The warehouse smelled of dust and diesel.
Makun clocked in at 8:47, more than an hour late, and Marcus was already waiting by the time clock with his arms crossed. The supervisor's face sat somewhere between annoyance and satisfaction, as if Makun's lateness had confirmed something he had been looking forward to saying.
"Late again."
"Traffic." Makun didn't stop. He took his gloves from the hook and kept walking toward his station.
"Traffic," Marcus repeated, following him. "Always traffic. Or the alarm didn't go off, or the bus broke down. You've got an excuse for everything, don't you?"
Makun swallowed the answer climbing up his throat and pulled on the gloves. "I'm here now."
"Yeah, you are. For now." Marcus leaned against a support beam and watched him the way a hawk watches a field. "We're having a talk at the end of your shift. About reliability."
Makun said nothing. He turned to the crates waiting to be sorted and started checking labels against the manifest on his tablet, and after a while Marcus wandered off, muttering something Makun chose not to hear.
The morning crawled. He moved crates, scanned barcodes and restocked shelves, the kind of repetitive work that numbed the mind and kept the body busy. He preferred it that way. Busy hands left less room for the dream to creep back in, for the glass and the slow tapping on the other side of it.
At 11:23 he was moving a pallet of tablets, the expensive kind, when the forklift began to grind. It was not a noise he had ever heard it make. He eased off the accelerator, but the sound only got worse, metal screeching against metal, and when he pulled the brake the whole machine lurched. The pallet tipped, the boxes slid, and four of them hit the concrete with a crack that rang through the warehouse like a gunshot.
Work stopped. Heads turned.
Makun stared at the wreckage: shattered casings, exposed circuit boards, screens crazed into spiderwebs.
"What the hell did you do?"
Marcus was already running over, red-faced, the veins standing out in his neck.
"The forklift—" Makun began.
"The forklift was fine yesterday! You broke it!"
"I didn't—"
"You break everything!" Marcus jabbed a finger at the boxes. "You know what those cost? Twelve hundred each!"
Makun climbed down and looked at the pallet. The straps hung loose, frayed at the edges and tied wrong. Whoever had loaded it had never really secured it at all.
"The straps were already loose," he said, keeping his voice level. "Whoever loaded this—"
"Don't blame someone else for your screw-up."
"I'm not. Look." He pointed at the frayed ends and the bad knots. "This was never secured. That's not on me."
Marcus didn't look. "It's always somebody else's fault with you, isn't it?"
A loose circle of workers had gathered by now, waiting to see how it would end. Makun felt his jaw tighten. "I'm telling you what happened."
"And I'm telling you you're done." Marcus pulled out his phone and started photographing the broken tablets. "That's four grand in damaged goods, and it's coming out of your paycheck."
"That's illegal," Makun said flatly.
"Sue me." Another photo. "Or accept that you're a walking disaster and get out of my warehouse."
Something in Makun gave way then. It happened quietly, like a thread pulled too tight for too long finally parting, and when he spoke his voice was very calm.
"I didn't break your forklift. I didn't load that pallet. And you're not taking money out of my pay for something I didn't do."
Marcus stepped into his space. "You threatening me?"
"I'm telling you how it is."
"Here's how it is." Marcus lowered his voice, cold and deliberate. "You're fired, effective immediately. Don't bother with your locker. Security will walk you out."
The words hung in the air. Makun looked at the satisfaction on Marcus's face and at the other workers, who were suddenly very interested in anything except him. He could argue, or demand to speak to someone higher up, but he already knew how that conversation would go, because he had had it at every job he had ever lost. Equipment broke around him, accidents followed him, and every job ended the same way.
"Fine." He pulled off his gloves and dropped them on the forklift seat. "I'm gone."
He walked to the exit without looking back. Jerome from security met him at the door. Jerome had always been decent, and he was decent now; he said nothing, just walked Makun to the gate and buzzed him out, and the gate clanged shut behind him.
Makun stood on the sidewalk and took stock. No job, no savings, no backup plan, and forty-eight hours to find three months of rent.
Then the sky opened.
The rain came down cold and heavy and soaked through his shirt in seconds, and he didn't bother looking for shelter. He just started walking. The city blurred around him, cars hissing through puddles and people huddled under awnings, everyone carrying on as if nothing had happened, because for them nothing had.
Twenty minutes passed before he realized where his feet were taking him.
The overlook was a small park at the edge of the Lower City, where the ground fell away into a concrete ravine. Rusted, unused train tracks ran along the bottom, and beyond them the city sprawled in stacked gray blocks, its lights starting to flicker on as the afternoon bled toward evening. Makun gripped the wet railing and let the rain hammer his back while his mind did what it always did at moments like this, and laid out the whole account.
He had been abandoned at birth, with no family and no history, and the only thing that came with him was his name, written on a card tucked into his blanket. Nobody at the hospital had ever found out who wrote it. He had passed through seven foster homes before he aged out at eighteen, and none of them had kept him. He had heard the reason whispered often enough: there was just something off about that boy. Then came the jobs, too many to count, dishwasher, stock clerk, delivery driver, security guard, warehouse worker, and every one had ended the same way, with him fired or let go and somehow always at fault. Friends had drifted off. A couple of girlfriends had tried to live with the chaos that followed him and given up. The last one, Amara, had put it plainly: "It's like you're cursed, Makun. I can't do this anymore."
He had laughed it off at the time. Cursed. What a ridiculous idea.
But standing in the rain, looking out at the gray city laid out like a corpse, he couldn't shake it. What if she had been right? Not bad luck, not coincidence, but something real, something he couldn't see but could feel, like pressure behind his eyes or chains around his chest. The dream came back to him: the chains, the glass, the shapes that fed.
What if it's real?
The chill that went down his spine had nothing to do with the rain.
"No," he said aloud, shaking his head. "That's insane."
The thought stayed anyway. He stood at the railing until the rain thinned into drizzle and his fingers went numb on the metal, and then he turned and walked home.
The apartment looked even worse when he was dripping on its floor. He peeled off his shirt, wrung it out over the sink and hung it over a chair. His phone buzzed with three missed calls from an unknown number. Debt collectors, probably; they had been circling for months. He ignored them.
The eviction notice was still in his pocket, damp and soft from the rain. He smoothed it out on the table by the window and sat in front of it, and its weight pressed on him the way the glass had pressed in the dream. For the first time in a long time, Makun had no idea what to do next.
He picked up his phone and stared at the empty search bar. His thumbs hovered over the screen, and then, almost without deciding to, he typed.
Why is everything going wrong in my life
He hit search.