"Yo, spaceman. You just leave orbit again?"
The voice came from the desk on his left, close enough that Eli felt the nudge against his elbow before the words hit him. His pencil had been moving without him. A loose tangle of lines ran across a printed cell diagram, straight through the labeled sections, dragging graphite over the text beneath it. Prophase. Prometaphase. Metaphase. The words blurred under marks he didn't remember making.
Marcus leaned a little closer. "I swear, dude. You were gone. Like, fully gone."
Eli set the pencil down.
It had been happening more often lately. Little gaps where the world just kept going without him, a few seconds here, a full minute there, and every time he came back from one he had this specific feeling, like catching the tail end of something his own body had been doing on its own. He kept telling himself it was stress. Sixteen year olds zoned out. It was normal. But the gaps were getting longer, and the feeling they left behind was getting harder to shake.
"I'm here," he said.
Marcus didn't look convinced. He tipped his chair back onto two legs, balancing there with the casual confidence of someone who had already fallen three times this year and hadn't taken anything from it. "You were staring at that page for like a full minute."
Eli tried to remember what he'd actually been thinking about during that time. Nothing came back.
He looked down at the textbook again. The diagram was a clean cross-section of a cell mid-division, the kind of image that appeared in every biology course across the Somatic Republic, standardized and signed off on. There was a small line of text at the bottom of the page. Approved for Standard Academic Use, Somatic Republic Department of Education. He'd always thought it was a little strange that someone had to officially sign off on what a cell looked like.
He tried rubbing the pencil marks away with his thumb and smeared them wider instead.
Across the room, Mr. Han was still talking at the projector screen with the settled energy of someone who had made peace with not being listened to. The slideshow behind him was that pale, washed-out blue of presentation templates that nobody had updated in years. Someone in the second row was scrolling under their desk. Two girls near the windows whispered behind their hands, faces tilted close like they were sharing something important.
Outside, Port Virel sat under a sky the color of wet concrete. The gray of the harbor and the gray of the clouds were close enough to the same shade that the line between them had mostly disappeared. A cargo freighter moved slowly across the water far below, one of the big inter-coastal haulers that ran the Low Coast trade routes south. Its horn carried faintly through the glass, low and hollow, before the city swallowed it back up.
Eli pushed a hand through his hair. It fell back across his forehead the same way it always did, deep burgundy, thick, completely indifferent to whatever direction he put it. He looked at his left hand and found the familiar smear of graphite running from his pinky almost down to his wrist. Lefty problem. Chronic, at this point.
Marcus tipped his chair forward again. "You sleeping at all?"
"Yeah."
"You look cooked."
"I'm fine."
Marcus snorted softly and dropped it.
"You good for after school?" he asked.
"Yeah. I won't forget."
"Alright. Just checking."
Eli reached for his pencil again and stopped. The tip had snapped off clean at some point without him noticing. He turned it in his fingers slowly.
Then his phone vibrated in his pocket.
Once. He ignored it.
It went again. A flicker of irritation, quiet and automatic.
Marcus noticed. "Secret side piece, huh?"
Eli angled the screen just enough to read the name without pulling it all the way out.
Mom.
She didn't call during school unless she needed something specific.
He was on his feet before he'd decided to stand. "Bathroom."
Mr. Han waved without turning around. The two girls near the window laughed softly at something that had nothing to do with him.
The hallway outside was the particular kind of quiet that only existed during class hours. The building was still full, but the corridors belonged entirely to whoever happened to be in them. A janitor's cart sat near a supply closet halfway down, mop bucket half full, handle leaning against the wall. The old fluorescent lights above ran in long rows, one of them flickering at irregular intervals with the lazy persistence of something that had been meaning to die for months. Lockers lined both sides, dented in the specific spots where years of frustration had left their marks.
Somewhere deeper in the building, a locker slammed. The sound traveled the full length of the corridor before it dissolved back into the hum of the lights.
He answered while he walked.
"Hey."
"Are you in class?"
Her voice was steady, which was normal, but quieter than usual. The kind of quiet that meant she'd stepped slightly away from whatever she'd been doing.
"Yeah," he said, slowing near the end of the hall. "What's up?"
"I won't keep you long. I just wanted to ask you something before I forgot again."
He leaned back against a locker. The metal was cold through the back of his hoodie. Down at the far end of the corridor, a group of seniors pushed through the exit door to the courtyard, their voices trailing off as it swung shut behind them.
"What?"
"Did you leave your bedroom window open last night?"
He frowned. "No."
"The one facing the street."
"I don't think so. Why?"
He tried to picture the room the way he'd left it that morning. Bed. Desk. Window. Nothing had seemed off.
In the background he heard the small clink of a spoon against the edge of a pan. Cooking oil hissing at a steady temperature under it. The sounds of her morning, familiar enough that he could picture exactly where everything was in their kitchen without trying.
"I could've sworn I closed everything before bed," she said. "But it feels colder in here than it should. Like there's a draft coming from somewhere."
"It's probably just the weather. The whole apartment gets like that when the wind shifts off the harbor."
"Maybe." She didn't sound fully convinced. "You didn't come back downstairs after I went to bed?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
He looked at the scuffed tile floor. A long scrape ran across one section where something heavy had been dragged at some point and never cleaned up properly. "Why are you interrogating me?"
"I'm not interrogating you." He could hear the faint shape of a smile behind it. "I just hate feeling like I missed something."
He almost said everyone forgets things. He stopped himself. She hated being told she'd forgotten something, it made her bristle in a way he'd never fully decoded. And honestly, she was almost never wrong about it. She kept tight control over the small stuff. Locks, windows, whether the stove was off. The kind of details most people let slide because there were too many of them to hold onto. She'd held all of them his whole life, and he'd picked up the habit without meaning to.
He heard a small sip of coffee through the line.
"Well," she said, tone shifting into something a little lighter, "if I burn your birthday dinner because I'm standing here worrying about a window, I'm blaming you entirely."
"There it is."
"I'm serious."
"You always burn it anyway."
"I absolutely do not."
"Every year."
She huffed. "Ungrateful."
He smiled despite himself and pushed off the locker, pacing slowly down the empty corridor. His footsteps echoed lightly off the hard floor.
"I'll be home right after school," he said. "We can check it together."
He could hear her moving around the kitchen more clearly now. The soft pat of her slippers on the tile. The tap of her nails against the ceramic mug. Pacing. It apparently ran in the family.
Then he heard the front door.
It wasn't loud. Just the soft click of the latch releasing and the door finding its stop, the way it did when someone who knew the weight of it let it close behind them. Not a slam. Not hurried. Controlled.
She went quiet mid-step.
The stove kept hissing.
"Hold on," she said. Not scared. Just the specific quiet of someone buying themselves one more second.
He straightened without deciding to. "What?"
"I thought I locked that."
He heard her footsteps move away from the stove, toward the entryway.
"Mom?"
A pause.
"Eli, I—"
Something moved fast across the floor. A sharp scrape of weight shifting quickly.
A high sudden shatter came through the speaker, ceramic splitting against tile, and then the phone itself hit the floor with a flat hard crack.
He waited.
He waited for her to laugh. For her to say sorry, just dropped it in the sink again. For the embarrassed exhale she made whenever she fumbled something.
The stove kept hissing through the open line.
And underneath it, a sound he couldn't place. Low and indistinct, movement maybe, coming from somewhere further back in the apartment.
"Mom."
Nothing.
"Mom, answer me."
The line stayed open. The stove kept hissing.
Then the call cut.
He stared at the screen for half a second, phone held slightly away from his face like he was still waiting for the display to change.
He hit redial.
One ring. Voicemail.
He tried again.
Straight to voicemail.
Her phone rang out forever when she ignored a call. Eight, ten, twelve rings before it gave up. It had never gone straight to voicemail before.
The hallway felt like it had tightened around him. He pushed through the double doors at the end of the corridor and the cold hit him immediately, that raw damp air that came off the harbor, sharp in a way that felt personal. The sky above Port Virel pressed low and flat against the rooftops. Somewhere above the tree line to the east, the old port cranes were barely visible through the cloud cover, their arms hanging still over the water.
He called again. Voicemail.
He was already moving toward the sidewalk.
Behind him the school door swung open again. "Yo, Mr. Han's asking where you're at—"
Marcus. He didn't turn around.
He broke into a full sprint.
Passing the building entrance he caught a flash of golden curls tied back loose at the edge of his vision, a sight his eyes recognized before his brain could catch up. He didn't slow down.
The Low Coast didn't stop for emergencies. That was the first thing you understood growing up in the harbor district. A man stacking produce outside the corner store on Aldren Street didn't look up. Two kids on bikes swerved around him without a word. A cluster of women talking outside the laundromat moved instinctively to give him room and kept talking. The neighborhood absorbed his panic and kept its own pace.
It was probably nothing. Her phone died. She dropped it and the screen broke. The door was the neighbor from the third floor who always propped it open when she came back from the market.
He tried each version in a row, looking for the one that would hold.
He called again.
Voicemail.
He cut across a strip of patchy grass at the edge of the school parking lot and a car horn blared as he stepped off the curb without looking. He registered it somewhere behind him. A delivery truck idled further up the block, the driver leaning against the passenger side with a cigarette, watching the street with the patience of someone being paid by the hour. The wires strung between the buildings swayed overhead in the harbor wind.
He ran harder.
Their building came into view at the end of the block. Four stories of worn brick, the color of old rust, streaked pale in places where decades of salt air had worked into the mortar. Narrow balconies jutted from the upper floors, cluttered in the way balconies in this part of the Low Coast always ended up, weathered chairs, a few clay pots with plants that had given up sometime around last autumn, strings of decorations that had been up long enough to just become part of the building. On the third floor the woman who propped the door when she came back from the market was leaning over her railing with a cigarette, watching the afternoon traffic like she had nowhere to be.
The building looked exactly the same as it always did.
No crowd on the sidewalk. No police at the curb. No ambulance with its lights going. Just the scratched metal front door, the worn mat, the row of brass mailboxes visible through the glass.
He dug his keys out while he was still moving, fumbled them twice, caught the right one, and pushed inside.
The lobby smelled like damp carpet and citrus cleaner, the combination that had been soaked into the walls long enough that it was just what the building smelled like. The elevator sat on the fourth floor. He didn't wait. He hit the stairwell door and went up two steps at a time, palm against the cold metal railing at each landing.
Fourth floor.
The corridor stretched long ahead of him. The carpet was the same deep burgundy it had always been, worn thin in the center from however many years of people walking the same path. Doors spaced evenly along faded beige walls, repainted enough times that the corners had started to round. A pair of shoes outside one door that he didn't recognize. A television murmuring behind another, the laugh track muffled and hollow through the wall.
Their door was at the end. Number 416.
Closed. Locked. Exactly the way they always left it.
He stood there for a moment. He could hear himself breathing.
Then he unlocked it and went inside.
The apartment was warm. His mother ran the heat high because she'd always had thin skin and the Low Coast winters carried a damp that got into everything. The air held the smell of her morning, stale coffee and the garlic-heavy something she'd been building on the stove, layered into the warmth of a small space that never fully aired out between one day and the next.
The stovetop light was on.
The burner was still going under the pan, the cooking oil in it gone dark at the edges from sitting too long at temperature.
"Mom?"
His voice reflected flat off the walls. The apartment was small enough that a single word filled the whole thing.
A wooden spoon rested in the palm tree shaped spoon rest beside the stove, the ceramic one she'd found at the Callen Street market three years ago because it made her laugh. A dish towel hung from the oven handle, folded unevenly, the kind of fold you made when something pulled your attention mid-task.
Her phone was on the tile near the refrigerator, face up, screen black, a crack running from the corner diagonally across the display. Clean split. Dropped straight down. Her white ceramic mug was in pieces across the floor, and coffee and milk had run into the cracks between the tiles, pooling in the low spots, already cold.
He moved further in.
The couch cushions were straight. The stack of unopened mail on the entry table hadn't been touched. The window facing the street was closed, latch down.
He checked the bedroom. The bed was made the way she made it, comforter smoothed flat and precise, the kind of tightness that came from habit more than effort. Closet door closed. Bathroom dark.
He came back to the kitchen.
He reached over the pan and turned the burner off. The hissing stopped. The click of the igniter going quiet sat in the silence like something final.
He stood in the middle of the apartment and looked at the broken mug on the floor. The cold coffee spread through the tile cracks. The phone with its cracked screen. The wooden spoon in the palm tree rest beside a stove nobody was cooking at anymore.
He tried to build an explanation out of what was in front of him.
The door. The sound on the line. The way the phone hit the floor. The apartment sitting perfectly still around the evidence of a morning that had stopped mid-motion and never finished.
He couldn't make anything hold.