Archive of Our Own

When Yone arrived at the studio early that morning, Aphelios—who, as usual, had gotten there before anyone else—was locked in a grim battle with the studio’s decrepit old coffee machine. The thing was a relic Sett had hauled over from his parents’ house, a model so ancient it might have rolled off the assembly line sometime during the Cold War, and three or four times a week it sprayed water everywhere, leaving the carpet damp. For Aphelios, who couldn’t stand any kind of mess in the studio, the machine was practically a recurring nightmare. But what could he do? The thing had apparently been part of his mother’s wedding trousseau—something she’d picked out herself for the son she adored—and nobody had the nerve to suggest throwing out something so sentimentally precious.

“Busy this morning, aren’t you, Aphelios.”

Red to the tips of his ears and clearly on the verge of exploding (the only reason he wasn’t calling Sett right now to scream at him was that he couldn’t speak), Aphelios gave Yone a wave.

They hadn’t been a team for very long, but Yone had already figured out that there weren’t many people in the world capable of getting Aphelios this worked up. The most recent—and currently most reliable—name on that list belonged to a fellow member: Sett. During Heartsteel’s first week sharing a dorm, all six of them had had to tread carefully, adjusting to life under one roof like soldiers crossing thin ice, and nowhere had the ice been thinner than between Sett and Aphelios.

Sett had grown up in a culture where you kept your shoes on indoors. He was constantly losing the studio key, and every so often he’d forget to keep the butter knife separate from the rest of the clean dishes. Worse, whenever Aphelios’s twin sister Alune wasn’t looking, he’d find some new way to mess with him. Aphelios was Sett’s exact opposite in every respect, and far too shy to let any of it slide gracefully—so he’d end up snapping at Sett, then getting even more worked up at himself for snapping.

Unable to just stand by and watch them fight, Yone had once asked the two of them what he could do to make it stop. Aphelios had said he could forgive Sett knocking over the potted plant by the front door while parking—up to three times, maybe—but raiding his snacks on purpose was unforgivable. Over the following month, Sett had managed to do both at least twenty more times each. So really, Aphelios had every right to feel like he was losing his mind.

But it wasn’t long before Aphelios started turning just as red whenever Sett’s massive arms happened to flex nearby, and Yone—who, as the team’s producer, had watched the whole thing unfold—decided that their constant friction wasn’t entirely a bad sign. Whatever direction things between them ended up taking, he figured he might as well hope it turned out for the better.

Yone took off his coat and sat down on the sofa, and Aphelios, having somehow managed to mop up the carpet, came and sat across from him looking utterly drained—as if he’d already burned through an entire day’s worth of energy before nine in the morning. Yone took the cup of coffee Aphelios handed him and asked,

“Any progress?”

Aphelios shook his head. Lately, the two of them—no, every member of the group—had been working around the clock to finish Heartsteel’s debut album, but they’d all started feeling the same suffocating sense of being crammed together inside a glass box. Aphelios’s talent was practically a guaranteed ticket to the project’s success, and the others had thrown themselves into helping him with everything they had—but the first time they all heard the demo of the title track, nobody said a word. It wasn’t that the song was poorly made. Far from it. It was just that everyone in the room had sensed, instinctively, that something was missing. The track had come so close to perfect—“almost,” as K’Sante had put it—but it was missing that one sharp hook that could grab the public’s attention in an instant. Yone sighed and set down his cup of coffee.

“Still no progress, huh. That’s not good.”

So far, none of this differed from the pattern of the past few days, when work had stalled at every turn. But today, Aphelios was a little different from yesterday. Instead of adding anything more, he held out his tablet to Yone. Then, the way he usually did when Alune wasn’t around, he typed out what he wanted to say on his phone.

[We haven’t fixed a single thing about our song. But while I was doing research, I found this instead.]

“What is it?”

[Looks like an original song by some amateur musician on YouTube. Sounds pretty decent to my ear—I wanted to see what our producer thinks.]

Yone took the tablet, eyeing the YouTube video playing on it with suspicion. The footage was nauseatingly shaky, and the faceless person filming it kept mumbling something in a thick, slurred voice. The camera lurched through a room crammed wall to wall with junk—banging the same table corner twice along the way—before finally settling on someone slumping down in front of a bass guitar and starting to play. The whole time, the frame showed nothing but a pair of legs and arms wrapped around the instrument. Whoever this was had clearly been drunk, high, or both at the time of filming, and Yone found himself freshly struck by just how shameless this generation could be—not content with manufacturing their own cringeworthy moments, they had to go and broadcast them to the entire internet at full volume, too.

But the longer he listened to the drunk’s humming, the more his skeptical expression began to shift, and within a few seconds Yone found himself completely absorbed in the screen. He turned to Aphelios.

“Who is this? Where did you find this?”

Aphelios gave a faint smile.

[Well? Looks pretty usable, right?]

“Phel, this is… this is way beyond ‘usable.’ Seriously, who is this, and what do they do?”

[I don’t really know either. It just showed up in my recommendations and I happened to click on it. The bio’s got nothing but a single email address. Honestly, before I even said anything to you, I’d already emailed that address introducing our project, and even DM’d a private Instagram account I managed to track down—but it’s been days with no response.]

For once, Yone felt like he could’ve kissed both Aphelios and his impressively perceptive YouTube algorithm for digging up a talent like this—but everything that came after was nothing short of disheartening. The video Aphelios had just shown him was, in fact, the only one ever uploaded to the channel, and there hadn’t been an update in a long time. The bare-bones channel description read almost like a dare: you don’t need to know a thing about me, just listen to this and get lost. But Yone was someone who could read between the lines of Aphelios’s silences, so he chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before speaking, calm as ever.

“And yet there has to be a reason you’re showing me this now—knowing you.”

[You know me well.]

As if he’d been waiting for exactly that, Aphelios pulled up another page without hesitation and held the screen right up to Yone’s face again. This time it was an article from some local newspaper, about a robbery at a gas station down south. According to the piece, a man had burst in armed with a gun, after the register—but a part-time employee on shift had subdued him through sheer quick thinking. Apparently the brave employee had trained in some kind of martial art since childhood. Given that the story had nothing whatsoever to do with music and seemed to come completely out of nowhere, Yone found himself staring straight at Aphelios’s face this time.

“So what does this have to do with the person from before?”

[Look closely, Yone.]

Aphelios tapped the photo attached at the bottom of the article. It showed the employee who’d caught the robber, mid-interview. As Yone studied it more closely, his eyes narrowed. The employee looked barely into her twenties, if that. And there, on her left forearm, was the same music-note tattoo that had been visible—unmistakably—even through the nauseating shake of the video footage. There was no question. They were the same person. Aphelios’s typing sped up.

[For the past few days I’ve been combing the entire internet for any trace of this channel’s owner. And out of nowhere, I stumbled onto this.]

Yone’s brow furrowed.

“Seriously, who even is this person? How does someone go from ignoring your email and abandoning their channel to single-handedly busting up a robbery in some backwater town?”

[I don’t know the whole story either. But either way, it’s pretty much certain she’s down south right now.]

Sure enough, the article had been posted exactly a week ago. Now it was Yone’s turn to be impressed by Aphelios’s research skills.

“Phel, you’re incredible.”

[Don’t mention it.]

“So what now? I think we need to talk to this person, one way or another—and I’m guessing you feel the same.”

[That’s actually the whole point. There’s something I wanted to ask of you, which is why I showed you this channel in the first place.]

“What is it?”

[You know how the rest of us have been swamped lately—not just with the album, but with all the label negotiations too. Realistically, I just don’t have the time to go all the way down there and meet this person myself.]

“So you’re saying you want me to go find this channel’s owner?”

[Exactly.]

Lately, Heartsteel had been caught in a whirlwind of back-and-forth with various companies—Sett, Ezreal, and K’Sante, all dropped by their previous agency, went without saying, but even Aphelios, who’d been doing music independently before joining, was in the same boat. Almost none of these companies offered decent terms, and most didn’t even bother reaching out first. The commercial value of a group of recycled rookies who hadn’t even debuted yet was, in a word, about on par with some third-string player standing at the very back of the line during draft season, praying for a late-round pick that would probably never come.

The members endured all this humiliating treatment while holding onto one single truth: they were merchandise that had just gone up on the shelf, and the better they sold, the higher the price would climb. Right now, they were nothing but a bunch of nobodies—but if the Heartsteel project succeeded, the world would soon find out exactly who they were.

In any case, just as Aphelios had pointed out, Yone was the only one on the team free enough at the moment to pack a bag and go. And if they were going to recruit a new member, it made sense for the producer—Yone, more than anyone—to be the one making first contact. Effectively, Aphelios had left the entire judgment call about this channel’s owner in Yone’s hands. And though he understood all that, Yone still hesitated, for reasons of his own.

“Will things be all right while I’m gone? Heartsteel, I mean…”

[It belongs to all of us. Sure, it’ll be rough without you, but it’s the kids’ job to behave and mind the house while Mom’s out.]

Ezreal had been the first one in the group to call Yone “Mom,” and Aphelios almost never did it himself, so Yone let out a short laugh.

[Just don’t go carrying the whole thing on your own shoulders, all right?]

“I had no idea you could say something so thoughtful. All right, if that’s how it is, I’ll go.”

[Thanks—counting on you. And while you’re at it, good news would be even better.]

ㅡ

Sunlight slanted in through the gaps of curtains hung up haphazardly over the window. Kayn lay there for a long while even after waking, blinking through half-shut eyes. Through her upside-down field of vision, the clock read well past noon—which meant she was, once again, about to be late.

Just yesterday her boss had snapped that if she showed up late one more time, he’d happily grant her wish and fire her—and yet none of that registered as any kind of crisis. All Kayn wanted was to soak in the uneasy peace of being the one person not working while everyone else was. Work was something you did when you felt like it, and even if she got fired, she could find another job whenever she needed one. That was pretty much how the last few months had gone. Her body stayed put wherever it happened to be, while time just kept flowing on by itself, no effort required. With her sense of space and time so disconnected from each other, she felt lost no matter where she was—so there wasn’t much point trying to put any real effort into days this meaningless.

Rubbing her eyes, she fished her phone out from the dashboard’s clutter of rubber figurines, car air fresheners, and a charm necklace she’d picked up at a flea market. Her messages were stacked with hundreds of texts from her coworkers.

[Where are you?]

[Are you still asleep?]

[Pick. Up. The. Phone.]

And the last one read:

[You are SO dead.]

Kayn rubbed at her throbbing temples. Then, without looking anywhere in particular, she muttered out into the air.

“Seriously? Rhaast, why didn’t you wake me up?”

[You never asked me to.]

“Since when do you actually listen to anything I say?”

At that, Rhaast let out a low, unpleasant laugh—as if meant for someone to hear, from some corner inside her skull.

“What’s your problem now? Something else bothering you?”

[Since when do you actually care?]

“Forget it. Shouldn’t have bothered.”

When Kayn had to explain Rhaast to other people, she usually compared him to a computer’s SSD. Partly because, so far, she’d never come up with a better comparison, and partly because Rhaast really was a separate personality that existed only inside her own head. By being with her, he sharpened her talent enormously and fed her an endless supply of creative inspiration. Wherever they went, the two of them were always singular and plural at once. Rhaast saw the world through Kayn’s eyes, and Kayn turned whatever image came through that lens of his into music. That’s how long the two of them had been stuck together—Rhaast had been there when Kayn was seven and got slapped hard enough by her parents to burst an eardrum, and he’d been there at fifteen, careening on a four-wheeler straight into a landscaping tree and snapping it in half. So Kayn could afford to be fairly generous about putting up with the way this alternate personality of hers chattered loud enough to rattle her skull all day, or popped up at exactly the wrong moment and landed her in trouble.

But Kayn rarely got the chance to bring Rhaast up around other people. Not that they knew anything about him—they just didn’t particularly want to hear about it, either. Why would anyone bother wondering who Rhaast was when there was already a perfectly good medical term for it? Half the world was made up of idiots who thought world hunger had ended the moment they personally finished dinner. People’s imaginations shrank to nothing once something wasn’t their own problem, and their lack of understanding grew in exact inverse proportion. No matter how hard Kayn tried to prove Rhaast was real, the best she ever got back was “he needs to go” or “you need treatment”—and none of them understood that to Kayn, that was the same as asking her to carve a pound of flesh off her own thigh with a knife. To make people like that understand Rhaast, she’d have had to treat them the way adults handled very young, very stupid children. But Kayn wasn’t a patient person, and more than anything, she hated kids.

Rather than put up with all of that in places where Rhaast wasn’t welcome, Kayn chose to change strategy instead—she started drifting toward places where it simply didn’t matter. But that was exactly the problem. For this dimwitted music genius, scanning barcodes at the local supermarket was on par with proving some brand-new theorem. Rhaast, whose social skills and life competence converged on absolute zero, would even sabotage her on purpose whenever he got bored or sulky, keeping sleeping Kayn from waking up in time for her shift. So quite apart from her own general lack of motivation to make a living, the fact that she’d burned through two jobs in a single week could be laid squarely at Rhaast’s feet.

Still, this was the first time so many people had gone looking for her while she was out. The tone of the messages was off enough that Kayn found herself genuinely puzzled. Had something happened at the store? It wasn’t as if her absence carried enough weight to cause a real disaster, but it wasn’t great for her either if the boss’s mood soured too badly over a little lateness. The day hadn’t even started, and already everything felt like it was unraveling. Kayn let out a long sigh.

With no other option, she gave up on dawdling, rolled the windows down to air the car out, and pushed the seat—reclined all the way back for sleeping—into its upright position. She popped the headrest back on, dragged on the shoes she’d kicked off somewhere under the driver’s seat, and ran her fingers roughly through hair that had grown tangled all the way down past her waist. That was the extent of getting ready for work. Still, the outside air helped clear her head a little. She sat there for a moment with her forehead against the steering wheel, and once her mind felt more or less functional, she started the car.

ㅡ

These days, Kayn worked at a warehouse-style market about a fifteen-minute drive from the parking lot she “lived” in. It was a nondescript little shop out on the edge of town, the kind of place whose only regular customers were long-haul drivers stopping in a hurry for things like engine oil. Her main job was receiving stock and managing inventory—carrying a handheld scanner around, walking to whatever shelf the machine told her to, counting how many items sat on it, and punching the number back in. Aside from that, she occasionally wandered the store, and if she happened to spot a leaking detergent bottle or an egg carton some customer had been pilfering one egg at a time, she’d press the report button to flag the location for the manager. What a creatively stimulating work environment.

Naturally, on her first day, Rhaast had reacted like someone had just asked him to swallow a live hamster whole. Given that he could blow up at any moment without warning, Kayn was already braced for something like today. Not that she was thrilled about it either, of course. The only reason she’d decided to stick around this place was that the owner had agreed to pay her in cash. Either way, Kayn was the one responsible for keeping both herself and Rhaast fed.

Kayn finally pulled into the lot and parked, locking eyes with a coworker hiding behind a delivery truck for a smoke break. The guy recognized her car the second it rolled in and snickered.

“I was hoping to stick around just long enough to watch you get fired before I quit. Guess today’s the day.”

“Shut up. Is the boss inside? How pissed is he?”

“Go find out yourself. Anyway, Kayn—somebody’s here looking for you. You’d better get in there.”

“Me? Who?”

“How would I know? Guy’s been sitting there waiting since morning, and the boss’s mood—already crap—just got worse.”

Strange. As far as Kayn knew, the only people around here who even knew her name were the people at the store—no connections, no acquaintances, nothing. There were her old bandmates, sure, the ones she’d walked out on herself, but as for actual family, every last tie had been severed since she’d been handed over to Child Protective Services at age ten. None of them had any reason to track her down all the way out to this charmed little corner of nowhere. So who on earth could it be?

Tilting her head, she stopped dragging her feet and headed for the office at a brisk pace. But the man sitting in the visitor’s chair, supposedly there looking for her, was a face she’d never seen in her life—so her unresolved curiosity only grew.

He had the longest hair she’d ever seen on any man in her life, and he sat with his back so straight it looked like someone had swapped out his spine for a steel rod. He sat there with his hands folded neatly on his knees, not a single thing out of place, as if he’d been planted in that chair since before recorded history. The sheer untouchable air about him made it obvious even the boss found this stranger uncomfortable to be near.

“Ah, Kayn. So what’s the excuse for being late again today?”

The boss had been standing by the window, as far from the man’s table as he could get, shifting his weight nervously—and the moment Kayn walked in, his face lit up with outright relief. Whether the sweat on his forehead was from the heat or from the man’s sheer presence was impossible to say. Then he made for the door, practically fleeing, and left Kayn behind.

“He’s here for you. I’ll clear out—you two take your time.”

With the third party gone, a brief silence settled over the room. The man took a sip of the cold coffee the boss had poured him, and his expression made it very clear he was summoning every ounce of self-control he had not to spit it back out.

“Awful.”

His voice was low and husky—genuinely nice to listen to. To Kayn, it sounded exactly like the kind of voice that ought to come out of someone who looked like him. He pushed the cup aside and turned to look at her. She sat down across from him, taking him in without letting too much curiosity show on her face.

“So, who are you supposed to be? Because I’ve got no idea.”

“Let me introduce myself first.”

He pulled a business card out of his bag and handed it to her. On the ivory card, neatly printed, was the name Yone, alongside the title Music Producer. Kayn’s eyes flicked back and forth between the card and his face—from his deep, pale-blue eyes to the shimmer of the card’s pearl-finished corner, from his jawline, looking like something carefully sculpted by hand, back to the bold capital “Y” on the card. While she was briefly wondering whether she ought to scribble her own name on a Post-it or something, since she sure didn’t have a business card of her own, Yone’s expression settled into a perfect blend of irritation and exhaustion.

“Looks like you’ve been bouncing around quite a bit these past few days. I must have sent a hundred messages to that email of yours, and not one of them got opened. Took me a whole month to chase you down from the south to here, and it wasn’t easy.”

“Seriously? A whole month just to find me? You’re not messing with me?”

Honestly, Kayn’s life lately had been so directionless that even she couldn’t say which city she’d slept in a week ago, so naturally she had her doubts about whether this man had really “come looking for her.” Still, if he was telling the truth, she found herself a little curious what kind of face he’d made every time he lost her trail. He had the look of someone so unshakable you could stab him and not get a single drop of blood out.

“Can’t say it’s my fault, but I suppose I did put you through some trouble. Sorry about that, I guess.”

Just as Kayn was starting to feel a personal kind of interest in this man, he moved straight to the point, as if there was nothing left worth saying.

“That video on your YouTube channel—it was pretty impressive. Did you make that yourself?”

“Oh. That.”

She lowered her eyes and shot back.

“Unless your ears are stuck on your ass, yeah, obviously. So you’re a producer—guess you’re here to talk music, then.”

“Why else would I have come all the way out here, if not for that track?”

But Kayn thought it might almost have been easier if Yone had said he’d come because of some photo of her face—or her chest—floating around Instagram. Because that song came with a sad, pathetic story attached.

The day her old band informed her, unilaterally, that she shouldn’t bother showing up to the next rehearsal, Kayn had gotten plastered, eaten an entire pizza by herself, and then kept drinking on top of it to settle her stomach. By the time she’d had enough alcohol that she genuinely thought she might die from it, the resentment of it all became unbearable, and she ended up sobbing on her own. All through the small hours, even knowing it was pointless, she kept turning WhatsApp on and off, just in case they’d changed their minds, slapping at her own cheeks as she stumbled around the room. Then her gaze landed on the iPad sitting on the table, and she picked it up. Half-mindlessly, she opened GarageBand, and buried at the bottom of it was a track she’d abandoned back in high school—her own monumental piece of work, stitched together out of a mess of live loops.

It was the one thing they hadn’t managed to take from her, and yet it felt like it had nothing to do with her anymore, either. Because as of that day, she’d decided she could never do music again. Either way, she’d thrown back three whiskeys in a row, recorded herself playing in a state of total blackout, and uploaded it to YouTube. It wasn’t really a video meant for anyone in particular—more like a distress signal flung out in every direction by an astronaut stranded in zero gravity. By the next morning, she’d been too busy throwing up to even half-remember she’d uploaded anything at all. In the end, the video had become a piece of her own personal cringe history, preserved forever by her own two hands.

“Sorry, I’m only just now remembering that channel even exists. So what’s the point? You didn’t come all the way out here just to give me a review.”

“Our team’s composer heard that track and got interested in you. So—if you’re willing—we’d like you to join our project. Shieda Kayn.”

That was the moment Kayn first heard the name “Heartsteel.” Yone pulled a thick stack of documents out of his bag and calmly walked her through the members and the team’s goals, laying out their progress so far with what seemed like complete candor—nothing held back as confidential. What caught Kayn’s attention was how, compared to her old band, this Heartsteel unit seemed to operate with an almost excessive lack of rules. The producer’s fingerprints on the tracks were so faint—thinner than dust drifting through the air—that it was nearly impossible to get a read on the man. So she spent most of his explanation only half-listening, keeping her mouth shut in a way that nonetheless said, go on.

“I should’ve checked beforehand whether this was the kind of project that’d interest you. But as you know, this country isn’t exactly small, and I didn’t have time for that.”

Yone’s tone carried an edge.

“I’ve already wasted far too much time tracking you down. We need the album out before next month’s event schedule gets in the way, and with everything thrown off track, things are already too tight. So I’d appreciate it if you could decide, right here and now, whether you’re willing to join us.”

It wasn’t an offer or a request—it was a notice. Kayn could tell this man was a born negotiator. After all, leaving no room for negotiation was the single most important quality a negotiator could have.

“Is this normally how producers operate?”

“Just so we’re clear—there won’t be another exception like this one.”

Kayn kept her arms crossed and bit the inside of her cheek. When she finally opened her mouth a moment later, the first thing out of it was:

“If I say yes to joining your team, what exactly can you do for me?”

“Are you looking for financial compensation?”

“Money, whatever, doesn’t matter. Just—go ahead, say literally anything. Anything at all.”

Yone realized, then, that this wasn’t really about compensation at all.

“Some guy I met back in Georgia told me he was a hotshot agent and said if I just paid him three hundred grand, he’d get me signed to one of the Big Three labels overnight. And some other guy who stopped by here over a tire pressure problem said if I slept with him ten times, he’d put me straight to number one on the Billboard chart. So what can you do?”

Yone went quiet, and the office fell silent in an instant. He seemed to be turning what she’d just said over carefully. When he spoke, it was thoughtful.

“Sounds like your past dealings with people in this industry haven’t gone particularly well.”

Kayn just shrugged.

“You’re not exactly the first guy to come along promising to be my big new opportunity. I got sick of music a long time ago, thanks to all that.”

“Is that so.”

“And every time someone hears some nobody like me’s doing music, they all say pretty much the same thing. Oh, but don’t take that too personally—you’re the first person to actually come all the way out here on your own, and the first to even know about a channel I’d forgotten myself. That part was kind of refreshing, actually.”

Then Kayn leaned across the table toward him.

“What I want to know is—what makes you and your precious Heartsteel any different from those two assholes?”

Yone didn’t look away. He met her gaze head-on, calm as ever, and held up his empty hands, palms open, without a flicker of emotion.

“Unfortunately, I can’t promise our project’s profitable enough to guarantee anything on that scale. And I have no intention of demanding a kid like you trade sex for success, either.”

“And?”

“I came to find someone capable of succeeding—not to beg for the privilege of making someone succeed. I’d think you’d want to work with people like that, too.”

“Then what exactly am I supposed to base that on, joining a team with zero actual chart record? Are you trying to claim this Heartsteel, whatever it is, is something special? Hey—isn’t that a little arrogant?”

“Special? Arrogant? What I think highly of isn’t Heartsteel.”

Yone seemed to be doing his best to explain patiently.

“It’s your hunger for music.”

This time, it was Kayn’s turn to be at a loss for words.

“If what you said about being sick of music were really true, the moment I’m out of your sight you’d go straight to deleting that YouTube video. I’ll bet my entire career that you won’t.”

“Pretty confident, huh. Why’s that?”

“You already know that as long as that video stays up, people like me will keep coming, wanting you—people who won’t ask you for money, and won’t ask you to sleep with them. That’s both your weapon and your trap, Kayn. Am I wrong?”

Kayn stared at him for so long that the coffee in his cup, barely touched, went stone cold.

“But if you don’t choose me—trust me—no producer offering better terms than mine is ever going to come along again.”

“What?”

Instead of answering, Yone simply, quietly tapped the area around his left eye. The gesture alone carried such weight that Kayn nearly toppled right out of her chair.

“What the fuck. Who are you?”

“I had so much time to kill on the way here, it was more than enough to do a little digging into your background.”

Kayn put on a show of irritation, but in truth this man had startled her past surprise and into something close to panic. Rhaast, who’d been quietly watching it all unfold, let out a low growl—an unmistakable warning.

“And once you’re a producer, you end up hearing all sorts of industry gossip whether you want to or not. Sounds like your reputation with your old band wasn’t exactly great, either.”

“What are you even talking about—you don’t know anything about—”

“All thanks to the tenant living in your left eye, apparently? Does he go looking for fights on purpose too, the way you do?”

“What— no, what the fuck—”

By this point, every word of their conversation up to now had completely flown out of Kayn’s head. Everything on the tip of her tongue was a tangled mess, and her heart was pounding like crazy. She needed to know how—and through whose mouth—word about Rhaast had gotten out. He was the most private of all her secrets, and absolutely not a topic that was ever supposed to come up in a negotiation. She was so furious her jaw was trembling.

“Say one more word about Rhaast and I’ll kill you.”

“So his name’s Rhaast?”

If Yone already knew that the official reason she’d been kicked out of her old band was that damn “mental illness,” and if, on top of that, he was going to use the word as leverage to gain the upper hand in negotiations—Kayn was fully prepared to gut him for it, and her eyes were already scanning the desk for anything sharp. But before she could go off, Yone got there first.

“Relax. Your old band probably never recognized Rhaast’s worth for what it was. We’re different.”

“Different how?”

Yone’s finger moved across the open documents, tapping each member’s name in turn.

“About what you asked before—what makes Heartsteel different from other bands. Every single person gathered here is greedy, through and through. All of them want nothing but the best.”

He watched the color drain in and out of Kayn’s face in real time, and remained chillingly unmoved by it.

“And they’re the type who’d be perfectly fine with the team being seven members instead of six, if it gets them there.”

Kayn let out an irritated laugh.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I wouldn’t know. That’s not really my call to make.”

He said it like the answer was obvious.

“So. Are you working with us or not?”

Kayn’s shoulders were still trembling slightly, the heat of her anger not yet faded—but as it slowly cooled, she found herself starting to understand, piece by piece, what kind of man this was. Yone wasn’t the type to talk about “gut feelings” when sizing someone up. He simply took in everything in front of him exactly as it was, understood it, and so, without ever jumping to conclusions, he’d managed to see straight through every part of her.

But Kayn had nothing left to say to him.

“Get out.”

“Get out?”

“Yeah. Right now—before I snap your neck, get out. I don’t want to hear another word about contracts or any of it.”

Kayn snapped.

“Is that your decision?”

“What, disappointed it’s not the answer you wanted? Were you expecting me to fall for it, even a little?”

“It’d be a lie to say I’m not disappointed.”

He let out a deep sigh. In an instant his face turned exhausted, and he rubbed at the bridge of his nose with the air of someone cutting his losses.

“But would anything else I say make any difference to you at this point?”

Kayn tried to picture how stupid her own face must look right now, then decided to stop. Yone’s tone was as flat and emotionless as ever, which somehow made it sound all the more like he was simply stating facts—and by the time the words hit her eardrums, they’d transformed into something close to a raw, blistering insult.

“I’m thrilled to hear you’re satisfied with a life going nowhere, in this dumb little beach town of yours. And that this is the payoff for the effort I put into crossing half the country, for a month, just to find you. There’s really nothing more for me to say.”

With every word that landed, Kayn’s back curled forward a little more, until she was nearly hunched over, her eyelids fluttering hard as if fighting back tears—while Yone, who hadn’t shifted his posture by so much as a millimeter since they’d sat down, just kept talking, flat and unconcerned.

“If I had more time to spare, I’d try to talk you into it. But I suppose my offer was too hasty. Sitting here any longer would just be a waste of both our time.”

Yone glanced out the window, as if already retracing his route back. Kayn just sat there with her head down, as if she’d forgotten how to speak.

“One more thing—not that it’s any of my business, but…”

“Then don’t!”

Kayn snapped, unable to hold back, but Yone simply ignored her.

“Honestly, you’ll end up making your own music someday, with or without me or any band. You’re young, and you’ve got talent. That’s something to be glad about, no question.”

And what he added next sounded, somehow, faintly bitter.

“Still—try not to waste too much of that time. In this industry, opportunities are given to you, not chosen by you. Keep this up, and you’ll regret it someday. I’m sure of it.”

With that, Yone picked up his bag and stood.

“Sorry for taking up your time. Tell your boss thanks for the coffee.”

“…When are you leaving?”

The question burst out of Kayn before she could stop it. Even she didn’t know why, but she felt like she needed to know. Yone looked caught off guard too, one eyebrow lifting. He answered slowly, weighing out each word.

“Tomorrow. Tonight I’ll be staying at a hotel nearby.”

And then he left.

ㅡ

Kayn’s old band used to say that nothing served the common good quite like music. Music was equal for everyone, they said—a peaceful means that hurt no one, carrying the symbolic weight of speaking for every voice. Kayn knows now that it was a flat-out lie. The more you pick it apart, the more you realize nothing in the world is as filthy and unfair as music, because the music industry runs on something fundamentally unpredictable.

A pro athlete has stats on record, and you can use those to roughly predict how they’ll perform next season. But on the Billboard charts, a record is worth nothing more than exactly that—a record—so every kind of rational logic loses its power. The public is fickle, and stars who burn bright for a moment and vanish without a trace are a dime a dozen, so the ones who tend to stick around long-term are usually the ones willing to claw and scrape by any means necessary not to fade out. Music demands exactly one thing from a musician—and the problem is, that one thing is everything they have. If Kayn was guilty of anything, it was being too young to know how to compromise, and so, stupidly, she handed over her entire life to it. Just as music had demanded of her.

It was right after Kayn had just graduated high school, holding acceptance letters from two different colleges, trying to figure out what to do next. Truth be told, even back then she hadn’t been entirely sold on a career in pop music—not even watching her old friend Akali find success at such a young age had changed that. Like Akali, Kayn had been born holding talent and genius in both hands, but what she wanted wasn’t fame so much as a bigger world, more people to meet. So she asked Zed, her primary guardian, what he thought she should do.

He was a former soldier who’d served a tour in Afghanistan—the kind of man who could teach Kayn how to tie her shoes, how to ask for directions in Arabic, how to fry an egg, but who had absolutely no frame of reference for her interests, her future, or the things she loved, and so he had no real advice to offer. In the end, Zed irresponsibly told her to just go out and experience as much as she could while she had the time.

Taking him up on it, Kayn headed for the warm south before settling on a college. Her first destination turned out to be incredibly dull, nowhere near as satisfying as she’d hoped. The fact that even the owner of the café she ate breakfast at every morning asked her why on earth she’d come all the way out to a place like this on vacation pretty much said it all. There, Kayn discovered she hated relentless sunshine and golden, sun-baked sand. She hated getting sunburned, and the easygoing smiles of cultured locals and laid-back surfers grated on her nerves. What suited her was a city—fast, efficient, mechanically loud, the kind of place that could swallow everything in the world and run it like interchangeable parts. She loved a city’s growth potential and efficiency, and she was the type of person who only really worked the way she was meant to when she was part of one. Realizing all this made her want nothing more than to get back east as soon as possible. Just like Zed had said—she’d learned something through experience.

So she started picking up odd jobs, trying to scrape together a way out. By day she waited tables at a restaurant; by night she played drums at a jazz bar. That was where she met the people from her old band. They’d been sitting in a dim corner, each nursing a stout, and just as she was finishing up her set and heading back to the kitchen for a break, one of them grabbed her by the wrist.

“We’ve had our eye on you for a few days now. Your playing’s pretty impressive.”

Once they’d succeeded in getting her to join their table, they introduced their band and launched into talk about music. A few rounds of cheap drinks made their way around, and the mood turned warm almost instantly. In her defense, Kayn was never naive, exactly. It was more that she’d never once won anyone over with her personality, and she didn’t know that most people just get easier to talk to once they’ve had a few drinks—so the more she found herself swept up by people being friendly to her, the more she genuinely believed they simply got her. To make matters worse, with her head fogged by alcohol, even Rhaast’s constant interjecting came through muffled, like a conversation underwater.

Mid-flirtation with the group, Kayn slurred out, irritated.

[Will you cut it out with the drinking and get up already?]

“Ugh, shut up, Rhaast…”

That left the others looking confused.

“Rhaast? Who’s that? It’s just us here…”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just—like an imaginary friend in my head, kind of thing.”

Kayn brushed it off vaguely, and the conversation moved on quickly. They lavished praise on her musical instincts, and Kayn—giddy at finally being recognized by people she actually clicked with, professionals no less—played them every song she’d written so far. Their expressions changed instantly.

“You made all of this by yourself? In high school? Kayn, you’re either a genuine genius or completely insane. Forget going home—you want to join our band instead?”

“Seriously? You really mean it, I can join?”

“Of course!”

After that, everything moved fast. It was one of the few dreamlike moments in Kayn’s life. Belonging somewhere, being recognized by others—those two facts alone were enough to fill her up. They said they wanted to release her demos one by one, and that they’d soon go on tour with those very songs. Which meant they needed money. Even the frontman rolled up his sleeves and went out to work as a lifeguard, or hauled fruit crates around some café. Instead of taking on more part-time work herself, Kayn handed everything else over to the band manager and devoted herself entirely to refining the mixes. On every songwriting credit, her name sat right alongside the band’s name—the name of the community she now belonged to.

Meanwhile, the time when Kayn was supposed to go home was creeping closer. She’d boldly decided to give up on college altogether. When she called home to break the news, Zed picked up on something being wrong faster than anyone could have. As far as he knew, Kayn might have had some trouble controlling her impulses, but she’d never been a kid without any plan at all. Still, he also knew there was no point trying to talk her out of something once she’d made up her mind, so he didn’t object. Or rather—he couldn’t. How was any guardian in the world supposed to object, when the kid he’d raised believed success was right there within reach, and was practically buzzing at the thought of finally giving him something to be proud of? So Zed kept his mouth shut. He didn’t say it out loud, but privately, he thought to himself that whether this would end up screwing them all over was something only time would tell.

And sure enough, it wasn’t long before Kayn started to notice something was off. There were a handful of documents being pushed in front of her, and at first she’d simply found it strange that one ordinary member would have so much paperwork to sign. The more carefully she read through them, the more she could tell each one had something vaguely concealed between the lines. Even so, Kayn wasn’t the type to assume every hole in the ground was a snake pit, and it never crossed her mind, not even for a second, that any of this could come back to hurt her. She figured now was a time to focus on the music, and Rhaast had already left at least six unfinished tracks lying around, abandoned the moment he got bored of them.

But it turned out every single thing lurking in those holes was a venomous snake. And before long, the gates of hell swung open.

The very things she’d done out of trust for her friends were what ended up hurting her. First, the documents turned into weapons, biting at her from every direction. One paper she’d personally signed listed Shieda Kayn as the band’s principal officer—and demanded to know where all the collected team funds had gone. Words like “accounting fraud” and “embezzlement,” of all the absurd things, started slipping out of someone’s mouth, almost casually. To set the record straight: Kayn had never once personally handled a single cent related to the band—not the merch staff’s wages, not the van rental, not the show entry fees, nothing. By the time she realized she’d walked into a trap, it was already too late. With barely a moment to catch her breath, testimony followed claiming she’d always been negligent about band activities and frequently skipped rehearsals. Kayn shot back that of course she had—she’d joined last out of everyone—and that the idea of her being the band’s “principal officer” was complete bullshit, and that it was unbelievable a bunch of useless idiots like this were even allowed to take this to court—and nearly got slapped with an additional charge of contempt for it.

She couldn’t go down like this. Kayn ran herself ragged trying to find help. But when she finally consulted a legal advisor, all she got back was that from now on, no matter where in the country she performed her own songs, not a single cent would ever land in her hands again without the band’s consent. The fact that she’d registered the band’s name as a copyright holder could, in context, be read as her having transferred the copyright over—“that’s just how the law works,” she was told.

Still, when it became clear Kayn had no intention of backing down, and that the legal battle might even drag on, the band members—traitors, now—told her it was time to “let this go.” What they meant was for her to quietly cave and fall in line. Kayn shot back, telling them to cut the bullshit and surrender themselves instead, and that they’d better apologize right now, before she chewed them down to the bone. She was alone in a leaking little rowboat taking on water from every side, and that was when the warship they’d brought along rammed straight into its hull, tearing open a massive hole. This latest attack claimed Kayn was “mentally ill,” suffered “severe mood swings,” and was a “girl who talked to an imaginary friend in her head”—unstable enough that her own judgment couldn’t be trusted in court. There was no cleaner kill shot than that.

So what happened? Kayn went down with the ship. A clean knockout.

Looking back, maybe deciding to pursue music in the first place had been the mistake. Now Kayn almost wishes she’d been stupid enough not to feel any of it—the betrayal, the rage, any of it—but every morning when she opens her eyes, the same questions come back. Where did it all go wrong, exactly? What was missing in me, that things ended up like this? A person who stops feeling useful tends to fall apart, and discarded like trash, Kayn was turning into someone paranoid enough to surprise even herself. The stress got so bad that one night, Rhaast woke her up in the middle of the night, and she found herself with blood pouring steadily from her nose. Every day felt like living with a slab of lead sitting on her chest.

Every now and then, a call came from home. Whenever Zed asked how she was doing, all Kayn could do was lie—say the album release had been pushed back, that her songs would definitely make the setlist for the next show. With college given up, everything she’d poured her whole life into stripped away, and what little money she’d had spent down to nothing, there was no way she could go home now and admit she’d failed. Zed knew it was all a flat-out lie, knew the kid’s insides had rotted black with whatever she was going through—but he let it go anyway. Instead, the way he sometimes had, back when Kayn brought home a disappointing test score or got caught for a borderline traffic violation, he offered her his usual blunt, roundabout brand of comfort.

“I know, Kayn. Whatever ends up going wrong—none of it’s on you.”

In that moment, Kayn bit down on her own lip until it bled, holding back a scream. If she could have, she’d have screamed into the phone with everything she had: Nothing’s on me? How would you even know that? I don’t even know that myself! Tell me how I’m supposed to stop blaming myself! Of course, that chance never came.

Then, when she heard that her old bandmates had used her songs to open for some show, Rhaast spoke up.

[Told you so. You should’ve walked out the second you had the chance.]

“I know. I know, Rhaast…”

ㅡ

Kayn could barely remember how she’d gotten through the rest of the day after Yone left. The moment her shift ended, she left her car sitting in the store’s lot and walked all the way to Santa Monica Beach. The cool summer air wrapped around her face like a scarf, carrying the smell of salt. Before long, the Ferris wheel—Pacific Park’s signature landmark—came into view in the distance, and beside the row of colorful vendor stalls, a wide stretch of sand opened up. The ocean here was something like North Carolina’s, and yet completely different.

She slumped down onto a nearby bench without any care for how it looked. The whole time, her chest sat heavy, and the words that man had left behind kept buzzing through her head on a loop, like a round sung over and over. Yone’s line about opportunities being given, not chosen—that was half right and half wrong. Chosen, since when? Her old band had been an opportunity that came walking right up to her on its own! And now there was his card sitting in her hand. Yone, too, had walked right up to her on his own. That gleaming, ivory-colored card could be a one-way ticket pulling her out of the abyss—or it could be a napalm strike that burned her down to ash.

Or, of course, it could turn out to be nothing at all—because there happened to be a trash can right next to the bench she was sitting on. She weighed her options: throw the thing in her hand straight into the trash, or actually reach out to Yone. In the end, she chose neither, settling into the most anticlimactic option available—shoving the card into her pocket and heading into a pub across the street to get a drink first.

One letter of the sign out front was flickering, the neon sign on the wall was broken, and there wasn’t even a mirror in the bathroom. In other words, a flawless little factory for getting blackout drunk. The moment Kayn sat down, she ordered the cheapest glass of wine on the menu. The next round was whiskey, and before long she’d settled into a rhythm of ordering the same thing every five minutes. The bartender came over once to check her ID after watching her go at it, then just shook his head and let it slide. Every time the burning liquid slid down her throat, it felt like she could point out exactly which organ sat where—practically a crash course in internal medicine.

This was how alcohol always worked: it took every problem and made it simple, light, perfectly clear. There was nothing complicated or difficult left in any of it. Because nothing in this world comforted young people who’d almost been something, who’d almost seen something through to the very end—in other words, the ones life had already beaten—quite like cheap booze. So these days, Kayn had settled comfortably into a life where one drink simply called for the next.

When you get hurt, the smart move is usually just to wait for it to heal—but some wounds only grow sharper with time. As for Kayn, she was the type who couldn’t even allow herself to admit she’d been hurt in the first place. Sometimes it felt like the whole world around her was nothing but a massive wall. No matter how hard she clawed and scraped to belong somewhere, every single time, she got knocked flat—rejected by the world, over and over. They say people become what they’re told they are, and the only person in this whole world who’d ever told Kayn she wasn’t wrong was Zed. So how was she supposed to win, here? How was she supposed to compete while still playing by the rules?

Maybe she’d been drinking too fast. A heavy, swimming dizziness suddenly washed over Kayn. She’d been sitting at the bar, and when the thought struck her that she should head to the bathroom, she tried to get up—only to drop straight back down onto the stool. Everything went dark in front of her eyes. And just before she toppled over, chair and all, someone caught her by the waist.

“You okay? You’ve been putting it back pretty hard. Where do you live?”

It was a man’s voice she didn’t recognize. His hot breath drifted close to her ear and the back of her neck. Inside Kayn’s skull, instead of a functioning brain, there was just unabsorbed alcohol sloshing around. Not even being able to hear Rhaast’s voice anymore was a genuinely bad sign. She fought to get her balance back, struggling to tell this stranger she was fine and to back off. But the moment her feet touched the floor, the whole bar started spinning, building and all. Both her elbows and knees were definitely pressed against something, and yet she couldn’t tell whether she was standing, lying down, or face-down on the floor. It took a good while longer before she realized she was wedged, unable to move, between the wall and this man’s body.

And that’s when someone’s voice cracked through the air like a thunderclap.

“Who the hell are you? What do you think you’re doing?”

This time, it was a voice she recognized.

ㅡ

As evening fell, the whole beach began burning a deep crimson. Yone had stepped out for a short walk to clear his head in the sea air, weaving through crowds melted together into one indistinct mass of revelry. As he walked, lost in thought, he found himself looking back over the past month’s journey.

The whole time, Yone had been tracking Kayn’s whereabouts based on whatever scraps of information Aphelios had managed to squeeze out of various sources. America was a country that was, all at once, absurdly small and impossibly vast—every single time he thought he’d finally found her, Kayn’s trail dissolved like smoke. The girl really did seem to leap across the map of the United States like a flea on amphetamines. From Florida to Texas, then Oregon, and now all the way here to California—Yone had ended up burning an entire month out on the road, chasing some maddeningly elusive afterimage of her, all while living on coffee that was basically dishwater.

At one point during this tedious chase, Yone had come dangerously close to suspecting that this whole thing was some kind of setup—that this insane girl and Aphelios had cooked it all up together just to mess with him. That was the time he’d burst into some diner where Kayn was supposedly working, only to be told she’d quit and headed west barely two hours earlier, after smashing an ashtray over a customer’s head. Yone was never the type to get carried away by his emotions or act recklessly, but that one time he’d been so furious he’d ended up smashing his phone mid-call to Aphelios. On top of that, Kayn left a trail of trouble wherever she went, and the humiliated staff at every place she’d worked practically shuddered at the mere mention of her name—which made it nearly impossible for Yone to even get in touch with her, let alone get her personal contact information. If he could’ve, he’d have given up on the whole thing and just gone home.

And yet here he was, after all that. Not home—California, about as far from home as it got. Had Kayn ever wanted to end up here? Probably not. Not that it mattered. After tonight, Yone would be a man with no ties left to either her or this city.

With Kayn already on his mind, the instant he caught a glimpse of her face among the passing scenery as he walked, his first thought was simply that his eyes were playing tricks on him. But it wasn’t a trick of the light, or some kind of vision—Kayn really was sitting there, inside the window of that rundown old bar with decades-old pop music drifting out of it. She was so drunk she was practically slumped over with her nose pressed into the table. A moment later, a man she didn’t know approached her, and what looked like some sort of disagreement passed between them before they moved together to a darker, more secluded corner.

Yone stopped where he stood and hesitated for a moment. He had no way of knowing whether this was something he should get involved in at all. He could easily just walk past and pretend he hadn’t seen anything. Maybe the man and Kayn knew each other—maybe more than just knew each other. And Yone wasn’t anybody to her. Thanks to the past month’s worth of digging, he knew enough about a person named Kayn to write a monthly magazine column on her—but that was the extent of it. Whatever happened to Kayn, she was still a stranger to him, and there was no kind of loyalty owed to someone he’d only just met that very day.

But the sight of her hand slipping as she tried to shake the man’s arm off, and his hand sliding under the hem of her skirt—somehow, even in the dim light of that bar, both registered with perfect, almost painful clarity in his eyes. Yone felt like an icicle had just driven straight into his brain.

With no real plan in mind, he pushed open the door and strode straight toward the two of them. Between his long legs and the fact that his anger had reached its absolute peak, what would have taken anyone else three steps, he covered in one. Yone shouted.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“What’s your problem? Who are you to be butting in?”

The man seemed startled by the sudden interruption, but quickly scowled hard at Yone. Yone found himself momentarily speechless. Fine, he’d cut in—but even he couldn’t answer the man’s question. What was he to Kayn, exactly? He wasn’t her guardian, and she wasn’t a member of his band, so what was he even supposed to say? The guy she told to get out earlier today?

“I’m—”

Yone gave up trying to answer and instead grabbed Kayn’s arm to pull her up. A small groan slipped out of her, and the man, like a puma robbed of its prey, lunged just as fast and grabbed her other arm.

Then everything happened in an instant. With her body pulled in two directions at once, Kayn’s elbow, fueled by sheer disgust, reflexively whipped back into the man’s jaw. He let out a single sharp yelp and went flying backward, while Kayn blinked, slow and unfocused. The man barely managed to right himself, leaning awkwardly between a chair and the table, blood dripping from between his teeth—he’d probably bitten his own tongue.

“Whoa, sorr-y. Didn’ mean t’ hit ya that hahrd.”

Drunk Kayn dissolved into hysterical giggling. The man was too busy groaning in pain to react, and Yone simply stood there, momentarily stunned by what had just unfolded right in front of him. The people sitting nearby had noticed and started whispering among themselves. The last thing he wanted was to draw any more attention in a place like this. That’s when Kayn’s eyes swung over to Yone. She took a step toward him, and he took half a step back.

“Heyyyyy.”

Kayn grinned, loose and shameless. She seemed to have already forgotten she’d nearly knocked someone out cold a second ago. She gave Yone’s face a slow, heavy-lidded once-over, head to toe, then reached out and patted his cheek without warning.

“Ouuur haaandsome prooducer.”

Kayn studied Yone’s eyes carefully, rubbing her palm against his cheek as though trying to gauge what was hiding inside them. Backlit, his eyes had a sharply defined dark rim around the iris, and within that, something like a sea with no bottom in sight. The color was almost too clear and clean for someone who supposedly made music for a living. Yone, his face caught in her grip, bent forward and let her hold him there—mostly because, whatever else happened, he wanted to avoid setting off another scene. His arm came up reflexively to support her waist, and his long hair spilled down over her face. After clinging to him like that for a while, like a newborn, Kayn finally delivered her verdict.

“Yeah, no—your eye cooolor. Reeally don’t like it.”

Pulling her hand back from his cheek, Kayn suddenly started rummaging through her pockets, dumping everything she found onto the table. She seemed to be trying to pay her tab, but most of what landed on the table was completely useless junk. Then she stumbled out the door, just like that.

Yone stood there for a moment, dazed by everything that had just happened, before fishing the girl’s phone and a set of keys out from among the bills scattered on the table, and following her out.

ㅡ

By the time Yone stepped outside and looked around, Kayn—unable to wait even that long—had already gotten herself into more trouble not far off. This time, she was locked in the most passionate embrace the century would ever see, with the wall behind the bar. Watching her empty her stomach onto the alley floor like a broken sewer pipe, Yone found himself genuinely impressed that a human esophagus could move like that.

“Kayn. Pull yourself together.”

“Uhh… think I’m dyiiing…”

Her voice was nearly swallowed up by the music drifting out from inside the bar. Yone sighed, swept her hair back, and patted her on the back. Only once her stomach had quite literally turned itself inside out did Kayn finally stop, propping her hands on her knees and trying to catch her breath. Yone spoke up carefully.

“Feeling a little better now?”

Unfortunately for Yone, that was only the beginning. Out of nowhere, as if some last burst of clarity had hit her, Kayn’s head snapped up. Then, like a wind-up rubber toy released from its spring, she started marching straight out of the alley. When she reached the street, Yone tried to stop her, but it did absolutely nothing. Giving up, he let go of her entirely just to see how far she’d go—and she promptly started clawing her way toward the ocean, practically on all fours. Quite a sight, truly.

Once Kayn finally made it onto the sand, she marched straight toward the water like a zombie. Yone couldn’t tell whether she was in a good mood or a bad one, so he held back from touching her and could only follow along behind. The moment her feet hit the open sand, grains worked their way into the backs of her half-on sneakers, and the sticky sea breeze rolled across her skin. Kayn floundered forward, her legs sinking with every step into the loose, dry sand, and the instant her foot finally touched seawater, Yone, unable to take it anymore, shouted.

“Kayn! Kayn! Stop! That’s enough, seriously!”

“Let goooo!”

“What are you doing, this is dangerous!”

Even as he shouted, Kayn kept wading deeper, until the water reached her waist. Waves broke apart into spray, soaking both their bodies and hair. Kayn struggled hard to free herself from Yone’s grip, but this time he refused to let go so easily, and she eventually wore herself out and burst into loud sobs. Yone felt an exhaustion deeper than any sigh could express. If only he’d been drunk too—how much easier this would all be. The water now dragged at both of them, heavy and pulling, not just at Kayn but at Yone as well. Night had fully fallen, and everything around them was dark, so all he wanted, desperately, was to collapse straight into a hotel bed.

Had he just stuck his nose into something he shouldn’t have? He was halfway through wondering whether he should just leave her here and head back, when Kayn mumbled something through her sobs. At first, Yone thought it was just the wind playing tricks on his ears. But he hadn’t misheard.

“What did you just say?”

“I hate you. Why did you come looking for me?”

“What?”

Yone froze where he stood.

“You shouldn’t have come here. If you hadn’t, everyone would’ve just forgotten about me—forgotten I ever failed at anything. Why couldn’t you just let me stay buried under all that garbage from my past? Who even are you? Why now, of all times, did you have to come to me? Why now, of all times, did you have to offer me a chance?”

Kayn trailed off into a sniffle. It was the kind of resentment only someone who’d tried, and failed, to piece their own shattered heart back together could put into words—and Yone knew that. He turned her words over slowly in his mind.

That I should have left you alone. That you wanted to be forgotten.

Why did those words taste so bitter to him? Maybe Kayn would forget everything that happened tonight once it was over. But Yone, almost certainly, never would. Without realizing it, even the thought that he ought to get her away from the water had completely slipped from his mind.

All the strength drained out of Yone at once, and without meaning to, he let go of the hand he’d had braced beneath her ribs. Kayn dropped with a splash into the water, salt water rushing mercilessly into her mouth and nose, and she came up coughing, gasping for air. And a moment later, a second nightmare unfolded—Kayn turned her head to the side and started throwing up again, right there in the water. Yone, the first to come back to his senses, hauled her up out of the water, sighing, as she choked and very nearly drowned all at once.

This time, Kayn didn’t fight him. She was completely worn out, too. Their chests and thighs brushed against each other repeatedly beneath the surface, but she stayed still in his arms, breathing hard and ragged. And then, on the rough, gritty sand, she passed out cold.

ㅡ

What time was it? Morning? Afternoon? Kayn’s eyelids fluttered. The sunlight was so blinding she couldn’t open her eyes at all. Squinting through barely-open lids, she registered a soft mattress beneath her back and a clean white comforter against her skin. Through the slightly open window, rows of beach umbrellas lined the shoreline in neat formation, and a cool Pacific breeze drifted in.

The last time she’d actually slept in a real bed felt like a past life, so for a moment Kayn lost all sense of reality and let herself sink fully into the comfort of it. Maybe she’d really died last night and gone to heaven. Although—did people in heaven hang around in just their bra?

She was so wrapped up in the luxury of the sheets that it took a while for the realization to hit—she was wearing nothing but a bra, not even underwear. The instant it registered, Kayn shot upright almost on pure reflex and started patting down her own body. Everything went white. What the hell had happened last night?

Once she’d gathered herself a little, she figured nothing terrible had happened to her. Other than being undressed, nothing felt wrong—she didn’t feel gross or dirty anywhere. And lying in a bed this nice, she probably hadn’t been kidnapped, either. Not that she had much experience with that sort of thing, but if she had been, it seemed reasonable she’d have woken up somewhere a lot darker and grimmer.

Okay, Shieda Kayn. Think it through, step by step. What the hell did you do yesterday?

The fragments drifting through her memory had no rhyme or reason, and the more she tried to piece them together, the more confused she got. To make things worse, her hangover was bad enough to split her skull. No matter how hard she dug, all she could come up with was: getting wasted at some bar she didn’t recognize, crying and carrying on in the arms of some man she didn’t know, throwing up everything in her stomach, and then… after that, total darkness. Maybe it was better not to remember at all. Trying harder just made the headache worse, so she figured this must be roughly what it felt like to be someone who’d dropped out of years of rehab halfway through.

Finally tearing her eyes away from her own body, Kayn noticed, for the first time, a half-undressed man asleep on the other side of the bed. It was Yone.

He was folded up as small as a body that size could possibly get, on a single-seat sofa by the table, wearing nothing but a pair of cotton pants—same as her, more or less—so that every breath sent the bare muscle of his chest and shoulders rippling visibly. It was a well-kept body. From the very first moment she’d seen him, he’d given off the impression of a finely forged weapon, and seeing him stripped down only confirmed it. Even curled up tight, the lines of his neck and shoulders stayed sharp, and his lean jaw looked sharp enough to edge over into something almost severe.

Kayn spent a moment blankly taking in the sight of him sleeping, still completely lost as to what was going on. Between the two of them, their clothes combined didn’t even add up to one decent outfit—and yet they’d ended up at opposite ends of the room from each other. What on earth was going on here? She was halfway through wondering whether she should wake him up and ask, when it turned out to be unnecessary. The sheet wrapped around her body rustled, and Yone’s eyes snapped open the instant he heard it. This man apparently had ridiculously sharp hearing, even asleep.

“Awake now?”

He said it, rubbing the heel of his hand against his eyes. Even with sleep still weighing down his face, his eyes alone glinted like the very first beam of light to ever touch the earth after creation. Kayn nodded, a little timidly, and asked her question in a tone uncharacteristically careful for her.

“So, um… is there any chance you could tell me what happened last night…”

“Why, do you want to know?”

Yone said it with an expression that had gone past sheer exhaustion into something half-amused. Seeing the look on his face, Kayn realized she wasn’t entirely without a clue, after all. In fact, the memories of last night were slowly clawing their way back to the surface. Not just the whole string of disasters from the bar to the beach—on the way back to the hotel, carried on his back, she’d thrown up on his shoulder again, too. She’d really gone all out.

“……No.”

“Good to hear. Although it didn’t look like you’d forgotten everything. I was starting to wonder how you could possibly have anything left in you to throw up, after all that.”

And Yone, ever so kindly, went on to point out something that absolutely did not need pointing out.

“Just so there’s no misunderstanding—I didn’t touch your clothes. You took every last piece off yourself, in your sleep. Made it real convenient, getting laundry service in the middle of the night.”

Kayn started to sit up, but as the sheet slipped down her body, she scrambled to cover her chest first. Honestly, her head hurt so badly she couldn’t even tell anymore whether she wanted to throw herself out the window or just evaporate on the spot. Yone pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge and drank straight from it. Not knowing what else to do with herself, Kayn ended up just watching his throat move as he swallowed—until he lifted a finger to point toward the bathroom, and she flinched, shoulders hunching, as if she’d been caught at something.

“You stink. Go shower. I’ll drive you home after.”

Yone’s order was short and to the point. Now that she thought about it, he hadn’t looked her way once since waking up. And Kayn, for her part, had been through too much to meet his eyes head-on either, so without a word, she bolted for the bathroom. She was so mortified that her legs scrambled along on tiptoe while her mouth fought to keep a string of curses from spilling out of pure embarrassment—leaving absolutely no room in her head for anything else.

But all that effort went to waste the moment she spotted her own underwear, still dripping seawater, hanging from the inside doorknob—her legs gave out entirely and she sank to the floor. She’d never once cried for her mother the way other people did, so instead she nearly sobbed out for Zed at the top of her lungs. It took everything she had to pull herself together enough to wash out her underwear and scrub herself down with water cold enough to count as torture, all while fighting a desperate internal battle against the urge to just shove her face into the sink and stay there.

I must’ve lost my mind. What the hell did I even go into the ocean for?

When she stepped out of the shower, a neatly folded set of clothes was waiting for her. Kayn slipped into clothes still smelling strongly of fabric softener and hovered awkwardly near the door. By then, Yone had already finished getting himself completely put together, down to his hair, and was sipping his morning coffee.

“Um, the laundry costs… actually, more importantly, the carpet cleaning…”

“Don’t worry about it. Not necessary.”

Yone cut off her attempt to make amends without an ounce of hesitation. Was he angry? He was probably calculating exactly how much to charge her. Separate from the embarrassment, Kayn couldn’t help but sink into gloom over the sorry state of her own wallet.

Before long, Kayn found herself dumped into the passenger seat of Yone’s silver Audi like a piece of luggage, and when he asked where she was headed, she mumbled out the name of the supermarket she worked at in a voice that practically disappeared into itself. He just gave a slight raise of his eyebrows and said nothing more. Kayn kept stealing glances at him, but she’d never once in her life been the type to read other people’s moods—not even Zed’s—so she had no idea what was going on in his head.

Now that Zed had crossed her mind, Kayn felt even more wretched. In some ways, he’d been an almost excessively hands-off guardian, but he’d also been incredibly strict about basic human decency. Growing up, Kayn had always taken his rule about “not being a burden to others” to mean, roughly, “that’s how you end up owing people”—but now that she’d actually gone and caused a mess herself, it turned out guilt and shame were a far worse problem than owing anyone anything.

What would Zed say if he found out about last night? She could picture it without much effort—him fuming, calling her a disgrace, telling her to stop embarrassing the family and just come home already. The entire way down the open coastal highway, Kayn swore to herself, over and over, that she’d never touch alcohol again—which, given exactly how many barrels’ worth of liquor she’d put away over the past year, said quite a lot.

While she was lost in all that, the car pulled into the store’s lot. Kayn’s old Plymouth Barracuda was still sitting right where she’d left it the day before. It had clearly been a decent model once, but its upkeep was such a disaster—rust creeping over the wheels and all—that it looked like it might just break down on the way to the corner store.

Yone asked Kayn whether she’d be driving herself home from here. She tilted her head, looking faintly confused, as if he’d said something strange.

“No, this is my home.”

Yone went silent, and that was when Kayn finally caught up to what she’d just said, blushing all the way to the tips of her ears. The car being her “home” wasn’t a figure of speech—she really did eat and sleep in it. She stammered out an explanation.

“I haven’t really been sleeping right lately. If someone touches me while I’m asleep, I tend to end up hitting whoever’s nearby, or breaking stuff. And, you know—I don’t really have the money for a place, either.”

Her voice trailed off smaller and smaller, until by the last word it had nearly cracked apart entirely. What was she even rambling on about? Realizing too late that the more she talked, the more ridiculous she sounded, Kayn finally shut her mouth. After sitting quietly for a moment, she announced this time that she’d pay Yone back for the laundry and for letting her stay the night. But no matter how hard she dug through her pockets, there was no way anything was going to be in there—she’d dumped absolutely everything she owned out onto that bar table the night before.

In the end, she even offered to send him the money over Venmo, which Yone, naturally, turned down.

“I told you, forget it. I didn’t step in expecting some reward, and I’m not exactly so desperate I need to take money from a kid.”

It suddenly clicked for Kayn exactly why being called a “kid” by Yone grated on her so much. It wasn’t anything as simple as pride. The problem was what it implied underneath—that Yone was the adult, generously overlooking her mistakes, while she was just some clueless brat who couldn’t manage a single thing on her own. In Kayn’s world, attacking someone else was no big deal, but being looked down on was unforgivable. Something flared up hot in her chest. Unable to manage the shame anymore, she decided to let the anger take over instead.

“God, fuck! Just take the damn money already.”

The outburst came tumbling out, and Yone just stared at her for a moment. Kayn had clearly already started feeling embarrassed about snapping like that, but she also showed no sign of backing down from her stubbornness, so Yone sighed. He wasn’t about to match her anger with his own, though, so instead he spoke, looking tired.

“…Under normal circumstances, I’d be on a flight home by now. But with everything turning out like this, my whole schedule’s a mess.”

He glanced briefly at his watch.

“You free this evening? If you’re that insistent, let’s just get dinner together.”

In a businesslike tone, Yone told her when he’d come pick her up, then held her gaze, as if waiting to see whether she had anything else to add. Then, with a look like something had just occurred to him, he suddenly reached toward her, leaning halfway across to wrap his arm around her shoulder.

Kayn startled. There was nothing left in the space between them—close enough that a hug, or even a kiss, wouldn’t have been strange at all. With absolutely no idea what was happening, or what he was about to do, Kayn’s mind raced through both possibilities at once. Her heart dropped straight through the floor. She felt dizzy, her stomach twisting strangely. All she could do was freeze stiff right where she sat, blinking.

All of it happened in under five seconds. Right on the edge of suffocating, having forgotten how to breathe, Kayn realized Yone hadn’t laid a single finger on her. He was just reaching past her to open the passenger door. No hug. No kiss. Anywhere. Yone explained himself in the driest possible voice—the kind of tone you’d use to mention that tomorrow’s forecast called for rain all day.

“That door’s a little stuck. Figured it’d be hard for you to get open on your own.”

And just like that, every bit of the spell broke. Kayn, finally pulling herself together, turned her head away fast. She clearly didn’t want Yone to see, but by the time she climbed out of the car, her face had already gone so red it was impossible to tell what color it had been to begin with. Just how far did this man need to go to make her feel embarrassed—worthless, even—before he’d finally be satisfied?

“See you later.”

The sound of the door closing rang out behind Kayn’s back. And just like the day before, Yone left her standing there and drove out of the lot.

ㅡ

[Knew this would happen. Real proud of yourself, huh.]

“Then you should’ve stopped me from drinking! Where the hell were you last night, not showing your face once!”

[Kayn, I’m a little worried you keep forgetting we share one liver. If one of us is busy chugging away, doesn’t it make sense the other one’s just as busy trying to sober up?]

After sending Yone off, Kayn tore into a thoroughly innocent Rhaast while digging through the back seat of her car. Back there, a burial mound of her clothes had merged with a heap of random junk into one massive grave-shaped pile. With dinner time fast approaching, there wasn’t a single wearable thing in sight. Then, finally, she dug out one piece of clothing that had once been her absolute favorite—a pair of jeans, faded to nothing and torn wide open at the knees after a botched wash. Kayn had spent her whole life being called either “mentally ill” or “that crazy bitch,” but looking at this outfit today, she couldn’t help but think there was a more fitting word for the look. Homeless.

Kayn let out a sigh deep enough to reach the planet’s core. The jeans were something she normally wore all the time without a second thought, but for some reason, her hand wouldn’t go for them now. The thought of walking down the street next to Yone in that outfit just didn’t sit right with her. At best, she’d look like the extra in a disaster movie who gets killed off within the first five seconds of screen time—she clearly needed to rethink the whole outfit.

Running a hand through her hair, she picked out the neatest outfit she could find. Going too dressed-up would feel unnatural, though, and it was a little too early in the season for anything bulky. While she agonized over it with a dead-serious expression, Rhaast jeered at her, sounding thoroughly unimpressed.

[Look at you, putting on a show. Anyone watching would think you’re meeting a boyfriend, not a producer.]

“Shut up. Quiet.”

Kayn’s irritation was right there on the surface.

“You’re one to talk—you go weirdly quiet whenever that guy’s around. What, you got a thing for him too? ‘Cause he’s hot?”

[Got a thing for him? Me? Look in a mirror!]

Rhaast’s voice went up, exaggerated, the way it always did when he was trying to needle her.

[Look at what you’re doing right now! How many hours have you been digging through that pile of clothes? Honestly, I’m embarrassed just watching you. And you’ve got the nerve to ask if I’m the one with a thing for him?]

“Forget it. I shouldn’t have bothered.”

Kayn snapped, but between the two of them, that line had long since become shorthand for surrender. After a pause, Rhaast, still chuckling, spoke up again.

[But you actually kind of like him, don’t you?]

“What?”

At that, Rhaast dropped his voice to a whisper, the way you’d share an important secret.

[Kayn, you still haven’t figured it out? Out of every single person who’s ever run their mouth about me—he’s the only one who never treated me like some weakness or flaw of yours.]

Kayn’s hand, mid-search through the pile of clothes, went still. The two of them might sound, on the surface, like they could kill each other with words alone—but if Rhaast had hands of his own right now, he’d have reached out and patted her on the shoulder, no question. Because in this entire world, Rhaast was the only one who understood exactly what kind of sacrifices Kayn made for him, how much she’d given up to keep him with her, and just how much it had cost her.

[If you ever actually need a boyfriend, I think it’d have to be a guy exactly like that.]

“Ugh, quit talking nonsense. I told you, it’s not like that.”

[Doesn’t change the fact that he’s sexy, though. Right?]

Kayn didn’t answer, just let out a long sigh. Because, exactly as Rhaast claimed, that was the whole problem. If Yone hadn’t been sexy—if he hadn’t been a man impossibly more good-looking than he had any right to be—she’d have just thrown on her usual ripped jeans and shown up to dinner without thinking twice. For someone blessed with the kind of looks that made even a kitchen rag look stylish on her, agonizing over an outfit was about as irrational a waste of time as anything could get. But even setting the clothes aside for a moment, her one and only pair of sneakers was still caked with wet sand from last night and looked completely unwearable.

After a moment’s thought, she remembered a pair of shoes she hadn’t given a thought to in ages, buried in the trunk. She and Akali had bought them together at an outlet mall right before Akali left town—a pair of summer sandals with about two finger-widths of heel. The idea of putting her feet into anything that wasn’t a sneaker, let alone something with an actual heel, had been unthinkable to her at the time, so she’d shoved them straight into the car and forgotten about them the moment she bought them. Shoes like that belonged in a Disney princess’s ballroom, not on Kayn.

Pulled out into the sunlight, the long-neglected leather had bloomed with little spots of mildew here and there. Kayn hesitated for a long while before scrubbing them down with a car-cleaning rag. Just get through today, she thought. After this, I’ll never have to worry about strapping garbage like this onto my feet ever again.

“God, the things I’m willing to do.”

ㅡ

Early that evening, Yone’s Audi pulled into the lot right on time, as ever. Kayn was sitting in a folding chair under the awning, arms crossed, fiddling with her phone. Even after she’d gotten into the car, her eyes stayed glued to the screen, so Yone asked, out of politeness, what she was doing. Kayn answered, short and flat: “Minecraft.”

It was a long-standing little ritual of hers, a kind of therapy in its own right. Looking visibly absorbed in a game meant she didn’t have to make conversation with whoever she was with, and it doubled perfectly as a way to hide her own nerves. As an added bonus, way back when she’d first started seeing a therapist as a kid, she’d been told Minecraft could actually help with the psychological side of things. Yone didn’t push it any further, and just drove on in silence.

While each of them sat with their own thoughts, Yone arrived at his chosen destination and pulled the car to a stop. Around an extravagant building facing the beach, palm trees leaned at their leisure, and the salty breeze tickled across their skin. Across the street, tourists lounged about, still covered in sand from the beach, taking their time. It was a well-known restaurant in the area—even Kayn recognized it. As she stood there looking up at the sign, Yone took hold of her arm and led her inside.

“What are you doing? Come on, let’s go in.”

But there was a reason Kayn had never once set foot in this place during all the time she’d lived in town. The moment she scanned the menu at their table, her shoulders instinctively hunched at the murderous tourist-trap prices. She blinked several times, certain she must be misreading something, but the number of zeros stayed exactly the same no matter how many times she looked. Finally, Kayn swallowed hard and made an important announcement.

“Hey, can I be honest with you?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t have the money to eat at a place like this.”

Yone asked, with an expression of genuine curiosity.

“You don’t actually think I dragged you out here just to squeeze a shirt’s worth of cash out of you, do you?”

“Isn’t that what this is?”

“I’ll bet you anything—if you calculated it by the hour, just having me sit here would cost more than the bill for this whole place.”

That left Kayn baffled.

“So you didn’t bring me here to buy me dinner?”

“I never said I was charging you anything. I can’t exactly walk into a family restaurant like this on my own, and you’re the only person I know around here—so I’m the one asking you to keep me company.”

While Yone went through a few orders with the waiter, Kayn, sitting across from him, kept making a sour face, still clearly unhappy about all this. Yone tried to talk her down with the patient air of an adult explaining to a kid why their picnic got rained out.

“Sounds like pride’s a pretty big deal for you. Well, taking money from you would be just as embarrassing for me. So just stop worrying about yesterday already. I stepped in because I wanted to.”

“You’re kidding, right? So everything’s just supposed to be fine now? What about your flight?”

Yone tilted his head. It seemed what Kayn really wanted was some price tag attached, something that could let her wipe last night’s mess off the record entirely. Kids these days really did try to wrap everything up far too neatly.

“In that case.”

With no common ground between the two of them in sight, here’s the compromise Yone landed on.

“If it really bothers you that much, just keep me company drinking tonight. You can find out for yourself exactly how much of a pain it is dealing with a drunk.”

Yone called the waiter back over and ordered an extra-dry vodka martini, straight up, along with a plate of olives on the side. While he worked through a single glass at a leisurely pace, the dishes they’d ordered arrived one after another on the table, though he barely touched any of it. Yone treated eating less like consuming a meal and more like tasting it—and breathing, for him, seemed to amount to little more than a faint tremor in place.

Kayn, by contrast, demolished every dish that came their way with an enormous appetite, and even claimed Yone’s share of the ice cream entirely for herself. She looked like someone who, unable to actually hit the man who’d technically saved her life, had decided to take her frustration out on the food instead. Naturally, the conversation drifted from how the food tasted, to Santa Monica’s famous tourist spots, and eventually settled on music. Licking her dessert spoon, Kayn suddenly asked.

“So how’d you end up a producer, anyway? Where’d you even scrape up the rest of Heartsteel from?”

“That’s not a very interesting story.”

“You apparently know everything about me. Being the only one in the dark isn’t all that fun either, you know.”

Yone straightened against the back of his chair and slowly turned his cocktail glass in his hand. He wasn’t normally the type to put much of himself on display, but the alcohol seemed like it might loosen his tongue just enough.

“It’s a genuinely boring, unremarkable story, so don’t expect much.”

He paused for a moment, then began.

“Where to even start. Well—I was born and raised in rural Japan. Some backwater corner of Tohoku.”

“Ha! You? A country boy?”

“What were you picturing, exactly?”

“Obviously. If you were American, I’d have figured—private school, uniform and all, then off to some Wall Street job crawling with psychopaths, and you debuted after writing lyrics about stabbing a client with a letter opener.”

“Wow. Sorry to disappoint, but my story’s a lot less dramatic than that.”

It was, admittedly, a guess that fit his polished, urban look well enough, but Yone shrugged off Kayn’s sarcasm easily. The alcohol had, for a moment, carried his mind across all those years and all that distance, back to a hometown impossibly far away.

Yone sat there and quietly closed his eyes. And in an instant, he was back in that village—surrounded on every side by more trees than people, where dense snow filled in every gap the forest left behind. Back to those reckless, carefree days, holding his brother’s hand and racing through fields of winter pampas grass. For a moment, the noisy restaurant around him dissolved beyond the ocean, and silence filled his ears instead. It was a taste as sharp and fresh as the martini in his hand, always—and no matter where on earth Yone went, it had never once left his side.

ㅡ

In a village of barely a hundred people, there was no such thing as strangers; live there your whole life, and you ended up knowing everything about everyone else as a matter of course. The future was even more predictable. Most kids inherited the family business the moment they graduated high school, and the ones who didn’t ended up working at a factory or a supermarket in the next town over, at least an hour’s drive away. The kids who left for the city never came back.

In a place like that, judgments about a kid weren’t based on what they’d “done,” but on how their family had “raised” them. Growing a child wasn’t, in the end, all that different from growing cucumbers or squash. As a child, Yone grew up obedient, doing whatever the adults told him to. He was the eldest son, with family land waiting to be inherited, so he absorbed it all, bit by bit, growing up: when to till the fields in spring for a good autumn harvest; how long the summer rains needed to last before the potato crop failed; how to predict the date of the first autumn frost; where to gather pine needles for winter firewood, and how to manage the greenhouse temperature so mold wouldn’t take hold. For people who grew, built, and harvested things for a living, not a single moment of laziness was permitted, and every season of the year came pre-packed with its own list of tasks. Even now, that inheritance still ran through Yone’s blood.

To Yone, home meant winter, distilled down to its purest form. It was so cold, and so absurdly vast, that he’d always been certain he wouldn’t survive to adulthood. Standing in the middle of all that wilderness, there was no way to tell where the forest began or ended, no way to be sure whether there was even a way out, or whether walking long enough, through sheer endurance, could ever actually get you out of it. As a child, every time Yone climbed the mountainside in winter to gather rotting branches for kindling, he felt like even the trees had eyes on him. Even the snowflakes falling from the sky seemed to be watching. He grew up completely overwhelmed by that forest, his boots sinking knee-deep into the snow with every step, always certain that everything around him was watching for its chance, waiting for the moment it could finally kill him.

After enduring that endless winter long enough for the season to finally turn, if the day ever came when death finally set someone free, a single body could vanish into the snow and no one would ever know. And if anyone ever did bring up the person who’d disappeared, instead of saying, did you hear, that family’s son, of all things— they’d simply say, oh, there used to be a kid like that, and let them be forgotten, as if they’d never existed in the first place. That was the only way anyone could ever truly be forgotten there—that was his hometown.

Just sitting still in one place, waiting for spring to come, was enough to suffocate anyone. So instead, Yone and his younger brother Yasuo found their own small ways to break out of it. The village was so remote that the internet cut out whenever it snowed or the wind picked up too much, and the power went out for no particular reason all the time. The two brothers, restless with boredom, would slip into the forest whenever they could get away from the adults’ eyes—after helping with chores, or once school let out. In the middle of a lake deep in those woods sat a small patch of land, like an island, and that was their secret base. In summer, the two of them stripped down and dove into the water; in winter, they drilled holes through the frozen surface and fished. At night, the stars poured down over their heads.

One day, Yasuo showed up at the lake with a portable DJ controller. He claimed the owner of the electronics shop in town had “given” it to him—though by that point, Yasuo had a habit of showing up with brand-new things he’d never had before, claiming some story like that, only for the police to show up at their door not long after. But this time, instead of pressing him on where he’d actually gotten it, Yone reached out and touched the new machine as if hypnotized.

And just like that, something magic happened. Yasuo, watching beside him, stood there with his mouth hanging open, then clapped along to his brother’s playing.

“Whoa, this is totally your thing. You’re seriously doing this for the first time? You didn’t secretly practice without me, did you?”

“Does that even make sense?”

Yone really was struggling with the thing, not even knowing how to change the setup on a machine he’d never touched in his life. But seeing his brother completely unable to tear his eyes away from it, Yasuo suddenly threw out a question, out of nowhere.

“What are you gonna do after high school? You gonna head to the city?”

“What are you talking about. Who’s gonna take care of our fields if I do that?”

“Why not? It’s not even making any money anyway, you could just sell the stupid thing. You’re this good at DJing—why would you wanna stay stuck out here in the countryside?”

“What about you, then?”

“Tokyo, obviously. I’ll go to college there, make new friends, make a ton of money.”

It was, honestly, a pretty solid plan for the future. The kind of dream any teenager would naturally have—but to the people of that village, it might as well have been blasphemy. The adults always pointed at Yasuo, calling him reckless and empty-headed, but privately, Yone thought that just because someone was a hothead didn’t mean they were always wrong. Yasuo mumbled on. It was only late autumn, and already their breath was coming out in visible puffs.

“I want you to come to the city with me too. Can’t the two of us just get a place together?”

“No. You’re different from me.”

“Tch. That’s harsh.”

Yasuo, a little sulky and a little hurt, muttered the words under his breath. He’d jumped to the conclusion that even his own brother thought he was an idiot. But Yone shook his head and explained, calm as ever.

“I’m not making fun of you. Yasuo, all you have to do is hold out here until you’re an adult, and you can become whatever you want. You could go to Tokyo, just like you said.”

“Really? Then what about you? What can you become?”

At that, Yone went quiet. What could he become? He was nothing. The truth was, his future was already set in stone. Once Yasuo left the village, he’d truly be alone. And he’d become an ordinary person, just like generations of village elders before him had lived out, in practice: marry a local girl, have kids, plant the same crops year after year, drink with the rest of the village on weekends… grinding down and smoothing away every sharp edge of body and soul, until he became someone who fit perfectly within whatever the adults had decided counted as normal. Yone had been raised far too well to ruin that plan now—there was no way, at this point, he could turn his back on everyone’s expectations.

“I’ll just live off the land, I guess. I’m the eldest son. Let’s head home now.”

But looking back, he’d been lying to himself even then. After his brother left for Tokyo, the DJ equipment stayed behind in his room, and Yone used it on his own to write a handful of tracks. YouTube turned out to be a surprisingly decent teacher for a complete beginner. He couldn’t really give himself a rational explanation for why he couldn’t let music go, but figured there was nothing wrong with keeping it up as a hobby, at least. So in between hauling sacks of fertilizer, mounding soil around potato sprouts, scattering chicken feed, and digging up horsetail weeds, Yone composed—and eventually set up a YouTube account just to archive what he made.

Whether the channel slowly gaining subscribers turned out to be a blessing or a curse for Yone, he honestly couldn’t say. One day, the head of a major record label—a producer himself—reached out to him through the channel. Yone’s work could be called delicate, if you were being generous, or niche, if you weren’t—but either way, it had exactly the kind of qualities that people looking to shake up the industry with something fresh would want. The two of them kept in touch for a while, and a lot got discussed along the way. Not long after, Yone released his first record under his own name.

The album was a massive success. The artist Yone had worked with as producer was already a globally recognized star, and Yone’s distinctive imagination breathed new life into the songs. The village’s attitude toward him swung back and forth like a broken pendulum. After all, the sudden departure of a kid who’d always been so obedient and well-behaved was something that needed time to sink in. When word first started spreading that Yone had gotten into the music business—that, following his brother’s lead to Tokyo, he’d gotten swept up in some pipe dream, abandoned the farm, and was “wasting his time on something pointless”—people treated him like a weed that had only been mistaken for a cucumber flower until it finally bloomed. But then, once Yone became an overnight star producer, the kind of name that turned up the second you searched it on Google, suddenly he was treated like some legendary flower that only blooms once every three thousand years.

His next album succeeded too, and the one after that. So if you asked Yone whether being recognized by everyone felt good, he’d tell you it was awful. Because it was only ever recognition by half-measures. Even after he’d achieved enormous success on the other side of the world, people back home still wanted him farming rather than making music—they’d simply chosen to “tolerate” some of it, purely because he’d become famous. After all, the village’s population kept shrinking, its administrative borders kept contracting year after year, and out of that nowhere little town, someone had finally emerged who’d actually “made it”—at something other than farming, of all things.

And as always, the worst rarely shows up alone. No matter where Yone went—even just stepping outside with a shovel to clear snow—the adults would greet him with a lecture instead of a hello. Always stay humble. Watch your attitude so you don’t embarrass the village. When I was young, no one would’ve dreamed of making money off something like that. You should be grateful to the elders who gave you that kind of opportunity… All of them acted as if simply living in the same village gave them the right to weigh in on his life, and since there wasn’t just one or two of them, all those words piled up inside Yone’s chest, hundreds of tons of it, like manure spread over a field.

What drove Yone to the edge was the gap between how little recognition he actually got and how much was demanded of him in return. What did the people of that village even know about his music, to talk like that? Had any of them ever actually bought one of his albums? Could they understand even a quarter of what was going on in his head? Yone had his doubts. One side told him not to get cocky just because he had talent; the other told him to be grateful to the elders who’d “supported” his music career—he almost wished the two sides would coordinate their story a little better. So which was it, then—was his success down to talent, or to the village’s support? If they’d really contributed something directly, then what exactly had they been doing, all those summers he spent locked away in a stuffy little room composing—back when he’d been on edge, terrified someone outside might hear the music leaking through the door?

Naturally, work on his next album started to drag. With every release, he found himself spending longer and longer stretches sitting in the studio, unable to do anything at all. Around that time, he fell in love with cold brew, picked up smoking, and started drinking too. He thought about it: a village where the only way to be forgotten was to die meant, in a way, that even if he died, he could never truly be absorbed back into that place as one of its own.

Even so, he forced himself through composing, somehow, and the album that finally emerged after all that struggle was rewarded with brutal reviews. People who had no idea what they were talking about declared that the magic was already gone from his music, that it never made sense for him to get famous off such a niche gimmick in the first place, and that of course this was the result, now that he no longer had a famous artist’s name to ride on. On Pitchfork, the album scored a 1.4, accompanied by the site’s signature brand of biting criticism and lengthy mockery.

Yone let out a hollow laugh. After reading through every single review of his album, one by one, he quietly shut down his computer and headed out to the lake in the woods—his old hideout. He lay down on his back in the empty clearing, and a calm stillness settled over him. He closed his eyes there. He knew exactly how he looked now, not just to the people of his village, but to fans too: a fraud. Some overhyped kid riding on a couple of songs. A fake. Maybe, deep down, people had wanted him to fail more than they’d ever wanted him to succeed. Maybe they’d wanted him to prove, with his own two hands, that they’d been right and he’d been the fool. Either way, his career had hit rock bottom—so wouldn’t that finally be enough to satisfy the village now?

But Yone left the village before he ever got an answer to that. He couldn’t stand another moment there. He decided Yasuo had been right all along—he should have left this place a long time ago, just like his brother had. The very thing everyone had always called Yasuo’s flaw—acting the instant he made a decision—turned out to actually be his greatest strength. Move faster than anyone else, and no one ever catches up to you.

After that, Yone never deliberately went looking for his brother. His brother, who’d always done everything ahead of him, had already built a solid foothold in music alongside like-minded collaborators, all while Yone had still been wasting away back home. In the village, Yasuo had been “Yone’s brother.” Out in the world, Yone became “Yasuo’s brother.” That felt deeply strange at first, but the strangeness faded soon enough—more and more, in fact, as Yone drifted further from his hometown, his music, and every trace of who he’d been. Instead of trying anything new musically, he wandered from country to country, mostly across Asia, and gradually, people forgot about him.

Then, one day, while Yone was staying at some tiny hotel, Yasuo called him. Yone hadn’t spoken out loud in so long that his voice came out half-cracked when he answered. It was the first time the two brothers had been in touch in six months. After a brief exchange of how-are-yous, Yasuo asked whether Yone might be interested in joining some new project, started by a group of musicians he knew. Just as Yone was about to give his reflexive no, Yasuo got there first.

“Look, if you need time to think it over, you can just say no. But I really don’t want you to keep drifting further and further away from music like this. Otherwise, one day, there’ll come a time when you want to do it but can’t, and have to give it up for good—and I don’t want that for you. There’s a right time for certain things in life, things you can only do right then and never again. And it’s surprisingly hard, pulling out chords you’ve had sitting in your head for years and getting the timing exactly right.”

A brief silence passed between the two brothers. Then Yone chuckled.

“You sound just like a farmer, talking about the ‘right time’ for things.”

“Shut up. So, are you in or not?”

“I’m in. Tell them I’m in.”

So did Yone hate his hometown? Actually, probably not. After all those years of wandering, the village remained exactly what it had always been—astonishingly beautiful and, at the same time, repulsive—so in the end, he’d simply stopped trying to pass any kind of judgment on it at all.

ㅡ

But Kayn, listening to all of this, seemed to have come away deeply moved by an entirely different part of the story.

“A 1.4? Wow, seriously? What did you even do to that album?”

“Why, curious? Want to listen to it now?”

Kayn shot back with a “go to hell,” then dissolved into giggles on her own. Somewhere along the way, a rum and coke had appeared in front of her too—this was already her third.

“And after all that, you still told me to join the team? That you’d be a success? You’re completely insane.”

At that, Yone laughed too, propping his chin on one hand.

“I told you, I never had any intention of riding on anyone’s name. If I’d wanted to succeed off some artist’s reputation, I’d have gone after someone like Taylor Swift.”

He called the waiter over and ordered another round of whatever he’d been drinking.

“But all of you—you’re all failures, all broken in some way. So am I. There’s a certain kind of thing you can only really pull off without any pressure when you’re around people like that. Music I’ve never once dared to try, that kind of thing. That’s all there is to it.”

Kayn took a quiet sip of her drink. Then she studied Yone’s face slowly, feature by feature. He was an interesting guy. His features were blunt, his expression cool, but when he smiled, it transformed into something startlingly gentle. It reminded her of the local weather—standing in the shade was cold, but the sunlight burned hot enough to sting your skin. Out of nowhere, Kayn spoke up, the words tumbling out without much order.

“So, back in high school, I got into it with two guys once.”

“With guys? Two of them at once? How’d that happen?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. Back then I didn’t really get that I had to be careful talking about Rhaast around people. So these guys started making fun of me in the hallway.”

Yone took a silent sip of his drink, as if to say, go on.

“Later, when Zed—the guy who raised me—got called into school, he told me something. He said if I wanted to protect Rhaast, if I’d decided to build a room in my head for another personality and live with him, then just being a good kid and trying hard wasn’t going to be enough. He said for a girl with nothing to her name, but a ton of talent, and different from everyone else on top of that—the whole world would come after her like a pack of starving dogs, ready to use any method they could to tear her down. And now that everyone knew my secret, I’d have to do way better than everyone else from here on out, so that people would actually start treating the whole ‘split personality’ thing as character instead of as something wrong with me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how it is. According to Zed’s whole philosophy, fairness is actually the more abnormal state of affairs—unfairness is the default.”

Yone had never once met this Zed in his life, but he was starting to get a pretty good picture of what kind of man he was. Kayn went on.

“So I asked Zed, wouldn’t it just be easier to transfer schools instead? Like, just coast through to graduation, don’t try to do anything, live like a ghost with zero effort—wouldn’t that be way less exhausting? I mean, easy for me to say, but having your guardian called into school is mortifying, right? So Zed just shook his head. He said, ‘I never raised you to be that kind of person, and you’re not that kind of kid.’”

Yone, mulling over her story, asked with a noticeably softer expression.

“What happened to the two of them?”

“Who?”

“The guys who started with you.”

Kayn propped her chin on her interlocked hands.

“One of them broke a rib. The other one’s nose got caved in.”

Yone let out a low laugh. A perfect ending for a couple of two-bit bullies.

“Come to think of it, didn’t you say you trained in some martial art?”

“Yeah. Zed taught me that too. He said if I ever ran out of other options, I could just open up a dojo.”

Kayn waved a hand, as if trying to wave off the alcohol buzzing through her. Her forehead and both cheeks were already running hot. This was where she stopped short of telling the whole truth—that the fighting Zed taught her hadn’t just been useful as a backup career. That for a girl who’d grown up getting hit by the people closest to her since childhood, it had been the single most important way out she had.

“Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is this: that day, listening to Zed, something clicked for me. Hearing what he said, it felt like if someone’s life is set on a certain path from the start, they’re bound to end up doing that thing no matter what. So I couldn’t give up on music. Couldn’t give up on Rhaast, either. If I’d just transferred schools and ended up losing him for good, I sure as hell wouldn’t be sitting here right now, drinking with you.”

“Or throwing up on my shirt?”

“God, that’s so petty. Can you not bring that up again?”

The soft background music in the restaurant suddenly cut off—the pianist, who’d been playing through their setlist all evening, had finally lifted their hands from the keys. Watching them step away, Yone suddenly turned to Kayn.

“What about guitar, then? Where’d you learn that?”

“Taught myself, obviously.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear you play. Right here.”

Kayn just stared at him for a moment.

“Seriously? Is that even allowed?”

“No reason it shouldn’t be.”

Without missing a beat, Yone called the waiter over and asked if they had a guitar anywhere on the premises. Then, gesturing at Kayn, he claimed she was a talented guitarist he’d discovered at Juilliard, and asked whether, if there wasn’t another session scheduled, she might be allowed up for a few minutes. A little while later, a black acoustic guitar appeared on their table, and Kayn ran her hand over the body as if in a trance.

“Wow. Been a really long time since I’ve held one of these.”

“You don’t have your own?”

“Don’t have one. Sold it at a pawn shop two months ago to buy toilet paper.”

With the guitar strapped on, Kayn shot up from her seat as if launched, then immediately stumbled back. She’d been drinking too fast, and on top of that, she’d completely forgotten she was wearing heels. Catching herself against the table, she shot a quick glance at Yone, then yanked off her tiny pink mules and held them in one hand. Yone’s eyes naturally landed on her sharply defined ankles, but Kayn, paying it no mind, walked barefoot, heavy-footed, up onto the stage.

What caught Yone’s attention in that moment wasn’t Kayn’s short dress, or even the heels—it was her legs. Yone made no judgment whatsoever about how she looked, but he’d readily admit that the line of her legs was remarkably precise, almost sleek. It wasn’t physical allure that made another person’s body part leave such a strong impression on him. It was that Kayn’s legs hadn’t been shaped for strutting down well-paved streets in high heels—they were built for tearing through forest trails, chasing down prey. She was a born hunter, through and through, and in this day and age, legs like that were a genuine rarity.

And having spent more than half his life buried in the woods, Yone could recognize it at a glance—the predator’s instinct lurking somewhere underneath.

Standing on the stage, Kayn seemed to spend a moment checking the tuning, then started working her way down the fretboard without a moment’s hesitation. For someone who claimed she hadn’t touched a guitar in months, she slipped into the melody, smooth and skillful, in the blink of an eye. As the unfamiliar tune replaced the pianist’s quiet background music, people’s attention naturally turned to her.

Once she started playing, nothing could stop her. Kayn played like someone half out of her mind. She gripped the strings with such force it looked like she might tear them right off the neck. Even as her fingertips visibly turned bright red, she never once let go.

Sitting at the table, Yone found a quiet realization settling over him. It was, in fact, the answer to a question that had been circling his head for the entire month he’d spent chasing her down. Why he’d been so instantly captivated, the first time he heard her song. What it was, inside that loud, muddled track, that had sparked his and Aphelios’s inspiration in the first place. All of it began to come into focus now, like the edges of a puzzle finally falling into place.

The verses Kayn wrote, and the genres she favored, were rough, chaotic, deafening—but, paradoxically, she’d probably found her truest sense of rest and quiet right there inside all that chaos. Maybe, to her, there was no quieter place in the world. Standing alone on a stage, every problem in the world got shoved far outside the foul line, and nothing could touch her up there. No one could hurt her there.

No one could tell her she was wrong, there.

It was absolute freedom. And so Shieda Kayn connected the dots in a world made entirely of fragments, and broke a world made of unbroken lines back down into pieces—through music that belonged to no one but her.

Suddenly, beneath brows furrowed in concentration over the fretboard, her two mismatched eyes locked onto Yone. Kayn gave him that signature piercing look of hers and smiled, just slightly. Then, with absolutely no fear in her, she seemed to murmur silently toward him: What’s my talent? I’m good at being good at things. That’s how I was born, and that’s how I was raised. If you want to take me anywhere, you’d better get used to that, and fast. Yone said nothing. Instead, he etched the burning look in her eyes—that crackling, electric instant—into his memory with the sharpest possible clarity. He realized, then, that even if tonight ended and he and Kayn never crossed paths again, this night would still send a shiver through him every time he thought of it, for the rest of his life.

At last, the song came to an end. The people in the restaurant applauded her. Someone goofed off with a soft little wolf-whistle. Yone tipped back what was left in his glass and downed it.

ㅡ

The two of them stepped out of the restaurant. Kayn started whining again about feeling sick, so before they parted ways, they decided to take a short walk. By the time he was calling separate Ubers for the two of them, Yone had to admit—he’d done something less than mature, and it had been a mistake. He’d let her get drunk all over again, after how much she’d had just the night before. Kayn was still barefoot, and as they walked along the beach, she stumbled along half-asleep on her feet.

“You still want to work with me?”

“I’m not so sure anymore. I did, up until I caught up with you here—but after watching you play, now I’m less convinced.”

“Seriously? Wasn’t I just incredible up there? That’s harsh. I’m hurt.”

Drunk Kayn sniffled in an exaggerated way. It was admittedly kind of cute, but at the same time, Yone felt a wave of deep exhaustion. Walking a little ahead of him, Kayn suddenly threw out a suggestion.

“There’s actually a quick way to figure that out.”

“What’s that?”

“Just kiss me once.”

“What?”

“Let’s just go ahead and create something to really regret.”

Bright moonlight lit up the side of her face. Kayn grinned, baring her teeth.

“And if, after that, you still feel like turning around and going home alone—then fine, that’s it, clean break, just walk away.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It’d definitely be more fun this way. Just imagine how funny it’d be, ending up in a band with someone you’ve already kissed.”

Yone let out a short laugh.

“That’s a pretty entertaining drunk theory. But Kayn, I’m a lot older than you’d guess. If you kissed me, you’d probably end up regretting it for a completely different reason.”

“Ugh, what’s even the issue? Why do you keep talking like some ancient old man?”

“Because it’s true. And if it turns out, later, that it really was a mistake—what are we supposed to do then?”

“That’s exactly the kind of regret you’re supposed to save for later, not now.”

I might be your last chance, you know—isn’t it kind of a waste to just leave it like this? Half-submerged in alcohol, Kayn asked it with a slurred tongue, acting like someone insisting their lottery ticket was a winner even though every single number was off by exactly one. And since Yone was drunk too, with no real way to push back, he ended up swayed, just a little, by Kayn’s ridiculous logic. She was young, and everything between the two of them felt rushed—but there wasn’t much to be done about that now.

“Okay then. Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just do what I tell you.”

Kayn obediently closed her eyes. Yone looked down at her face for a long moment, then brushed back a few strands of hair the night wind had blown across her cheek, tucking them behind her ear—and instead of her lips, he pressed a careful kiss to her forehead.

At that, Kayn slowly opened her eyes, like a fairytale princess just released from a spell. Even in the dead of night, the whole world seemed to glitter so brightly it was hard to meet Yone’s eyes. She whispered, faint.

“I just failed the audition, didn’t I?”

“If tonight’s performance was the audition, shouldn’t you be the one who came looking for me—not the other way around?”

“…That’s a shame. I was just starting to get interested in those Heartsteel guys.”

“Your Uber’s here. Go.”

Both of them understood, at that point, that there was nothing left worth adding. Yone looked into Kayn’s two mismatched eyes—blue and red—as if trying to confirm something. There was wickedness in them, and murkiness, and a sharp kind of purity, all at once. A child shaped out of chaos itself. Kayn gave her head a light shake and walked away.

“Take care. It was nice meeting you.”

Kayn figured that was the end of it. But the next morning, when she woke up, she found a flight ticket booked under her own name waiting for her—and immediately curled back up and collapsed onto her side. Unbelievable. The sender was Yone. The destination was New York.

“Ughhhhhhhhhhh……..”

Seriously, just how far did this man need to go to make her feel like an idiot before he was satisfied? Face buried in a pillow, Kayn swore she’d pay him back with plenty of trouble in return. In her head, plan after plan was already neatly stacking up: smearing his bathroom sink with hair dye twice a month, setting his oven on fire, bringing home stray cats without permission… every single one of them sounded pretty great to her.

And out of everything, the thing she liked best was that producer himself. This time, Kayn really wanted to see him angry.

There was no time to hesitate. To make that happen, she’d need to be near him—so Kayn scrambled out of bed right away.