Chapter 3

  Sailing Stones

  When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV.

  Not the TV other kids watched. All the fun, bright, loud stuff on Disney Channel, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. As much as I wish I could have.

  In the homes I bounced between, that kind of television was either rotting your brain or it required cable they didn’t have. Sometimes they would frame it like a moral stance; ‘No, you can’t watch it, its evil.’ and then sometimes it was just poverty dressed up as principle.

  Either way, it usually meant PBS.

  It was what you got when the world wanted to be educational instead of kind.

  PBS had quiet voices and soft colors and adults speaking slowly; like if they didn’t raise their voice you’d lean in and pay closer attention to them.

  The sort of channel that didn’t try to entertain you so much as improve you. Which—if you were ten and already tired of being a project child—had a certain irony to it.

  I remember one afternoon in particular. I was alone in a living room. The couch had those stiff cushions that never quite stopped feeling new because nobody relaxed enough to sink into them.

  So I sat on the floor, by this old coffee table. I had my knees pulled up to my chest with my chin resting on them while I watched this program.

  It was about stones.

  Bear with me on this.

  It started the way PBS always starts—it was some guy standing in front of a huge landscape, smiling too wide, excited about something no normal person would call exciting, unless you were a geologist.

  He said “Rocks!” with the kind of reverence people usually reserve for newborns or finding God.

  He pointed to one like it was a treasure the rest of the world just hadn’t noticed yet.

  And my first thought, honestly, was: ‘yeah, that’s a rock.’

  There are rocks everywhere. The whole world is basically rocks with water on top. I was ten and understood that much at least.

  I would’ve turned the TV off if he’d stayed on that. If the entire segment had been “stones are formed by—” with diagrams and polite little ‘fun facts’, I’d have been gone in a flash.

  But that wasn’t what he was actually focusing on. This was all proverbial foreplay, really.

  He leaned in, pointed over his shoulder, and the show shifted gears. The music changed. The camera focused and panned across the landscape and then I saw what was really there. A huge salt plane.

  It looked weirdly alien—all empty and white under the sharp blue sky. The words ‘Death Valley’ sizzled across the screen. I’d never heard of that place before then, and it already sounded like a warning to not go there.

  Then he said it: ‘Sailing Stones.’

  Even the name felt like it didn’t belong in science. Maybe more like something you’d find in a fairy tale with a geography lesson stitched into it.

  He pointed out these large stones sitting in the open on the plain—stones bigger than a small child and evidently they moved.

  Not rolled downhill, or pushed by people, dragged by animals.

  No, they moved on their own!

  The show flashed pictures: thick, large rocks squatting in that white, blank expanse; like they’d been dropped there by some bored god. And behind them—tracks. Long grooves carved into the crusty white ground. Some were straight, but some were curved and looped; like the stone had changed its mind halfway through its course.

  I noticed a few of the paths even crossed each other. Like if they had seen their close friend and then reconnected after a long time, conversations taking place before they continued on their journey to nowhere.

  The lines stretched for yards, sometimes dozens of yards. Distances that felt impossible when you remembered what was actually making them.

  My ten-year-old brain—already trained to assume the world was mostly disappointment—was in awe so hard it physically stung me. I could never forget that feeling.

  I leaned closer to the screen.

  This was different.

  A stone is supposed to be the one thing that never goes anywhere. Like the ultimate proof that time can pass without anything truly changing. It doesn’t have wants. It doesn’t decide. It doesn’t travel.

  And here were stones with trails behind them like they’d been walking. Like they had been sailing.

  The guy on screen spoke in that PBS voice—gentle, calm—but the words were explosive to me.

  ‘Inexplicable.’ He said, ‘Mysterious. No one has seen them move.’ Yada, yada, yada.

  It was the kind of buildup that made me believe I was about to witness something that splits the very world in half.

  And the show knew how to do it too. It teased, it paced, it held the truth just out of reach like a hand playing keep-away with a dog and I was the mangy mutt who wanted more.

  It offered possibilities the way adults offer candy right before they take it back.

  They told stories first. The man brought up Indigenous stories—spirits that lived in the land, that could inhabit the stones, they would ride them across the flats. The camera lingered on the empty salt pan while he said it, as if the air itself might ripple with something unseen.

  Then my imagination lit up; it was like a fire exposed to oxygen.

  I saw it all instantly: little sprites with painted faces and bright eyes, perched on the backs of their mighty steeds like riders on a slow-moving beast.

  I pictured them steering, whispering directions. The stones turning and gliding, leaving those lines like signatures of expeditions into the great unknown.

  I pictured the desert at night full of silent motion—stones sailing through moonlight like they were late for a meeting only the ghosts could attest to.

  It wasn’t even that I believed it was true, but it also was.

  I wanted it to be. So desperately. I think I was just envious of the mystery, the uncertainty.

  I think I understand it now. Why this memory burns so bright.

  If those stones could move for reasons we didn’t understand—in that valley of death hiding something both alive and strange—then maybe the world wasn’t as figured out as everyone around me pretended it was.

  Maybe there were corners where rules were still being learned. They are filled with forces that didn’t care if you were good or bad, wanted or unwanted—like I was.

  Maybe there was magic that didn’t ask permission. That didn’t need to pray. That didn’t need to believe in someone coming to get them. Because they could make their own way.

  And for a few minutes, I actually had that. This simple show let me have that hope, as intangible and indescribable as it may have been.

  It let me sit in the glow of mystery. It let me feel like the universe was bigger than foster homes and moving boxes and adults telling me “it’s only for a while.”

  And then, inevitably, it did what it had to.

  It explained the mystery away.

  The man’s voice stayed warm, but the words turned from the fantastical, and mythical into something clinical.

  They started talking about ice and the thin sheets forming on the salt plains in the right conditions. They started talking about wind and temperatures. About the way water can freeze, and then crack and shove. They showed diagrams and models. Stuff that was so lost on me.

  I couldn’t understand any of it. I didn’t want to.

  All I realized and cared about was that they took the spirits out of the story and replaced them with measurements.

  The stones weren’t sailing anymore because they were piloted by the spirits.

  They were just slipping in a weird little choreography of climate and physics.

  Ice forming at night—the desert cold enough for it—and wind pushing the sheets, the rocks dragged along like furniture on a polished floor.

  No secret intelligence, intent or meaning to it all. Just consequence.

  A freak event in a freak place that happened to look like wonder from far enough away.

  I stopped paying attention before they finished. I felt it in my chest before I could name it: That drop. The hollow click of the world locking back into place.

  I stared at the screen, my face hot with betrayal even though nobody had promised me anything.

  “What a load of horse shit!” It came out loud and sharp in the quiet living room. I should have been thankful no one heard me, but I doubt I would have even cared even if they did.

  I stood up so fast my knees cracked against the coffee table. I smacked the TV buttons like I could punish it for what it made me feel.

  I clicked the channel away, then ripped the power cord out. Like it had just robbed me of my imagination, held it up, and then dissected it with a sinister smile.

  I was just ten, but I understood something that day—something I’d keep understanding over and over. And maybe that’s why I am remembering it now.

  The world knows how to sell you wonder.

  It knows how to build up the shape of magic—how to make you lean in, how to make your eyes widen and how to make you believe there’s a hidden door in reality. And then, right when you’re ready to step through it, it shows you the hinge. The screws. The mechanism. All that boring and dull truth.

  It wasn’t even that science was wrong.

  It was that the reveal felt like a lesson:

  Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  Don’t hope too hard.

  Don’t look for spirits in the desert.

  Times were oddly simpler back then.

  There’s a special kind of simplicity to being a kid who still believes disappointment has an off switch.

  When I think about that program I get that dull ache inside—not because of the stones; honestly. But because of that moment right before the answer. That suspended breath. The brief, dangerous possibility that there is something else. I so desperately needed something else.

  I just wish I could go back to that moment right before the explanation.

  The moment where my world was cracked open enough for something impossible to slip through.

  ~~~~

  We sat around the small dinner table in the apartment.

  Alaric had ordered food for us and we’d eaten about an hour ago now—maybe two, actually. Time was doing that thing it always does when you’re trapped in a room with someone who never stops talking: stretching, thinning out, turning see-through until it’s hard to keep tabs on. Hard to keep tabs on anything, really, especially without a phone.

  The plates were still there, pushed to the side now like they’d been dismissed. The delivery bag sagged against the table leg, grease-stained and crumpled, the only thing in the room that looked like it had lived a life. My glass of soda was sweating a ring into the cheap wood, a slow little bruise spreading wider every minute. The harsh overhead light made everything look tired—me, the furniture, the air itself.

  And I needed a cigarette so bad my damn teeth hurt.

  Alaric—Alan, now technically—had been going nonstop for this plan of his. Not just a plan either, but an actual playbook.

  He didn’t ramble, either. That would’ve been easier to ignore. No, this guy was so well-spoken it was literally disgusting. Every sentence came out polished, weighted.

  He constructed and built this whole plan of his carefully and deliberately, every possible failure accounted for like he had mapped it out already.

  And the worst part about all of it was he wasn’t wrong.

  Evidently he knew the narrative in the sense of how it should play out. Like he had a blueprint tucked behind his ribs. That gave us an advantage, sure. But where we now have to tread in the unknown is that we are considered ‘characters’.

  And when you also add in how all these other ‘characters’ and ‘cast’ members have free will, you start to realize just how much of a shit show of probabilities you need to worry about. Variables neither of us can really control. Meaning that over time, the version of the narrative he knows will no longer be there. So the best solution for this, apparently, is planning out and trying to map all those routes before the story gets too far gone.

  So, he talked.

  And talked.

  And kept talking.

  Probabilities and potential outcomes 101; the biggest class on ‘What if…’ I had ever taken. And I was doing this mostly unwillingly.

  “If this, then that.”

  “If we intervene here, this could happen, which might lead to this.”

  “But if we leave it alone, we risk that.”

  Branches on branches on branches until the whole thing becomes this massive fucking tree with a thousand rotting limbs that no sane motherfucker could ever hope to keep straight. Unless you are a little man in a suit who evidently knows everything.

  And yet somewhere in this messed up equation is where I am.

  Because as I learned, through the draft—the book which I am apparently bound to like a dog on a leash—I can see all potential outcomes. Every branch, fork and path that ends with a bang or a whimper can be seen by me.

  Through this deity author person, they took my blood and bound me to all of them. Some weird voodoo shit. Like they cracked me open and poured the story into my veins.

  To summarize, this mostly feels like I am in Ocean’s Eleven, except my “Danny Ocean” is a geriatric and the score we are after is this fucked-up reality with probability being all the lasers keeping us from the fabled “desired conclusion” that he keeps circling with his pen.

  Alaric had his readers on, perched low on his nose.

  There was a notebook open in front of him filled with tight writing. Not lists really—more lattices with boxes and arrows extending to all the branching possibilities.

  Every now and then he would pause, tap the pen against the table twice, and then continue as if he’d just finished consulting with a council of invisible advisors.

  At first I tried. I really did.

  But eventually the words started slipping past me. They became the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the drone of the window AC: constant, present, impossible to fully tune out and impossible to care about. My attention kept skidding off his sentences like my brain was coated in oil.

  So I glanced up at the clock on the wall instead. It was one of those cheap circular ones with black numbers that looked like they were printed by someone who had a vendetta against good fonts. The second hand clicked too loudly. Every click felt like it was mocking me for sitting here, for letting him keep me trapped in this bright, stale, rectangle of time.

  Seriously. It was almost midnight.

  Almost.

  The day was trying to end. The night was trying to begin. And Alaric was still mid-monologue like we didn’t just have the busiest day of our lives… okay, that was a bit of an overstatement, but still.

  “...And so,” he was saying, “with this in mind, we must be sure to account for the possibility of compromising the story.”

  He continued.

  “You need to understand not just the immediate outcomes, but the potential for ruining future outcomes that are more valuable if we maintain them. A minor intervention now may appear beneficial and still result in catastrophic deviation later.”

  He looked up at me over the rim of his readers.

  “Do you understand?” he asked after a pause, then added, as if simplifying for a child, “It is okay to lose some small battles, essentially, for the sake of winning the larger war at hand.”

  I blinked at him.

  Okay Napoleon.

  My brain tried to reboot. Somewhere in my mind, a switch flipped from listening to enduring.

  I latched onto the simplest translation I could manage.

  “Yeah,” I said, voice flat. “I get it. Basically, ‘don’t be a fucking idiot.’ I understand.”

  He stared at me for half a second too long. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, he took his readers off and folded them in one hand like he was closing a book.

  “Indeed.”

  Jesus, there it was. That word. It can only be a word, because it needs at least one more to be his crutch phrase.

  I sucked the inside of my cheek, trying to hide my disappointment before it could turn into something louder. I was beginning to realize it: “Indeed,” wasn’t agreement. It wasn’t yes. It was the sound he made when he wanted to file your comment into a drawer labeled unhelpful, but tolerated.

  He put the readers down beside the notebook and sat back, still looking at me like I’d just mispronounced something sacred.

  I swallowed a groan. My knee bounced under the table. The craving for nicotine sat behind my throat like a trapped animal. I felt close to turning myself inside out if I had to wait any longer.

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  I pushed my chair back with a scrape.

  “Look, Alaric,” I said, standing up, rubbing my palms over my jeans like I could wipe the restlessness off. “I’m pretty tired, and I really need a cigarette or I’m not gonna be useful to anybody.”

  His eyes tracked me calmly, like I was a variable he’d already included in his little lattice of doom.

  “Sit,” he said, not loudly. Not angrily. Just like the word was supposed to work.

  I didn’t sit.

  “No, I need to stand,” I shot back. “I’ve been sitting for hours. We’ve been sitting for hours.”

  I dragged a hand through my hair, exhaling sharp. The air in the apartment tasted like old grease and paper. Probably just the take out though, it wasn’t there before.

  “Look,” I said, forcing myself to keep it practical, “I need to be able to, like… function here, you know? I don’t even have my—”

  I patted my pockets out of habit and came up empty, which made irritation flash hot in my throat.

  “Do you know where my wallet and phone are? Not that it would even work here, I guess. And another thing, actually, do we even use dollars here? Sorry, I feel insane asking that, but I’m asking it cause I don’t even know.”

  He didn’t even smirk. He didn’t even look amused by the fact that I was stuck asking basic reality questions like a confused tourist, all while he’d just spent hours explaining some bigger, greater picture than what I actually wanted to focus on—at least in this moment.

  “Yes,” he said, ticking the answers off with the same patient tone he used for everything else, “we use dollars. No, your phone would not work here. Our employer simply brought you over and not anything else that you own.”

  Our employer.

  That phrase is gonna make my skin crawl. What, all of this is some kind of fucking job? Okay, well, is there an HR department for ripping someone out of their life and dropping them into a fucking book? Because I need to file a goddamn complaint.

  Alaric—Alan—stood. His chair made a controlled little sound against the floor. He moved toward the living room area where he’d set a briefcase earlier—one I recognized from that night on the sidewalk, funnily enough. I don’t remember much from that night, but that briefcase was familiar, anchored in my memory like a landmark.

  He popped it open on the coffee table and started rummaging like he was reaching into a magician’s hat. Papers. A folder. Another notebook. A floor lamp. An opened 35 pound bag of… dog food? A small, neatly packaged box.

  He brought the box over and planted it in the center of the dinner table with a soft thump.

  “Okay,” he said. “You will get a small allowance each week from me. It should cover you for basic expenses.”

  He opened the box like he was unveiling a product in a commercial. Inside were items arranged with almost insulting neatness: a wallet and ID, a set of keys, and a new smartphone still wrapped in that pristine, untouched plastic that screams not yours yet.

  He slid them all toward me across the table.

  “Your rent, utilities, future tuition costs are all covered by me,” he continued, not looking up as he spoke, as if he’d already decided money was just another controllable variable. “You won’t need to worry about any of that. You have cash, a bank card, new ID and a smartphone. You should not need much else other than clothes. Things will change, of course, once you are in the Institute.”

  The keys sat there like a promise.

  Or maybe more like a leash. Keeping me locked down in this apartment. Keeping me in range.

  I picked up the phone first, turned it over in my hands. It was heavier than mine. Much newer and clean. The screen was black and blank and waiting to be filled with a life I hadn’t asked for.

  “Gotcha,” I muttered. “That allowance will be in the bank account, right? Using cash is… not really preferred for me. I have a knack for losing things.”

  As soon as I said it, something flickered across his face. It wasn’t a full expression—I didn’t know him well enough to pick up on his emotional tells—but his eyes widened just a fraction, like a thought had snapped into place behind them.

  He leaned forward. The air changed. Like a 180.

  “I shouldn’t have to say this,” he said, voice lower now, “but I will.”

  I stopped fiddling with the phone. The plastic wrap crinkled softly under my thumb, suddenly too loud.

  “You are prohibited from getting drunk,” he said. “From this point on, you are a sober man. Understood?”

  I stared at him.

  For a second, my brain tried to treat it like a joke—an overprotective dad line. Like something you say to a teenager before prom. But his eyes didn’t have any humor in them. They were flat and focused, like he was reading a warning label on a bottle of bleach.

  “O-okay,” I said, because it came out before I could stop it. Then I tried to regain some control of the conversation by pulling it into something normal. Something reasonable. “Uh… can I at least drink socially then? Yvette seemed to be keen on grabbing a couple—”

  He didn’t let me finish.

  He just shook his head once. Slow. Final.

  “You cannot get drunk here. There is too much at stake for you to do that.”

  The way he said here made my stomach tighten. Like this place wasn’t just another city. Like it was a glass room and someone was always watching.

  “Any chance you jeopardize what we are doing,” he continued, “we can and will lose control. There is no reset button here. Did you not listen to what I explained earlier? We just discussed the importance of discretion!”

  His voice climbed slightly at the end, sharp enough to scrape.

  I exhaled hard through my nose and ran my hands over my face. Suddenly the cigarette craving wasn’t even the worst itch under my skin. Now I needed a drink just out of spite.

  Here we go, I thought. Yet another old man trying to tell me how to live, except this one had a briefcase and a god complex.

  “Y-yeah!” I said, dropping my hands, forcing a laugh that came out wrong. “I did, I heard you. But if I just want a fucking drink, is that an issue? Why are you making it sound like I have a problem?”

  Alaric laughed once. A short, humorless sound.

  Then he stared me down.

  “You do have a problem.”

  The words hit harder than they should have, not because they were new, but because they were said so cleanly. No hesitation. No softness. No maybe. Just a verdict.

  I felt my jaw clench. The apartment seemed smaller all at once, like the walls had moved in to listen. Like even the clock was leaning in, eager to hear how this turned out.

  “But you cannot let it surface here,” he said, and now his voice was gaining heat, gaining force. “At all. There is too much at stake and I need you sober. There is no telling what may happen and when. If we are needed to intervene, I need you available and of sound mind.”

  His hand flattened on the table, palm down, as if he could press the point into the wood and make it permanent.

  “I cannot read the book,” he snapped, and for the first time that night I heard something raw in him—frustration, fear, something that made him sound less like a strategist and more like a man cornered. “No one can read it for you! Only you can.”

  His face was reddening. The veins at his temples stood up like he was holding back something bigger.

  “If you are too sloshed out of your god damn mind to act,” he continued, voice rising now, “then the story is fucked!”

  The word fucked sounded wrong coming out of him, like someone had put profanity into a cathedral.

  I stared at him, trying to find the angle where this was still a conversation and not an attack. My chest was tight. My hands curled around the edge of the table.

  What the hell is happening right now?

  Is this what he really thinks of me? Am I just a liability? A drunk he’s forced to babysit in a world that can’t afford mistakes?

  “If that’s what you really think,” I shot back, and my mouth was moving before my thoughts could catch up, “you stupid bastard—why did you even pick me in the first place?!”

  The second the words left me, I knew it. I felt it like stepping onto thin ice that just cracked a mile long.

  Alaric’s face changed. It didn’t contort into some dramatic rage, but it went uglier in a different way—harder, sharper, like he’d finally stopped pretending.

  “You think I chose you?” he barked, and the sound of it made the air jump. “Spare me your drivel!”

  He rose from his chair so fast the legs squealed. His hands shook—not with age, but with anger.

  “If it were truly up to me,” he spat, leaning forward across the table, “I would have found someone who would have done this with ease! Someone disciplined. Someone capable. You are merely a blemish to this world.”

  Each sentence landed like a slap.

  “Your very existence lowers its chances of survival, do you understand me?!” he continued, voice harsh now. “You would jeopardize everything, all because you are addicted to a fucking bottle. All because you can’t bear to face the reality of being treated like an unwanted mistake.”

  My throat closed. For a split second I couldn’t breathe right. My vision narrowed, not from tears—never from tears—but from that awful hot shock of being seen in the exact way you hate being seen.

  I dragged my hands down my face.

  Now I was 10 again, watching the TV shut off. Now I was 15 again, being told my choices were dangerous to the house. Now I was whatever version of me adults hated the most: a problem they’d already decided I was going to be.

  “Now you will make me bear the consequences of your ineptitude,” he said, and his face was red, his eyes bright with a kind of fury that looked more like panic. “Once again, all just another failure, another brick into the wall of this insanity! All thanks to the drunk: Jesse Parks! Take a bow, son, take a bow!”

  My name sounded like a curse in his mouth.

  Something in me snapped into motion.

  I reached forward, grabbed the wallet, ID, and the phone off the table, fingers clumsy with adrenaline. The keys clinked as I scooped them up. The chair scraped as I shoved past it, heart hammering in my ears.

  I didn’t say anything. If I spoke, it would’ve been worse. It would’ve been something I couldn’t pull back from.

  “Where are you going?” he called after me.

  I kept walking.

  The apartment felt too narrow. The air stale and my skin buzzing like I’d been plugged into an outlet.

  “Jesse!” he snapped. “Where are you going?!”

  I reached the door, yanked it open. Cold hallway air hit my face and for a second it felt like the first real breath I’d taken all night.

  I turned just enough to look at him.

  He stood by the table, shoulders squared like he was preparing for battle, his notebook and his plans spread out in front of him like he could still control something. His eyes were locked on me, furious—and beneath that, something else. Something frightened.

  “I need some air,” I said, voice tight.

  Then I slammed the door. The frame rattled throughout the hallway.

  Fuck him. Fuck this. Fuck being drafted into somebody else’s crisis.

  In my head, that same old ache throbbed—the one from being told you’re a problem, from being treated like a mistake, from being reminded that no matter how fantastical the situation gets, people still know exactly where to stick the knife.

  I stepped away from the door.

  I didn’t know where I was going yet.

  I just knew I couldn’t stay in that room another second.

  ~~~~

  The door slammed hard enough to rattle the frame.

  Alaric did not flinch.

  He stood where he’d risen—half behind his chair, half over the table—hands still curled like he was holding the shape of the argument in them.

  The apartment had gone quiet in that ugly way that follows violence you can’t see. Except for the refrigerator’s hum, the drone of the window AC, the clock ticking like it was trying to pretend nothing had just happened.

  On the table, his notes and his books lay open. Pages of ideas and plans and lattices—boxes and arrows, contingencies threaded through contingencies. All a map meant to keep a living story from turning feral.

  Alaric’s breath came slow through his nose. Measured. Controlled.

  Controlled.

  And controlled.

  Then his composure cracked like glass.

  “Fuck!”

  The word came out sharp and small, nothing like his usual diction. He swatted the papers. They lifted, scattered, slid across the cheap wood and rained to the floor in a loose, pathetic storm. The sound of pages striking linoleum was softer than it should’ve been. Like the apartment itself was careful not to make it worse.

  He stormed away from the table and into the living room, one hand clamped over his face. He stopped at the window and stared out.

  The city still breathed with life. Cars crawled through intersections, their pale headlights dragging over asphalt. A couple laughed somewhere down the street. A bus sighed and hissed at the curb. People moved with purpose and boredom and petty urgency, completely unaware they were living inside a narrative that had just been nudged off course.

  Alaric watched them like they were drowning and didn’t know it.

  Had he just lost the editor?

  The thought wasn’t dramatic; it was clinical. A line in his mental lattice turning red.

  What were the implications? What were the chances now?

  And just how many more times would he need to—

  The shelves creaked.

  Alaric froze.

  There were no shelves.

  Not really. Not the kind that made that sound. Not the old wood which bowed under the weight of far too many books, groaning under invisible strain.

  The sound came again, drawn out like a slow exhale through timber.

  Pages rustled somewhere in the room, soft and dry, like someone had opened a book in the dark.

  They were present.

  Alaric shut his eyes as if that could put distance between him and the thing that did not need distance to reach him. He took a deep breath. Held it. Let it go. He assembled his face again, piece by piece, the way a man re-fastens armor after a blow.

  When he spoke, the confidence returned—suave, safe and practiced.

  “Your timing truly is as impeccable as ever,” he said, voice smooth enough to hide the tremor behind it. “The situation is well out of hand… as I am sure you have seen.”

  A shadow flickered to the table. It did not cross the space so much as arrive—a stain that decided it belonged there now. It shifted around the pages that remained, sliding over the ink as if perusing his handiwork first, then unspooling into the floor shifting among the scattered remains of ideas and plans, like water finding the lowest point.

  Then the chorus invaded.

  Not a single voice—never a single voice—but many, layered and collapsing over one another, a message delivered through overlapping mouths that weren’t there. The whispers surged, threaded now with something like amusement.

  Poor teacher.

  Alaric’s brows furrowed. His head tilted, a gesture of correction more than confusion. Were they mocking him?

  “I have taught,” he answered, carefully. “They refused to heed my words.”

  The shadow rippled, as if the Deity had smiled without needing a face.

  You present a cage, the voices said, blunt and strangely precise. And call it shelter.

  Alaric’s jaw tightened. He hated that it landed. He hated that it landed cleanly.

  “You chose him,” Alaric replied, an attempt at offshoring the responsibility and bitterness, it all leaked into the words despite his best effort to keep them sterile. “Not I.”

  A soft laugh moved through the apartment. Not sound, exactly. More like the idea pressed into the air.

  Alaric turned away, unable to look into that bottomless dark. He stared at the window again, at the city.

  “You would… never understand,” he muttered, and it came out more honest than he intended. “You have no idea what goes into doing this.”

  The chorus drifted closer—not physically; there was no body to approach—but the sound thickened, in a way fog thickens when you recognize you’re lost.

  “You just watch,” Alaric said, and he hated how defensive it sounded even as he said it. He tried to look back at them. “You simply orchestrate it all, like an idealist's scripture. You set all these pieces. And then you somehow just expect that I will find the truth and make it so.”

  Expect, the Deity repeated, interrupting, drawing the word out as if savoring it. Yes. I expect.

  The overhead light dimmed a fraction, not out of malice but out of inevitability—like every bulb in the world understood it had been out-ranked.

  You are frightened.

  A pause. The shadow deepened.

  And when you are frightened, you are cruel.

  Alaric swallowed.

  His eyes dropped to the notebook again, not because it offered answers in the moment, but because it was easier than staring into the darkness that did not blink.

  “I need him stable,” Alaric said, quieter now, the words stripped of their edge. “I need him sober. I need him capable.”

  The chorus repeated nothing this time. It only listened in that way that felt like teeth behind a simple smile.

  “He is the editor,” Alaric added, forcing the logic back into place like a splint. “The only one bound to the draft. Only he can—”

  See? the Deity finished, soft and almost bored. Yes. He can simply see. Nothing more. Yet, for you, such perspective is everything.

  A soft rustle ran through the apartment. Not from the notebook, but from the delivery bag on the floor. The cheap paper crinkled, folding inward slightly, as if something had leaned against it—casually, intimately—like it belonged here too.

  Alaric closed his eyes. For one humiliating heartbeat he felt exactly as small as he had in that old bookstore, when the Deity first made itself known and the world’s edges had started to peel like wet paper. A mouse pinned beneath a cat’s paw, not because the cat was hungry, but because it was curious.

  But what can you do? It whispered. In that knowing cluster of voices. It always has an answer. Always knows a truth. In a way, Alaric always resented it for that.

  You can simply do what you have always done. Speak. Guide. Teach.

  Alaric’s mouth twitched. A humorless near-smile that did not reach his eyes.

  “You are… simplifying,” he said, but the defense was thin even to his own ears.

  The shadow shivered, as if laughing without sound.

  So I am wrong? the voices asked. Or are you simply accustomed to making harsh things sound noble when spoken in the right tone?

  Alaric opened his mouth.

  Closed it again.

  He did not have a clever answer. He did not have a lattice for this. There was no contingency plan for being seen too clearly.

  The chorus lowered, sharpened.

  To mistake control for righteousness is beyond you. Do better.

  Alaric’s shoulders sank a fraction. The fatigue in him—old, packed down, ignored for centuries—rose to the surface like rot through plaster.

  “He is unstable,” he said again, but quieter, stripped of accusation. “He is… fragile.”

  The Deity’s voices softened—not in kindness, but in inevitability.

  So are you.

  The truth stung because it was familiar.

  Alaric could only bitterly scoff.

  The shadow swelled. The voices became almost gentle, which was worse.

  You fear the story escaping you because you believe yourself to be the only one capable of bearing its weight.

  The Deity continued, But you forget your anger. It is also intervention. Every cruelty, a deviation. Every raised voice, a fork in the path.

  Alaric’s eyes closed.

  Jesse’s face flashed behind his eyelids—not the angry, flushed face from minutes ago, but from earlier—slouched in the chair, knee bouncing, eyes dull with exhaustion at someone else making just another plan for him to follow and him having no say in it at all.

  Alaric had seen that expression before.

  On many young faces. In many eras. It never changed, no matter how much the clothing did.

  A child shaped by being unwanted learns to pre-empt rejection by rejecting first. Not out of spite, but out of simple preservation. A reflex built in homes where affection comes with terms and mistakes with consequences.

  Alaric had stepped right into the pattern that built Jesse into what he was. And he had swung his own demands like a club, as if blunt force could carve out discipline where instead patience was required.

  He had no right.

  Not after what he had done.

  Not after what he had asked.

  He opened his eyes and turned back to the table.

  The notebook lay there like a confession. His lattices sprawled like spiderwebs across the page, each arrow a small attempt to outthink fate. He was not wrong to plan. He was not wrong to take the story as seriously as he did.

  But the boy had never needed a rulebook. He did. The boy needed a hand that wouldn’t become a fist when it got scared.

  Alaric began gathering the scattered papers from the floor. One by one. Quietly. The motion was small, almost humiliating—an old man picking up his own mess under a buzzing light—but there was something honest in it. A kind of penance.

  When his fingers brushed the edge of his notebook, he hesitated.

  His own handwriting stared back at him.

  He stared at his scribble on the edge, sobriety. He stared until the word stopped meaning what it meant and became what it had been in his mouth: A test.

  His pen lay nearby.

  He picked it up.

  His hand hovered, steady in spite of the tremor that lived deeper than muscle.

  His pen stalled.

  For a moment, his fingers tightened like they wanted to break the pen in half rather than admit that he had no idea what to add that could fix this.

  He set it down anyway.

  He slid his notes aside. His tense plans. His little diagrams meant to outmaneuver an omniscient narrative. He reached and lifted the draft.

  It had weight to it that wasn’t only physical. The book felt like a living thing resting in his palm, like holding the throat of a beast and pretending it could not bite.

  He glanced toward the corner where the shadow pooled.

  The Deity did not move. It did not need to. It was simply… there. Waiting. Watching. As if it had all the time in the world.

  Alaric swallowed.

  When he spoke again, his voice was different. The diction remained, but the armor had cracks now, and something tired seeped through.

  “I am tired of failing.” Alaric said.

  The confession hung in the apartment, heavier than any oath.

  The pattern. The accumulation. The way effort could be poured into the world like water into a sieve. The way he could do everything “correctly” and still end up here—under buzzing light, in a cheap apartment, chasing a boy down a hallway, all because he had forgotten how to be gentle.

  A part of him wanted to argue. To justify. To blame the stakes. To blame the Deity. To blame a broken child.

  But he couldn’t.

  Not honestly.

  Not after the realization that a child dragged from the street had every right to rage and he—Alaric, with all his years and all his experience—had none.

  The shadow thinned.

  Its voice became distant, as if it had stepped back not out of mercy, but to allow the moment to settle into the page.

  Yet he heard it as clear as day.

  Then don’t fail him.

  Alaric stared at the door Jesse had gone through.

  Alaric drew in a slow breath.

  His hand tightened around the draft.

  “Indeed,” he whispered—quiet, not brooding, not dismissive. A word that finally meant what it pretended to mean all along.

  He put on his coat.

  And when he opened the door, he did it gently. As if the difference mattered.

  As if the story could feel the softness.

  As if, somewhere in the branching lattice of outcomes, this—this small choice, this first step taken without anger—could become the fork that will get them where they should have been from the start.