate. He grips my hand back, his static-laced fingers digging into my palm. “Please. Take me with you.”

“I’ve got you,” I fiercely whisper, though I know he can’t hear it over the roar.

The anomaly responds to emotional resonance. That’s what he said in the archive. High-frequency neuro-chemical output. Feelings.

It opened because I was crushed by the absolute worst day of my life. It brought me to Atlas because my need to escape was a frequency too loud for the present to contain. Now, I have to be louder. I have to want him in my world more than the timeline wants to keep us apart.

I close my eyes. I don’t focus on the fear of the void. I focus on the sheer, stubborn defiance that has kept me surviving my life. I focus on the heat of the diner grill, the smell of cheap coffee, the loud, obnoxious laugh of my best friend Kevin. I focus on the taste of that bruised apple. I focus on the warmth of Atlas’s lips against mine in a concrete bunker at the end of the world.

Let us through, I scream in my mind, throwing every ounce of my desperation against the walls of the vortex. He belongs with me!

Atlas anchors himself to me. I can feel him doing the exact same thing – pushing all his new, terrifyingly massive emotions outward. The rebellion of eating contraband. The wonder of my mustard-yellow coat. His profound, aching desire to choose.

Our combined desperation hits a critical mass.

The roaring vortex hesitates. The static shock vibrating between our joined hands suddenly shifts, changing from a painful resistance to a magnetic pull. The indigo shards of light around us ignite into a blinding, magnificent white.

The pressure breaks.

The universe snaps like a rubber band, and we are violently thrown forward into the dark.

We hit the ground hard.

My knees slam against solid concrete, and the impact knocks the wind out of me in a rush. I roll onto my side, gasping for air, my hands scraping against rough, gritty floorboards.

For a long moment, there is only the sound of ragged breathing.

I blink my eyes open. The blinding light is gone. The sterile perfection of Sector 4 is gone.

Instead, I am staring at a rusted metal pipe.

The air is heavy, thick, and humid. It smells intensely of damp earth, mildew, and decades of undisturbed dust. From somewhere above us, I can hear the faint, rhythmic thumping of a high school basketball bouncing on a gymnasium floor.

We are back. It’s the boiler room beneath Northwood High.

Panic spikes in my chest. “Atlas?” I croak, my throat raw.

I scramble up onto my bruised knees in the dim light. The false cinderblock wall the construction crew smashed is right behind us. The blue glow of the anomaly is gone, replaced only by the weak, yellowish light filtering from a single incandescent bulb swinging gently from the ceiling.

“Atlas!” I say louder, terrified I’m going to look down and find empty space.

“I am here.”

The voice comes from the shadows a few feet away. I crawl forward.

He is sitting on the dusty concrete, his long legs sprawled out in front of him. His perfect, matte-gray tunic is covered in streaks of gray soot and dirt. His dark hair is a messy, windblown disaster.

He is entirely solid. He is entirely real.

I practically tackle him, throwing my arms around his neck. He flinches for a fraction of a second – physical contact is still a foreign language to him – but then his arms wrap tightly around my waist, burying his face in the rough wool of my thrift-store coat. He smells like ozone and panic, but beneath that, he just smells like a boy.

“You made it,” I whisper, a dizzying wave of relief making my head spin. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

He slowly pulls back, his dark eyes wide and pupils dilated. He isn’t looking at me. He is looking over my shoulder at the basement.

I turn to look, trying to see what’s wrong, but it’s just the boiler room. It’s a mess of twisted copper pipes, discarded wooden pallets, cobwebs thick as gauze in the corners, and the giant, rusted metal hulk of the old heating unit. It’s filthy and chaotic.

To Atlas, it is a miracle.

He reaches out with a trembling hand and touches the concrete floor. He rubs his fingertips together, feeling the grit of the dust.

“It is... uneven,” he whispers, his voice thick with awe. “The surface. It is not uniform.”

“It’s just dirt, Atlas.”

“Dirt,” he repeats the word like it’s an incantation. He looks up at the ceiling, where a massive spiderweb is draped between two rusted pipes. “And that?”

“Cobwebs. Spiders make them.”

“Biological architecture,” he breathes. “Unregulated.”

He stands up, his movements slightly unbalanced, like the gravity in my world is pulling on him differently. He walks toward the old rusted boiler, staring at the chipped green paint flaking off its side. He reaches out and gently touches a flake of peeling paint. It crumbles under his finger, falling to the floor.

He gasps softly, looking at the fallen paint chip, then at his dirty fingers.

“Things decay here,” he says. “They change.”

“Yeah,” I say, pushing myself up to stand, brushing the dust off my jeans. “Nothing stays perfect for long here. You’ll get used to it.”

“I do not want perfect,” Atlas says, turning to face me. The weak yellow light catches the sharp angles of his face, making him look less like a synthetic hologram and more human than ever. “I want this. I want the chaos.”

A flutter of nervous excitement erupts in my stomach. I did it. I actually stole a boy from the future. He’s here, in my messy, difficult, chaotic world, and for the first time all day, the heavy weight of my reality feels a little lighter. If I can pull someone across time and space, maybe I can survive junior year. Maybe I can figure out the electric bill.

“Come on,” I say, stepping over a discarded wooden pallet. “We should get out of here before anyone finds us. I need to get you out of this basement. I’ll take you to Kevin, my best friend. He’s going to absolutely lose his mind when he meets you. Then I’ll take you to the diner. Jerry’s probably furious I walked out, but...”

I stop talking.

A sudden wave of nausea washes over me. It’s a strange, disorienting vertigo, like stepping onto an escalator that isn’t moving. The air in the basement suddenly feels... thick. Not with humidity, but with a strange, vibrating tension.

“Nessa?” Atlas asks, stepping toward me. “Is your biological system experiencing distress?”

“I don’t know,” I say, pressing a hand to my forehead. “I just felt... weird for a second.”

“The transition between timelines is severe. Your neuro-chemical balance requires calibration.”

“I’m fine. I just...” I shake my head, trying to clear the dizzy spell. “Let’s just go.”

I start walking toward the heavy metal door that leads up to the school hallway. The single, swinging incandescent bulb hangs directly between us and the exit, casting our long, distorted shadows against the painted cinderblock wall to our right.

I take three steps toward the door.

And then I freeze.

My blood runs completely cold.

“Atlas,” I whisper. “Stop moving.”

He stops instantly, his military-grade obedience kicking in. “What is the threat?”

“Look at the wall.”

He turns his head slowly.

We are standing completely still. I am frozen mid-step. Atlas is standing perfectly straight with his hands by his sides.

But our shadows on the cinderblock wall are still walking.

I watch in absolute, paralyzing horror as my dark silhouette on the wall takes another step forward, swinging its arms. Beside it, Atlas’s shadow mimics his earlier stride.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

Then, abruptly, the shadows snap into place, aligning perfectly with our stationary bodies. They freeze, locking into the correct position on the wall, as if they had just been struggling to catch up.

I swallow hard, my throat clicking in the quiet basement.

I raise my right arm.

The shadow on the wall does nothing. It stands perfectly still.

One beat. Two beats. Three beats.

Then, my shadow’s arm jerks upward, raising in a delayed mimicry of my movement.

“What is that?” I ask, my voice trembling. “Atlas, what is happening to our reflections?”

Atlas stares at the delayed movement on the wall. He steps forward. The shadow waits three seconds, then takes a step forward too. A crease forms between his dark eyebrows, his analytical mind working furiously to process the impossible physics happening in front of us.

“The universe,” Atlas says softly, “is experiencing lag.”

“Lag? Like a bad internet connection?”

“Space-time is attempting to process our presence. I do not belong in this century. You do not belong with the residual chronal energy you absorbed in my century. We have created a paradox by returning together.” He looks down at his hands, then back at the wall. “Our mass is here in the present. But our temporal footprint is dragging behind us in the past.”

“Is it dangerous?” I ask, pulling my arm down. Three seconds later, my shadow lowers its arm.

“I do not know,” Atlas admits, and hearing Unit 7 say he doesn’t know something is more terrifying than the shadow itself. “In my time, temporal physics is theoretical. The State forbids unauthorized chronal experimentation because the ripple effects are entirely unpredictable.”

“Ripple effects,” I repeat, a cold dread pooling in my stomach.

I wanted an escape. I wanted to bring a piece of a better universe back to fix my broken one. But as I watch my shadow twitch on the wall – a dark, glitching stain on the fabric of reality – I realize what I’ve actually done.

I haven’t escaped my problems. I’ve just dragged a much bigger one across a hundred and thirty-three years of space and time.

“Come on,” I say, grabbing his wrist. “We need to get out of this school right now.”

We run for the metal door leading to the hallway. Three seconds later, our shadows finally begin to chase us.

Chapter 7

The fall doesn’t kill me. It catches me.

I expect a bone-shattering impact, the kind that ends with sirens and a hospital bill my parents can’t afford. Instead, the darkness thickens. It turns viscous, like wading through invisible molasses, slowing my descent until my boots touch the floor with a feather-light tap.

The air down here is different. Stale. Recycled.

I double over, hands on my knees, gasping for breath. My heart is hammering against my ribs like a bird trapped in a shoebox.

“Breathe,” Atlas says. His voice is close. Too close.

I flinch, straightening up. We are in a small, cramped space, illuminated only by the faint blue glow of his wristband. It’s not the sterile white corridors of the levels above. The walls here are rough, unfinished concrete. Shadows cling to the corners.

“Did we just jump down a garbage chute?” I ask, my voice trembling.

“Structural dampening shaft,” Atlas corrects. He steps past me, and for the first time, I see a flicker of something human in his posture. He’s hunching slightly, protective. “But yes. It is where things go to be forgotten.”

He waves his hand over a panel on the wall. A low hum vibrates through the floor, and a strip of amber light flickers on overhead.

I blink, adjusting to the dimness. And then I stare.

The room is a closet, maybe six feet by six feet. But it’s the contents that stop my breath. It’s cluttered. Chaotic. Beautifully, messily cluttered.

Unlike the pristine, empty world above, this space is crammed with… junk. But it’s carefully curated junk. A jagged piece of blue glass. A twisted coil of copper wire. A torn page from a book – actual paper – pinned to the wall with a blob of gray adhesive.

“What is this place?” I whisper.

“My archive,” Atlas says. He sounds shy. It’s a strange tone for a boy who looks like a marble statue. “I collect things. Errors. Anomalies. Things the system designates as waste.”

I step toward the shelf. There’s a button. Just a plastic button, probably from a shirt, navy blue with four holes. Beside it is a circuit board that looks like a miniature city map.

“You’re a hoarder,” I say, but I’m smiling. “You’re a space hoarder.”

“I am a preservationist,” he says, stiffening slightly. “These objects possess... texture. History. In the sectors above, everything is replaced before it can age. Nothing is allowed to have a past.”

He moves to the back of the room, to a small, temperature-controlled box humming against the wall. He taps a code into the lid.

“I have something else,” he says. “The rarest anomaly I have found.”

I lean against the concrete wall, wrapping my mustard-yellow coat tighter around me. The adrenaline is fading, leaving me cold and exhausted. “Let me guess. A paperclip? A shoelace?”

“No.”

He turns around. In his pale gray hands, he holds something bright, shocking, and impossibly red.

An apple.

It’s small, slightly lopsided, and perfect. The red skin shines under the amber light, a scream of color in this grayscale world.

“Is that...” I blink. “Is that real?”

“Organic matter is strictly regulated,” Atlas whispers, looking down at the fruit with reverence. “Nutrient intake is liquid. Efficient. Flavorless. But this... I found a tree growing in a ventilation breach in Sector 4. It should not exist. The air filters should have killed it. But it grew.”

He steps closer to me, extending his hands. He holds the apple out like it’s the Crown Jewels. Like it’s a heart.

“For you,” he says.

I stare at the apple. Back home, at Murphy’s, I’ve tossed dozens of these into the trash when they get bruised. I’ve seen kids at school throw them at each other. They’re cheap. Common. Boring.

But here, in Atlas’s hands, it looks like magic.

“I can’t take that,” I say. “That’s your... your treasure.”

“You require sustenance,” he says simply. “You are trembling.”

“I’m trembling because I just time-traveled and jumped down a shaft to avoid murder-drones, not because I need a snack.”

“Please.” He presses it into my hand. His fingers brush my palm, cool and dry. “I want to see you eat it. I want to know... I want to know if it makes a sound.”

I look at him. His dark eyes are wide, stripped of that terrifying calmness I saw earlier. He looks desperate. Not for safety, but for experience. For life.

I lift the apple. It smells faint, sweet and dusty. I take a bite.

Crunch.

The sound is explosive in the small room. Atlas actually jumps, his eyes widening. I chew, the tart sweetness flooding my mouth. It’s a standard Red Delicious – mealy, thick skin, sugary – but watching Atlas watch me, you’d think I was eating starlight.

“Well?” he asks.

“It’s sweet,” I say, swallowing. “And crisp. And... messy.” I wipe a drop of juice from my chin.

“Messy,” he repeats, testing the word. “Inefficient.”

“The best things usually are.”

I hold the apple out to him. “Your turn.”

He recoils. “I cannot. My digestive biome is optimized for nutrient paste. Unprocessed solids could cause... system errors.”

“Live a little,” I say. “Risk the error.”

He looks at the apple, where the white flesh is exposed against the red skin. Then he looks at my face. Slowly, terrifyingly slowly, he leans in. He doesn’t take the apple from my hand. He just leans down and takes a small, tentative bite from the other side.

He chews. His brow furrows. He swallows.

“It tastes like...” He struggles for the word. “Like the color red. Loud. Sharp.”

“That’s flavor, Atlas.”

He looks at me, and the intensity in his gaze makes my knees weak. He isn’t looking at the apple anymore. He’s looking at my mouth.

“You are so different,” he murmurs. “Your coat. Your hair. Even your skin... it has imperfections. It tells a story.”

I self-consciously touch the scar on my chin, from when I fell off my bike at seven. “I’m just a mess, Atlas. Back home, I’m nobody. I’m the girl who counts change for lunch. I’m the girl with the broken car and the thrift store clothes.”

“Thrift store,” he says. “This implies... reuse? History?”

“It implies I’m poor,” I say, the bitterness leaking in. “It means I don’t get to choose the new stuff. I get what’s left over.”

Atlas steps closer. The space between us evaporates. In this tiny closet of broken things, he looks at me like I’m the only whole thing in the universe.

“In my time,” he says, his voice low and steady, “we do not have poverty. We do not have hunger. We have safety. We have optimization.” He gestures to his gray uniform. “I was assigned this tunic. I was assigned my work cycle. I was assigned my rest periods. I did not choose them.”

He reaches out, his hand hovering near my face. He waits, silently asking permission.

I nod, barely breathing.

His fingers graze my cheek. “You choose your clothes. You choose your food. You choose to work at... Murphy’s. You choose to be angry. You choose to cry.” His thumb brushes away a smudge of dirt on my jaw. “To me... you are the richest thing I have ever seen.”

The air in the room shifts. It feels heavy, charged with static.

“You think my messy life is rich?” I whisper.

“I think freedom looks like chaos to those who have never seen it,” he says. “And you are beautiful chaos.”

My heart is doing that traitorous flip again, but this time it’s not fear. It’s something warm, something that spreads through my chest like hot coffee on a winter morning. Back home, boys look through me. Or they look at me with pity. Or, like Brad today, they look at me with contempt.

Atlas looks at me with wonder.

“Atlas,” I breathe.

“Nessa.” He says my name like it’s a spell. Like it’s a forbidden word.

He leans in. I don’t pull away. I don’t want to. I tilt my head up, my back pressing against the cold concrete shelf of his archive.

“Is this...” He pauses, his face inches from mine. “Is this a greeting in your time?”

“Sometimes,” I whisper. “If you choose it.”

“I choose it,” he says firmly. “I choose this.”

He closes the gap.

His lips are cool, hesitant at first. He doesn’t know the geometry of a kiss; he presses too firmly, then too softly. But then I sigh, my hands finding the rough fabric of his tunic, pulling him closer, and he learns.

He learns fast.

The kiss deepens. It’s not like the movies. It’s desperate and clumsy and terrifyingly real. It tastes like the apple – sweet and sharp. It feels like the static shock of touching a doorknob, a jolt that rattles my teeth.

For a moment, the sterile world above doesn’t exist. The drones, the debt, the dollar bill thrown at my head, the foreclosure notices – it all vanishes. There is only the rough concrete against my back, the amber light, and this boy who thinks my broken life is a masterpiece.

He pulls back slightly, resting his forehead against mine. His breathing is ragged.

“That was...” He sounds dazed. “That was not efficient.”

I let out a breathless laugh. “No. It wasn’t.”

“My heart rate is elevated to one hundred and forty beats per minute,” he whispers. “My cortisol levels are fluctuating. This is... dangerous.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No.” He runs his hands down my arms, gripping my elbows as if to anchor himself to the earth. “I never want to stop. I want to feel everything. I want to know what everything tastes like. I want to know why you cry when you are sad, and why you laugh when you are terrified.”

“I can show you,” I say, the words slipping out before I can stop them. “I can tell you about all of it.”

“Nessa,” he says, and there’s a crack in his voice. “I have spent eighteen cycles in the gray. Today... today is the first time I have seen color.”

I lift my hand to touch his face, tracing the sharp line of his jaw. He leans into my touch, closing his eyes.

“We have to – ” I start, but I’m cut off.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The sound is shrill and violent.

The amber light overhead turns a pulsating crimson. The peaceful hum of the room is replaced by a mechanical grinding sound from the ceiling.

Atlas pulls away from me, his eyes snapping open. The wonder is gone, replaced instantly by terror. He looks at his wristband. The blue hologram is flashing red.

“They are purging the ventilation shafts,” he says, his voice flat. “They know there is organic contamination.”

“The apple?” I ask, looking at the half-eaten fruit in my hand.

“You,” he says. “To them, you are the contamination.”

The room shakes. Dust trickles down from the ceiling.

“They are flooding the lower levels with sterilization gas,” Atlas says, typing frantically on his wristband. “Sixty seconds. Maybe less.”

“Gas?” I grab his arm. “Atlas, what do we do?”

He looks at me, then at the door, then back at his collection of broken treasures. He grabs the piece of blue glass and shoves it into his pocket. Then he grabs my hand.

“We cannot stay here,” he says. “There is no hiding place left.”

“Then we go back up?”

“Up is death. Down is sealed.” He looks at me, his dark eyes searching mine. “Nessa, how did you get here? Exactly.”

“I... I fell. There was a blue light in the basement. I was crying, and I just wanted to leave, and...”

“The anomaly,” he says. “It responds to emotional resonance. High-frequency neuro-chemical output.”

“English, Atlas!”

“Feelings!” he shouts over the rising alarm. “It responds to intense feelings. That is why it opened for you. You were overloaded.”

The hissing sound of gas entering the upper shaft echoes down to us. It sounds like a snake the size of a train.

“We have to make it open again,” Atlas says. “It is the only way.”

“But the anomaly is back in the boiler room! In my time!”

“The weak point in space-time exists in both places,” he says, pulling me toward the back wall where the shadows are deepest. “It brought you here. It can take you back.”

“Me?” I stop, digging my heels in. “Just me?”

Atlas pauses. The red light washes over his face, making him look like a tragic hero in a movie I haven’t seen yet.

“I belong here, Nessa. I am Unit 7. If I go with you...”

“If you stay here, they’ll delete you!” I scream. “You hid me. You ate the apple. You’re contaminated too!”

The hissing gets louder. A wisp of white vapor curls under the doorframe.

“I cannot survive in your world,” he says. “I do not know how to choose.”

“I’ll teach you!” I grab the front of his tunic, bunching the gray fabric in my fists. “I will teach you how to choose. I’ll teach you how to eat burgers and wear flannel and be messy. Please.”

The tears are coming back, hot and stinging. “Please, Atlas. Don’t make me go back to being alone. Not after this.”

He looks at my tears. He reaches out and catches one on his finger, staring at it like it’s a diamond.

“We have to jump,” he says.

“Jump where?”

“Into the breach.” He points to the corner of the room, where the air is shimmering, warping like heat off pavement. “We have to want it. We have to want to escape more than we fear the fall.”

I squeeze his hand. I think about the dollar bill on my desk. I think about his lips on mine. I think about the taste of the apple.

“I want to go home,” I say. “But I want you with me.”

“Then hold on,” Atlas says.

The door blasts open. White gas pours in, thick and choking.

Atlas pulls me into the shimmering air. And together, we fall.

Chapter 6

The future doesn’t sound like flying cars or laser blasts. It sounds like absolutely nothing.

As Atlas pulls me through the corridor, the silence is so heavy it feels like pressure in my ears, like when you dive too deep in a swimming pool. Our footsteps don’t echo. The floor is some kind of matte, rubbery material that swallows sound. The walls are seamless, glowing with a faint, ambient light that has no source. There are no corners, just smooth curves.

It’s like being inside an iPhone that’s been wiped clean.

“Hurry,” Atlas whispers, though he’s not out of breath. He moves with a fluid, efficient grace that makes my stumbling jog feel clumsy. “The sterilization drones patrol the main arterials every six minutes.”

“You keep using that word,” I pant, my mustard coat flapping heavily around my legs. “Sterilization. It sounds... bad.”

“It is the removal of contamination,” he says simply, checking the silver band on his wrist. A holographic map blooms in the air, blue lines intersecting in a grid. “You are contamination.”

“Thanks,” I mutter. “Really know how to make a girl feel special.”

He glances back at me, his dark eyebrows pulling together in that confused frown. “You are welcome?”

We turn a corner, and the world opens up. The hallway ends in a massive viewing deck, a wall of glass—or whatever transparent material they use in 2157—stretching fifty feet high.

I skid to a stop. My breath hitches, but not from running.

Below us lies the city I saw in the anomaly. But seeing it through a shimmer of blue light was one thing; seeing it now, with my own eyes, is terrifying.

Silver needles pierce the violet-gray sky, connected by translucent tubes where pods zip back and forth like blood cells in a vein. Everything is symmetrical. Everything is silver, white, or gray. There are no billboards. No trash cans. No graffiti. No trees.

It’s perfect. It’s the most beautiful, horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.

“Sector 4,” Atlas says, watching me watch his world. “Home.”

“It’s so...” I search for the word. Clean? Cold? dead? “Big.”

“It is optimized for maximum population density and resource distribution,” he recites, like he’s reading from a textbook.

“Where are the people?” I press my hands against the glass. It’s cool to the touch. “There must be millions of people down there. Where is everyone?”

“It is 0900 hours during the Production Cycle,” Atlas says. “Everyone is in their designated locations. To be elsewhere is inefficient.”

“Inefficient,” I repeat. “Right.”

A soft chime echoes from the ceiling, making me jump. The light in the hallway shifts from cool white to a warning amber.

Atlas grabs my arm. His grip is firm, his fingers long and strong. “We cannot stay in the open. The biometric scanners will cycle soon. Come.”

He drags me toward a narrow maintenance panel in the wall. He taps a sequence on his wristband, and the panel slides open with a hiss. It leads into a cramped service tunnel filled with pipes and humming machinery.

“In here,” he says.

We scramble inside, and the panel slides shut behind us, cutting off the view of the silver city. The tunnel is dimly lit by emergency strips on the floor, casting long, weird shadows against the pipes. It’s warmer here, smelling faintly of ozone and hot metal.

I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the metal grating of the floor, pulling my knees to my chest. My heart is hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

Atlas stands over me for a moment, then, with a stiffness that suggests he’s not used to sitting on floors, he lowers himself down across from me. He sits with perfect posture, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees.

He stares at me. Just... stares.

“What?” I snap, defensive. I wipe a stray tear from my cheek. “Am I leaking again?”

“Your appearance,” he says slowly. “It is... a lot.”

I look down at myself. My battered Doc Martens, the fading black jeans with the hole in the knee, the mustard-yellow wool coat I found at the Salvation Army three months ago.

“It’s just clothes,” I say.

“Yellow,” he says, like it’s a foreign word. He reaches out, then stops himself. “Why yellow?”

“Because I like it,” I say. “Because it was twelve dollars.”

“Twelve... dollars?”

“Money,” I explain, realizing he probably doesn’t use cash in a world where everything is provided. “Currency. Credits. You know?”

“We are allocated credits based on contribution,” he says. “But we do not exchange them for... color.”

“I bought it at a thrift store,” I say, wrapping the coat tighter around me. It’s my armor. “It’s where you go to find things other people didn’t want anymore.”

Atlas’s eyes widen. In the dim light of the tunnel, they look like pools of ink. “You wear the discarded shells of others?”

“It’s not a shell,” I say, feeling that familiar prickle of shame I get when Chloe makes fun of my outfits. “Look, my family doesn’t have a lot of money, okay? I can’t just walk into the mall and buy whatever I want. I have to hunt for it.”

“Hunt,” he repeats. He shifts closer, sliding on the grate. “You... hunt for your coverings?”

“Yeah. You dig through bins of unmatched socks and stained t-shirts until you find something that actually works. Something that fits. Something that...” I trail off, running my thumb over a loose button on the coat. “Something that feels like you.”

“That sounds...” He pauses, searching for the word. “Dangerous. Unpredictable.”

“It is,” I say. “Sometimes you find nothing. Sometimes you find a designer coat with a missing button for twelve bucks.”

“And you chose it,” he whispers. “You looked at all the options and you selected this one. Because of... preference.”

“Yeah.”

He reaches out again, and this time, he doesn’t stop. His fingertips graze the sleeve of my coat. The wool is rough and pilly, scratchy against the skin. He rubs the fabric between his thumb and forefinger, mesmerized.

“It is textured,” he murmurs. “Inefficient. It creates drag. It traps particulates.”

“It’s warm,” I say. My voice comes out breathless.

He looks up from the coat to my face. We’re so close I can see the flecks of gray in his dark eyes. I can smell him—he smells like rain on concrete, clean and sharp.

“In my time,” he says softly, “we do not choose our coverings. We are assigned Unit attire based on our sector and function. Gray for Sector 4. White for Medical. Blue for Administration. The fabric is self-cleaning, temperature-regulating, and perfectly uniform.”

“Sounds boring,” I say.

“It is safe,” he counters. “No one is judged for their covering. No one lacks a covering. Everyone is equal.”

I think about Chloe Madison and her sneer when she looked at my coat. I think about the video she posted. Poverty Princess.

“That sounds nice,” I admit. “Not being judged.”

“But,” Atlas says, his hand still lingering on my sleeve, “you have variety. You have... the hunt.”

“I guess.”

“Tell me more,” he demands, dropping his hand but leaning in with an intensity that makes me want to shrink back and lean forward at the same time. “What else do you choose?”

“Everything,” I say. “Well, not everything. I can’t choose my parents or my house or the fact that our car breaks down every other Tuesday. But... I choose what I listen to. What I eat.”

“You choose your nutrients?” He looks scandalized.

“I work at a diner,” I say. “Murphy’s. It’s a place where people come to eat.”

“A communal feeding center.”

“Sure. But we have a menu.”

“A menu,” he says, tasting the word.

“It’s a list,” I say, my hands moving as I talk, trying to paint a picture of Murphy’s in this sterile metal tube. “Pages and pages of options. Pancakes. Waffles. Burgers. Fries. Salad. Milkshakes in three different flavors.”

“And the unit—the person—selects the nutrients based on what their body requires for optimal function?”

I laugh. It’s a dry, ragged sound, but it’s a laugh. “God, no. People pick the stuff that’s terrible for them. They pick the bacon cheeseburger with extra grease because it tastes good. They pick the chocolate shake because they had a bad day and they need comfort.”

Atlas stares at me, his mouth slightly open. “They consume based on... emotion?”

“All the time,” I say. “I have this regular, Old Pete. He comes in every Tuesday. He orders the meatloaf special, not because it’s good—it’s actually kind of dry—but because it reminds him of his wife who passed away. He eats it and he remembers her.”

Atlas looks like I just told him I can fly. “He ingests inefficiency to provoke memory.”

“He eats it because he loves her,” I say.

Atlas pulls back, leaning against the curved wall of the tunnel. He looks overwhelmed. “Love,” he says. “We read of this in the Archives. A chemical imbalance that creates irrational attachment.”

“It’s not a chemical imbalance,” I say, feeling a sudden, fierce need to defend Old Pete, and my parents, and Kevin. “It’s... it’s everything. It’s why my parents fight about bills—because they want to take care of us and they’re scared they can’t. It’s why I was crying. Because I was scared I’d never see them again.”

Atlas looks down at his hands. They are perfectly clean, unscarred. “We do not have fights,” he says quietly. “We do not have bills. We do not have fear.”

“That sounds...”

“Perfect,” he finishes. “That is what we are told. The Optimization removed all variables that lead to conflict. No poverty. No hunger. No war. Every Unit has a function. Every Unit is provided for.”

He looks up at me, and his eyes are haunted.

“But we do not have meatloaf that tastes like memory,” he says. “We do not have yellow coats that you hunt for. We do not have...” He gestures to the space between us. “This.”

“This?”

“Conversation,” he says. “Curiosity. In Sector 4, we exchange data. We do not exchange... stories.”

I look at him—really look at him. He’s beautiful, in a statue-esque way. Symmetrical features, clear skin, perfect hair. But there’s a hunger in his eyes that has nothing to do with food.

In my world, I’m the girl with the thrift store clothes and the empty bank account. I’m the girl people look through, or look down on.

But here, looking at Atlas, I feel... rich.

I have stories. I have tastes. I have choices, even if they’re just between paying the electric bill or going on a field trip. I own my mess.

“You really don’t get to choose anything?” I ask. “Not even your friends?”

“Associations are determined by work proximity,” he says. “I was decanted in Hatchery 7. Raised in Cohort Beta. Assigned to Structural Maintenance based on aptitude tests at age five.”

“Decanted?” I choke out. “You don’t have... parents?”

“Bio-contributors are irrelevant,” he says dismissively. “The State is the parent.”

My stomach twists. I think about my dad’s tired eyes when he comes home from overtime. I think about my mom frantically cleaning the kitchen when she’s stressed. They drive me crazy. They scream about money. But they are mine.

“That’s lonely,” I whisper.

“Lonely,” he repeats. “A state of distress caused by isolation. I am rarely isolated. I am always connected to the Grid.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I say. “You can be in a room full of people—or connected to a Grid—and still be lonely if no one actually sees you.”

Atlas goes very still. The amber light in the tunnel reflects in his dark eyes.

“I see you,” he says.

The air in the tunnel suddenly feels very thin. My heart does a traitorous little flip.

“You’re just a glitch to them,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling, toward the city above. “A variable to be corrected. But...” He reaches out again, and this time, he touches my hand. His skin is cool, dry. “You are vibrant. You are... loud.”

“I’m loud?” I laugh nervously.

“Your colors. Your emotions. Your stories. You are the loudest thing I have ever encountered.”

He laces his fingers through mine. It’s awkward, like he’s testing the mechanics of how hands fit together, but it sends a jolt of electricity straight up my arm that has nothing to do with sci-fi tech.

“I do not want you to be sterilized,” he says gravely.

“I’m big on that too,” I say.

“I want...” He frowns, looking at our joined hands. “I want to know what a burger tastes like.”

I smile. A real smile, the first one since I woke up this morning. “Grease and salt and heaven.”

“Heaven,” he murmurs. “An archaic concept of paradise.”

“Murphy’s Diner,” I correct him.

Suddenly, the amber lights in the tunnel turn a pulsing, angry red. A klaxon blares—a sharp, digital screech that makes me clap my hands over my ears.

Atlas scrambles to his feet, pulling me up with him. The gentle curiosity is gone, replaced by instant, high-alert tension.

“They found the breach,” he says, his voice tight. He taps frantically on his wristband. “The sensors picked up your thermal signature. Or maybe the sound of your... laughing.”

“My laughing set off an alarm?”

“Joy is inefficient,” he says, grabbing my shoulders. He looks behind us, down the dark tunnel, then back at the panel we came through. “They are sealing the sector. We cannot go back to the viewing deck.”

“Then where do we go?” Panic rises in my throat, choking me.

“The waste disposal chutes are too narrow,” he mutters to himself. “The ventilation shafts are monitored.”

The panel behind us hisses. Someone—or something—is trying to override the lock. I hear a mechanical whirring, like a drill.

“Atlas,” I say, grabbing the front of his gray tunic. “Atlas, do something.”

He looks at me. For a second, he looks terrified. Not for himself, I realize with a jolt. For me.

“There is one place,” he says. “It is strictly prohibited. If we are found there, it is not just sterilization. It is immediate deletion.”

“Better than immediate death right now!” I yell over the klaxon.

“It is my... archive,” he says. “My collection.”

The door hisses louder. Sparks fly as the lock melts.

“Take me there,” I say. “Now.”

Atlas nods. He grabs my hand, tighter than before. He pulls me away from the door, deeper into the tunnel, toward a dark, gaping hole in the floor that looks like a drop into nothingness.

“Jump,” he says.

“What?”

“It is a gravity slide. It will catch us. Jump!”

The door behind us explodes inward. A silver, floating drone with a glowing red eye swoops into the tunnel.

I don’t look back. I squeeze Atlas’s hand, shut my eyes, and step into the dark.

Chapter 5

The first thing I notice is the silence.

It’s not the quiet of an empty house or a library. It’s a heavy, pressurized silence, like the air inside a jar that’s been vacuum-sealed.

The second thing I notice is the light. It’s aggressive. A flat, clinical white that pushes against my eyelids, demanding I wake up.

I groan and try to roll over, but the surface beneath me is hard. Not concrete-hard, but smooth and unyielding. My stomach does a slow, sickening flip, like I’ve just stepped off a spinning carnival ride.

“I can’t do it anymore.” My own voice echoes in my memory. The boiler room. The blue light. The fall.

My eyes snap open.

White.

White ceiling. White walls. White floor.

I scramble backward, my boots squeaking against the pristine surface. Panic spikes in my chest, hot and fast. I’m not in the school basement anymore. There are no rusted pipes, no water stains named Bob, no smell of mold.

Here, it smells like… nothing. Or maybe like new electronics. The smell of ozone and static.

“Hello?” My voice cracks. It sounds too loud in this room, bouncing off the surfaces with nowhere to hide.

I check myself. I’m still wearing my mustard-yellow wool coat – warm and dry now, the rain gone. I’m still wearing my faded black jeans. I still have my hands, my feet. I pat my chest, feeling the frantic rabbit-kick of my heart.

Okay. I’m alive.

I push myself up. My legs feel like jelly, trembling under my weight. I spin in a slow circle. The room is a perfect cube. No furniture. No visible light fixtures, just a glowing ambient radiance coming from everywhere at once.

And no door.

“Okay,” I whisper, the word shaking. “Okay, Nessa. Think. You fell. You hit your head. This is a hospital. A very fancy, very minimalist hospital.”

But deep down, I know that’s a lie. Hospitals have noises. Beeping monitors, squeaky gurney wheels, nurses talking in the hallway. This place has the silence of a tomb.

I take a step toward the wall. It looks like plastic, but when I touch it, it’s cool and smooth, vibrating with a faint, almost imperceptible hum.

“Is anyone there?” I shout, banging my fist against the white panel. “I need help! My name is Vanessa. I think I’m hurt.”

Nothing.

I rest my forehead against the cool wall, fighting the urge to vomit. I wanted to escape, I think. I wanted out.

Did I die? Is this what happens? You ask the universe to make it stop, and it puts you in a white box for eternity?

A soft hiss behind me makes me jump out of my skin.

I spin around, fists raised – though I have no idea what I’m planning to do with them.

A section of the wall that I could have sworn was solid has slid open. And standing in the opening is a boy.

I freeze. He freezes.

He’s tall – taller than Kevin – with sharp, angular features that look like they were carved out of marble. His hair is dark, cut short and precise, not a single strand out of place. He has the kind of face you see on billboards for expensive cologne, the kind of face that usually comes with a smirk.

But he isn’t smirking. He’s staring at me with wide, dark eyes.

And he is entirely, completely gray.

He’s wearing a fitted tunic made of some matte fabric, slate-gray pants, and gray boots. Even his skin looks pale, washed out under the harsh lights.

For a heartbeat, neither of us moves. We’re just two statues in a white room.

Then he blinks. He looks at his wrist – where a thin, silver band glows with data – and then back at me. He looks confused. Not scared, not angry. Just... baffled. Like he’s found a penguin in his bathtub.

“Identify,” he says.

His voice is smooth, calm, and utterly devoid of inflection.

I lower my fists slightly. “What?”

He steps into the room. The door hisses shut behind him, sealing us in. The space suddenly feels much smaller.

“Identify,” he repeats, taking a step toward me. “You are not designated for this sector. Your biometrics are not registering on the local net.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say, backing away until my shoulders hit the wall. “Where am I? Who are you?”

He stops five feet away from me. He tilts his head, his eyes scanning me from my damp, frizzy hair down to my scuffed thrift-store boots. His gaze lingers on my coat. He winces, actually winces, as if the color physically hurts him.

“Your outer layer,” he says, pointing a long finger at my chest. “It is… discordant.”

“It’s wool,” I say defensively, clutching the lapels tight.

“It is yellow,” he corrects. “Extremely yellow. Why would you choose such a pigment? It serves no camouflage or thermal regulation purpose better than standard issue.”

“Standard issue?” I let out a breathless, hysterical laugh. “Dude, I got this at Salvation Army for twelve bucks. Look, I don’t care about my coat. I want to know where I am. Did I get arrested? Did the school call the cops?”

He frowns. It’s a small, precise movement of his eyebrows. “School? Cops? Your dialect is archaic.”

He taps the silver band on his wrist. A holographic screen projects into the air above his forearm – blue light scrolling with numbers and symbols I don’t recognize. My jaw drops. I’ve seen holograms in movies, but this is crisp, solid.

“No record found,” he mutters to himself. He looks up at me, his expression shifting from confusion to something sharper. Suspicion. “How did you bypass the perimeter sensors? There was no breach alert.”

“I didn’t breach anything!” I push off the wall, anger starting to override the fear. That’s the thing about the worst day of your life – eventually, you just get tired of taking hits. “I fell. I was in the basement at Northwood High, and there was this blue light, and I fell, and now I’m in this… Apple Store nightmare room. I just want to go home.”

He stares at me. “Northwood High?”

“Yes. Northwood. Off Route 9?”

He lowers his arm, the hologram vanishing. He looks at me with a strange intensity. “Northwood is a historical district. It was repurposed for habitation units forty cycles ago.”

“Repurposed?” My stomach drops again. “What are you talking about? I was there ten minutes ago.”

He shakes his head slowly. “That is impossible.”

He walks past me. I flinch, but he doesn’t reach for me. He moves to the wall I was leaning against. He waves his hand in a specific pattern, and the opacity of the white wall dissolves.

It becomes a window. Floor to ceiling.

I turn to look. And the breath leaves my lungs in a rush.

I’m expecting to see the parking lot. Or the football field. Or even a hospital courtyard.

I am not expecting the sky to be the wrong color.

It’s a pale, violet-tinged gray, thick with clouds that look like spun metal. And below…

“Oh my god,” I whisper.

There are no trees. No uneven asphalt roads. No strip malls.

The city is a sea of silver and white needles, towers stretching up so high they seem to pierce the clouds. They’re connected by translucent tubes where pods zip back and forth in perfect, silent rhythm. Everything is clean. Everything is symmetrical. Everything is moving, but there is no noise. No honking horns, no sirens.

It looks like a computer chip grown to the size of a metropolis.

I press my hands against the glass. It’s cold. “Where is this? Is this… is this New York?”

The boy steps up beside me. He looks out at the view with zero interest, as if it’s the most boring thing in the world.

“This is Sector 4,” he says. “The year is 2157.”

I freeze.

I hear the numbers, but my brain refuses to process them. 2157.

“That’s not funny,” I say. My voice sounds very small.

“Humor is inefficient,” he replies automatically. “I am stating fact.”

I turn to look at him. Really look at him. The gray clothes. The perfect skin. The tech on his wrist. The way he speaks.

I think about the blue vortex. The feeling of time unspooling.

“No,” I breathe. I back away from the window. “No, no, no. I have to go back. My mom – the electric bill – I have a shift at Murphy’s tomorrow.”

“Murphy’s?” he asks.

“The diner! I have to work!”

He stares at me blankly. “Work? You mean your assignment? You are too young for a labor assignment. You should be in Education Module 7.”

“I’m seventeen!” I yell. The panic is clawing at my throat now. “I’m a junior! I have a life!”

I grab the front of his gray tunic. The fabric is smooth, synthetic. “Send me back. You have to send me back.”

He looks down at my hands clutching his chest. He doesn’t push me away, but he goes very still. “You are making physical contact. This is unregulated.”

“I don’t care!” I scream.

And then, it happens. The dam breaks.

All of it – the fight with my parents, the humiliation in the cafeteria, the dollar bill hitting my desk, the fear, the cold, the hunger – it all crashes down on me at once.

I let go of him and wrap my arms around myself, sliding down the wall until I’m crouching on the floor. A sob rips out of my chest. It’s ugly and loud and wet.

I bury my face in my knees, shaking violently. I’m crying so hard I can’t breathe. I’m lost. I’m literally lost in time. I’m never going to see Kevin again. I’m never going to fix things.

I cry until my throat hurts, until the silence of the room is completely shattered by my jagged gasps.

After a long time, I realize the boy hasn’t moved.

I lift my head, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my mustard coat. My face feels hot and swollen.

He is kneeling in front of me.

He’s not touching me. He’s just crouching there, watching me with that same intense confusion. But there’s something else in his eyes now. Curiosity.

“You are leaking,” he says softly.

I sniff, a wet, gross sound. “I’m crying, you idiot.”

“Crying,” he repeats, testing the word. “Biological response to physical trauma. Where is your injury?”

“I’m not injured,” I choke out. “I’m sad. I’m scared.”

He tilts his head. “You are expelling hydration because of… emotion?”

“Yes.”

He reaches out, his hand hovering near my face. He hesitates, then touches the track of a tear on my cheek. His fingers are cool. He pulls his hand back and looks at the moisture on his fingertip.

“That seems… inefficient,” he says. But his voice isn’t critical. It sounds almost filled with wonder. “To lose resources because of a feeling.”

“Well, in my time, we have feelings,” I snap, though it lacks any real heat. “We feel things, and we cry, and we wear yellow coats because we want to.”

He looks at the yellow wool, then back at my face.

“In my time,” he says quietly, “we have safety. We have order. We do not have… this.”

He gestures vaguely at me. At the mess of me.

“It’s chaotic,” he says.

“It’s life,” I whisper.

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he glances at the door, and for the first time, he looks worried.

“The perimeter drones will cycle back in three minutes,” he says, his tone shifting back to brisk efficiency. He stands up and offers me a hand. “If they find you here – unregistered, discordant, leaking fluids – they will detain you for sterilization.”

I stare at his hand. It’s pale and perfect.

“Sterilization?” I squeak.

“It is unpleasant,” he says. “Come with me.”

I look at the window, at the gray, alien world outside. Then I look at the boy. He’s the only thing in this entire terrifying future that has looked at me like a person, not a glitch.

I reach up and take his hand.

“I’m Nessa,” I say.

He pulls me to my feet. The grip of his hand is firm, grounding.

“I am Unit 7-Atlas,” he says. Then he pauses, and adds, “Just Atlas.”

“Okay, Atlas,” I say, gripping his hand tighter as the door hisses open. “Get me out of here.”

The bell above the door at Murphy’s Diner jingles, a sound that usually triggers a Pavlovian response in me to grab a pot of coffee and put on my customer-service smile. Today, it just sounds like a taunt.

I burst in, breathless, my mustard-yellow coat damp from the drizzle that started halfway through my run from the school. My hair is definitely doing a frizz-halo thing, and I can feel the sweat trickling down my back.

I check the clock behind the counter. 4:02 PM. Two minutes late.

Jerry is standing by the pie case, arms crossed over his grease-stained apron. He’s staring out the window at the empty parking lot. The diner is silent. Not the comfortable silence of a lull between lunch and dinner, but the heavy, suffocating silence of a place that’s slowly dying.

“I’m here!” I gasp, shrugging off my coat and stuffing it onto the hook by the kitchen door. “Sorry, Jerry. Construction traffic.”

A lie. I ran the whole way.

Jerry turns. He’s a big man with a face that looks like it was carved out of half-melted candle wax—droopy and tired. He doesn’t look angry about the two minutes. He looks sad. Which is infinitely worse.

“Nessa,” he says. His voice is a low rumble. “Don’t worry about the punch clock.”

I freeze, one arm halfway into my polyester uniform vest. “What?”

“It’s dead, kid. Has been all week.” He gestures to the empty booths, the pristine vinyl gleaming under the fluorescent lights. “I sent Marco home early. Honestly, I was about to call you and tell you not to come in.”

My stomach drops through the floor, plummeting straight into the basement I just fled.

“No, Jerry, please,” I say, the desperation in my voice pitching it too high. I sound like a child begging for candy, not a seventeen-year-old begging for survival. “I can clean. I can organize the walk-in. The grout in the men’s room needs scrubbing. I’ll do it.”

Jerry sighs, rubbing a hand over his bald head. “I can’t pay you to scrub clean grout, Nessa. You know I love having you here, but the margins are… they’re thin right now.”

I do the math instantly. It’s automatic. It’s the superpower nobody wants. If I lose this shift, that’s fifty dollars gone. Plus tips, though on a Tuesday, tips are usually just loose change from old guys drinking bottomless coffee. Fifty dollars is the electric bill partial payment. Fifty dollars is groceries for four days.

“Please,” I whisper. “Just for a few hours. Whatever you can spare.”

Jerry looks at me. He really looks at me. He sees the red rims of my eyes, the way my hands are shaking, the desperation radiating off me like heat waves. He knows about my dad’s back injury. He knows about the mortgage.

He caves.

“Alright,” he grumbles, turning back to the register. “Stay until seven. But if nobody walks through that door by six, I’m cutting you loose early.”

“Thank you,” I breathe. “Thank you, Jerry.”

I tie my apron with trembling fingers. I have a job. I have three hours. I can breathe.

By 5:30 PM, I have wiped down every table three times. I have refilled the salt shakers until they are level. I have reorganized the sugar packets by color.

Two customers came in. Old Man Miller, who ordered a black coffee ($1.75) and left a quarter tip, and a trucker who ordered a slice of cherry pie to go and didn’t tip at all.

I’m standing behind the counter, staring at the napkin dispenser, counting seconds.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.

My phone buzzes in my apron pocket.

Strictly speaking, phones aren’t allowed on the floor. But since the floor is empty, I pull it out. The screen is cracked in a spiderweb pattern near the top, making it hard to read the notification.

It’s a text from Mom.

Dad’s overtime got canceled again. His back flared up. I’m so sorry, honey, but I need you to transfer whatever you have for the electric. They’re coming tomorrow morning to shut it off.

I stare at the words until they blur.

Overtime canceled. That was the lifeline. That was the plan. Dad works extra, Mom picks up a cleaning shift, and I cover the gap.

Now the gap is a canyon.

I check my bank app. $12.43. My paycheck from Murphy’s doesn’t clear until Friday. The cash in my pocket is exactly three dollars and forty cents—my change from yesterday plus Miller’s quarter.

I type back: I don’t get paid until Friday.

Three dots dance. Then: I know. I’m sorry. I’m going to try to sell the TV.

I grip the counter so hard my knuckles turn white. The TV is ten years old. It has a line of dead pixels running down the center. We’d be lucky to get twenty bucks for it.

I feel it rising in my throat—the scream I swallowed in English class. The scream I swallowed when I saw the blue light. It’s hot and acidic.

The bell above the door jingles.

I shove the phone into my pocket and paste on the smile. It feels tight, like a mask that’s too small for my face.

“Welcome to Murphy’s, sit anywhere you—”

“Hey, Ness.”

It’s Kevin.

My shoulders slump. The smile slides off. “Hey, Kev.”

Kevin looks out of place in Murphy’s. He’s wearing a vintage blazer he found at the Goodwill bins and eyeliner that makes his dark eyes look huge and worried. He doesn’t sit. He walks straight up to the counter and leans over it.

“You weren’t at the bus stop,” he says.

“I ran.”

“You ran? All the way here?” He looks at my hair. “That explains the electrocuted poodle look.”

“Thanks,” I say flatly. “I’m working, Kevin.”

“You’re staring at a napkin dispenser,” he corrects. He lowers his voice. “I heard about English class. Brad is a neanderthal. I put laxatives in his Gatorade during gym.”

Despite everything, a small snort of laughter escapes me. “You didn’t.”

“I cannot confirm or deny,” he says with a smirk that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “But he spent fourth period sprinting to the bathroom.”

The laughter dies as quickly as it came. “It doesn’t matter, Kev. He threw a dollar at me. Like I was a stripper. Or a charity case.”

Kevin’s face softens. “Nessa, screw them. Seriously. In two years, we’ll be out of here. You’ll be a famous historian or whatever, and Brad will be peaking as an assistant manager at AutoZone.”

“Two years,” I repeat. It sounds like two centuries.

“Hey,” Kevin says, reaching across the counter to tap my hand. “Did you see the comments on Chloe’s video? People are actually calling her out. Look.”

He pulls out his phone.

“No,” I say, shrinking back. “I don’t want to see it.”

“It’s good! Look, this girl from the debate team wrote—”

He taps the screen, and the video starts playing before he can mute it.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

The sound of me dropping dimes onto the cafeteria tray.

Then Chloe’s voice, shrill and laughing. “Wait for it... wait for it... oh my god, she’s actually counting pennies. Poverty Princess at work, guys.”

The sound echoes in the empty diner. It bounces off the chrome and the glass. It sounds louder here than it did in the cafeteria.

“Turn it off,” I snap.

“But look at the comment—”

“I said turn it off!”

I slap his hand away. The phone clatters onto the countertop.

Kevin freezes. He looks hurt, but I can’t stop. The dam has broken.

“You think this is funny?” I hiss, my voice shaking. “You think some debate girl defending me changes anything? I have twelve dollars, Kevin. My dad can’t walk. My mom is selling our broken TV to keep the lights on. And I’m standing here hoping nobody comes in so I don’t have to serve them, but also praying everyone comes in so I don’t get fired.”

I grab a rag and start furiously wiping a spot on the counter that is already clean.

“Nessa...”

“Stop trying to fix it!” I yell. “You can’t fix it! You can’t joke it away! It’s not a scene in a movie where we play a montage and everything gets better! It’s just... it’s just my life. And it sucks.”

Jerry sticks his head out of the kitchen pass-through. “Everything okay out here?”

I stop wiping. I’m breathing hard. I look at Kevin, who looks like I just slapped him. I look at Jerry, who looks worried.

I look at the clock. 5:45 PM.

I can’t do this. I can’t be the poor girl, the charity case, the employee, the daughter, the victim. I can’t be Vanessa anymore.

“I have to go,” I whisper.

“Nessa, you have an hour left,” Jerry says gently.

“I feel sick,” I lie. Or maybe it’s not a lie. The room is spinning. The smell of old grease is making me gag. “I have to go. Keep the tips. Just... I have to go.”

I don’t wait for permission. I snatch my coat off the hook. I just turn and bolt.

“Nessa!” Kevin calls after me.

I hit the door, the bell jingling its mocking little tune, and run out into the rain.

I don’t go home. Home is a house full of backward clocks and unpaid bills and parents who look at me with guilt in their eyes.

My feet carry me back the way I came.

The rain has picked up, cold stinging needles against my arms. I’m shivering inside my damp coat, but the cold air on my face feels good. It numbs the outside, matching the numbness spreading on the inside.

I find myself at the back of the school. The construction fencing around the old gymnasium annex is loose—Kevin showed me the gap weeks ago. I slip through, my sneakers squelching in the mud.

The school looms above me, a dark brick monster. The renovation crew has gone home for the day. The windows of the old wing are black, staring like empty eye sockets.

I shouldn’t be here. It’s trespassing. It’s dangerous.

But I can still hear it.

Not with my ears. It’s a vibration in my sternum. A hum. That blue light in the basement.

Different, it had whispered. Escape.

I need escape. I need it like oxygen.

The side door to the boiler room is propped open with a brick—careless construction workers. I slip inside.

The air is stagnant and smells of concrete dust and mold. I pull my phone out to use the flashlight, but the battery is dead. Of course it is.

I don’t need it, though.

Down the metal stairs. Past the groaning boiler. Toward the back, where the renovation crew smashed through the false wall.

The glow is brighter now.

It pulses against the far wall, casting long, dancing shadows across the floor. The blue is deeper, richer than before. It’s not just cobalt; it’s the color of the ocean at midnight, the color of a bruise, the color of a storm.

I stop at the edge of the broken brickwork. My teeth are chattering, but I don’t think it’s from the cold anymore.

“What are you?” I whisper into the dark.

The anomaly swirls in response. The shards of light—they look like glass, but fluid—spin faster. The hum rises in pitch, harmonizing with the ringing in my ears.

It feels… waiting.

It feels like standing on the edge of a high dive. That moment of vertigo where gravity wants you, and you just have to let go.

I step over the rubble.

The room inside is freezing. My breath comes in white puffs.

I stare into the center of the spinning light. It’s hypnotic. If I look closely, I think I can see things in the shards. Not reflections, but... scenes?

A boy with dark eyes looking at the sky. A silver city that looks like it’s made of needles. Me, but not me—a version of me wearing a dress made of light, laughing without covering my mouth.

Liar, my brain whispers. It’s a hallucination. You’re having a breakdown.

Maybe I am. Maybe this is what it looks like when you finally snap.

But I don’t care.

“I can’t do it anymore,” I say to the light. Tears hot and fast, tracking through the rain on my cheeks. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be me.”

The light flares. It reacts to my voice—no, to my pain. It swells, the blue turning blindingly white at the edges.

The hum becomes a roar.

My shadow stretches out again, detaching from my feet. It steps into the vortex.

And then, the vortex reaches back.

It’s not a wind. It’s a physical force, like a giant hand grabbing the front of my shirt. It yanks me forward.

I scream, but the sound is swallowed by the roar.

I try to dig my heels in, survival instinct finally kicking in, but the floor is slick with condensation. I slide.

No. Wait. I didn’t mean—

My foot catches on a piece of rubble. I stumble.

I fall forward, arms outstretched to catch myself, but there is no floor.

There is only the blue.

It hits me like a wall of ice water. The cold seizes my muscles. The world dissolves. The smell of dust and mold is replaced by the smell of ozone and antiseptic.

The ground vanishes. The ceiling vanishes.

I am spinning, disassembled, scattered into a million atoms of light.

And for a split second, before consciousness blinks out, I see the dollar bill from English class floating in the void beside me.

Then, darkness.

Chapter 3

Technically, the alarm on my phone didn’t fail. The battery died sometime around 3:00 AM because the charging cable has a sweet spot the size of a pinhead, and apparently, I rolled over in my sleep and severed the connection. But it doesn’t matter. The yelling downstairs is louder than any digital chime.

“Peter, it is the third notice! The *third* one!”

My mother’s voice is a jagged thing, sharp enough to cut through the floorboards and the thin rug I bought at a garage sale for two bucks.

“I know, Linda. I know. I’m handling it.” My dad sounds like he’s speaking from underwater—muffled, heavy, drowning.

“Handling it? They’re going to shut it off by Friday. How do we handle no electricity? Do we cook on the radiator? Oh wait, the gas bill is overdue too!”

I stare at the ceiling. There’s a water stain in the corner shaped like a grimacing face. I named him Bob years ago. *Good morning, Bob,* I think. *At least you don’t have to go to high school.*

I roll out of bed, the air in my room biting at my exposed skin. Our house is a sieve; it holds heat about as well as I hold onto my patience these days. I plug my phone back in, jiggling the cord until the lightning bolt icon flickers to life, then grab my robe.

Downstairs, a door slams. The engine of my dad’s ancient Ford coughs, splutters, and finally roars to life with a sound like a dying dragon. He’s escaping. I don’t blame him.

I time my exit from the bedroom perfectly. Mom will be in the kitchen, aggressively scrubbing dishes that are already clean, fueled by panic and caffeine. If I move fast, I can make it to the bathroom without having to discuss the concept of foreclosure over a bowl of store-brand cereal.

I turn the shower handle. It squeaks, protesting. I wait.

And wait.

The water comes out in a pathetic drizzle, and it is ice cold. Of course. The water heater is on its last legs, another casualty of the chaotic ecosystem that is my family’s finances. I stand under the freezing spray for exactly ninety seconds—just enough to wake up, not enough to get hypothermia—and scrub fast.

*One, two, three. Breathe. Just get through today.*

Back in my room, the outfit selection is a strategic operation. I need something that says “I didn’t try too hard” but also covers the fact that my wardrobe hasn’t been updated since freshman year. I pull on black jeans that are fading to gray and a striped long-sleeve tee.

Then, the coat.

It’s a mustard-yellow wool coat I found at the Salvation Army three years ago. It’s warm, which is the most important thing, but it’s also distinct. Loud. It’s a beacon. But my other jacket has a broken zipper, and the wind outside is whipping against the windowpane with personal vendetta levels of force.

Mustard yellow it is.

I grab my backpack and descend. The kitchen smells like burnt toast and stress.

“Nessa?” Mom calls out, her back to me. She’s hunched over the counter, staring at a stack of envelopes like they’re venomous snakes.

“Running late, Mom. Love you,” I lie about the time, not the love. I grab a bruised apple from the fruit bowl.

“Wait,” she says, turning. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She looks ten years older than she did last month. “Nessa, honey, did you pick up that extra shift at Murphy’s this week?”

My stomach twists. “Yeah. Thursday and Saturday.”

“Good. That’s good.” She hesitates, her fingers twisting a dishrag. “Do you think… when you get paid on Friday… could you help with the electric? Just until Dad’s overtime check clears?”

The twist in my stomach becomes a knot. That check was supposed to go toward the AP History field trip deposit. The one everyone is going on. The one I’ve been saving for since September.

I look at her. I see the desperation she’s trying to hide behind a tight smile.

“Yeah, Mom,” I say, my voice flat. “I can cover the electric.”

“You’re a good girl, Vanessa. We’ll pay you back. I promise.”

“I know.”

I walk out the door before I can say something cruel, biting into the bruised apple. It tastes like mush.

Northwood High is divided into two distinct castes, visible the moment you hit the parking lot.

To the left, near the athletic fields, is the glistening row of Range Rovers, Jeep Wranglers, and the occasional BMW, bought by parents who work in the city and treat the suburbs like their personal resort. To the right, affectionately dubbed “The Junkyard,” are the sedans with mismatched doors and rusted wheel wells.

I park my Corolla—a hand-me-down from my uncle that shakes violently whenever I go over forty-five—in the deepest corner of The Junkyard.

“Hey, Ness!”

I flinch, then relax when I see Kevin. He’s leaning against his car, shivering in a denim jacket that is definitely not warm enough for November. Kevin is the only person at Northwood who knows exactly how much is in my bank account, mostly because his is usually empty too.

“Morning,” I mumble, locking my car manually because the fob died in 2019.

“You look like you want to murder someone,” Kevin says, falling into step beside me. “Is it Jerry? Did he cut your hours again?”

“No, Jerry’s fine. It’s just… life.” I pull the mustard coat tighter around me. “The electric bill is eating my field trip money.”

Kevin winces. “Ouch. Sorry, Ness. Maybe I can spot you? I made decent tips last night.”

“You’re saving for your car insurance,” I remind him. “If you don’t pay it, you lose the car, you lose the job, and then we’re both walking to school in the snow.”

“Logic is the enemy of friendship,” he sighs. “But you’re right.”

We merge into the stream of students heading for the double doors. It’s like entering a nature documentary where the predators are wearing Lululemon.

“Oh, look,” Kevin whispers, nudging me. “Royalty approaching.”

Chloe Madison and her entourage are walking up the main steps. Chloe is wearing a cream-colored coat that probably costs more than my car. She’s laughing at something on her phone, her perfect blonde ponytail swinging like a pendulum.

As we pass, she looks up. Her eyes scan over Kevin, dismiss him, and land on me. The smile doesn’t drop, but the temperature of it changes. It goes from warm to absolute zero.

“Cute coat, Vanessa,” she says. “Vintage?”

“Thrift,” I say, clutching my backpack straps. “It’s called recycling, Chloe. You should try it sometime.”

Kevin stifles a snort.

Chloe’s smile sharpens. “Adorably eco-conscious. See you in English.”

She sweeps past us, leaving a cloud of expensive vanilla perfume in her wake.

“I hate her,” I whisper.

“She’s threatened by your authenticity,” Kevin says loyally.

“She’s threatened by nothing. She just likes poking things with sticks to see if they bleed.”

The morning is a blur of lectures I don’t hear and notes I forget to take. My brain is running a background calculation that never ends: *Check is $180. Electric bill is usually $120. That leaves $60. Gas is $30. Lunch money...*

By fourth period, my stomach is making noises that sound like a dying whale. The apple wore off hours ago.

I head to the cafeteria. Usually, I pack lunch—peanut butter sandwiches, mostly—but we were out of bread this morning. I have exactly three dollars and fifteen cents in change at the bottom of my bag.

The cafeteria line is long. I grab a tray and a slice of pizza that looks like it’s been under the heat lamp since the Reagan administration.

When I get to the register, Mrs. Gable looks tired. “Three twenty-five, hon.”

I swing my backpack onto the little shelf and start digging. I pull out a handful of quarters. Then dimes.

“One fifty... one seventy-five...” I count them out on the plastic tray.

Behind me, someone sighs loudly.

“Come on,” a male voice says. “Some of us are starving.”

My face heats up. “Just a second,” I mumble. I find a nickel. Two pennies. I’m ten cents short.

I dig deeper, my fingers scraping against lint and pencil shavings.

“Seriously?” It’s Chloe’s voice. Of course. She’s right behind me in line. “Is there a toll booth back here?”

“I’m just looking for a dime,” I say, keeping my head down.

“Here.”

A perfectly manicured hand reaches past me and taps a credit card on the reader.

“I got it,” Chloe says to the cashier, flashing a benevolent smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Put hers on mine. We can’t have everyone waiting while she excavates for copper.”

“I have the money,” I snap, finally finding the last dime.

“Don’t be ungrateful, Ness,” Chloe says, her voice sickeningly sweet. She leans in, holding her phone up. I realize too late that the camera lens is pointed right at my pile of change on the counter. “We all need a little charity sometimes.”

She snaps a picture.

I leave the pizza. I grab my bag and walk away, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I don’t look back, but I can hear the giggles.

I hide in the library for the rest of lunch, pretending to study while I scroll through social media, waiting for the inevitable.

It takes twenty minutes.

A notification pops up. Tagged in a story.

I tap it against my better judgment. It’s the video. It zooms in on my hands shaking as I count out the dirty quarters, then pans up to Chloe’s face making a sad-pouty expression.

The caption, in bright pink glittering font: *Poverty Princess holding up the line again. Someone start a GoFundMe before we all starve. #charitycase #northwoodproblems*

I flip my phone face down. I feel small. Microscopic. Like I could slip between the molecules of the air and disappear, and it wouldn’t make a difference to the universe.

English class is usually my sanctuary. I like stories. I like escaping into worlds where the problems are dragons or oppressive governments, not electric bills and mean girls.

But today, the classroom feels like a courtroom.

I slide into my seat in the back row. Kevin isn’t in this class; I have no buffer.

Mr. Henderson is droning on about *The Great Gatsby*, talking about the green light and the American Dream. The irony is so thick I can taste it.

“Fitzgerald illustrates the hollowness of the upper class,” Mr. Henderson says, pacing the front of the room. “The idea that wealth insulates you from consequence.”

A soft *ping* ripples through the room. Then another. Someone giggles.

I keep my eyes on my desk, staring at the grain of the wood. I know what they’re seeing. Chloe must have reposted it, or someone screen-recorded it.

“Miss Davis?” Mr. Henderson asks.

My head snaps up. “What?”

“I asked for your interpretation of Gatsby’s shirts. Why does Daisy cry over them?”

“Because...” My throat is dry. “Because she realizes what she missed. It’s not about the shirts. It’s about... security.”

“Interesting.” He turns back to the board.

From the corner of my eye, I see movement. Brad, a linebacker whose neck is wider than his head, is whispering to Chloe two rows over. He grins.

He crumples something up in his hand.

He winds up and throws it.

The paper projectile arcs through the air. It’s a perfect shot. It lands right in the center of my desk, bouncing once before settling next to my notebook.

It’s not a note.

It’s a dollar bill.

The classroom goes silent. Even Mr. Henderson stops writing, his chalk hovering over the blackboard.

I stare at the wrinkled face of George Washington. It looks like he’s judging me.

“Thought you might need it for the vending machine,” Brad calls out. “Since you’re struggling.”

Laughter. Not a roar, but a ripple. Snickers behind hands. Smirks.

The dollar bill sits there like a paper airplane of humiliation. I don’t look up to see who threw it, because that would mean seeing their faces, and I can’t handle their smirks right now. I can’t handle the pity in Mr. Henderson’s eyes.

I can’t handle any of it.

Something inside me snaps. It’s not a loud snap—it’s the quiet sound of a tether finally fraying all the way through.

I stand up.

“Vanessa?” Mr. Henderson says.

I grab my backpack. I snatch the dollar bill from the desk, hating myself for needing it.

“Vanessa, sit down.”

I walk out the door.

“Vanessa!”

I’m running before I hit the hallway.

I don’t have a plan. I just need *away*.

I can’t go to the bathroom; that’s the first place they’ll look, and girls cry in bathrooms. I refuse to give them the satisfaction of knowing I’m crying.

I can’t go to my car; the parking lot monitors will catch me.

I run past the gym, past the cafeteria where the ghost of my humiliation still lingers over the salad bar. I find myself in the East Wing.

The East Wing is the oldest part of Northwood High, built in the fifties. It’s currently a construction zone. There are plastic tarps hanging from the ceiling and “DANGER: ASBESTOS REMOVAL” signs taped to the walls. Students aren’t allowed here.

Perfect.

I duck under a sheet of heavy plastic sheeting. The air here is cooler, smelling of drywall dust and old copper. The sounds of the school—the bells, the laughter, the squeak of sneakers—fade away, replaced by the dripping of a leaky pipe somewhere in the dark.

I keep walking until I find the stairwell to the basement. It’s roped off with yellow caution tape.

I don’t care. I duck under it and descend.

The stairs are concrete, worn smooth by decades of footsteps. It gets darker the lower I go. The only light comes from the dusty windows at ground level above me, casting long, distorted shadows against the peeling paint.

I reach the bottom landing. It’s a storage area, cluttered with broken desks, old globes where the Soviet Union still exists, and stacks of dusty textbooks.

I drop my backpack on a pile of gym mats and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. I pull my knees to my chest, burying my face in the scratchy wool of my mustard coat.

And then, I let it out.

The sob rips out of my throat, ugly and jagged. I cry for the cold shower. I cry for the electric bill. I cry for the look on my mom’s face, and for the dollar bill on my desk, and for the fact that no matter how hard I work, no matter how many shifts I pick up at Murphy’s, I will always be the girl counting pennies while everyone else swipes platinum cards.

It feels like the weight of the building is pressing down on me. I want to be anywhere else. *Anywhere.*

“I just want to leave,” I whisper into the silence. “I just want to go.”

*Hummmmm.*

The sound is low, barely on the edge of hearing. It’s not the boiler. It’s too smooth, too rhythmic.

I lift my head, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

The air in the corner of the basement, behind a stack of rusted filing cabinets, is… shimmering.

I blink, thinking it’s tears blurring my vision. I rub my eyes.

The shimmer is still there. It looks like heat haze rising off asphalt in July, but it’s freezing down here. And there’s a light—a faint, pulsing cobalt blue—bleeding through the cracks in the back wall.

I shouldn’t investigate. I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that when you find the glowing thing in the creepy basement, you run the other way.

But I’m not scared. I’m too empty to be scared. I’m just curious. And for the first time all day, I’m not thinking about money.

I stand up, my legs shaky. I walk toward the filing cabinets.

The hum gets louder. It vibrates in my teeth. It feels… sad? No, that’s crazy. A sound can’t feel sad. But it feels like a heavy sigh, a longing that matches the hollow ache in my own chest.

I push one of the cabinets aside. It scrapes loudly against the concrete, revealing a hole in the brickwork that definitely wasn’t part of the original blueprints. It looks like the renovation crew smashed through a false wall and then abandoned it.

Inside the hole, the air is thick. The blue light isn’t coming from a bulb. It’s just *there*, hanging in the center of a small, windowless chamber like a suspended drop of ink in water.

It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying.

It calls to me.

*Escape,* it seems to whisper. *Different.*

I step through the broken wall. The air instantly drops twenty degrees. My breath plumes out in front of me, illuminated by the blue glow.

The anomaly swirls. It looks like a mirror that someone took a hammer to, thousands of shards of light spinning slowly around a center of absolute darkness.

I reach a hand out. I don’t know why. My body is moving on autopilot, drawn by a magnetic pull I can’t resist.

“Hello?” I whisper.

The hum spikes in pitch. The shards of light spin faster.

My shadow stretches out in front of me, hitting the blue light. But instead of stopping on the floor, my shadow seems to detach itself, stepping into the light before I do.

I gasp and try to pull back, but the gravity of the thing has me now. It’s not pulling my body; it’s pulling my emotions. It’s latched onto my desperate need to escape, feeding on it, amplifying it.

RIIIIING.

The school bell cuts through the silence like a physical blow. The sound shatters the trance. I jerk my hand back, gasping as the cold air rushes into my lungs. The blue light flickers, dimming slightly.

I scramble backward, my heart hammering against my ribs. What was that? What was I doing?

I check the time on my cracked screen. I have twenty minutes to get to Murphy’s before Jerry fires me.

I scramble up the stairs, leaving the blue light pulsing in the dark. But as I run, I can still feel it pulling at me, a hook buried deep in my chest.

Chapter 2