Nights at the orphanage had a shape.
Pipes coughed. The old radiator exhaled like a sleeping dog. Floorboards complained at exact intervals as the wind pressed and pulled at the bones of the building. Out beyond the chain-link fence, a bus sighed to a stop. Somewhere upstairs, the youngest kid had a dream he couldn't outrun and kicked his mattress three times, the way he always did.
Goose sat by the open window with the night air on his face and mapped it all without eyes. He didn't need them. He'd learned the walls by their creaks and the courtyard by the grass's whisper; he could tell who turned down the hall by the weight and rhythm of their footfalls. The world was a score, if you listened long enough.
He ran his palms along the frame, knuckles resting on rust-warmed metal. Tap, tap—he matched the radiator's slow pulse until his own heart settled to it. On good nights, the building sang in one piece. On bad nights it had seams.
Tonight was good. Mostly.
Elira's steps came at eleven, the way they did on Mondays. Light heel, toe, a near-silent drag when she was tired. She had been tired for months, but she smoothed her voice when she got near him, like pressing wrinkles out of a shirt by hand.
"Hey, Goose," she said from the doorway. Warmth in a whisper. The nickname fit easy in her mouth; it always had. "You still awake?"
He turned his head toward the sound and lifted his hands. I was waiting. He signed one-handed against the window frame, the other hand anchoring him.
"Of course you were." A smile—he could hear it; smiles changed how breath left the nose. She crossed the room and set something on the table, paper and plastic and the soft thud of a folded blanket. "Kitchen saved you a roll. I brought jam. And—don't get mad—two packets of butter."
He bumped the frame once, an almost-laugh. Reckless, he signed.
"Live a little," she murmured. She sat on the sill opposite him and unwrapped the bread, the knife whispering against paper. "You okay?"
He lifted his shoulder. Mostly. The night air carried the city's bright noise, damped by distance: a street musician's off-key trumpet somewhere three blocks away; a couple arguing softly, their anger already melting; a cat debating whether to jump from the fence to the dumpster.
"You hear the trumpet again?" she asked, because she always asked the right questions.
He nodded, and she put a quarter of the roll into his hand, warm as another palm. They ate in companionable quiet while the radiator kept time.
When they were done she gathered the paper, wiped crumbs from his shirt, and set the trash aside. "We've got an early morning," she said, careful. Cautious breaths before a leap. "Can you sit back for a second?"
He frowned a question. She took his fingers and pressed them, one by one, to the edges of a box under a blanket on the floor. Cool, smooth plastic. A latch. A seam. The smell of new packaging, clean enough to be a lie.
He went very still.
"We did it," she said softly. "Well—you did it. I just…pestered people and put tips in jars and sold my old stupid shoes." A huff of air, a laugh that almost broke. "They finally delivered the pod. They'll send a tech to calibrate in the morning. You can… you can run, Goose. In there. If you want."
He didn't move. Sound failed him for a moment; the world narrowed to the blood in his ears. He found the latch again, traced it, then let his hand fall and tapped the window frame twice in disbelief. He tipped his head forward. The air stung a little.
Elira's hand found the back of his neck. "Hey," she said. "Hey. It's okay."
Thank you, he signed into her wrist, clumsy and quick.
"Don't you dare," she whispered, voice wobbling, "make me cry before midnight. House rules."
He breathed out through his nose and tapped back, House rules. Then, Tomorrow?
"Tomorrow." She squeezed once. "Sleep now. Big day."
He settled. She fussed with the blanket over the box like covering a sleeping child. At the door she paused and looked back—he felt it the way he felt sunrise, a pressure against the skin.
"Run for me in there," she said, very softly. "Just once."
She left with the same careful rhythm she'd arrived. The building swallowed her up.
He sat with his palm cooling against the metal and cataloged the orphanage's song again. Pipes. Wind. A floorboard pop as old Mr. Kell motored by on his night patrol, humming tunelessly. The trumpet down the block shifted and found a real note at last.
He could have sat there until the radiator slept and the morning trucks came to rattle the fence. He would have, if the world hadn't suddenly gone wrong.
It was tiny at first—a bubble of silence under the window, as if the courtyard had forgotten to breathe. The crickets bowed out of the chorus mid-measure. The wind hiccuped. Sound isn't supposed to stop; even quiet has grain to it. This was an error.
Goose's knuckles slid to the sill. He leaned forward, letting his other senses dim as he listened into the dark.
There. Barely there. A scrape like two coins rubbed together. It came from the roofline, a thin metal whisper, then—shhk. Like teeth.
His hand found the window latch. He undid it without sound and inched the pane higher. Cold air. The scrape repeated, the rhythm resolving into a pattern: four clicks, pause; three clicks, pause. Like a lure pretending to be a metronome.
He tapped the frame once, soft: a single note to find the room's reverb. It came back short. Dry air. Good carry. He placed his left hand flat on the metal and his right against the glass and waited without breath.
The scrape split.
One version stayed on the roof. The other slid behind him in the hall, a fraction late. Not echo. Mimicry.
A lesser listener would have turned. Goose mapped the hallway by the sound of dust. He didn't need to see the bend of shadow at the bottom of the door to know something had hooked itself into the building's sound.
He has no weapons, he thought without words. No legs. No voice. He had taught himself long ago not to panic when he made inventories like that.
He did have a window frame. He did have lungs and a throat.
The scrape shifted to the windowsill.
He brought his right hand up and brought it down, once, on the metal: clang.
The sound leapt out into the courtyard and bounced off the chain-link fence, the dumpster lid, the brick arch—the room lit up in his head. He waited two heartbeats and hit the sill again, harder: CLANG. Then a third time, off-beat: cl—ANG.
The scraping froze. He felt it rather than heard it: the wrong rhythm hesitating as something tried to correct itself to his measure.
He hummed low in his throat, matching the four-three pattern exactly. He caught it, held it, then eased his tone half a heartbeat slower.
The scrape faltered. Teeth against teeth.
A weight hit the windowsill with a hush of grit and a slow exhale that smelled like old coins and wet paper. A shape leaned in, joints where joints shouldn't be, mouth not where mouths belonged. He felt it the way you feel a storm behind closed eyes: pressure. Cold.
Goose slid his left hand along the frame and found the screw that had always rattled. He tapped it with the knuckle of his forefinger—tik tik tik—and shifted his hum again, drawing the rhythm off like pulling a thread. The thing leaned, following, and stopped. Confused. Its head tilted; the air moved wrong where its ears would have been.
He would not last long. His arms were already shaking. He needed a second sound, a third. He needed—
The air split with the sound of cloth snapping in wind. A shadow knifed down the fence, boots bit metal, and someone landed in the courtyard in a three-beat grace Goose had never heard before.
The thing at the sill lunged.
The newcomer didn't shout. She moved. The hiss of paper, the crackle of something that wasn't fire, and then a word whose shape Goose felt more than heard—old sound, like a door slamming in a temple.
Light flared hot enough he sensed it through his skin. The wrong shape reeled back, mouth splitting up toward its ear while it screamed at a frequency that made his molars ache. The paper struck home with a wet pop.
Silence collapsed back into place the way a pond does after a stone. The courtyard became the courtyard again. Crickets remembered they had instruments. The radiator sighed, offended.
Goose's hands fell limp to his lap.
He heard boots on concrete, then on metal, then the soft thud of someone catching the window frame in one hand and vaulting up with the other. She came in through the window like the night had invited her.
"Don't move," she said, very calm.
He couldn't have if he'd wanted to.
She crossed the few steps between them and stopped at a distance that was polite and tactical at once. He smelled rain on cloth, old ink, burned paper. Her breathing was steady. Her weight on the boards said tall, light, trained to land in the soft part of a floor.
"You…" she began, and then stopped. He could hear her head tilt. When she spoke again, her voice was a little lower. "What did you do?"
He raised his hands and signed slowly, palms toward her. Matched it. Changed it.
A pause. The small shift of a stance when someone is surprised and pretending not to be. "You can hear that?"
Everyone can hear. He signed, then corrected himself with a small headshake. Not like this.
She huffed the ghost of a laugh. "No. Not like this." Paper rustled. The courtyard smelled faintly of iron again, but clean now, like a blade wiped dry.
"Name?" she asked.
He pointed to his chest. Izaiah. Then, after a beat, tapped the sill twice. Goose.
"Goose," she repeated, like an instrument trying a note for the first time. "I'm Kaela." He could taste the consonants. She hesitated. "You shouldn't be doing this alone."
He shrugged with one shoulder. No one else hears it.
"I do," she said. No brag in it. Just fact. "And so do a few who'll be angry I let this get this close to you."
He tilted his head. Angry at you? His hands formed the sign slow; she followed it.
"It's my job." She shifted, foot scuff saying she was looking at where the thing had been. "But you… matched its lure and bent it off-time. Without training. That's…not something you just do."
He lifted both hands in a shape that meant sorry and I'll try not to and I didn't have a choice all at once.
Kaela's weight shifted again—the sound of someone cataloguing a stranger and deciding, for now, to holster suspicion. "If another one comes, don't try to solo it with percussion. Hum if you must, but keep your head down. And shut the window."
He tapped the frame lightly. Thank you.
She made a sound that could have been you're welcome in a language that used breath for words instead of lips. Cloth snapped again; she went out the way she'd come in, silent as a cat over a fence. The courtyard accepted her absence.
Goose let his head fall back against the wall and listened for his hands to stop shaking. The radiator offered to keep time again. He let it.
He should have called Elira. He should have wheeled to the office and found the night supervisor. Instead he kept the window open an inch and tried to coax the room's song back into one piece. His hum settled the way rain settles dust.
Ten minutes later, a door downstairs opened with a jolt and a bag hit tile. The cadence of the steps up the hall was pure Elira: tired-toe, tired-heel, stubborn-straight spine. She stopped in the doorway and said his name like she always did when she half-expected him to have fallen asleep just to spite her.
Then she inhaled, sharp. "What… what happened?"
Paper.
Ash.
Dust.
Her shoes scraped the floor as she crossed the room and took his hands, turning them over like he might have split his knuckles.
He shook his head. All right. He tapped the sill twice and pointed outward. Fixed.
She blew out a breath. "I should've been here." Her palm pressed to his cheek and stayed there. "I hate this building."
He bumped his face into her wrist in a small, practiced comfort. I'm okay. Then, before she could spiral, Tomorrow? He pointed toward the blanket-shrouded box on the floor.
Her hand stilled. The air in her chest changed shape—the sound hope makes when it lifts something too heavy for it. "Tomorrow," she said, and her voice steadied as if the word itself had scaffolding inside it. "Calibration at nine. I pull the early shift to be home for it. And I am absolutely calling out of the late shift if they give me lip."
He squeezed her fingers once. Reckless.
"Live a little," she said, and he could hear the smile properly now.
They tidied the window, latched it, and made a ritual of checking that the radiator was still singing the same old song. Elira kissed his hair. He settled in the thin bed with its loud springs. She tucked the blanket up to his chest like he was five, because she refused to let the world take small kindnesses from him just because it had taken other things.
When she turned out the light, the building hummed. Outside, a truck reversed into the alley behind the kitchen. The steady, spaced beeps bounced off brick and metal and came back to the window in a pattern his heart recognized and obeyed.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
He let the sound carry him, counting the distance between each note, stealing one last breath of cold air from the crack in the frame.
Tomorrow, he thought, but not in words. Tomorrow had a sound. He slept to it.