Makun stood outside the building for ten minutes, staring at nothing. People walked past him, a woman carrying groceries, a man shouting into his phone, kids kicking a flat soccer ball down the street, and the world went on moving as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't just been thrown out by the one person who might have had answers.
Eventually he started walking, without thinking about where. The bus ride home was a blur of bodies pressing against him and voices laughing and complaining, all of it distant, as if he were wrapped in glass. By the time he reached his building the sun was high, and with the air conditioning dead the stairwell had turned into an oven.
Inside, the apartment met him with its usual smell of mold and heat and failure. The eviction notice lay on the table by the window where he had smoothed it out the night before, and its forty-eight hours had become less than a day. He locked the door, leaned back against it and slid down until he was sitting on the floor.
Thirty dollars in his account. No job. No answers.
He had always fought. Every foster home that didn't want him, every job that fired him, every relationship that fell apart, every time the world knocked him down, he had gotten back up, because that was what you did. But sitting on the floor of an apartment he would be thrown out of tomorrow, Makun felt something he had never let himself feel before. It wasn't sleepiness, and it wasn't the exhaustion of a long day. It was a tiredness that went all the way down, tiredness of fighting and losing and standing up only to be knocked down again.
Twenty-three years of clawing to survive, and this was where it had brought him: alone in a moldy apartment, with thirty dollars and nowhere to go.
The dream flickered through his mind, the chains and the glass and the shapes that fed, and then Zuri's face and the terror in it. I can't help you. No one can. Twenty-three years of accidents that shouldn't have happened and chances that went up like smoke. Amara's voice: It's like you're cursed.
Maybe she had been right. Maybe he was cursed, or broken, or wrong in some way that made the universe push him out.
The thought that came next arrived quietly. It was cold and simple, and it didn't feel like despair so much as the end of a long sum.
He got up, went to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Half a bottle of sleeping pills sat on the shelf, an old prescription from two years ago, when the nightmares had gotten so bad he stopped sleeping altogether. He had quit taking them because they didn't work; the dreams came anyway.
He stared at the bottle, and noticed that his hand was steady.
He poured the pills into his palm, white and round, maybe twenty of them. In the mirror his own face looked back at him, dark circles under the eyes, hair matted with sweat, the shadow of bruises through his shirt. It was the face of someone who had already given up. He waited for some reason to keep going to come to him, and none did.
He filled a glass at the kitchen tap while the pipes groaned, then sat on the edge of the tub with the pills in one hand and the water in the other. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he let it. Through the open door he could see the eviction notice on the table.
He swallowed them one at a time until his palm was empty and the glass was half drained. Then he set the glass on the floor and leaned back against the cold tile to wait.
The apartment was quiet apart from the traffic outside and the distant voices of a world carrying on without him. After five minutes his eyelids grew heavy and his limbs felt loose and far away. After ten, every breath took effort, as if his lungs were filling with something thick. After fifteen, the tiles swam, and the crack in the ceiling split into two, then three, then too many to count.
This is it, he thought, very softly. I'm dying.
He should have felt something, fear or regret or relief, but there was nothing. And then there was something after all, and it wasn't in his body. It was deeper.
He could feel the chains.
They weren't like the ones in the dream. These were real, wrapped around something inside him that was neither quite his chest nor quite his heart, insubstantial and undeniable at once. His mind was sinking, but the chains were clearer than they had ever been, as if dying had finally let him perceive what had always been there. The questions came flooding in behind them. Why could he feel them now? What were they, and who had put them there? What had Zuri seen? Why him? What had he been meant to be?
His body went numb. He lost his hands, then the floor beneath him, until there was nothing left but the chains and a slow, gentle pull from somewhere within, as if something were being drawn out of him a little at a time.
My soul.
He had heard people talk about dying, about tunnels and light and a peaceful dark. This was none of that. This was separation. He could still feel his body, distantly, the way you hear a television playing in another room, but he was no longer inside it. He was drifting.
Then he was looking down at himself.
His body sat slumped against the bathtub with its head tipped to one side and its mouth slightly open, pale, its chest barely moving. The sight should have terrified him, and it didn't, because he was looking at something else: a cord, silver and translucent and thin as thread yet somehow solid, running from him down to the body on the floor and anchored in its chest, right where his heart was.
Astral projection. He had read about it on late nights down internet rabbit holes and had thought it was nonsense. Yet here he was, floating and weightless, tied to his dying body by a silver thread. The cord pulsed, faint and weak, as if it were fraying, and he understood that if it broke he would be truly dead.
But he wasn't simply hanging between life and death. He was moving, and not by choice. Something other than the cord had hold of him, a current, like a river he couldn't see. The bathroom walls turned translucent, and through them he saw the building and then the city, but darker, layers of reality laid over one another, and in those layers things were moving. Shadows. Shapes with the wrong proportions.
The things from my dream. They were real. They had always been real, and now he could see them.
The current pulled harder. He tried to resist, to anchor himself, but he had no body and no hands to hold on with. The city fell away and the walls dissolved, and he sank through layers of existence he had no names for.
A word surfaced in his mind, though he couldn't have said where it came from. The Veil. The boundary between the living world and whatever this was, and he was falling through it.
Behind him the silver cord stretched thinner and longer, straining.
Where am I going?
Nothing answered. There was only the pull, relentless, drawing him down into the dark.