Archive of Our Own

In the dark behind Viktor’s eyes, Jayce has not disappeared yet.

Viktor is standing on the platform of the last train out of the city, though in the dream the station has become longer than any station should be, stretching into a strip of concrete and yellow warning paint and advertisements bleached colorless. Nothing ahead of him but tunnel-dark and the dirty breath of underground air. The rails glitter below, two black ribbons with a little silver spit on them.

His cane is hooked over his wrist. His shoulder aches from the strap of his bag. Somewhere above him, the station speakers murmur something chewed into static. Farther down the platform, Viktor knows there is a vending machine with one dead coil, a coffee stand that closes too early, and a bench where someone once carved a heart into the wood with a key.

The tunnel wind pushes at him. Viktor looks down and sees the yellow line beneath the toe of his shoe. Then Jayce is beside him.

“Hey,” he says, from the empty space where no one had been a second ago. He is frowning. “No. Don’t do that. Step back.”

He reaches out and pinches Viktor’s wrist. His hand is warm. Sunlight pools behind him though they are underground, catching in his hair, burning at the edges of him until Viktor’s eyes hurt from looking.

“I miss you,” Viktor tells him. “Tell me where you are,” Viktor tells him. “Tell me and I’ll come.”

Viktor opens his eyes. The train is screaming into the station, lights tearing out of the tunnel, and he is too close to the edge. Much too close. His shoe has gone over the yellow line. The wind of the train slams into him hard enough to tilt his body forward and fall.

He yanks himself back. His cane cracks against the concrete. Someone is shouting while the train brakes shriek. A flock of pigeons explodes from the rafters in a violent gray panic. When he stops moving, Viktor is on the floor, one hand braced against the filthy platform tile, breathing like he has been pulled out of water.

He looks to his left. The space beside him is empty. His phone vibrates in his pocket. It is not the message he’s been waiting for but a horoscope notification.

A difficult truth may reveal itself today.

*

This is how it starts three months, ago, with Viktor’s life being really fucking boring.

Three years after graduation, adulthood has apparently settled on teaching night classes before returning home to do increasingly pointless things. Measuring reaction time before and after caffeine. Timing the exact interval between taking pain medication and feeling guilty about taking pain medication. Cataloguing bruises by color progression. If that loses its novelty, he'll ride the same train back and forth across the city for no reason other than to watch people. He invents diagnoses from hairlines, estimates vitamin deficiencies by fingernails, spends entire commutes wondering what sequence of microscopic catastrophes turned each passenger into exactly the person sitting across from him. He would like to believe he's observing these people anthropologically. In reality, he's built himself the exact same cage.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, his alarm begins screaming. He has set it to a song he used to like, which now means he hates the song and, by extension, himself at four-ten. In the bathroom mirror he looks both too young and old, like someone from a commercial about how suicide is never the answer. He showers without enjoying the water, he dresses without choosing an outfit, black T-shirt, black jeans, socks from the clean pile if there is a clean pile, from the floor if there is not. He drinks day-old reheated coffee, scalding his tongue on purpose because sensation is sensation, and eats an avocado scooped out with a spoon, a cucumber bitten down to its pale, watery spine.

The night school gig simply pays the bills and leaves him enough daylight to be chronically ill. It is basically an adult secondary education with integrated science support, which means Viktor spends five nights a week standing in front of a room full of adults who dropped out of high school for reasons ranging from poverty to pregnancy to drugs to boredom to felony-adjacent creativity, explaining that life is nothing but a pyramid scheme run by mutations, bacterial freeloaders, and cells too stupid to know when to stop dividing.

Tonight, he's getting a new student.

The email from attendance is waiting in his inbox when he arrives. Late enrollment request approved, it says. It also says, Student has documented learning accommodations, ADHD listed. Additional processing time recommended. Attendance office requests faculty flexibility during adjustment period. The name at the bottom is Jayce Talis.

He does not know what he expects from a late-starter with a learning disability and initials that sound like they belong to a deodorant ad, but it is not the man who appears twelve minutes after the class should have started, broad-shouldered and winded, swiping glossy dark locks out of his eyes. He pauses in the doorway with both hands wrapped around the straps of an overstuffed backpack, his shirt is creased across the stomach and darkened with sweat beneath the collar. Loose papers jut from the half-closed zipper behind his shoulders, trembling each time he breathes. Every head in the room turns toward him.

“Sorry. Wrong building. Then right building, wrong floor. Then right floor, wrong room. Then I realized I had been right the first time, but then I had to use the bathroom.”

“Mr. Talis, I assume.”

“Jayce is fine.”

Viktor points with the marker. “Please find a seat.”

Jayce does, after choosing the least efficient path through the room. He bumps a chair with his hip, whispers sorry to the woman whose pen he drops twice, then finally folds himself into the only empty desk near the back. 

Viktor turns back to the board and begins the class properly, or as properly as he ever does, which means drawing an ugly little tumor of a cell and explaining adaptation and cellular stress. Whether they understand him is technically important and irrelevant. The program requires measurable progress, compassionate instruction, and the general pretense that everyone in the room has an equal chance of passing if he says mitochondria slowly enough.

Halfway through, because he can’t help it, his eyes drag over to Jayce bent over his notebook with alarming focus, pen moving constantly. His knee bounces beneath the desk. Viktor slows as he passes him, expecting frantic notes, maybe half-formed cells, maybe some desperate attempt to catch up with four months of material through brute force.

Instead, Jayce’s notebook is full of rocks. Little angular formations with artistic shading. Cubes, spikes, clusters, one long obelisk-looking thing with tiny labels around it. There is a page corner dedicated to what appears to be a geode sliced open like a sparkly organ. In the margin, Jayce has written calcite? then crossed it out, then written maybe fluorite?? and an arrow.

Jayce, sensing the shadow of judgment fall over him, slowly lifts his head. Briefly, they regard each other in silence. Viktor looks down at the notebook again. Jayce places his hand over the largest crystal cluster, solemnly guilty.

“These are not cell diagrams,” Viktor says.

“No,” Jayce admits.

“Nor are they stress responses.”

“No.”

“Nor are they anything I asked you to write down.”

Jayce shrugs. “Not exactly.”

Someone in the front row makes a tiny choking sound.

“I was listening.”

“Were the rocks listening also?”

“They’re minerals, technically. I remember better when I draw. The shapes help.”

Viktor’s gaze drops back to the page. Beside one shaded crystal, in handwriting much smaller than the rest, Jayce has written: stress response = system under pressure changing form without necessarily breaking. 

Viktor asks Jayce to remain after class. Red crawls up Jayce’s neck in variolitic increments, and Viktor’s attention fastens to it before he can pretend otherwise. When the room finally empties, Jayce stays folded into his desk.

“Come.” He gathers a folder from his desk and gestures Jayce forward. “These are the materials you missed. First four months. Syllabus, lecture slides, reading list, diagnostic assessment, and the department’s orientation document.”

“Oh,” Jayce says. “Thank you. Wow. I thought you were going to tell me to drop.”

“Do you want to drop?”

"Not unless you make me." He says it with a crooked smile that reaches his eyes before anything else. They are an odd color, green at first glance, then gold when the light catches them. A tiny pale scar cuts through one eyebrow, interrupting an otherwise symmetrical face.

"I have no interest in making you." making you what?

“That’s good, thank you.” Jayce flips open his notebook. “Oh. Right. So I know it might look like I’m ignoring you. I’m not. Or I am, visually, but not mentally. Actually visually too, sometimes, because I do look up, I just don’t always maintain eye contact because then I start thinking about eye contact, and once I’m thinking about eye contact I’m not hearing anything except my own brain going normal normal normal act normal, which is obviously fatal.”

“Obviously.”

“But if I draw, I can listen,” Jayce says. “It helps me keep track of what you’re saying. Sometimes I get stuck on the words and stop actually understanding them. If I draw it, it gives me something to connect it to.” He laughs nervously. It hits the walls, comes back changed, warmer. Viktor feels the sound low in his stomach and has the immediate impulse to leave his own body and observe it from a great distance.

“Sorry, I’m nervous. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. I also talk when I’m excited. And when I’m trying not to talk. Silence makes me feel like someone put a glass over me.”

“I see.”

“By the way,” Jayce says. “I like the way you teach. You’re a very good teacher. And you have cool hair.”

Viktor clears his throat hard enough to scrape it raw. Most students thank him only when he cancels an assignment or lets them leave early. Nobody comments on the way he teaches unless the projector is broken or the lecture has exceeded their tolerance for consciousness. 

“What about the way I teach?”

“I don’t know. You just make everything sound less textbook-y.”

“That is because textbooks have a remarkable talent for suffocating curiosity.”

Jayce laughs. “Yeah, that. You say stuff like that.” He shifts his notebook against his chest. “It helps, the way you explain things. It makes them feel like something is actually happening, not just words I’m supposed to memorize. And you don’t talk to us like we’re stupid.”

Viktor looks down at his papers, though he has already gathered them. “You are not stupid.”

“I know I’m not.” Jayce shrugs, smiling. “I mean, I just know people think I am when I don’t do things the way they expect. There’s a difference.” His smile changes. “That’s why I wanted your class.”

Viktor blinks. “You wanted my class?”

“I was not actually supposed to be in this class.” He rubs at the back of his neck. “They put me in the other section first.”

“With Heimerdinger?”

“Yeah.” Jayce laughs, then looks down at his shoe. “I asked to switch.”

“Why?”

Jayce shrugs. “The time worked better.”

“The other section is at the same time.”

“Right… Yeah. I…uh, also saw your name on the teacher listing. And then I looked you up. Your class videos were linked on the department page. The old ones. From last term. I watched one and it was easy to follow. And, your Russian accent. I was intrigued by it. So I asked to be moved. I asked twice, actually. Then I maybe emailed attendance, and kept emailing until it worked. And now I’m here.”

Of everything Jayce has just confessed, Viktor’s mind seizes on the least relevant detail. “I am not Russian.” 

Jayce blinks, then goes salmon red. “Oh,” he says. “Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean–”

“No, of course. Why distinguish between entire countries when one can simply gesture vaguely eastward and let history do the rest?”

“I’m sorry. I should’ve said accent. Just accent. But I did like it. Your voice, I mean.”

“Apart from my voice,” Viktor says, “which should not be the focus here, this is a course designed to help you earn your diploma. It is, however, science-based. I assume you understood that before you began harassing attendance.”

“I do. I mean, I need the diploma. That’s the whole point, duh.” He exhales a laugh and looks down, then back up, then starts talking faster. “But I also love science. A lot. When I was a kid, I used to do experiments all the time. I’d grow mold on bread in different places around the house, which my mom hated because I kept labeling bags of disgusting bread and putting them in cabinets. I also once tried to see if different kinds of soda cleaned pennies faster, and then I forgot about them for two weeks and my mom found a bunch of sticky cups under my bed. And I used to freeze things to see if they’d break differently. Grapes, rubber bands, batteries–”

“Batteries?”

“Yeah, I know that now. But I liked figuring out what would happen. I liked when I could actually see the result. Like vinegar and baking soda, magnets, taking apart old radios, trying to make a potato battery, which did not work because I had no idea what I was doing and also I think the potato was already kind of rotten.”

Jayce’s hands are restless around his notebook, thumb dragging over the folded corner.

“You understand,” Viktor says, “that this program will still require written work.”

“Yeah, no, I know. I’m not going to turn in, like, a crystal collage. Unless extra credit is available.”

“It is not.”

“Shame.”

“But for you, we can work on timing. Breaking the material into smaller sections. The diagnostic assessment will show where you are, and then we can decide what needs the most attention.”

“Okay.” Jayce smiles. 

“My office hours are on the syllabus. Use them. Oh, and class starts at six.”

“I know.”

“So be here at six.”

“I will.”

“Not six-twelve.”

"Yes, sir." Jayce says, backing toward the door. “I begged my way in. I’m not wasting it.” The gap between his teeth reappears as he points both hands at Viktor in an absurd pair of finger guns.

*

Jayce is, in fact, not on time.

He squeezes sideways through the desks, whispering apologies as his backpack strikes one chair and nearly removes a woman’s water bottle from another. He reaches his seat, drops one notebook, catches it with his foot, and lowers himself into the desk.

Viktor is explaining how cells register mechanical force through their membranes and cytoskeletons. He has drawn integrins, focal adhesions, and ugly little scaffolding of actin filaments across half the board. By now, a woman in the front row has let her cheek collapse into her fist. Another student near the windows turns a pen slowly between two fingers while watching the clock. At the back, a man’s eyes have been closed long enough that nobody is pretending he is thinking.

Jayce, however, has his eyes glued to the board. His hand goes up.

“Yes?”

“Could repeated mechanical stress change gene expression permanently? Not just while the force is happening, but afterward, through chromatin remodeling or something like YAP and TAZ staying active?”

Viktor blinks a few times, briefly uncertain that Jayce has actually said what he thinks he heard.

Jayce’s hand lowers by several inches. “Or not.”

“Where did you learn about YAP and TAZ?”

“Some book, I think.”

Viktor turns back to the board and uncaps the marker twice before realizing it is already open. “Yes,” he says. “Repeated mechanical stress can produce persistent changes in gene expression. YAP and TAZ respond to cytoskeletal tension and can move into the nucleus, where they influence transcription. In some contexts, mechanical conditions also alter chromatin organization and leave cells more responsive to similar stress later. A kind of mechanical memory, though the term should not be mistaken for conscious recollection.”

Jayce nods quickly and begins writing again.

“The effects depend on the cell type, the duration of the force, the surrounding matrix, and several pathways we are not covering.”

Jayce’s pencil slows.

“This is far beyond the level of this class,” Viktor adds. “We are doing secondary-school science, not graduate mechanobiology.”

“Oh, shit. Right. Sorry.”

Viktor leaves the board and makes his way toward the back row. On Jayce’s page, YAP and TAZ have been drawn as two tiny men being escorted from the cell nucleus by security guards. One carries a suitcase. The other is crying. 

“Are those… transcriptional coactivators being evicted?”

“Yep. They stayed active too long.”

“I see you have given one of them a hat.”

“He’s traveling.”

“Where?”

“The cytoplasm.”

A laugh catches in Viktor’s throat and escapes as a cough. “My answer was not intended as a reprimand.” The apology has to be dragged through him manually, snagging on every internal surface. “I was clarifying that the material exceeds the requirements of this program. Not suggesting that you should stop asking.”

“Okay.” Jayce’s smile curves shyly, a moon half-hidden behind clouds.

“And I may have phrased it poorly.” Viktor looks toward the board, where the rest of the class has become intensely interested in pretending not to listen. He lowers his voice. “I apologize.”

Jayce closes the notebook halfway, preserving the tiny deportation scene between the pages. “Okay, thank you. Apology accepted.” He smiles. Viktor’s eyes narrow on instinct, and for a second he forgets what else he was about to say.

*

That night after getting home, Viktor opens the bathroom cabinet for painkillers and finds the bottle empty. The kitchen supply is empty too, along with the loose emergency tablets he keeps in a mug beside the sink and forgets about until he’s crawling for them. When, exactly, had he managed to consume every drug in the apartment? He tries reconstructing the previous weeks through foil packets and childproof caps: two for the headache after class, three during the fever, another handful divided irresponsibly across several irresponsible nights. Apparently his recent life can be measured entirely in milligrams. Great. Marvelous.

The pressure behind Viktor’s right eye keeps tightening, and a minute later his teeth knock together hard enough to hurt. He drags on yesterday’s sweater, then another over it, misses the neck hole once, and has to sit on the edge of the bed until the room stops tipping.  By three in the morning, he is limping toward the only convenience store in the neighborhood that never closes, shoulders drawn nearly to his ears.

The bell above the door gives a brittle little chime. Viktor stops beneath it, and considers striking himself unconscious with his cane because why, because by what malignant arrangement of the universe is Jayce Talis standing behind the register in a red store vest.

“Welcome to 24-Hour Konbini–oh my god. No way. Holy shit.” He leans across the counter and squints at Viktor. “I’m dreaming. I have to be dreaming.”

Viktor turns toward the aisles. No one stands between the shelves. The glass doors reflect only Jayce behind the register and Viktor in front of it.

“You work here,” Viktor says.

“I do!”

Viktor turns toward the medicine aisle before Jayce can ask why he looks like he has been exhumed. Every label immediately begins dissolving into the next: antihistamine, antacid, analgesic, anti-everything, rows of little boxes promising relief in increasingly cheerful fonts while the pressure behind his eye drives a nail farther into his skull. He narrows his eyes at the shelves. This makes no difference.

“Those are buy one, get one half off.”

Viktor turns his head slowly. Jayce is pointing at the shelf. 

“The painkillers. Not the sleep stuff. I mean, maybe the sleep stuff too, but I don’t know. The stickers are kind of confusing. Sorry they’re behind glass. People steal stuff all the time.”

He is still wearing the wrinkled gray T-shirt from class beneath the store vest. His name tag hangs crooked, a tiny star sticker pressed beside his name, and one sleeve is shoved up to his elbow. His hair has somehow deteriorated further since Viktor last saw him. A pen rests behind one ear. When he offers Viktor a smile, the light catches through the small gap between his front teeth.

In the medicine case glass, his reflection is faint: hair just as messy as Jayce’s, if not worse, fever-bright eyes, one hand white-knuckled around his cane. Behind that, Jayce’s reflection hovers near his shoulder.

“You need me to unlock it?” Jayce asks.

“Please.”

There are too many keys on the key ring clipped to his belt, and he fumbles the first two, muttering under his breath.

“New job?” Viktor asks.

“New-ish. Two weeks.” Jayce finds the right key and crouches in front of the case. “I’m very good at mopping. Bad at cigarettes. People get mad if you don’t remember their favorite brand.” He slides the glass open, and Viktor is hit by the chemical smell of unopened boxes, plastic, dust, artificial cherry. “What do you need?”

“Something for fever. Migraine. Possibly death.”

“We’re out of death. Supply chain.” Jayce grins, then reaches for a box. “This one’s probably fine. Ibuprofen. Unless you can’t take that.” He pauses with the box halfway off the shelf. “Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. And acetaminophen?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want both? You can alternate them.”

“I am familiar with the concept of medication.”

“Do you want water too? We have the big bottles by the register. Also sports drinks. Also one of those little applesauce pouch things, if you haven’t eaten.”

“Eh, just these. Thanks.”

Jayce smiles, closing the glass case with his hip. “You’re welcome. I can ring you up.”

They are both at the register when the bell above the door chimes. At first neither of them turns, because people enter convenience stores at three in the morning all the time. In this part of town, it is one of the few places left for the sleepless, the drunk, the lonely, the shift workers, the men buying flowers from a plastic bucket after ruining their marriages, the teenagers buying alcohol with fake IDs. Basically the night has its own digestive system, and the store is one of its organs.

But then Viktor sees Jayce’s face change. And Viktor turns. A man is standing behind him in a black hoodie, one hand shoved into the front pocket, the other holding a brown paper bag. His face is mostly hidden by the hood and a scarf pulled up too high, but his eyes are visible, wet and red-rimmed and unpleasantly awake. 

“Money,” he says, his hand shifting inside the hoodie pocket. “Now.”

Naturally, Viktor’s brain treats the whole thing as another hallucination. Why not? Why should the night settle for a measly migraine and a chance encounter when it could also include armed robbery? Perhaps next Viktor could buy ten scratch-off tickets and win a million dollars.

Jayce raises both hands slowly. “Woah, okay,” he says. His voice has changed too. “Okay. No problem.”

Viktor stands very still with his cane in one hand and the boxes of painkillers between them on the counter like a very useless witness. The man jerks his chin toward Viktor. 

“You. Don’t move.”

Viktor considers several snarky responses and rejects them all on account of wanting to remain alive, which is extremely disappointing. Jayce starts pulling bills out and putting them into the bag. Ones, fives, a few twenties. It is a pathetic amount of money. Viktor has seen medical invoices worth more. 

“Safe,” the man says.

Jayce swallows. “I don’t have access to the safe.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“I’m not. It’s on a timer. I can’t open it.”

The man’s pocket-hand moves again. Viktor’s mouth goes dry. Jayce’s eyes flick to him for half a second.

“I’m giving you what I have,” he says. “That’s all I can do.”

“Phone and wallet.”

Jayce pushes his phone and swollen wallet across the counter.

“Yours too,” the man says, looking at Viktor. 

Viktor reaches into his coat slowly and places his phone and card holder beside the register. The phone is old enough to be a joke, held together with a strip of black electrical tape. 

“What the fuck is that?”

“A phone,” Viktor says. 

Jayce makes a sound in his throat, something between a cough and the noise a rabbit might make while watching another rabbit get flattened by a lawn mower. The robber’s eyes narrow above the scarf. Viktor pushes the phone another inch across the counter. 

“Take it. Please. I have a migraine and a fever. I’d like to go home.”

Then the man grabs both phones anyway and shoves them into the bag with the cash and runs out of the store. For a few seconds too long Jayce remains behind the counter with both hands lifted slightly in front of him as though the robber may return and accuse him of lowering them without permission. 

“Okay,” Viktor says, exhaling. How bad would it be if he were to collapse here and become the store’s second major incident of the night. “Now what? Surely you have procedures. Call the police. Call your manager. Press a button beneath the counter that alerts the national security guards. Something.” 

Jayce’s breath catches audibly between his teeth. “Y-yeah. Procedure.” He bends toward the drawer beneath the register and misses the handle the first time. On the second attempt, he yanks it open so hard that a stack of receipts slides onto the floor. “There’s a manual. There’s supposed to be a manual.” He’s moving things around without seeing them: rolls of receipt paper, pens, a stapler, a packet of stamps, the plastic binder that has been directly in front of him the entire time.

Viktor picks it up and sets it on the counter. “This?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” The pages flutter beneath his shaking hands. “Okay…  robbery, where is it… fire, flooding, chemical spill, violent customer…” He finally finds it and reads the first line three times. “Ensure the perpetrator has left the premises.”

Beyond the glass doors, the sidewalk is bare beneath the streetlights. “He appears to have concluded his shopping.”

Jayce lets out a breath that shakes on the way out. He presses the heels of his hands briefly against his eyes, then reaches for the landline.

“I need to call the cops first,” he says. “Then my boss. Or maybe the security company. No, cops first. It says cops first.”

“That seems reasonable.”

Jayce dials, gets one number wrong, hangs up, and starts again. Viktor watches the cord twist around his wrist. Watches Jayce swallow before speaking. Watches him suddenly become very polite with the dispatcher, giving the store address twice, apologizing when he talks too fast, correcting himself about the man’s height, the color of the hoodie, whether there had actually been a weapon.

“I didn’t see one. But he had his hand in his pocket, so I thought….yeah, maybe. No, nobody’s hurt.” His eyes flick toward Viktor.

Viktor gives him a thumbs-up in confirmation.

“No,” Jayce continues. “He left on foot. I don’t know which direction. I’m sorry. I wasn’t– I didn’t look.” His voice cracks faintly on the last word. Viktor blinks away. On the counter, abandoned amid the disaster, sits the box of ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Beside it is the bottle of water Jayce had insisted he buy.  Jayce hangs up.

“They’re sending the cops,” he says. “I have to call my boss now. Did I scan these?”

“I do not know.”

“I think I did.”

“I think you did not.”

Jayce presses a button on the register where nothing useful happens. He stares at the screen, then at the cash drawer which is still hanging with its mouth open, containing approximately six coins and the lonely paperclip the robber had declined to steal.

“Okay. Well.” He puts the box into Viktor’s hand. Then the water. “Here. I think we can all agree this transaction has been through enough.” He chuckles painfully. “Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing, it’s fine. None of this was your fault.”

Jayce rubs both hands over his face, then drops them. “Do you mind staying? Just until the police get here.”

Viktor does. He makes Jayce drag a stool out from behind the counter and lowers himself onto it while Jayce works through the rest of the procedures, locking the doors and taping a handwritten closed sign to the glass. The police arrive first. Jayce’s boss follows a few minutes later. They pull Jayce aside near the refrigerators, far enough away that Viktor cannot make out the words even if he tries, which he does not.

His headache is still there, lodged behind one eye and pulsing. Sweat has begun gathering beneath his sweater and along the back of his neck. The fever breaking, presumably. Or organ failure. He tears open the box of painkillers and pushes four tablets through the foil instead of the recommended two. Every few seconds, Jayce nods nervously then looks toward Viktor as though checking he has not vanished. When he’s finally let go, Jayce walks back with his shoulders pulled up near his ears. His hair has fallen over his forehead again, and there is something so painfully sweet about the sad smile he gives Viktor.

“Good news. I’ve been given the rest of the night off.”

“Oh, how generous.”

“Yeah, my boss said I should take some time to process everything. Oh, and they said they might need us to come in later and look at photos or give another statement. But not tonight.” His eyes drop to the torn box in Viktor’s lap. “Did you take four?”

“No.”

“There are four empty spots.” Jayce’s gaze lingers. “Are you okay? You look really pale.” He crouches slightly, bringing himself closer to Viktor’s eye level without quite kneeling.  “You shouldn’t walk home alone after what just happened. How far do you live?”

“Three blocks.”

“Oh.” He straightens. “Okay. I’ll walk you.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you have just been robbed.”

“So have you.”

Outside, the sidewalk beyond them is empty, washed gray beneath the streetlights. A plastic bag drags itself along the curb and catches against a parking meter. The officer’s car is parked at the curb, blue-red lights rotating across the windows. Every time it passes over Jayce, his face changes color. When they walk, he follows close enough that Viktor can hear the scrape of his shoes and the uneven rhythm of his breathing. 

Halfway down the block, he says, “So, just to be clear, this isn’t usually what happens after your class, right?” He laughs. It is such a pretty sound even out here, bouncing off the shuttered storefronts and coming back to Viktor warmer, with the moon pressing its pale thumb against the roofs and the streetlights making everything beneath them look jaundiced. He then shoves his hands into his pockets, remembering his wallet is no longer in one of them and pats the empty space with a small frown. “Damn. My library card was in there. I’ve had that card since I was twelve.”

When they reach the corner, Viktor’s cane strikes the curb wrong, sending a bright metallic shock up his wrist. 

“I was thinking the city should fix the sidewalks.” They cross beneath a streetlight that turns Jayce’s face briefly yellow, then releases him back into shadow. His gaze catches on Viktor’s leg. He jerks it back to the sidewalk quickly, suddenly fascinated by a crack in the concrete.

“You may ask,” Viktor says.

“Ask what?”

“I was born like this. It’s fine. My femur is rotated.”

“Oh. About your leg.”

“It’s a femoral anteversion. The bone twists inward along its axis, which affects the alignment of the hip, knee, and foot.”

“I see.”

“They could have attempted to fix it when I was younger. Derotational osteotomy. Cut the femur, rotate it, insert hardware. But my family did not have the money. Physical therapy helped until insurance decided I had received enough attention for one fiscal year.”

“Huh.”

Usually Viktor avoids this conversation. Come to think of it, none of Viktor’s students have ever asked before. They notice the cane, certainly, and the strange inward angle of his leg, but they simply file it as not relevant to the diploma and continue waiting for him to explain the next assignment.

Jayce kicks a pebble into the gutter. It skips once, misses the drain, and rolls under a parked car. “You know, I didn’t drop out of high school because I was bad at school.”

“I did not assume you were.”

“Thank you.” Jayce smiles but it passes quickly. “I was actually doing pretty well before.”

“Before what?”

Jayce takes a breath. “I got sent to juvie.”

“For what?”

“It’s stupid, really. But remember how I told you that I used to conduct all sorts of experiments. Well… one of them went horribly wrong. I basically caused damage to our apartment building…”

Viktor, out of all the things he can say or do, he chooses to laugh, mostly because he can’t help it. It’s even funnier because Jayce still sounds so guilty about it, and partly embarrassed. He nudges another pebble with the toe of his shoe but does not kick it.

“Hey, it's not funny. The fire spread to a good portion.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Luckily, no. But the prosecutor said it didn’t matter that I hadn’t meant to burn anything down because I’d built it on purpose and ignored basically every safety rule that exists.”

“How long?”

“Eighteen months.”

“In juvenile detention?”

“Fourteen. Then probation.”

“And school?”

“I tried to keep up inside, but the classes were… bad. Mostly worksheets, which were horrible for my ADHD. And they put me in remedial classes because they didn’t have my records, and by the time they fixed it, I was already behind in everything else. When I got out, I was nineteen. I tried going back, but everyone was younger, and people knew. Or they found out. So I stopped.”

The street narrows ahead of them. Apartment windows rise on both sides, most of them dark. Somewhere above, a television laughs through an open window. A bus passes at the far end of the block, carrying three people beneath its bright interior lights like specimens in a moving display case.

“So you enrolled now,” Viktor says.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. That is good.”

Jayce shrugs. “I’m sure you hear worse reasons for people not finishing high school.”

“Eh. I have taught men convicted of assault, fraud, possession, and one extremely dumb case of identity theft. Your story does not make you special.”

“Oh.” The smile fades. “Was the identity theft person interesting?”

“He spent four years pretending to be a dentist.”

“Was he good at it?”

“He had no complaints.”

“You’re making that shit up.”

“I am not.”

Viktor is, but Jayce looks delighted enough by the lie that correcting it would be unnecessarily cruel.

They stop beneath a narrow brick building whose windows stack one above another into the dark. Viktor digs through his coat for his keys while Jayce tips his head back, counting each row until his gaze reaches the roofline.

“Which floor?”

“Sixth.”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“I climb them every day.” A light flicks on in the window beside Viktor’s apartment. It catches first on the window glass, then on the large wooden cross suspended inside it, illuminating Jesus Christ. 

He sighs. Jayce follows his gaze. “What?”

“The old woman who lives there.”

“What about her?”

“She put that cross in the window after I moved in,” Viktor says. “Now she switches it on whenever she sees me come home.”

Jayce glances up at the glowing figure of Christ. “That’s kind of funny. Why?”

“Beats me.” Viktor shrugs. “Sometimes I pretend it burns me.” He lifts one hand toward the window and hisses through his teeth. “Do you live far?”

“Nah. Maybe twenty minutes if I jog.” Jayce shoves his hands into his pockets and finds, once again, that one of them no longer contains his wallet or phone. His smile falters. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Jayce, do not worry about me.”

Viktor has no identification, no credit card, and no phone. Tomorrow, or later today, technically, he will have to call the bank, purchase a new phone, reconstruct his digital existence from passwords he has forgotten, and explain to several customer-service representatives that yes, the robber took the phone, and no, Viktor does not remember the security question he chose nine years ago because nine years ago he was apparently under the impression he would always know the name of his childhood best friend’s first pet. And he is feverish, medicated beyond the box’s recommendation, and six flights of stairs away from unconsciousness. But Jayce is standing there, smiling at him with such unbearable sweetness that Viktor can almost feel it sticking to the back of his teeth. So the night, come to think of it, has not been a total loss.

“You should get going then,” he says.

“I will.” Jayce rocks back on his heels. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?” There is a small upward turn at the end of it.

Viktor smiles. He waits until Jayce disappears around the corner before going inside. It is basic observational procedure. Someone has to verify that Jayce Talis can cross a single street without being robbed again, arrested, or struck by a vehicle. Only then does Viktor turn toward the stairs and begin climbing the goddamn things.

*

At six fifty-three on Friday, Viktor realizes Jayce has drawn him.

Jayce has spent the entire class folded over his notebook. Viktor assumes he was drawing more rocks until he dismissed everyone a few minutes early and found Jayce still hunched over the page, oblivious to the chairs scraping back and the room emptying around him.

Viktor stops behind his shoulder and clears his throat.

Jayce startles so violently that his pencil jumps across the paper. He looks up, then glances around the empty classroom. “Oops.”

“Why did you draw me?” Viktor asks.

A nervous laugh escapes him. He turns the notebook around and slides it across the desk. “Do you like it?”

He has even drawn the folds of his shirt, the sharp line of his nose, the hand raised midway with the marker pinched between two fingers. Behind the figure, the whiteboard drawings have been transformed into a kind of halo made of arrows and ion channels. The drawing is good. Jayce has noticed the way Viktor leans away from the bad hip. The angle of his wrist around the cane. The lock of hair that falls forward when he lowers his head. Details Viktor considers secretly his despite displaying them publicly every day.

“I think you look good. I mean in the drawing. Not that you don’t look good normally. You do. I just meant I drew you well. Although saying I think you look good because I drew you that way sounds worse, like I improved something about you. I didn’t. I drew what was there.” He rubs the heel of his hand across one eyebrow. “Anyway. I was going to come to your office hours.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. You couldn’t pay me to come in.”

“Well, I was going to come today, but then class happened.”

“Office hours occur after class.”

“I also know that now.”

“It is written on the syllabus.”

“I read the syllabus.”

“Then this information was already available to you.”

Jayce frowns at the notebook. “I read all of it, actually.”

“All of what?”

“The packet. The readings. The slides. The links you put in the notes. Except one of the videos was private, and one article wanted me to make an account, which I did, but then it said I needed institutional access, so I tried using the school login and accidentally locked myself out.”

“You completed four months of material.”

Jayce lifts one shoulder. “Most of it.”

“In three days.”

“So, since I’m already caught up, or almost caught up… I can still come to office hours, right?”

“If you have questions.”

“What if I don’t have questions?”

“Then the purpose of office hours becomes difficult to defend.”

“I could think of some.” Jayce hooks one finger beneath the folder’s elastic band and releases it with a soft snap. “I mean, could I just sit there? While you do whatever you do there. I’d bring something to do. You wouldn’t have to entertain me or talk to me or even acknowledge that I’m there, really.”

“Why?”

Jayce’s eyes drift to the dark classroom windows, where the desks float faintly in the glass. His thumb moves over the notebook’s spiral, catching each ring. “My apartment feels strange,” he says. “Since the robbery.” He gives a quick shrug that fails halfway through and leaves one shoulder higher than the other. “It’s stupid, I know. And it doesn’t make sense. Nothing happened there. But every little sound sends me to the window.” The spiral clicks again. “I don’t really want to sit there by myself.”

The answer already exists: office hours are for questions, clarification, academic support and what not, and definitely not for adopting lonely bored adult students who require supervised enrichment. There are boundaries and protocols. There is probably a flowchart explaining exactly when concern becomes favoritism and favoritism becomes misconduct and misconduct becomes an email from HR inviting him to a meeting that is not technically disciplinary but does contain three people taking notes. He could tell Jayce to contact student services, campus counseling, victim support, the police again, literally anyone whose employment description includes emotional stability. He could point out that Viktor is not especially comforting. He owns one chair for guests and it is covered in books. His office is old and stuffy. He has no snacks. He has no conversational games. He does not know how to sit quietly with another person without becoming violently aware of every breath they take.

More importantly, Jayce has a pretty face, which should not matter but has unfortunately become the central logistical obstacle of Viktor’s professional life. Policies are always written by people who have never been trapped alone with another human being’s pretty face. They imagine faculty misconduct begins with intention, with a hand placed casually on a knee, rather than with something much stupider: allowing a student to occupy the second chair because he looks scared and because the thought of sending him home produces some unpleasant contraction beneath the ribs.

Jayce sits in the chair beside Viktor’s desk with his backpack between his shoes and both hands folded over the zipper, his knee bouncing. The metal pull on his bag clicks against the floor. He inhales as though preparing to speak, catches himself, and exhales through his nose. His eyes move around the office. They begin with the shelves: battered science workbooks, general biology textbooks, test-prep manuals, an introductory anatomy book repaired along the spine with clear tape. Then the jars of teeth on the windowsill. Then the plastic model of an ear beside the printer. Then the little wooden case of microscope slides. 

His knee stops. “Oh cool, you have a microscope. Does it work? What do you look at?”

“Slides.”

“What kind of slides?”

“The microscopic kind.”

Jayce makes an impatient sound. “Cells?”

“Sometimes.”

“Your own?”

“Sometimes.”

That brings him fully upright. “You look at your own cells?”

“Everyone does.”

Jayce steps closer to the cabinet. “What about blood?”

“Sometimes.”

“Hair?”

“Hair is not cellular.”

“I know that. Skin? Saliva?”

Viktor tears his eyes from the papers.

Jayce clears his throat and lowers his voice. “I remember asking for a microscope for my birthday once. It looked more like a weapon than scientific equipment, but I could look at rocks up close, so it was still the coolest shit I owned.”

He opens his backpack and removes the packet Viktor gave him, followed by three pencils, two pens, a ruler, a crushed granola bar, and a notebook whose cover has been reinforced with strips of black tape. He arranges everything across his lap, drops one pencil, bends to retrieve it, drops the ruler while retrieving the pencil, and bumps his head against the underside of the desk.

The sound is hollow and surprisingly loud. Jayce remains crouched with one hand pressed to the back of his skull. “I’m okay.”

He sits again, rubbing his head. His hair has fallen over his forehead, and the impact has left a red mark just above one eyebrow. He opens the packet to the first page and stares at it for perhaps ten seconds before looking back up.

“So what do you do for fun?” He taps the eraser of his pencil against his knee. “You go home after class and then what?”

Viktor closes his eyes briefly. “I continue existing until the next class.”

Jayce smiles. “No, really.”

“I read.”

“What kind of books?”

“Books with words.”

“Fiction?”

“Sometimes.”

“Science?”

“Yes.”

“Poetry?”

“No.”

“Do you have friends?”

“Eh. I know people.”

“That is the answer serial killers give when the documentary asks about their social lives.”

“I know several people.”

“Do you see them?”

“Sometimes.”

Thirty seconds pass. “Do you go to bars?”

“No.”

“Clubs?”

“No.”

“Movies?”

“Sometimes.”

“With the several people?”

“Sometimes alone.”

Jayce nods. “I go alone too. People think it’s sad, but I like it. Nobody talks to me during the movie, and I can get whatever snacks I want without having to share. Except sometimes I still turn to say something and there’s no one there, which is embarrassing, but only for me, because nobody else knows I did it.”

A laugh escapes Viktor before he can stop it.

“Ha, made you laugh.” Jayce points both hands at him in a pair of triumphant finger guns. “What do you do alone?”

“I have already said I read.”

“Besides reading.”

“Sometimes I ride the train.”

Jayce waits for the rest. “That’s it?”

Viktor hums. 

“And go where?”

“Wherever it is going.”

“But why?”

“Because remaining in my apartment becomes intolerable.”

“Oh. You and I both.”

Viktor studies him for a second. “What about you, what do you do for fun?”

Jayce blinks. “Me?”

“No, the other person repeatedly striking my desk with a pencil.”

“Oh. Well, you know.” Jayce rolls the pencil between his palms. “I draw. And I collect rocks.” His knee begins bouncing again. “I take things apart too.”

“Do you put them back together?”

“Of course. That’s where half the fun is.” Then Jayce clears his throat. “So,” he says, still looking down, “are you single?”

“Not an appropriate question to ask your teacher.”

“I know.” Jayce presses the pencil harder into the paper until the point snaps.

Viktor extends his hand. “Give me the pencil before you injure yourself.”

Jayce places the broken pieces in his palm. His fingers brush Viktor’s for less than a second, warm and callused at the tips. He looks up at Viktor with a softness so open it feels almost dreamy. “You’ve always been interesting,” he says.

Viktor’s fingers close around the pencil fragments. “Always?”

Jayce blinks and the look vanishes. He clears his throat and withdraws his hand. “I mean, since I found your um, your class videos. Obviously.”

“Hm.”

Jayce leans forward slightly, forearms resting across his knees. The movement brings him farther into the narrow space between the chair and Viktor’s desk, close enough that Viktor can see the faint graphite smudged along the side of his hand.

Viktor’s gaze catches there. “Since you are so determined to occupy your hands, you may as well make yourself useful.”

He reaches behind the desk and pulls a radio from the lowest shelf. It is an ugly beige rectangle with a bent antenna and a tuning dial yellowed around the edges. The plastic casing bears several scratches, including one deep enough to resemble a surgical scar. He drops it into Jayce’s waiting hands.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It has not worked in ten years.”

“And you kept it?”

“It is mine. I am permitted to keep my own possessions, no?”

When Jayce turns the volume dial, the speaker releases a dry crackle then a faint hum that collapses almost immediately into silence. He tries again, tilting the radio toward his ear.

“Do you have a screwdriver?”

Viktor opens the top drawer and places one on the desk.

Jayce slides down onto the floor between the chair and Viktor’s desk. He removes the screws one by one, arranging them in a perfect row beside his knee. The back panel comes loose with a plastic snap. Dust clings to the wires and circuit board in gray little webs. He bends over it. His knee stops bouncing.

The screwdriver moves gently between the components. He presses one connection, turns the tuning mechanism by hand, then angles the open casing toward the desk lamp. A lock of hair falls across his eyes. He blows it away without looking up.

“Nope. This is gone. Dead. The variable capacitor’s corroded and one of the plates is bent. The oscillator coil might be damaged too.”

“And?”

“And I can’t fix it here.” Jayce nudges the bent plate with his fingernail. “You’d need a replacement from the same model, maybe the same production run. They don’t manufacture these anymore.”

“You know that from looking at it?”

“Well, yeah. The housing is weird. See how narrow it is?” He points to a space Viktor does not really care to distinguish from any of the other spaces. “A modern part won’t fit unless you rebuild the whole tuning assembly, and then it would probably sound terrible anyway. I mean, I could fix it if it’s that important to you. I’d just have to find one from a version where they still–” He stops.

The open radio softens at the edge of Viktor’s vision. “A version of what?”

Jayce’s mouth opens, then his eyes lift past Viktor’s shoulder. Whatever answer had been forming disappears. Jayce shoves back his sleeve. A thick bracelet circles his wrist, dark leather broken by a small blue crystal face. Faint light pulses beneath his thumb.

Viktor cannot remember seeing it before.

“Shit.” Jayce scrambles upright. “I have to go.”

He drops the screwdriver onto the desk and begins sweeping pencils, papers, and his notebook into his backpack. One of the radio screws rolls beneath Viktor’s chair.

“Okay…”

“This was fun!” Jayce shoulders the bag while moving toward the door. “Thank you for letting me keep you company!”

Viktor opens his mouth to point out that Jayce had been the one unwilling to sit alone, that the arrangement had not been made for Viktor’s benefit, and that keeping him company was an offensively inaccurate description of forty minutes spent interrogating him and dismantling his property. But Jayce is already gone.

*

There are stretches when Jayce is simply gone for a very long time. As his teacher, Viktor is concerned for entirely professional reasons. That is presumably why he begins counting the empty nights.

A warning would be nice. Even one of Jayce’s usual elaborate explanations sent through attendance would do. But there is nothing. One evening he is folded into the second chair in Viktor’s office, headphones looped around his neck, and by the next class his desk is empty. Then, without explanation, he returns, sometimes after one absence, sometimes after three, slipping through the door acting as though nothing happened, sometimes wearing the same clothes, sometimes looking as if several sleepless days have passed instead of one. Once he arrives with rainwater in his hair although the city has been dry all week. Another time there is ash caught beneath his fingernails. He gives Viktor a coin dated three years from now and insists it came from the convenience-store register, claiming it is counterfeit.

Tonight there is a tear in the shoulder of his jacket and gray powder rubbed into one sleeve.  Viktor waits until the room has emptied. “What’s going on? You missed the exam review and the entire introduction to the next unit.”

“I’ll catch up.” 

Viktor asks whether Jayce is struggling with the material, whether he is embarrassed to admit it, whether he is in some kind of financial, legal, or personal trouble that keeps swallowing his evenings. Jayce denies all of it without looking at him.

“Jayce, the program requires regular attendance. After enough unexcused absences, I have to submit a report. Continued absences could get you removed.”

“You’d kick me out?”

“The program would make that decision, not me.”

This is technically true in the same way that pushing someone from a roof does not technically constitute killing them because gravity makes the final decision. Viktor could omit an absence. He could change a late mark to present. He could invent a meeting, an assignment, an accommodation. The attendance software is ancient and barely functional; it once marked a student present for six consecutive weeks after he moved to another state. No one would notice. Viktor has already imagined how he would do it, which is an extremely bad thing to have imagined while lecturing someone about institutional requirements.

But Viktor has already chosen favoritism. There is no point pretending otherwise. There is a voltage in Viktor’s chest whenever the classroom door opens and Jayce appears, and on these nights Jayce attends, Viktor becomes better at his job. He invents useless jokes he would normally consider beneath him and aims them toward the back row, and when Jayce laughs, Viktor feels briefly rewarded for existing. Not only that, but the rest of the class could evaporate, leaving nothing behind but scorched outlines, and Viktor might continue the class without missing a word so long as Jayce is the only one paying attention. Which is not that catastrophically wrong yet but still in the larval stage, fattening itself on plausible deniability. Jayce is an adult. Viktor is not grading him differently. He has not touched him, kissed him, or asked him to remain after class for any other purpose. Still, he knows exactly what he is doing when he permits Jayce to occupy his office during hours intended for everyone. He knows what he is doing when he keeps the second chair clear. He knows what he is doing when he monitors Jayce’s attendance and chooses to mark him present despite him not being there at all.

He knows, because unfortunately, Viktor has spent most of the last few weeks picturing his nose crashing into Jayce’s pretty face like a meteorite.  He also knows he will not stop.

But it is not as though Viktor cares particularly about this job either. He has wanted to leave almost since the day he started. The program pays poorly, the administration communicates exclusively through emails containing the phrase gentle reminder immediately before a threat, the students are total jerks, except for Jayce, which is partly why Viktor has been so drawn to him. There are better jobs. He has been meaning to look. He keeps a folder on his laptop which contains his résumé, three cover letters, and a job listing that probably expired eight months ago. Every few weeks he opens it, updates one verb, becomes exhausted, and closes it again. 

Jayce’s thumb is moving over the strap of his backpack until the leather creaks. “Are you, um,” he says. “Are you hungry?”

Viktor is not hungry. Viktor tells him this. Twenty minutes later, he is sitting across from him in a ramen restaurant.

The transition occurs through a sequence of decisions so individually minor that Viktor cannot locate the exact point at which he loses custody of his own judgment. Jayce says there is a place across the street. He says he wants to tell him something but not inside the school. Viktor asks why. Jayce says he does not know. He says please, and then Viktor is waiting at a crosswalk beside him while the pedestrian signal displays a red hand, presumably in direct reference to Viktor’s ethical situation. 

The restaurant occupies a narrow space between a laundromat and a closed pharmacy. Its windows have fogged from the inside, sealing them inside a warm little aquarium of condensation and sodium. Red paper lanterns hang from the ceiling, each one casting the weak uterine glow of an emergency exit. It is nearly empty. A delivery driver is asleep over his phone at the counter. An old man in the corner lifts noodles into his mouth so slowly that Viktor begins to suspect he has been sitting there since the building was constructed.

Jayce has ordered the spiciest ramen on the menu despite admitting, after the first bite, that he has no tolerance for spice. He slurps another bundle of noodles noisily into his mouth. Broth freckles his chin. His face is flushed all the way to the tips of his ears.

Viktor watches him suffer for several seconds. Jayce swallows and coughs into his fist. “It’s good. It’s very flavorful.” He lifts the bowl and drinks directly from it. When he lowers it, his upper lip shines with oil. “You’re supposed to slurp ramen,” he says. 

“According to whom?”

“I read it somewhere. It shows appreciation to the chef.”

“The chef cannot see you. He is behind a curtain.”

“He can hear me.”

“Yes. The entire street can hear you.”

Jayce slurps again, louder and more intentional this time, maintaining eye contact while one noodle whips broth onto the table between them. He points his chopsticks at Viktor, then fumbles the grip and drops one into his bowl. It disappears beneath the broth. Jayce stares down at it.

“I’m normally good with chopsticks.”

Jayce tells him about the instant noodles his mother used to buy in bulk, bricks of dehydrated curls with flavor packets containing enough sodium to preserve a minor pharaoh. He used to crack the noodles into pieces and eat them dry over the sink so she would not catch him, though she always caught him because the crumbs adhered to his shirt like dandruff.

Viktor tells him about the soups his parents made from whatever had begun dying in the refrigerator. Cabbage, potatoes, carrots with soft black tips amputated before cooking. Nothing was wasted. A vegetable could become nearly liquid and still be considered salvageable if boiled long enough.

“So that’s why you’re like this,” Jayce says.

“Like what?”

Jayce gestures at all of him with the dripping chopsticks. “Economical.”

Viktor raises an eyebrow. Jayce laughs so hard he nearly inhales a noodle.

It is so uncomplicatedly good. Viktor has spent so much time worrying about the moral dimensions of being alone with Jayce that he neglected to consider the more immediate danger: he enjoys him. He likes the physical fact of Jayce across the table, mouth pink from spice, steam dampening the loose strands of hair along his forehead. He likes the way Jayce’s stories have no detectable destination. He likes the excessive, almost concerning amount of goodness inside him. Sometimes Jayce looks at him as though he already knows everything. It is a strange thing about him, the information he stores. Viktor mentions once that the light in his office worsens his headaches, and two days later Jayce arrives with a desk lamp scavenged from somewhere, its shade dented and its cord repaired with black tape. Viktor points out a mineral in Jayce’s notebook, and the following week a small piece of it appears beside his mug. Viktor says, during class one day, that he likes green apples the best and Jayce starts bringing him green apple flavored candies from the convenience store.

“You told me,” Jayce says whenever Viktor asks how he knew.

Perhaps he did, he cannot remember. Jayce asks so many questions that Viktor occasionally answers one without noticing he has been opened. What books do you read when you cannot sleep? Do you like thunderstorms? Did you always want to teach? What did you want before that? Do you think jellyfish know they are alive? The questions sound stupid until Viktor hears himself responding to every single one of them. 

I like the rain because everything turns gray, and gray is the closest thing I have to a favorite color. I’m addicted to my own melancholia. I read books about joyless people ruining their lives. Jellyfish do not even have brains, so whatever they experience cannot reasonably be called consciousness. And no, I never wanted merely to teach. I am extremely ambitious, despite the misleading evidence of my current life.

So a few nights after they get ramen, they go out for ice cream.

Jayce is waiting outside the school when Viktor finishes class, leaning against the brick wall with his backpack between his shoes and two green-apple candies balanced in his palm like a bribe. He says there is a place nearby that stays open late.  Jayce orders something blue with pieces of cake and red candy crushed through it, an atrocity assembled from the contents of a diabetic child’s bloodstream. Viktor chooses mint chocolate chip, to which Jayce calls Viktor a psychopath.

Across the street, the school building has begun turning itself off one window at a time. Viktor’s office remains lit on the fourth floor. From here it looks small and counterfeit, a square of yellow suspended against the dark. The second chair is invisible, though Viktor knows exactly where it sits, angled toward the desk because Jayce never returns it properly. 

Jayce follows his gaze. “I like your office,” he says. He scrapes his spoon across the bottom of the cup, though he has eaten only half. A thin smear of red syrup remains beside his mouth. It has survived the entire night. Viktor has been aware of it for twenty-three minutes, which is a ridiculous amount of time to spend tracking food debris on another person’s face.

“You have something,” he says.

“What?”

Viktor gestures vaguely at his own mouth but Jayce wipes the wrong side. “The other.”

He wipes his chin. Viktor makes an impatient sound. Before he can reconsider, he lifts his hand and catches the red mark with his thumb, which remains at the corner of Jayce’s mouth for longer than it should. Jayce’s skin is warm despite the cold. Up close, Viktor can see the tiny variations in his irises, green breaking into amber near the pupil, the faint roughness along his jaw. Jayce inhales, and Viktor feels the breath against the inside of his wrist.

A responsible person would step back now. Viktor does not step back. Jayce’s eyes lower to his mouth.

Something gathers between them. Viktor can feel it breathing, some small blind organism constructed from proximity, when Jayce leans forward by less than an inch. Viktor’s hand slides from his mouth to his jaw. The blue stone beneath Jayce’s sleeve flashes and Jayce recoils as though Viktor has struck him. The warmth drains out of his face all at once, then his eyes fill so quickly Viktor wonders whether the wind has done it, though there is almost no wind.

“Jayce?”

Fear is there, though fear is impossible because nothing has happened. They have eaten ice cream. They have laughed. Viktor has nearly made a mistake with his mouth. These are small things, containable things.

Jayce’s lower lip is trembling. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

He steps backward. “I have to go.” 

Viktor reaches for his sleeve. “Wait.”

Jayce’s eyes drop to Viktor’s hand around his wrist. The bracelet burns beneath Viktor’s fingers. Jayce’s mouth trembles, but he does not pull away.

“I’ll come to class,” he says. “I promise.”

He pulls free and begins walking away, then walking faster, then nearly running. Viktor calls his name but Jayce does not turn around. The streetlight above him flickers. For a moment, Jayce’s shadow stretches in the wrong direction. Then he rounds the corner and disappears. Viktor remains beneath the awning with his thumb still sticky from the corner of Jayce’s mouth.

Jayce does not come to class for the next three days. It leaves an absence so big that Viktor cannot stop touching with his mind, like a tongue worrying the soft vacancy of a missing tooth.

*

On the nights Jayce disappears, Viktor develops theories.

The first is that Jayce has another job. This would be the least interesting explanation and therefore the one Viktor attempts to believe. Perhaps he cleans offices after six o’clock or unloads trucks before dawn. Perhaps some manager changes his schedule without warning because managers enjoy messing with other people’s lives to prove they possess one themselves.

The second theory involves crime. Jayce has already committed arson once, although Viktor has reluctantly accepted that setting fire to an apartment building as a teenager does not necessarily indicate a lifelong professional interest. Still, Jayce has the very kind heart of someone who could become involved in a criminal enterprise by trying to help carry a box and realizing too late that it contains either stolen organs or several kilograms of cocaine. 

Viktor imagines him being driven across the border in the back of a van, apologizing to his kidnappers for taking up too much space. This theory is also unsatisfying.

Criminals generally have phones. Jayce’s stops accepting calls entirely. They don’t ring unanswered or go to voicemail. The automated message simply claims the number cannot be reached because it never existed.

Viktor listens to the message three times one Wednesday evening. Then a fourth, to confirm that it has not changed. He is standing alone in his classroom. Jayce’s chair sits empty near the back, one leg angled into the aisle because he never pushes it in correctly. On the desk, someone has scratched a small circle into the laminate. Viktor places his thumb over it.

Sometimes, he dreams that the classroom has been built inside a whale.

The walls flex around him with each slow breath. The lights hang from ropes of tendons, blinking whenever the animal dives deeper. Every desk is occupied, though none of the students have faces. Their heads are smooth eggs of skin bent over their textbooks.

Jayce’s chair is empty. Viktor continues teaching even though this bothers him a lot. He draws a cell on the board, but the marker squeaks against something wet and white. Bone, he realizes. The board is a rib. When he labels the nucleus, the whale’s heart beats hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling.

“Attendance,” Viktor says.

The faceless students raise their hands one by one. Present. Present. Present. Each voice comes from somewhere beneath the desks. When he reaches Jayce’s name, nobody answers. Viktor marks him absent. The ink immediately crawls backward through the pen and disappears into his hand. He tries again. Absent. The word lifts from the paper on six tiny legs and runs off the edge of the desk.

Somewhere behind him, Jayce is laughing. When Viktor turns, he is standing on the other side of the classroom window, although there should be nothing outside except organs and ocean. His hair drifts around his face as though he is underwater. One palm rests against the glass. The bracelet on his wrist burns blue enough to illuminate the enormous dark shapes moving behind him.

Viktor tries to cross the room but the desks multiply between them. Every time he pushes one aside, two more appear. The faceless students begin turning their heads to follow him.

Jayce mouths something through the glass. Viktor cannot hear him over the whale’s heartbeat. When he wakes, his hand is closed around his own wrist and there is a taste of salt in his mouth.

*

Whenever Jayce shows up, Viktor finds himself returning to the convenience store.

Jayce keeps a stool tucked beside the counter and drags it out for him. It is a rickety thing with a cracked vinyl seat and one leg shorter than the others, requiring a folded lottery advertisement beneath it to remain stable. Viktor sits while Jayce works, drinking burnt coffee and reading articles on his phone. Mostly he watches Jayce wipe the counter, restock candy, study, argue with the card reader, and give directions to drunk people who immediately forget them. Jayce talks constantly. He tells Viktor which regular steals sugar packets, which freezer makes a dying-whale noise every forty-seven minutes, which scratch-off ticket has the ugliest design. The arrangement becomes so regular that customers begin mistaking Viktor for an employee.

There are quiet stretches too. The hour after five, when even the drunks become scarce and the city seems to have misplaced its pulse. The overhead lights bleach everything into the same exhausted color: candy wrappers, skin, spilled milk drying near the refrigerators. Outside, cars pass occasionally, their headlights moving across the windows like search beams over black water.

Those are the moments Viktor intends to use. Where do you go? Jayce leans over the counter, drawing something on the back of a receipt. Why do you come back looking hurt? Jayce pushes a paper crane toward him without looking up. What is that bracelet? Its blue face pulses once beneath Jayce’s sleeve, so faintly Viktor could convince himself it is only the register screen reflecting against the glass.

Why does the thought of you disappearing make my heart feel as though it has received terrible news?

Every night Viktor waits for the right moment. The right moment always passes. Or perhaps it does not pass. Perhaps it arrives and Viktor simply lets it die each time. The truth is that he is afraid. Not of the answer, although the answer is likely terrible. He is afraid of the question itself, of asking and watching Jayce retreat. Jayce is skittish around concern. Too much of it and his face shuts down, Viktor has seen this happen whenever he mentions the absences directly. He does not want Jayce to stop appearing at office hours or vanish from class entirely, even if one night a week is all Viktor gets. He does not want to walk into the convenience store and find a stranger behind the register saying Jayce does not work here anymore.

And Viktor has been really fucking lonely for years. Lonely and bored, which are different diseases sharing a drainage system. Loneliness is the knowledge that nobody will notice if he does not speak all day; boredom is realizing he has nothing worth saying when someone finally asks. He has spent years returning to the same apartment, reheating the same meals, riding trains to destinations he does not need simply to remain in the presence of other bodies. So sue him for taking whatever portion of Jayce is available.

These nights, they make Viktor feel like he’s being violently drowned, but in a really good way.

At the end of every shift, sometime after the sky has begun thinning from black to the bruised blue before morning, Jayce walks him home. Viktor tells him this is unnecessary. Jayce agrees and follows him anyway. The city at that hour seems recently abandoned. Delivery trucks idle beside the curb with their doors open. Trash bags sweat against brick walls. The pavement shines with old grease and last night’s dew. They look at the moon. Jayce likes the moon. The moon is very pretty tonight, he says. The moon looks like cheese, he says. The moon looks like a fingernail clipping god forgot to sweep away. The moon looks like someone took a bite out of it. The moon looks sick. The moon looks lonely. The moon looks close enough to hit with a rock.

Viktor tells him the moon does not resemble cheese. Its surface is primarily silicate rock, powdered regolith, and impact debris.

Sometimes, he walks backward so he can speak to Viktor without turning his head. This is dangerous, idiotic, and apparently irresistible to him. He nearly collides with parking meters, bags of garbage, one newspaper box, and a man carrying trays of bread into a bakery. Viktor repeatedly orders him to face forward. Jayce obeys for several steps before rotating again, drawn backward by the magnetic force of his own conversational momentum.

Viktor, do you believe there is life elsewhere? Would you go to space if given the chance? Do you think people are naturally good? If you could see any moment in history, which one would you  choose?

The last question causes something beneath Jayce’s sleeve to flash blue. Viktor notices and Jayce notices him noticing but neither of them says anything.

“I’d go forward,” Jayce says after a while. He is facing forward now, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, the back of his neck pink from the cold. His hair is flattened on one side from the store cap, and he looks exhausted enough to dissolve.

“What do you expect to happen?” Viktor asks.

Jayce shrugs. “Something good, eventually.”

It is such a Jayce answer that Viktor nearly becomes angry. The belief in eventual goodness seems less like optimism than a congenital defect, something grown into his bones before he was old enough to understand. Viktor wants to tell him the future is merely the present after it has had more time to rot. Instead, he watches Jayce’s breath form briefly in the air and disappear.

They reach Viktor’s building too quickly every morning.

The illuminated cross waits in the neighboring window. Jayce looks up at it, then at Viktor, expecting the usual performance. Viktor raises one hand and gives a weak hiss. Jayce laughs, though he has seen the joke before. He always laughs as though Viktor has invented it again specifically for him. Then comes the pause. Jayce rocks back on his heels. Viktor tightens his hand around the cane. Both of them look toward the entrance, the street, the moon, anywhere except directly at the fact that Jayce has delivered him home and now has no defensible reason to remain.

*

One day, a colleague leaves two circus tickets on Viktor’s desk with a note explaining that her children have developed some kind of bug and that the tickets are nonrefundable. Viktor considers throwing them away; the circus combines several of his least favorite conditions: crowds, children, amplified music, the public celebration of preventable spinal injury.

During office hours, Jayce leans across the desk and turns one ticket with his fingertip. A man in silver sequins hangs upside down from a trapeze across the front. “You’re going to the circus?”

“No.”

“Then why do you have two tickets? Oh, it’s tomorrow. Who are you going with?”

“I just said, I’m not going. They were given to me.”

“Oh.” His thumb moves slowly across the glossy edge. “Well, I could go with you. If you wanted. Or you could say, No Jayce, I’m tired of you pestering me all the time.” He laughs. “Can you imagine yourself saying that? I don’t think you’d mean it.” His smile turns uncertain. “You wouldn’t, right? Because I think I’d probably cry.”

Viktor knows he has made a mistake before they even pass through the mouth of the enormous red-and-white tent. Children weave between adults carrying glowing plastic swords and clouds of spun sugar larger than their heads. Music pounds through the canvas walls hard enough to rattle Viktor’s teeth. Beside him, Jayce stands beneath the electric sign with his face tipped toward the lights, looking so delighted that Viktor’s mistake becomes considerably harder to regret.

“Wow, this is so cool. My mom took me to a circus once, but I barely remember it. Thanks for bringing me. I know crowds usually give you a headache, so I brought ibuprofen.”

“How do you know that? I never told you that.”

Jayce catches the edge of Viktor’s sleeve when a family cuts between them, holding on until the crowd passes. His fingers remain there a second longer than necessary. They find their seats near the aisle. Jayce folds himself into the narrow chair, knees pressing against the row ahead. He has purchased popcorn, a pretzel, and a cup of something violently blue.

“Heh, I skipped dinner.” Jayce offers him the popcorn. Viktor takes some despite having declined it twice.

The lights fall. For the next thirty minutes, bodies fling themselves through the air while Viktor calculates the probable velocity of each impact should the performers miss. Jayce watches with his mouth slightly open, applauding every landing and occasionally grabbing Viktor’s forearm when someone releases the trapeze.

Jayce follows his gaze and releases him. “Sorry.”

The next act begins with three performers descending from the ceiling on long strips of red silk. One of them notices Viktor, he becomes aware of this gradually. First comes the prolonged glance from above, then a smile delivered upside down while the man hangs by one ankle, then an entirely unnecessary rotation performed directly over Viktor’s seat. Jayce’s applause slows. The acrobat drops, catches the silk inches from the floor, and lands in a crouch. When he straightens, his gaze returns directly to Viktor.

Viktor keeps his eyes on the ring. The acrobat climbs again. Halfway up, he twists himself through the silk and looks directly at Viktor while arching backward. Jayce drinks from his blue cup hard enough to collapse the straw.

Then, during the performers’ pass through the audience, the acrobat comes down their aisle. He accepts applause, touches children’s outstretched hands, and pauses beside Viktor’s chair. Up close, he is older than Viktor expected, his face painted around the eyes with gold. He draws a red paper flower from somewhere inside his costume and offers it to Viktor. The people around them make a chorus of delighted noise. Viktor takes it because refusing would create a scene. The acrobat bows over his hand, smiling, and drags two fingers lightly along the back of Viktor’s chair before moving on.

Jayce follows the acrobat with his eyes until he disappears into the next row. “Huh.” His tongue presses briefly against the inside of his cheek. 

“What?”

“Nothing.” He faces the ring again, but the muscle in his jaw jumps beneath the skin. Viktor drops the paper flower into his lap. “What are you doing?”

“I have no use for it.”

Jayce pinches the flower by its paper stem. He turns it slowly between his fingers, flattening one of the petals with his thumb. Outside, beneath the white glare of the marquee, he opens the front pocket of his backpack and slides the flower inside. They reach the corner.

“Did you think he was attractive?” Jayce asks, his gaze dropping to the pedestrian signal. “Never mind.”

“Yes, actually. I think I did.” The light changes. Jayce steps forward without looking and nearly walks off the curb into the path of a passing car. Viktor catches the back of his sleeve and yanks him hard against his side as a car cuts through the intersection. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, pfft, nothing. I– I just didn’t think you’d say yes. Not that you shouldn’t think he was attractive. He was. Objectively. I have eyes. He was very symmetrical and clearly in good physical condition, which is probably necessary for the job. You can’t exactly be bad at upper-body strength and become a trapeze artist. Or maybe you can, but not for very long. Anyway, the makeup probably helped. Stage makeup is designed to exaggerate bone structure from a distance. So maybe he looked different up close. Not worse, necessarily. Just different. Sweatier, probably. And smellier.”

Viktor begins crossing once the road is clear. Jayce follows at his shoulder.

“Because performers sweat a lot. Under the lights, you know. And those costumes probably aren’t breathable. Sequins seem like they’d trap heat. Maybe not actual sequins, but whatever synthetic material they use. And he was wearing body paint too, so that probably had a smell.”

Viktor catches his lower lip between his teeth.  “How fortunate, then. That I had no intention of smelling him.”

“Good. I’m glad you didn’t because I think smelling strangers is generally a bad idea. You don’t know where they’ve been. He could have a skin condition. Or some kind of contagious fungus from sharing costumes. Circus people probably share costumes, right? Maybe not the whole costume. The pants would be individually assigned, hopefully. But accessories, definitely. Wrist cuffs, capes, those little sparkly things, all that stuff. It would be really inconvenient if you caught trapeze fungus and missed class.”

“Trapeze fungus.”

“It could exist. Anyway, are you hungry?”

“Not after you mentioned trapeze fungus, you absolute weirdo.”

“That’s fair.” Jayce nods gravely. “Bad transition. Sorry.”

*

Time passes, though Viktor loses track of it somewhere between Jayce’s increasingly frequent visits and the weird little accumulation of habits that begin to resemble a totally normal shared life.

One evening, they are doing Viktor’s laundry.

Viktor is not entirely certain how the evening has arrived here, with Jayce crouched before a washing machine in the basement of Viktor’s apartment building, feeding shirts into its rust-rimmed mouth while Viktor sits on an overturned detergent bucket and watches. But he is glad it has. It’s the weekend and they had stayed upstairs too long, talking until the apartment lost its edges and everything turned purple with dusk. They drank tea made almost entirely of sugar because Jayce had misunderstood the ratio and Viktor had been too spellbound to correct him.

Viktor was admitting that he passes nearly everyone in his class regardless of how well they perform. Jayce had looked at him as though this proved something important and told him how kind he is.

“You’re so good,” he said quietly. “A good teacher, a good person. I mean it. You act like you hate everyone, and maybe you do a little, but you still care about everything. In class you care when people get treated like they’re stupid. You care when something isn’t fair, even when it has nothing to do with you. You care if someone lies, or gets hurt, or needs help and is too embarrassed to ask for it.” His smile softened. “You notice all of it. You just pretend you don’t.”

His hand crossed the space between them, hesitated, then landed flat against Viktor’s chest.

“Here,” Jayce said. His palm was warm even through Viktor’s shirt, large enough that Viktor could feel the weight of every finger. “You’re so fucking good here. You have no idea how good you are.”

Viktor became certain that he was going to explode. Jayce’s hand remained there, heavy and gentle, like a bookmark pressed between the pages of a book Viktor had not realized was open. Viktor did not know what was expected of him. Ignore it? Remove it? Cover it with his own hand and thereby admit that he wanted it to remain?

Kiss him? Yeah, right. As if Viktor had it in him. Much safer to remain perfectly still until Jayce’s arm cramped and the problem removed itself.

“Your heart rate is elevated,” Jayce had said. “What are you nervous about?”

“I’m not nervous.” A stupid lie.

Jayce’s palm shifted slightly, as though trying to count the beats through Viktor’s shirt. Then, before Viktor could object, he caught Viktor’s wrist with his other hand and guided it toward himself. Viktor’s palm landed flat against Jayce’s chest. His heart was racing too.

“Twins,” Jayce said, and then his smile faltered. “That sounded less weird in my head.”

Now, watching Jayce’s reflection warp across the spinning glass of the washing machine, Viktor wished he had done it. Leaned forward and kissed him.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” Jayce says.

Viktor prefers his reflection instead. Jayce is smiling faintly, but the machine pulls his face sideways before Viktor can properly examine it. He shifts on the detergent bucket. His bad leg has begun to stiffen, the pain gathering inside the joint. He could stand, but standing would announce that the conversation has frightened him. Instead, he remains where he is and watches Jayce pick at the torn edge of the washing-machine label.

“Go on.”

“I don’t know how to explain it without sounding insane,” Jayce says.

“You routinely explain things while sounding insane. I have adjusted.”

Jayce laughs softly. He lowers his head. The bracelet is visible where his sleeve has ridden up, its blue face dark for once. He covers it with his opposite hand anyway.

Viktor’s attention moves there automatically. “Is this about that?”

Jayce’s fingers tighten. There is the answer, or at least the shape of one.

“I knew it,” Viktor says.

“Trust me, you don’t know anything yet.”

“I know you touch it whenever you lie. Or become scared. Often both.”

“That’s not…” Jayce sighs. “Okay. Maybe.”

“And it glows.”

“Sometimes.” Jayce exhales and drags a hand through his hair. “Viktor, I…” His fingers catch briefly in the mess of it. “I like you. I like you like you. Not just as my teacher. Not only as my friend. I…” His palm drags once over his jeans. “It’s more than that.”

Viktor’s stomach pitches. Saliva floods beneath his tongue. He looks toward the utility sink, then back at Jayce, calculating the distance between them and whether vomiting would permanently damage whatever is happening here.

Jayce’s smile loosens. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“No, I…”

“It’s okay.” Jayce recoils half a step. 

Viktor closes his eyes. “That came out wrong. I’m not rejecting you.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I like you too.”

A breath escapes Jayce. “Oh, thank God.” He presses one hand to his chest. “I really thought you didn’t. Or that you did a little, maybe, but not enough to do anything about it, which would’ve been fine. Not fine, obviously. Horrible for me personally, but morally fine.”

“Jayce…”

“Because of the teacher-student situation, I know. I’ve thought about it. A lot, actually. Probably too much. There are rules, and you could get fired, and I don’t want you to get fired. Unless you already hate this job enough that getting fired would be helpful, but even then it should be your decision. I shouldn’t be the reason.”

The corner of Viktor’s mouth lifts a little.

“And I know I’m an adult,” Jayce continues, “but you still grade me. Technically. Even though you pass everyone, which I’m not supposed to know, except you just told me. And I’d never expect special treatment. I don’t even want special treatment. I mean, I like special treatment emotionally. Everyone likes that. But I want you to know that you could fail me if I deserved it.”

“I am not going to fail you.”

“Right, because you pass everyone.”

“Because you are doing well.”

“Oh.” Jayce blinks. “Good. That’s better.”

He begins pacing through the narrow space between the washing machines, taking two steps in one direction before the wall forces him back.

“I also worried you were only being nice because of the robbery. Like maybe you felt responsible for me afterward, even though that makes no sense because you were robbed too. Or maybe you felt sorry for me because I didn’t want to go home alone, and then I kept coming to your office until you got used to me the way people get used to a stray cat hanging around their building. Except I’m not homeless.”

“Are you a cat, then?”

“No.” Jayce sighs. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

“Reassuring.” Viktor’s mouth opens around it, and the frightened smile returns. He steps closer until their shoes nearly touch. Jayce smells like detergent, sweat, and the sugary tea they drank upstairs. A crescent of lint clings to the shoulder of his shirt. Viktor stares at it so he will not have to look directly into Jayce’s face.

Jayce’s hand moves between them, slowly enough that Viktor could refuse without either of them having to call it refusal. His fingers brush Viktor’s knuckles. Viktor turns his palm over. Jayce fits their hands together. His palm is damp. Viktor’s probably is too. Their fingers settle awkwardly, then shift, then settle again.

“I’ll have you know,” Viktor says. “I have already behaved in ways that would interest the administration.”

“What–what ways?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“What?”

“You have missed thirty-eight classes.”

Jayce’s hand goes slack inside his. “That’s enough to get me kicked out, isn’t it? Wait… have you not reported them?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Viktor’s thumb catches against one of Jayce’s knuckles. He rubs the same spot once, then again.

“You know why.”

“Would it be so bad if I wanted to hear you say it?”

Viktor’s pulse stumbles beneath his skin. He shakes his head. “Don’t make me say it.”

“Okay,” Jayce says. His fingers close around Viktor’s. “Can I kiss you?” 

Viktor nods, so Jayce leans in, slowly at first, giving Viktor enough time to ruin it. Viktor does not. He tilts his face upward. Jayce’s breath touches his upper lip.

The bracelet flashes. Blue light fills the narrow space between their bodies. Jayce’s fingers crush Viktor’s hand, then he jerks away. The back of his leg strikes the washing machine and the lid of a detergent bottle rattles loose and rolls across the floor.

Jayce jerks back his sleeve.

“Jayce?”

Viktor reaches for him, then stops before touching him again. “Please tell me what is happening.”

“I’m sorry.” Jayce backs toward the door. His face has gone white except for the red around his eyes.  “I can’t tell you. Not yet. Every time I…” His voice catches, eyes jumping to the clock above the dryers when the second hand skips forward. The bracelet flashes. His hand curls over it, pressing his wrist against his stomach as if he can smother the light inside his body. Blue spills through his shirt, across the washing machines, over the detergent-softened floor. The machines begin humming out of rhythm. One stops mid-cycle, and another starts despite being empty.

Viktor steps closer. “Jayce.”

There is terror on Jayce's face, but something else beneath it. Relief. So much relief it makes him look sick.

“You’re alive here,” he says.

Viktor’s hand drops. “What?”

“In this one.” Jayce’s mouth lifts, tears gathering along his lashes. “You’re alive.”

The light climbs his throat. His outline begins to shake, splitting faintly from itself. For an instant there are two Jayces standing in front of Viktor, one half a step behind the other.

Viktor grabs his sleeve. His fingers close around fabric, heat, the hard metal edge of the bracelet.

Jayce catches Viktor’s wrist with his free hand. “And I’m so happy,” he says.

Then Viktor’s hand closes on nothing. The blue light collapses with a small electrical snap. Jayce is gone. His absence makes no sound. The washing machines continue turning, the dryers coughing out one of Viktor’s socks, which lands on the floor between them, or where between them had been a second ago.

The detergent bottle Jayce knocked over rolls slowly across the floor and taps against his shoe.

“Jayce?”

His own voice returns to him from the tile walls.

*

Viktor is not hysterical. He is not stupid. And he has not, despite the increasingly persuasive evidence, lost his mind. He writes down everything he saw. The light, the clock, Jayce splitting into two overlapping versions of himself. You’re alive here. In this one. He underlines this one three times.

He checks the apartment for gas. He tests the carbon-monoxide detector. He takes his temperature twice. He shines a flashlight into his pupils in the bathroom mirror and nearly blinds himself. He counts backward from one hundred by sevens, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine. His cognition remains intact, there is no slurring, there is no weakness on one side, no sudden inability to identify common objects. Toothbrush, razor, sink, towel. 

He returns to the living room and opens his laptop and types person disappearing blue light crystal into the search bar. The results suggest alien abduction, spiritual ascension, three television shows, and a discussion board whose banner contains a rotating skull. Viktor closes the laptop so hard the charger falls out. He begins again properly. He starts out by searching Jayce’s full name and clicks the first result.

A local artitcle opens beneath a photograph of Jayce outside a courthouse. He is sixteen, maybe seventeen. Camera flashes have turned his face bloodless, and his wrists are hidden behind his back. He is speaking to someone outside the frame, mouth open, eyebrows drawn together.

TEEN ARSONIST’S “TIME-TRAVEL” DEFENSE RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT MENTAL STATE

The first paragraph calls him troubled, the second calls him obsessed, and by the third, he has become delusional. According to witnesses, Talis repeatedly insisted that the device responsible for the apartment fire was not intended as a weapon but as a “temporal anchor” capable of accessing alternate versions of reality. Temporal anchor appears inside quotation marks every time.

The article describes notebooks confiscated from Jayce’s bedroom. Pages of weird equations, drawings of crystals, locations, lists of events followed by different possible outcomes. One police officer calls them “fantasy nonsense.” A prosecutor compares them to spell books. A neighbor says Jayce had become obsessed with magic and spent nights talking to himself through the wall.

Another article uses a worse photograph of Jayce sitting at the defense table with his fingers pressed against his temples. The caption reads: TALIS APPEARS CONFUSED DURING SENTENCING. The headline calls his testimony a senile ramble, despite Jayce being young enough to still have acne visible beneath the courtroom lights.

He claimed matter could remember previous states. He claimed crystals could store more than energy. He claimed reality divided whenever an event produced multiple possible outcomes. He claimed that with enough power, a person could move between those outcomes.

Claimed, claimed, claimed. Viktor swallows and opens the next result.

JAYCE TALIS DIES AFTER FALL FROM COURTHOUSE ROOF FOLLOWING SENTENCING

The article is short, four paragraphs padded with statements from police. According to witnesses, Talis broke away from courthouse security shortly after the hearing and gained access to the roof through a maintenance stairwell. Officers attempted to reach him. He fell before they could intervene. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

*

The attendance office opens at eight. Viktor is there at seven fifty-eight. The woman behind the glass finishes her coffee before unlocking the door. At eight exactly, the latch clicks.

“I need the record of one of my students. Jayce Talis.”

The keys clatter beneath her long nails. She sighs, deletes, and types again.

“No student by that name.”

Viktor slides the folder through the opening beneath the glass. Jayce’s name appears at the top of every page. Beneath it, the attendance grid stretches across several months, crowded with late marks, blank spaces, and absences Viktor changed by hand.

“Yes there is. He is enrolled in my class.”

The woman studies the first page then turns back to her monitor. She searches by surname, date of birth, course number. Each time, the same white box opens in the center of the screen.

“I received an email approving him,” Viktor says.

“Then forward it to me.”

Viktor takes out his phone. He searches Jayce’s name. Nothing comes up. The approval email is gone. So are the attendance warnings, the accommodation notice, every message Viktor remembers ignoring. His inbox jumps from the week before Jayce arrived to the morning after, as neatly as if no day existed between them.

The woman taps the folder. “Where did you get these?”

“I printed them from the attendance system.”

“They don’t match our records.” The vent above her desk starts. The top page lifts, settles, then lifts again. Jayce Talis rises and falls beneath the moving air. Viktor closes the folder. “Anything else?” she asks.

He removes his teacher badge and places it beneath the glass.

She rolls her eyes. “Faculty administration handles resignations.”

“Then send it to them.”

*

The school has provided two cardboard boxes. One is large enough for books, the other could hold a human head, presumably to indicate what administration considers a reasonable quantity of personal attachment.

He begins with the bookshelves and ends with the specimen jars and the dumb mug printed with the chemical structure of caffeine that Jayce got him. The mug still contains two pens, one dead marker, and a folded paperclip twisted into the rough shape of a man which Jayce had made during office hours.

“It’s you,” he had said, setting it upright on Viktor’s desk.

“Where’s my cane?”

“It kept falling off.” Jayce had bent another paperclip around one side and presented it again. “There. Biblically accurate you.”

The little figure has since collapsed against the inside of the mug, its wire head caught beneath a highlighter. Viktor lifts it out. One leg is longer than the other. The cane is still attached. He puts it in his coat pocket rather than the box.

*

Outside, the evening has begun turning blue. He leaves the boxes in his apartment and goes directly to the convenience store.

A young woman with blue hair Viktor has never seen is slouched behind the register in Jayce’s red vest. Hers hangs open over a black tanktop, the name tag crooked and missing the little star sticker Jayce had pressed beside his. Huge headphones cover both ears. Viktor can hear the music from across the counter, all bass and distortion. He taps the counter with the handle of his cane.

“What?” she says without removing the headphones.

“I’m looking for Jayce.”

Her eyes move over Viktor, starting at his face and ending at his feet. She reaches up and slides one side of the headphones behind her ear.

“Don’t know a Jay.”

“Jayce.”

“Joyce?” Her gum snaps between her teeth.

“Jayce,” Viktor says, louder this time. “Jayce Talis.”

The other headphone slides from her ear. Her chewing stops. She glances at the schedule taped beside the cigarettes. Names have been crossed out, rewritten, then crossed out again. Someone has drawn horns, fangs, and a forked tongue around the manager’s name.

“He isn’t.”

“Isn’t what?”

“On the schedule.”

Viktor leans against the counter. The mint display digs into his sleeve. “When was he removed?”

She shrugs and pushes the schedule with one painted fingernail. “Wasn’t removed. Was never on it.”

“He worked here.”

“Okay.”

“I have watched him work here.”

“Congratulations.”

“I need to find him.”

Her eyes travel over him again, slower this time: the hair he has not combed, the bruised half-moons beneath his eyes, the hand clenched white around the cane.

“Yeah,” she says. “I got that from whatever thing you’ve got going on. Best of luck finding your imaginary friend.”

*

A difficult truth may reveal itself today.

“Fuck you,” Viktor tells the horoscope.

The train doors open. People spill onto the platform and separate around him. Shoes, shopping bags, briefcases, one child dragging a stuffed shark by its tail. Nobody stops except an older man who asks whether Viktor needs medical attention.

“No.”

His gaze flicks toward the cane lying several feet away.  “Are you sure?”

“No, but go away.”

The man nudges the cane within reach. Viktor hooks it toward himself, plants one hand on the bench, and drags himself upright. His pulse bangs against his ribs. He keeps his back turned until the air stops catching between his teeth.

The train begins moving. Viktor wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Through the passing windows, Jayce appears between the passengers. Viktor freezes, presses two fingers to his temple, then searches the next window for him. The windows cut Jayce into pieces as the cars pass: an eye between two passengers, one hand against the glass, the torn shoulder of his jacket vanishing behind a metal support. Rain has flattened his hair against his forehead. Ash is smeared across one side of his face. Beneath his raised sleeve, the bracelet burns blue.

“Jayce!” He lurches after the last car, cane striking the platform in frantic, uneven blows. 

Jayce turns his head and twists between the passengers. His palm hits the window, his mouth forms Viktor’s name.

The man behind him says something– sir, wait, are you okay– but Viktor has already reached the yellow line again.

The bracelet flashes again. Every light inside the car goes out. Passengers become black cutouts against the windows. Someone lifts a phone. Another person turns toward Jayce, but the train is moving too quickly now, dragging their faces into a bright smear.

Viktor follows until the platform narrows and his leg folds beneath him, catching himself against a pillar. The final window passes. Jayce is no longer inside it. The train enters the tunnel. Viktor stares into the dark opening, waiting for the blue light to return. It does not. Only the red lamps at the back of the train shrink, merge, and disappear.

“You sure you don’t need medical attention,” the man asks behind him. “You hit the ground pretty hard.”

The display above the platform reads next train: 10 minutes.

Viktor could take it to the next station. He could climb the stairs, call a car, and arrive there before the train doubles back. Assuming Jayce remains on it, assuming he has not already thrown himself into another timeline, year, or dimension or whatever mixture of impossible science and magic he has gotten himself involved in.

Something squeaks below. A rat picks its way along the track, nose twitching between the rails. Viktor watches it disappear beneath the lip of the platform and briefly envies the simplicity of having only one reality to survive.

Someone clears his throat behind him. Viktor turns so jaggedly his cane skids across the tile.

“Could you please leave me–”

It is not the old man. 

Viktor’s body is not capable of running, and he will not later permit Jayce to describe what follows as running. He merely crosses the space between them with several fast and uneven steps, nearly misses the placement of his cane, catches the front of Jayce’s jacket, and collides with him hard enough to drive the breath from both of them. Jayce’s raised hands hover uselessly for half a second before closing around Viktor.

He presses his face into the torn shoulder of Jayce’s jacket and grips the fabric behind his back until his fingers ache. Jayce smells like rain and smoke and sweat and the metallic heat that always follows the blue light.

“You’re crushing me,” Jayce says into his hair.

“Don’t leave again.” The words catch against Jayce’s collar. Viktor tightens his arms before Jayce can answer. “Tell me what is happening. I am not letting go until you explain it, and if you disappear again, you will have to take me with you.”

Jayce’s hands move slowly over Viktor’s back. “Let’s sit down first.”

“No. Explain it here.”

Jayce exhales against Viktor’s temple. “You’re shaking.”

Viktor shifts his head and presses his ear flat against Jayce’s chest. Beneath the wet shirt and jacket, a heartbeat knocks hard and fast against him. He closes his eyes. “You’re alive,” he says. “You are not a hallucination. You have a pulse. You are warm. You are breathing.”

Jayce’s fingers curl into the back of Viktor’s shirt. “I keep checking too.”

Viktor pulls back just enough to see his face but does not release him. Ash has dried along Jayce’s cheekbone. A cut splits his lower lip. His eyes look exhausted and horribly relieved.

“I know about the trial,” Viktor says. “The bracelet. The articles. I know Jayce Talis died in this timeline.” Viktor’s fingers close harder in the back of his jacket. “He jumped from the courthouse six years ago.”

“You weren’t supposed to find that yet. I was going to tell you.”

“When? When were you going to tell me, Jayce?”

Jayce lowers his gaze to the narrow space between them, where Viktor’s coat is pressed against his torn jacket and rainwater has darkened both until the fabrics nearly match.

“I didn’t know how.” The cut in his lip pulls wider and a bead of blood gathers there.  A station announcement crackles overhead, dissolves into static, and repeats itself in Spanish and then in French. Jayce glances toward the clock above the stairs. His sleeve has ridden back. Beneath it, the blue stone gives one weak pulse.

Viktor drops one hand from Jayce’s jacket and closes it around his wrist. “No,” he says. “You will not look at that clock and disappear again.”

“It doesn’t work because I look at it. It just tells me how long I have.”

The bracelet pulses against Viktor’s palm. A thin vibration travels into his fingers. The stone is hot. “How long do you have until what?”

“Until this timeline rejects me.”

“And still you forced your way into it? Why?”

“You are what the bracelet searches for. Not this city. Not a date. You.” He glances down at the cracked stone. “Once it finds a reality containing you, it records that reality’s original state. The farther my presence pushes events away from what was supposed to happen, the harder the timeline tries to remove me.”

The familiarity of the answer makes Viktor angrier than the answer itself. Maybe Jayce has heard him object before. Maybe there are other Viktors folded inside his memory, each one issuing the same grievances with slightly different mouths.

Jayce’s thumb moves once over the bracelet. “I just had to see you. I couldn’t help it.”

“You couldn’t help it,” Viktor says. “So you enrolled in my class, took a job near my apartment, followed me home, sat in my damn office, and made me fall stupidly for you.”

Jayce flinches.

“And all this time, you knew every moment with me pushed this reality farther from what it was supposed to be. You knew it was shortening whatever time you had left.”

Viktor follows Jayce’s gaze toward the yellow line. The tracks lie black beneath the platform lights, polished silver along the rails.

“In every other timeline I found,” Jayce says, “you died.”

A train announces itself somewhere in the tunnel. The air shifts first, pushing warm wind along the platform and lifting the damp hair from Jayce’s forehead.

“How? How did I die?”

“Not always the same way. But it always ended with me standing somewhere without you, trying to understand how the entire world could keep going like nothing had happened.”

“And how many?” Viktor asks. “How many times have you watched me die?”

“Enough to lose my damn mind finishing what you started.” There’s a small, broken chuckle there. “And I know that’s what people do. They lose someone, and they grieve, and eventually they’re supposed to accept that loving them doesn’t give you the right to drag them back. I tried. I really did. This is the only timeline where we were never supposed to meet.”

The platform tilts. Viktor catches himself on his cane, but the white lights have already begun pressing inward at the edges of his vision. He turns toward the nearest bench and reaches it before his knees can embarrass him further. Jayce follows and sits beside him. For a long time, neither speaks. The train doors open releasing a crowd onto the platform: a woman dragging a stroller with one broken wheel, a child asleep against his father’s shoulder, a nurse staring at nothing. Other passengers step aboard before the seats have cooled.

Viktor watches them trade places. Near the last car, a couple stands in front of the open doors. The woman has one foot inside the train while the man holds her around the waist. They kiss quickly then kiss again when the warning chime begins. Her hand remains hooked in his coat until the doors force them apart. She presses her palm against the glass where he raises his to meet it. The train carries her away. The man walks beside the window for several steps before stopping at the end of the platform, still smiling after she is gone.

It hurts to look down. Jayce’s hand rests between them on the bench, palm turned upward. Viktor’s fingers brush it. Jayce turns his hand beneath the contact, and their palms meet.

“We lived together,” Jayce says. “In almost all of them. We were partners. More than partners.”

Viktor imagines a bedroom he has never seen, Jayce’s shoes beside a door, mismatched cushions and blankets worn thin enough to let the light through, a life so ordinary that the meaning of it hurts. 

“Were we happy?”

Delight loosens his face. “Sometimes. You could be a real little shit.”

The train disappears into the tunnel and the wind drops. Around them, the platform empties until only the buzz of the lights remains. Jayce’s shoulders lower. 

“How generous of me, then, to invent the device that lets you pursue me across multiple realities.”

Jayce scoffs. “Funny thing is, you didn’t only build it so we could be together. You built it because you couldn’t stand being told something was impossible.”

So this is what survives every version of him: the anger, the need to prove the world wrong, and a heart hollow enough to spend itself entirely on the first person he permits inside. “Then the bracelet was always going to exist, with or without us. But if it is anchored to me, what was the Jayce from this timeline trying to reach if he didn’t even know I existed?”

Jayce turns his wrist beneath Viktor’s hand. The fractured stone catches the station light, its blue reduced to a thin vein in the dark. “It wasn’t anchored to you then. You see, the first design wasn’t meant to find a person. It was supposed to detect overlap between timelines… places where two versions of the same thing occupied almost the same point.” His thumb moves along one of the cracks. Viktor watches the nail catch there. “He thought information was leaking through, dreams, stuff he didn’t remember writing, images of places he’d never been.”

“He drew me,” Viktor says.

“He didn’t know it was you.”

“What did he think I was?”

“I don’t know. I can’t really explain that. Just that he was trying to find whatever kept calling to him. And that was you. It was going to be you.”

A sudden grief opens in Viktor for the Jayce who belonged to this timeline, the boy who had built half a door toward a person he could not name, then died believing there had been nothing on the other side. He had spent his last years chasing an outline of Viktor through dreams, mocked for recognizing someone the world had arranged for him never to meet. And now another Jayce sits beside Viktor wearing his face, holding his hand, receiving the answer six years too late. This Jayce crossed entire realities to find Viktor. The other had remained trapped inside one, reaching toward him until everyone mistook the reaching for madness.

“You lied to me.” Viktor pulls his hand free. “You let me believe you were him.”

Jayce’s fingers remain curled around the space Viktor has left behind. “I never said I was.”

“You used his name.”

“It’s my name too.”

Viktor sees both versions at once: the man beside him and the seventeen-year-old from the courthouse photograph. One crossed universes to find Viktor. The other died reaching for him without ever knowing what he was reaching toward.

Jayce folds forward, forearms braced against his knees. “I needed a way into this timeline. I didn’t know how else to get near you.” His hands knot together between his legs. “I missed you so fucking much. Then I found you alive, and I stopped thinking.”

“You could have told me the truth.”

“And said what? Hello, I’m another version of the dead teenager whose trial you’ll eventually find online. In most realities we love each other, and in every one I’ve seen, you die. May I sit quietly in the back of your class?”

The absurdity presses briefly against Viktor’s throat. It’s safer to stare across the tracks instead.

“Sorry. Are you angry at me?” Jayce asks.

Viktor watches the empty rails shine beneath the station lights. “I don’t know.” His knuckles whiten around the handle of his cane. “I don’t know how I feel yet. This is a great deal to learn about one’s life in a single evening.” He sighs. “Did you lie about the ADHD too? Your mother, the fire, why you left school, was any of that yours?”

Jayce’s head lifts sharply. “No. The Jayce you met is me.” He rubs his palms against his jeans, leaving faint streaks of ash. “You have to understand, we’re all versions of the same person. Our lives branch but parts of them still overlap.”

It is a convenient way for Jayce to think. If every version of him is the same person, then he has not taken anyone else’s place. Same face, same mother, same scattered mind. But they are not the same. One Jayce was mocked in a courtroom and died on the courthouse roof. Another lived long enough to build the bracelet beside a Viktor who loved him. Sharing the same beginning does not make their lives interchangeable.

“I knew another Viktor,” he adds. “I never mistook you for him.”

Viktor examines their hands resting inches apart on the bench. Jayce’s knuckles are scraped. There is dried blood beneath one thumbnail. The hand resembles the one Viktor has imagined belonging to a hundred invisible versions of him, but it is this hand that brought green-apple candy to his office, drew in the margins of his worksheets, and built him a stool from a lottery advertisement.

“Do you still love him?”

“Yes.”

“And me?”

“I do.”

Resentment should come easily. Viktor’s jaw tightens at the thought of Jayce loving the same face twice, carrying tenderness from one life into another like a hand-me-down. But the anger does not come. Viktor thinks of a missing limb still aching years after it is gone, nerves reaching into empty space as if the body refuses to accept the loss. Jayce’s love for the other Viktor feels the same. Cutting it out would not free either of them. It would only leave another wound.

Viktor reaches across the narrow space and rests two fingers against Jayce’s wrist. A beat strikes them at once, quick and hard and then another.

“You are not the boy who died here,” he says. “And I am not the man you lost.”

Jayce’s fingers close around his. “No.”

The bracelet glows between them. Jayce tenses, but Viktor closes his other hand over the cracked stone before he can pull away. Blue light leaks through Viktor’s fingers and illuminates the veins beneath his skin. He feels Jayce beginning to retreat. Viktor holds tighter.

“I know which Jayce you are,” he says. “I am asking this one to stay.”

The station shudders. The tiled wall behind Jayce disappears, replaced by a laboratory washed in gold light. Viktor sees himself bent over a table he has never owned, older and thinner, Jayce asleep with his cheek pressed against one folded arm beside him. Then the laboratory tears sideways into the classroom. Jayce sits in the back row, smiling over a notebook full of rocks. Another flicker, and they are standing in a kitchen flooded with pale morning light, barefoot among open cabinets, arguing over something Viktor cannot hear. Bodies pass through them like smoke. A Jayce with gray at his temples. A Viktor with blood on his mouth. Two hands reaching across a hospital bed. A bedroom door closing. Funeral flowers, white. Laughter from somewhere that does not exist anymore.

The platform slams back into place. Jayce is still there. Their knees are pressed together. Their hands remain locked around the bracelet. Viktor can feel Jayce’s pulse battering beneath his fingers, too fast to count.

“The bracelet–”

“Can go fuck itself.”

Jayce tries to laugh but his breath breaks in the middle. His breath brushes Viktor’s mouth. Then his body slips out of Viktor’s grasp, leaving only a warm sting in his palm. A small fragment of blue crystal rests there, pulsing faintly.

*

Three days later, a shadow settles beneath Viktor’s door and does not move.

He stands on the other side with one hand around the lock, listening. A breath catches beyond the wood. Another follows, shallow and uneven. Viktor opens the door.

Jayce stands in the hallway with rain threaded through his hair and one sleeve burned open around the wrist. The bracelet hangs dim beneath it, pale blue light trapped in the cracks.

Viktor grabs the front of his jacket and drags him across the threshold. Jayce barely has time to stumble before Viktor’s arms lock around him. Something in Viktor’s back produces a small, white scream, but he ignores it and pulls tighter, pressing his face into the wet fabric at Jayce’s shoulder.

Viktor releases him only far enough to see his face. There is dried blood beneath Jayce’s nose. A shallow cut disappears into his hairline. His pretty eyes move over Viktor with increasing alarm.

“You haven’t slept.”

Viktor lets go and turns toward the apartment before Jayce can inspect him more closely. The living room has become a crime scene in which the victim is, indeed, sleep. Papers cover the table, the floor, half the couch. Printed copies of old forum posts lie beneath circuit diagrams and photographs enlarged until their pixels have become visible squares. Equations continue across the backs of grocery receipts, and unopened mail. Jayce’s courthouse testimony has been highlighted in three different colors. The broken radio sits open beside Viktor’s laptop, its components labeled with strips of tape despite having no relevance beyond Viktor needing something physical to dismantle.

“What did you do?” Jayce lifts a page from the floor. It contains one of his diagrams, or the dead Jayce’s diagrams, or both, depending on which definition of a person Viktor is currently accepting. Viktor has rewritten the equations along the margin, correcting several symbols and adding notes where the reasoning collapses into speculation. 

Viktor pulls a notebook from beneath a stack of printouts and opens it to a diagram of the bracelet. “The anchor destabilizes because it continues comparing you to the original state of the timeline. So stop it from recording deviations as errors. Give it a broader reference range or interrupt the feedback entirely.”

“It– it doesn’t work like that.” Jayce crouches beside the table. He turns several pages, his expression tightening as he reads. “You barely slept for three days to do this?”

“Jayce, please, that is not relevant. Can it work? What I just proposed.”

Jayce’s gaze drops.

Viktor places both hands on the table. “Can it?”

“No.”

“Well, you have not examined everything.”

“I have. The crystal isn’t enough. Not in this state. The materials we used to stabilize it don’t exist here.”

“Then bring them. Go to a timeline where they do exist. Take whatever you need and return.”

A corner of Jayce’s mouth moves then falls again. “The bracelet can barely carry me now. More mass means more resistance. Even something small could tear the field apart.”

“Then provide me with the specifications. I will reproduce it.”

“You can’t.”

Viktor closes the notebook. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t mean you’re not capable.”

“Well, you have chosen a fascinating way to communicate that, haven’t you.”

“The equipment doesn’t exist here either. Neither does the power source. There are entire branches of research that never happened in this world.”

“Then I will begin them.”

“Viktor.”

“What?”

The look Jayce gives him is filled with unbearable tenderness. It hurts. A lot. “I think this is my last visit.”

“For how long?” Viktor asks.

“I don’t know. A while, maybe.”

“A while, okay. A week? A month? A year?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you be able to return?”

“I–”

“No. Stop.” Viktor lifts one hand between them. “Enough.” He turns away. The papers on the table have slipped out of alignment, corners jutting in every direction. Viktor gathers them into one stack and strikes the edges against the wood once, twice, again, until every page sits perfectly flush. His grip remains around them after there is nothing left to straighten.

Behind him, Jayce says his name. He says that he loves him. I love you, he says. I’m sorry, he says. Viktor closes his eyes. Then he reaches blindly across the space between them and catches Jayce’s hand. His fingers lock around it before Jayce can withdraw.

“Let me help, please.” The words scrape on the way out. “Not this. Not standing here while you explain why everything is impossible. Let me actually help. Take me with you. Show me the device. The original work. Whatever laboratory has the equipment, whatever version of us has the materials.” His thumb presses hard into Jayce’s knuckles. “Stop protecting me from a problem I may be able to solve.”

“I’m not protecting you from the problem,” Jayce whispers. “I’m protecting the timeline from you. If you start changing things here, building technology this world isn’t supposed to have, opening routes between timelines, you won’t just make it harder for me to stay. You’ll change everything around you. The bracelet could start anchoring to those changes instead. Or the timelines could overlap. Or collapse. I don’t know. We never got far enough to know.”

Viktor’s voice gives out. He swallows and tries again but nothing.

“I can’t risk losing you again.” Jayce catches Viktor’s head between both hands as Viktor keeps shaking it, his thumbs pressing into the hinges of Viktor’s jaw. “I can’t watch it happen another time. Not here, not when this is the one world where you’re still–” 

The bracelet gives a weak pulse between them.

“Please, you have to understand.” His forehead nearly touches Viktor’s and his hands loosen. One slips from Viktor’s face, but the other remains suspended beside his cheek, trembling in the ghostly space between touching and not. “I’m sorry,” he says. His gaze drops to Viktor’s mouth. “I want to kiss you.”

Viktor looks at his. The cut in Jayce’s lower lip has opened again. Fresh blood shines through the dried fleck at one corner. 

“No.”

Jayce’s hand stops beside Viktor’s face. Viktor catches his wrist before it can fall and presses Jayce’s palm flat against his own cheek. The warmth of it nearly changes his mind. Nearly.

“You can have that when you come back.”

Jayce exhales.

“When,” Viktor says again. His fingers tighten around Jayce’s wrist. “Not if.”

The bracelet flashes again. Jayce’s shoulder tears briefly into blue light, the wall visible through the shape of him. Viktor releases his hand and steps back with an ache in his chest.

“Out. You are already being removed from this reality. I would prefer to pretend the decision is mine.”

*

The second time Viktor sees Jayce, Jayce has been dead for six years.

Morning has made the cemetery colorless. Mist sits low over the graves, caught between the stones like breath that belongs to no one. Viktor follows the path to section twelve, row seven.  A crow pecks at something soft several rows away.

Mist gathers in the engraved letters, and a beetle crawls into the engraved A of Jayce’s name and disappears. For a moment, the name appears full of milk. Viktor closes his eyes.

“You were right,” he tells the dead Jayce. “I exist.”

Then, quieter: “Tell him to come back. Tell him that I love him.”

*

Viktor’s life is really fucking boring.

Every morning, the same alarm drags him awake at six forty-five. He spends several minutes staring at the water stain above his bed, which has not grown, moved, or revealed itself as a portal. Then comes yesterday’s coffee reheated into bitterness, the same train with the same exhausted faces, and once every three months, someone from human resources asking whether he feels sufficiently challenged. Viktor says yes, because explaining the truth would require an uncomfortable amount of information about the dead.

He no longer teaches science to adults at night. Now he works for Continuum Systems, a company that builds extremely precise clocks and sensors. Their machines keep satellites, laboratories, banks, and self-driving cars operating in the same version of now. Without them, navigation systems lose track of where they are, financial records duplicate themselves, and two computers may disagree about whether a pedestrian has already crossed the street.

Viktor runs the Anomalous Measurement Division. It was not called that before he arrived. Before Viktor, strange readings were marked as equipment failures and erased, clocks occasionally moving backward, sensors recording events before they happened. The company blamed faulty wiring, heat, human error, or solar activity. They hired him after he found a flaw in their most accurate clock during the interview. Six months later, they promote him after he makes it remember two different times at once.

The work is slow. Sometimes months pass without anything impossible happening. He builds machines that notice when the laws of physics briefly change. He creates some kind of structure capable of holding two conflicting versions of the same event without breaking apart. He publishes papers with titles so boring no one realizes they are early instructions for tearing a door through reality. His colleagues believe he is improving timekeeping technology. Viktor allows them this comfort. 

Rain needles a lot lately. By the time Viktor reaches his apartment, the shoulder of his coat is soaked and his leg has begun to drag. 

One evening, he knows something is wrong before he unlocks the door.

The balcony light is on. It spills a weak yellow square across the wet concrete, already surrounded by moths throwing themselves against the glass. Viktor never leaves it on. The bulb attracts insects, and insects possess no understanding of property lines, personal space, or death by repeated collision. 

Inside, music is drifting from the kitchen, a song warped by static and distance. Viktor stops in the hallway with one hand still around the doorknob. Just in case, he leaves the door open behind him.

The music grows louder as he moves toward the kitchen. His old radio, the broken one he has yet to throw away, is sitting beneath the kitchen light in the exact center of the table. For several seconds, he cannot understand what he is looking at. His mind supplies every answer except the obvious one: it is no longer broken.

The casing has been fitted together so neatly that the seams are almost invisible. The crack along one corner is sealed with a thin vein of blue material that catches the light when Viktor moves. A new dial fills the empty socket. Fresh copper shines through the vents, wound into shapes too nicely to have been made by any machine Viktor recognizes. Beside it lies a folded piece of paper. Viktor’s fingers go numb. He unfolds the paper. Three words sit in the center of the page.

I figured it out.

Viktor closes his eyes and just breathes. For three years, he has imagined this moment incorrectly.