The ceiling had forty-seven tiles.
Yaz had counted them twice to be sure. The third time was just because counting felt good, like pressing a thumb into a bruise, but backwards. A small, private certainty in a building full of uncertain things.
He was awake before the bell. This happened sometimes, his body surfacing from sleep like something buoyant refusing to stay under. The dormitory breathed around him in the gray half-light: twenty beds, two rows of ten, and nineteen other shapes beneath wool blankets that scratched if you moved too much. He had learned not to move too much.
March fifteenth.
The thought arrived with his first breath of the day, cool and certain. Seven years ago today, somewhere (he didn't know where; he had never been told where) he had begun. Had opened his eyes for the first time. Had cried, probably. Babies cried when they were born; he'd seen it in the educational videos they watched on Fridays. They cried, and someone held them.
The window faced east. In summer, light came through like a warm hand on the floor, sliding slowly toward his bed until it touched his face. Now, in March, there was only gray. But even gray had texture if you watched it long enough. The glass held smears from old rain, and through them the sky looked like dishwater, like the film that formed on porridge when you let it sit too long.
He watched the gray and waited for something to feel different.
It didn't.
The bell came at six o'clock exactly. CLANG CLANG CLANG. A mechanical shriek that meant the same thing every morning: get up, move, be somewhere. Around him, bodies stirred. Blankets shoved back. The slap of bare feet on cold linoleum. Someone coughing, wet and ragged, three beds down.
Yaz sat up. His mattress crinkled beneath him, the plastic covering they used because children sometimes wet the bed, though he hadn't done that since he was four. He remembered being four. He remembered the shame of it, hot and spreading, and how no one had said anything. Which was worse than if they had.
His clothes were folded on the small metal locker at the foot of his bed. Gray pants, a gray shirt, and gray socks. The socks had thin spots at the heels where you could almost see through to skin. He dressed with the efficiency of long practice, fingers knowing each motion without thought. Button, button, tuck.
No one looked at him. This was not unusual.
He looked at them, though. He always did. The boy two beds over, Marcus, eleven, who talked in his sleep about trains, was pulling his sweater on inside out. The tag stuck up at the back of his neck like a white tongue. Yaz watched him walk toward the bathroom without noticing, without anyone telling him. A small, absurd thing. Someone had bought Marcus that sweater once, had handed it to him in some life before this one, and now it hung wrong on his body and no one cared enough to fix it.
Yaz's chest did something complicated. Not quite pain. Closer to the feeling of pressing his forehead against cold glass: a tightness that was also, somehow, relief.
He tied his shoes. The left lace was shorter than the right because it had snapped three weeks ago and he'd knotted it back together. The knot made a small bump under his finger every time he tied it. He had grown used to the bump. It was his now.
Breakfast was porridge.
Breakfast was always porridge, except on Sundays when they added a boiled egg that sat in its shell like a small, disappointed moon. Yaz carried his tray to the long table where the younger boys sat and found his usual spot: third from the end, near the wall, where he could watch the room without anyone watching him back.
The porridge had already skinned over. A thin gray film, like ice on a puddle no one would skate on. He pushed his spoon through it, watched it break and reform, break and reform. The cafeteria filled with noise. Chairs scraping. Voices rising. The clatter of metal on plastic. Somewhere a child was laughing too loud, the kind of laugh that was really crying turned inside out.
Tomás sat down across from him.
Tomás was nine, which meant two years older, which meant harder. His face had that look some of the older ones got. Not angry exactly, but emptied out. Like someone had taken a spoon and scraped the hoping parts clean. He had dark hair that fell into his eyes and a scar on his chin from a fall no one talked about.
Yaz watched him eat. Quick, mechanical bites. The way you ate when food was fuel and nothing more.
"It's my birthday," Yaz said.
The words came out smaller than he'd meant them to. He hadn't planned to say anything and had told himself he wouldn't, because wanting things out loud only made the not-getting hurt worse. But his mouth had opened and the words had fallen out, and now they sat between them on the table like something spilled.
Tomás looked up. His eyes moved across Yaz's face without catching on anything.
"So?"
The word landed soft and flat. Not cruel, exactly. Just empty. Just a sound that meant nothing, that made the thing Yaz had said mean nothing too.
"Nothing." Yaz's voice was even smaller now. "Just... I know what day it is."
Tomás went back to his porridge.
Yaz went back to his.
The skin reformed over the gray surface, and he broke it again with his spoon, and the noise of the cafeteria washed over him like water over a stone, and he thought, "This is seven." This is what it is.
Morning lessons passed in the usual way. Ms. Reyes was at the front of the room, her voice flat and distant as a recording. Numbers on a screen that Yaz already knew how to add. Words in books he'd already read twice. He sat at his desk and performed the motions of learning. Pencil to paper. Eyes forward. Hands raised only when not raising them would be noticed.
The classroom had twenty-three desks. The window showed a sliver of sky that changed colors through the morning: gray to pale gray to the particular white-gray that meant rain was thinking about falling. Yaz counted the change. He counted the tiles on this ceiling too (thirty-one), the number of times Ms. Reyes said "pay attention" (four), and the minutes until outdoor hour (one hundred and twelve, then ninety-seven, then eighty-three).
No one said anything about March fifteenth.
Why would they? It was a day like other days. The earth had gone around the sun seven times since he'd arrived on it, but the earth didn't care about that, and neither did anyone else in this room. They had their own days to count. Their own years behind them, years ahead. He was just a boy in a gray shirt at the third desk from the window, and there was nothing about him to remember.
He wrote numbers in his workbook. He spelled words correctly. When the bell rang for lunch, he stood and walked and ate and didn't taste anything. The afternoon stretched ahead of him like the hallway outside the dormitory. Long and fluorescent and leading somewhere he couldn't see.
Outdoor hour came at two o'clock.
The yard was wet from the morning's drizzle, the concrete dark and slick. The swing set stood in the corner with its rusted chains, the chains squeaking eee-errr, eee-errr in a wind that smelled like car exhaust and something metallic from the industrial zone to the east. The tree near the fence had been dead for as long as Yaz had been here. Its branches reached up like fingers asking a question no one would answer.
He walked to the fence.
He always walked to the fence. Not to try climbing it (he'd seen what happened to children who tried climbing it, the way Mr. Henriksen's voice went cold and flat, the way you lost outdoor hour for a week). He just liked to stand there. To curl his fingers through the chain-link diamonds and feel the cold metal press into his skin. To look.
Beyond the fence: the street. Calle del Olvido, though he didn't know that was its name. Pavement cracked like dry skin, a single lane for the automated vehicles that hummed past without drivers. Apartment buildings with windows that held the shapes of other lives. A bench across the street, metal slats, currently empty.
And farther: the path to the park. Three blocks away. You could see it from here if you knew where to look. A stripe of green in all the gray, trees that were still alive, and grass that grew because someone watered it. On good days there were families there. Parents and children. Children who had parents.
Yaz pressed his forehead to the fence. The metal was cold and left marks he couldn't see but could feel, a grid pressed into his skin like a barcode. The sky spat a few drops of rain, not enough to be called inside for. He stayed.
A woman walked past on the sidewalk. Yellow coat. Heels that clicked tck tck tck against the pavement. She was looking at her phone, thumbs moving fast, her face bent toward the screen. She didn't glance at the orphanage. Why would she? It was just a building. Beige paint fading. A sign with a missing letter. Nothing to see.
Behind him, the other children played. Or performed playing, which was different. Chasing each other around the dead tree. Arguing over the swings. A group of girls sat against the wall, braiding each other's hair, their voices rising and falling in patterns Yaz couldn't decode. He didn't know how to decode them. Had never learned.
He watched the woman in the yellow coat until she turned a corner and was gone.
At three o'clock, something happened.
Not to Yaz. Never to Yaz. But he saw it, because he always saw things. A caretaker came into the yard. Not Ms. Varga, who was thin and tired and barely looked at anyone, but one of the newer ones, a young man with a beard who still smiled sometimes. He was holding an envelope.
"Kwon," he called. "Yassine Kwon."
For one bright, terrible second, Yaz's heart lurched. His name. Someone had said his name. An envelope was a letter, and a letter meant someone had written it, and someone writing meant someone thinking about you, remembering...
But the caretaker was already frowning, checking the paper in his hand. "Wait, no. Sorry. Kim. Jae-won Kim."
A boy Yaz didn't know well (small, newer, only arrived two months ago) stepped forward. His face did something Yaz recognized: the same lurch, the same stupid hope. The caretaker handed him the envelope, and Jae-won took it with both hands like it might dissolve.
A letter. Someone had sent him a letter.
Yaz watched him carry it to the corner of the yard, watched him open it with careful fingers, and watched his face as he read. The face changed. Yaz couldn't see what it changed into (the angle was wrong, the distance too far), but he saw the way the boy's shoulders curled in and the way his hands shook as they held the paper.
He looked away.
The fence was still there. The street. The empty bench. A pigeon had landed on it and was pecking at something invisible on the metal slats. Yaz pressed his fingers harder into the chain-link, felt the diamonds cut into his skin, and thought about what it would feel like to get a letter. To open it. To see handwriting that belonged to someone who had held you once, who had known your face before you knew it yourself.
The rain started again, harder this time. The bell rang. CLANG. He pulled his fingers from the fence and went inside.
Dinner was the same as lunch, which was nearly the same as breakfast. Food that filled your stomach but left everything else empty. Yaz sat in his usual spot and chewed and swallowed and watched the room and did not speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him.
Somewhere across the cafeteria, Jae-won sat alone, the letter folded in his pocket, his face still holding whatever the words had put there. Yaz didn't look at him again. It felt like looking at a wound. Someone else's wound, not his, but close enough to sting.
After dinner: quiet hour. The common room with its old toys and older television, the screen showing something bright and meaningless. AI-generated characters moving through AI-generated stories that meant nothing and felt like nothing. Yaz sat in the corner and let the noise wash over him. He thought about forty-seven ceiling tiles. He thought about the number seven, how it looked written down, and the way the line bent at the top like a broken arm.
Seven years old.
Seven years of porridge and gray shirts and bells that told you when to move and stop moving. Seven years of not being looked at, not being remembered, and not being held by anyone who knew his real name. If he had a real name. If Yassine Kwon was what his parents had called him or just what the stranger at the intake office had written down.
Found, not surrendered.
He'd heard that once. Hadn't understood it then. Was starting to understand it now.
Lights out came at eight o'clock.
The dormitory settled into darkness. Not complete darkness, because there was a night light near the door, a small orange glow that turned everything the color of old rust. Yaz lay on his back and looked at the ceiling he couldn't see and listened to the sounds of nineteen other children breathing.
Some of them cried at night. The younger ones especially, the new arrivals who still had tears left. Yaz didn't cry. He hadn't cried in a long time. Crying was like shouting into a room with no walls. The sound just went out and out and never hit anything, and eventually you stopped.
But his chest was heavy. A weight sitting on his ribs, pressing down. Not sadness, exactly. Something bigger and quieter than sadness. The feeling of being a small thing in a large building in a large city in a world that was spinning through space and would keep spinning whether you were on it or not.
He pulled the blanket up to his chin. The wool scratched. His feet were cold. The radiator near the window made a clicking sound, tink... tink... tink, which meant it was trying to work but not trying very hard.
Happy birthday.
The words formed in his mind, and then (before he could stop himself, before he could swallow them down) they slipped out. A whisper. Barely a sound at all.
"Happy birthday."
His own voice in the darkness. Small and thin and talking to no one.
Something shifted in his chest. Not the weight lifting. It was still there and would probably always be there. But something underneath it. A warmth. Faint, like the ghost of a hand on his shoulder. Like a voice answering from the back of his head, from somewhere deeper than thoughts usually came.
You know.
He didn't know what it meant. He didn't know if he'd really heard it or just wanted to hear it so badly that his mind had made it up. But the warmth stayed. A small, stubborn thing, burning in the dark.
He closed his eyes.
He was seven years old, and no one in the world knew it but him.