There is a moment—a thin, glass‑sharp instant—when your mind wakes up before your heart does and realises something is missing.
Sometimes it is small. You open your eyes and know, with horrible clarity, that you have overslept. The train is gone. The exam has started. The future you meant to have has left five minutes early and did not wait.
Sometimes it is kind. You dream of drowning, of hands reaching through dark water and never quite closing, and then you wake to dry sheets and ordinary air and a relief so fierce it feels like embarrassment.
And sometimes—on a wet Glasgow night when the streetlights smear themselves across the tarmac and the buses hiss past like tired dragons—it is this.
Kade Lennox was not, by anyone's measure, late for anything important.
He was late for a shift he hated, the kind where people shouted down phone lines about broadband and direct debits and things that were technically not his fault. He was late for another evening of lukewarm tea in break rooms and fluorescent lighting that made everyone look half‑ghost. The sort of lateness that did not change the world, just annoyed his supervisor.
Still, his feet moved quickly, trainers slapping through the shallow puddles, shoulders hunched against the drizzle. His call‑centre lanyard tapped against his chest with each step, the plastic card smudged where his thumb worried it.
He was thinking, with the single‑mindedness of the mildly miserable, about nothing larger than this:
If I'm late again, Clark'll write me up. If Clark writes me up again, Mum will say it's fine but look at me like that. If she looks at me like that, I'll say something stupid.
Not about death. Not about cliffs or edges or anything grand.
He passed the off‑licence where the neon sign flickered, the kebab place with its sweet, greasy smell, the bus stop that still, stupidly, made his stomach twist because once, years ago, someone had screamed there and he had not moved.
He heard a horn.
It cut through the patter of rain and his own thoughts in one long, furious note. Everyone always says it happens fast, too fast to think, but that isn't true. There is all the time in the world in those seconds, pressed flat and stretched thin.
He looked up.
The lorry was too close. Headlights like twin suns bearing down, grille a wall of metal and inevitability.
There was a girl on the crossing.
Yellow backpack, one strap hanging off her shoulder, school shoes skidding on the slick white paint. She had misjudged the light or the distance or both. She froze, a rabbit in front of something worse than a fox.
Later, people would say she screamed. Kade would not remember that.
What he remembered was the way his chest hollowed out, like some enormous hand had scooped the air from him. The way another, older night shoved itself to the front of his brain: a mate bleeding on the pavement, someone shouting, Kade's feet glued to the ground.
Do something, do something, do something—
People like to imagine they will be brave when it matters. They picture themselves running into burning buildings, standing between a stranger and the worst of the world. Kade had done that too, on long nights with old episodes playing blue‑white on the telly, the theme music curling around the edges of his dad's cough.
The Doctor always ran. Never be cruel, never be cowardly. Hate is foolish, love is wise. His dad had said it with the weight of scripture, remote in one hand, mug of tea in the other.
This time, there wasn't any imagining. There was only his body moving.
He dropped his takeaway bag. It hit the pavement, curry splattering warm against his ankle. He ran, shoes slipping, arms already reaching. The world narrowed to a strip of wet road and a small shape in the centre of it.
"Oi!" he shouted, because that was what came out, stupid and automatic. "Move!"
She turned her head, eyes wide, and for one bright, ridiculous heartbeat he thought she looked annoyed, like he'd interrupted something important.
He hit her harder than he meant to. His arms wrapped around shoulders and cotton and fear, and momentum did the rest, carrying them both sideways, away from the oncoming light.
He had time for one thought, clear and fierce and utterly unlike him.
This is what he would do.
The Doctor, of course. His dad's hero. His hero. A man who ran towards danger with his coat flapping and his stupid hair and said things like never be cowardly as if they were simple, ordinary truths.
Then the truck hit him.
Impact was not a sound so much as a sensation, a thunderclap inside bone. The world went white, then black, then something stranger. The road vanished under him. The weight of the girl vanished too, whisked away to whatever safer place his shove had bought her.
There was a moment—another one, thinner and sharper than the first—where he expected pain.
There was none.
Instead, there was absence. No rain on his face. No chill creeping into his socks. No traffic. No city hum. No lanyard digging into the back of his neck. No weight at all.
He opened his eyes.
The sky was wrong.
It wasn't Glasgow's low, orange‑smeared ceiling but a huge, colourless expanse that seemed to go on forever, pale and bright and without sun or stars. The air was clear and cool in his lungs, if he had lungs. He couldn't feel his chest move.
He was standing.
That, more than anything, bothered him. He was certain that the last thing that had happened to his body was very much not standing.
"Right," he said, because silence felt too loud. His voice sounded normal, which was insulting. "Okay. That's…different."
"Different is one word," said a voice.
It came from just behind and slightly above his left shoulder, the exact place his dad used to speak from when they watched telly together and the old man wanted to point something out. Kade spun round.
There was an old man standing at the edge of everything.
At first, Kade thought he was looking at a cliff. A proper one, like in postcards: a long, sheer drop disappearing into mist, the rock face pale and impossibly smooth. It ran from one horizon to the other, so far he couldn't see the ends, as if someone had drawn a line across the world and then stepped back.
The old man stood with his toes just at that line, hands folded behind his back. He wore a suit that might once have been sharp but now sagged at the shoulders, and a tie loosened to the second button. His hair was a soft, thinning grey, his face lined, his eyes a sharp, familiar blue.
There was a feeling about him. Not danger, exactly. Not safety either. Something like recognition with the serial numbers filed off.[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]
"Well!" the old man said, and there was a smile in his voice. "You're obviously one of the more determined of us."
"Of…us?" Kade repeated. His head felt stuffed with cotton. "Sorry, have we—?"
"You refuse to pass through," the old man went on, as though Kade hadn't spoken. "Quite the strength of character, this body, mmm?"
"I'm…sorry?" Kade said again, because apparently his brain had decided that was his only available line. He dragged his gaze away from the cliff and looked around properly.
There was nothing.
Not nothing like darkness. Not a void, exactly. More like a blank page before ink. A pale, endless plain stretching back from the cliff edge, smooth and featureless. No buildings, no trees, no roads. Just him. The old man. The drop.
"Right, sorry," Kade said, because apologising was muscle memory. "Where am I, exactly? Where are you? Because the last thing I remember is being hit full force by a truck. Which, I feel, is the sort of thing you don't just…walk off."
"That's why we're here," the old man said kindly. "To stop you moving any further through. You are not finished. We are not finished."
Something in the way he said we made the skin on the back of Kade's neck prickle, even if he wasn't entirely sure he still had skin.
"We being…?" he asked, eyebrows knitting.
The old man's smile deepened. For a heartbeat, his voice shifted, overlapping itself, as if a dozen different speakers were sharing the same throat.
"Vestiges of your consciousness," he said, and Kade heard, absurdly, an uptight professor from some late‑night episode. "Fragments of yourself." Now the voice was lighter, quicker, as if it could barely keep up with itself. "Guardians of the Edge."
On the last word, the timbre dropped, roughened, settled into something else entirely. Rougher. Warmer. A cough buried in the vowels.
Kade's chest hurt, suddenly and fiercely, as if a hand had reached in and squeezed.
"Dad?" he said.
The man in front of him didn't change shape. He still had the same too‑big suit, the same careful stance. But for a second, Kade could feel his father in the air, the way you can feel a storm coming, or the way you can tell someone's been in a room you've just walked into.
"Sorry," Kade blurted, because the alternative was letting his voice break in front of a stranger who might or might not be him, which felt like a lot. "Could we just—could we focus on this, whatever this is? You said Guardians of the Edge. The edge of what? Ah—"
He had turned his head without meaning to, following a tug in his gut, and only now fully registered how close he was standing to the drop.
They were at the top of a bottomless cliff.
He stepped forward, one cautious pace, and peered over. There was no sea below, no rocks, no comforting darkness. Just depth. Layer after layer of hazy light, fading into something he couldn't name. His stomach lurched even though there was no wind, no pull.
"Life and death," said the cliff.
Kade jerked back. The voice vibrated through his feet, as if the stone itself had spoken. It sounded like every voice he'd ever heard through a wall: muffled, enormous, impossible to locate.
"It's symbolic, obviously," the old man added, as if that helped. "Consciousness will do that. But this is the place you pass through as you die. Go past here, there's no way back."
Something flickered in the air above the cliff—images, maybe. A girl with a yellow backpack, stumbling to safety. A paramedic swearing. A driver in shock. Somewhere on that same road, traffic would be backed up for miles and the world would go on grudgingly, tyres rolling over the spot where his blood should have been.
"And you're…stopping me?" he asked quietly.
"For the moment," the old man said. "But time's running out. You must make a choice."
The words hung there, heavy as a thrown coin.
Kade looked at the cliff, at the endless, waiting drop. He thought of his mum, driving herself to work in the half‑dark, hands clenched too tightly on the wheel. He thought of his dad's laugh, of the way he'd said never be cowardly with a wheeze between syllables. He thought of a mate on a pavement and a girl in the rain and the truck that had not stopped for him.
"Yeah," he said, his voice coming out hoarse. "Story of my life."
He took one careful step closer to the edge.
"What in the blazes are you doing?"
The old man's voice cracked like a whip. A hand shot out, surprisingly strong, fingers clamping around Kade's forearm and yanking him back a pace. His heel scraped on the smooth ground; for a sick second he thought he was going to go over anyway, arms pinwheeling.
"Hey!" Kade snapped, heart hammering in a chest he wasn't entirely sure he still had. "Easy! I'm just—looking."
"Looking?" The old man stared at him as if he'd suggested tap‑dancing on a land mine. "Looking? Get away from the cliff, boy, can't you see it drops hundreds of miles down there?" He jabbed a finger toward the pale abyss. "That is the death. That is what you mustn't go past."
Now that he said it, the air over the edge did seem to lean, very slightly, inwards. Kade's stomach turned over. The depth below wasn't just emptiness; it was…invitation. Quiet and patient and utterly certain of itself.
He swallowed, throat dry. "Right. Yeah. No more sightseeing. Got it."
The old man kept hold of him a moment longer, as if deciding whether Kade could be trusted not to launch himself off like an idiot. At last he loosened his grip, fingers sliding away, though he stayed close enough that Kade could still feel the warmth of him.
"We're hanging on by threads as it is," the old man muttered, more to himself than to Kade. "You take one more step, there's nothing left to work with. No choices. No second chances. Just…" He nodded at the drop. "Down."
Kade forced himself to look. Really look.
There were no waves, no rocks, no fog. Just distance, washing out from under the cliff in layers of light, like someone had tried to paint infinity and run out of colours halfway through. The longer he stared, the more it felt like staring into the gap between heartbeats—too small to see, too big to understand.
"I actually did it," he said softly. "Didn't I?"
The old man hummed. It wasn't agreement, not exactly, but it wasn't denial either.
"I'm dead," Kade went on, because saying it out loud made it both more ridiculous and more real. "Flattened by a lorry on Great Western Road, and now I'm in…metaphysical IKEA, shopping for afterlives."
"Hardly," the old man said. "We have much better taste in furniture."
Kade let out a shaky sound that might, in kinder universes, have been a laugh. He sank down onto the ground before his legs could decide for him, crossing them awkwardly. The stone was cool and very slightly rough beneath his palms, like the top step outside his old school.
"You said I had to make a choice," he said after a moment. "Between…?" He gestured, helplessly, at the cliff, at the blank plain, at himself.
"Between going on and going back," the old man said. "Between stopping and continuing. Between ending and becoming something else. Pick whichever wording frightens you least."
"That's not helpful," Kade said, because if he didn't complain he would scream. "You could at least give me a leaflet. Bullet points. Pie chart."
"We're not terribly fond of charts," the old man said. "They make endings look tidy."
He lowered himself to the ground with an old man's carefulness, joints clicking in ways Kade recognised from a hundred evenings on the sofa. For a second, Kade almost reached out automatically, the way he used to when his dad sat down too fast.
They sat there together, side by side, facing the drop.
From here, the cliff edge looked less like a barrier and more like a line drawn in pencil, one touch away from smudging. The not‑sky overhead stretched and stretched. Somewhere out there, Kade's mum was probably turning off the telly, setting his mug in the sink without washing it, telling herself she'd text him in the morning.
"Is she…?" he began, and then stopped, biting the inside of his cheek.
The old man didn't answer. The silence wasn't unkind. It sat between them like a shared blanket.
"I'm not finished," Kade said eventually. "That's what you said."
"We said we are not finished," the old man corrected gently. "You and I. The bits of you that make you you. The versions that stood up and the versions that didn't. The boy at the bus stop. The son on the hospital ward. The man who just jumped in front of a truck because a child forgot how roads work."
"I didn't forget," Kade muttered. "I froze."
"Yes," the old man said. "And then you didn't."
Kade let that sit. The words felt too big for his mouth.
Out over the cliff, something flickered again—tiny, distant, as if someone had lit a match under water. A girl with a yellow backpack, sobbing into a stranger's coat. A paramedic swearing. A driver in shock. A call‑centre desk with an empty chair and a headset coiled neatly on the monitor.
"Feels wrong to leave," he said. "Feels wrong to stay. Little bit rude, all round."
"Death is terrible at etiquette," the old man agreed. "Life isn't much better."
Kade huffed a breath. His hand had started to shake; he pressed it flat to the stone so it wouldn't show.
"How long do I have?" he asked. "To decide."
"You're out of time," the old man said cheerfully. "Have been since that bumper introduced itself to your ribs. But we've stolen a moment from the margins. A borrowed breath." He tilted his head, listening to something Kade could not hear. "Oh. Good. It's longer than I thought."
"Define longer," Kade said warily.
The old man didn't reply at first.
Instead, he lifted his hand and clicked his fingers.
The sound was small, domestic, like someone turning on a lamp. It shouldn't have done anything at all.
The plain shivered.
Directly in front of them, a low, flat slab of rock heaved itself gently up from the ground, smoothing and widening as it rose until it made a kind of table between them and the cliff—close enough that Kade could still see over the edge if he leaned, far enough that he no longer felt like one wobble would send him plummeting.
On top of the stone, where there had been nothing, there now stood a teapot.
It was exactly the sort of teapot that had lived in the Lennox kitchen for as long as Kade could remember: squat, chipped at the spout, white with a faded ring of blue flowers around the middle. Two mismatched mugs appeared beside it, one with a football logo half‑scrubbed off, one with a cartoon alien giving a thumbs‑up.
Steam curled, fragrant and familiar.
Kade stared.
"Right," he said faintly. "Okay. That's…aggressively on the nose."
The old man smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
"Well," he said, settling his elbows on his knees as if this were the most ordinary thing in all the worlds that ever were. "It seems we have time after all."
He nodded at the mugs, at the teapot, at the endless drop beyond their makeshift table.
"Fancy tea?"