Aster wakes sometime around 2 p.m., blinking blearily at the ceiling like it’s personally offended him.

  For a second, he doesn’t move.

  The bed—criminally soft but with enough support to keep him from sinking—cradles him like it thinks he deserves comfort. The silence is perfect. Too perfect. The windows block out every trace of city noise, every harsh shaft of light.

  His body feels… rested. Like, actually rested. Sleep. Real sleep. A full bastard of a night with no alarms, no panic jolts, no predatory thoughts gnawing at his sanity from the corners.

  He’s been out nearly twelve hours, and for most people, that might be a decent lie-in. For Aster, who’s been running on four-hour bursts since seventeen, it feels like he just mainlined three whole nights of sleep.

  And frankly, it feels suspicious as hell.

  It should’ve made him feel human. Instead, that alone feels unnatural enough to spike his pulse.

  It makes him feel vulnerable.

  He sits up too fast, with the kind of energy that comes from realizing something is terribly wrong but not knowing what to scream at first.

  Where the hell is he, really?

  Shuffling barefoot toward the kitchen, every step cold against the floor, he tries to piece together yesterday’s fever dream—almost dying of cold before being slapped through the face by a man in a robe telling him everything would make sense if he just brewed a potion in a stranger’s kitchen.

  He grimaces. Even the memory smells like bullshit.

  This house doesn’t. It smells like polish and lemon-scented surface spray mixed with a lived-in quiet that reminds him of privately owned holiday homes.

  Nothing but a monthly cleaning service has touched it in years.

  But something about it feels different. Personal. His. Almost like it could be the first place in years where he isn’t waiting for someone to kick him out.

  Which, obviously, makes him even more suspicious of it by default.

  Because nothing screams louder to those who rely on survival than the promise that everything will suddenly be okay. Which is precisely why every survival instinct in him starts bitching at once.

  He stops by the counter and presses his palm onto the cool marble. It whispers nothing back—no spectral voices congratulating him with “well done, chosen one.” Thankfully, no robbery alarms either. Just that sterile, dead calm.

  That’s when it hits him: he’s in a house a hallucination told him to find.

  A house.

  Given to him.

  By a man who doesn’t exist.

  Yeah, I definitely broke into an empty house and convinced myself a ghost gave it to me.

  His chest tightens as the logic catches up with the fact of it. Every square inch of plaster suddenly feels hostile. The walls seem to edge closer, the ceiling leaning down as if to listen. His skin prickles. There’s too much indoors in here. Too much implication.

  He doesn’t think. Thinking is a luxury for people not in existential freefall.

  He’s already moving—grabbing his still-damp clothes from the chair, the ones he arrived in last night, still smelling faintly of wet pavement and despair. He’s not about to start borrowing shirts from the ghost Airbnb.

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  He dresses in quick, messy motions, the fabric cold and clammy against his skin, like punishment for every half-delusion he’s humored lately. His fingers tremble—not from cold this time, but from that unmoored, crawling dread that starts in the chest and radiates outward until it’s indistinguishable from thought.

  By the time he reaches the front door, his breath has gone shallow. He doesn’t even check if the letter—the envelope Matter mentioned—is still on the fridge or if he imagined that as well. He’s completely pushed it from his mind as too ridiculous to even humour, just another trick his brain’s playing to preserve him from giving up entirely.

  Outside, the afternoon sun slaps him in the face with its cruel normalcy. The courtyard almost glows. Birds exist. Time has the audacity to continue. His shoes scuff the stone path as he walks, trying to keep his mind tethered to something as mundane as friction, willing himself to pile enough movement between him and the truth he’s ignoring.

  But as his foot crosses the threshold of the property, something snaps.

  A sudden surge—no, an influx—of raw, adrenal panic tearing through his body, like a wire pulled tight through his spine.

  A tearing surge of dread. Hot lightning under the skin. Every nerve screaming the same thing: something’s coming.

  The hairs on his arms stand like antennae. His heartbeat becomes percussion.

  He freezes, and for a second, everything else goes silent. Instinct howls for him to bolt, to run screaming down the street like reality itself is caving in behind him. He doesn’t. After years of living with a brain that lies louder than reality, the trick is knowing when to ignore it.

  So he does what any chronically under-medicated man would do: chalks it up to a minor symptom of his continued erosion into insanity. “Great,” he mutters. “Just another Tuesday.”

  He walks faster, hoping movement will trick his brain into thinking he’s doing something useful about it.

  The street outside is too normal to sustain panic. It’s almost cruel. Nannies herd strollers with professional dead eyes, joggers pretend they aren’t dying, and a few lunch-hour commuters discuss office air-conditioning as if the climate isn’t actively falling apart around them.

  The city lives in a bubble so far from what he feels that the disconnect makes him want to vomit.

  So normal it’s suffocating. He can almost feel the stability trying to latch on, dragging barbed hooks through the cracks in him.

  Yeah. This is definitely not where I belong, he thinks, the bitterness almost making him laugh.

  And that, on the list of things he doesn’t want to admit, lands the hardest.

  Aster, the man allergic to stability, has finally found a safe, quiet place and fled it like a rat from sunlight.

  He laughs once, bitter enough to taste, and keeps walking.

  Two blocks later, salvation appears in the form of a bus stop. Rusted sign, cracked glass, the smell of old gum and exhaust—it’s practically holy.

  He checks his pockets. Between loose change and a receipt for a meal he can’t remember eating, he scrapes together just enough coins for the fare.

  The bus wheezes up like a tired animal. He climbs aboard, nodding at the driver without meeting his eyes. Doesn’t need the social interaction today. Coins clink into the box; transaction complete, absolution paid.

  He pushes past a crowd of people in the throes of simply existing, each one wrapped in their own tiny tragedy of mundanity, and collapses into a window seat. The bus belches exhaust, sighs, and pulls away.