The bell rang, and Aka was still not ready.
He'd been not ready forty-six times before, but this time felt different in the specific way that the forty-seventh time something terrible happens always feels different from the previous forty-six.
Like a bruise you keep pressing to see if it still hurts.
It still hurt.
"Move," Saka said, from somewhere above him. Being stood next to Saka was like standing next to a very beautiful, very anxious building. "You're blocking the doorway and people are trying to walk through you."
"I'm not blocking—" Aka checked. He was, in fact, blocking the doorway. Three students had taken routes around him, giving the empty air beside him a slightly wider berth than was strictly necessary for a five-foot-five person. The space around Aka had opinions. "Okay. Moving."
They filed into the hallway.
Jefferson High, 8:04 AM, attempt forty-seven. The hallway smelled like floor wax and paper and the specific anxiety of 847 teenagers who would rather be anywhere else. Lockers banged.
Sneakers squeaked. Someone was playing music from their phone speaker with the bass all the way up, which was technically a violation of school policy and also, Aka noted distantly, a gesture of profound individuality that he envied with his entire non-corporeal soul.
He wanted to play music too loud from a phone speaker.
He wanted to be the kind of person who could do that without the bass notes briefly reorganizing themselves into sounds that didn't exist in the known frequency range.
"Stop thinking so loudly," Saka said.
"I'm not—" "You get this look." Saka tapped his own temple. Long fingers, elegant, currently wearing a plain gray hoodie that somehow still managed to look ceremonial.
"Like you're about to philosophically examine something innocent until it stops being innocent."
"I was thinking about music."
"About what music means, or about the music?"
Aka considered. "...Both."
"That's the problem."
Faya fell into step beside them, which meant she emerged from a slight crowd-gap and positioned herself between Aka and the wall in the specific way she always did — the wall was behind her, the crowd in front, no one approaching from her left. She had, over forty-six attempts, developed navigational habits so precise they looked accidental.
Her scarf was up.
Her amber eyes tracked the hallway in the way that certain animals tracked open ground: not afraid, exactly, but acutely aware that being seen could be the thing that killed you.
Her phone screen showed a note: WHICH CLASS FIRST? "English," Saka said.
"Ms. Chen. We covered Gatsby."
WE'VE COVERED GATSBY 46 TIMES
"Do you think Fitzgerald knew," Aka started.
Faya's head turned toward him with the specific velocity of someone who knew exactly where that sentence was going.
"—that the green light was going to mean so much to people who aren't even the people it was about." He finished lamely. "I just think it's interesting how something can become a symbol to people who weren't part of the original—"
PLEASE, Faya's phone said.
"Aka," Saka said patiently. "What is the goal?."
"Lunch," Aka said. "Boring lunch. Together. I know."
Saka looked at him.
"Say it like you believe it."
"Boring lunch." He paused. "Together."
"I believe it," Aka said. "I want boring lunch. I am a boring high school student who wants boring lunch with his friends."
A locker to his left swung open of its own accord. Just slightly. Just a few inches. The student standing in front of it stepped back, confused.
"I know," Aka told the locker. He kept walking.
The first period bell rang — the real one, the get-to-class-or-get-a-tardy-slip bell — and the hallway shifted from chaotic to urgent. Students broke into jogs. Books were grabbed. Conversations were severed mid-sentence and promised to be continued later, at lunch, over texts, in the specific patchwork of continuity that teenagers had evolved for fragmenting a life across fifty-minute intervals.
Aka watched all of this with the kind of intensity he was not supposed to have.
He was, technically, older than the concept of fifty-minute intervals. He was, technically, older than the concept of "later." The void did not have a "later." The void was a total sum, the everything and nothing, the place where later and before collapsed into the same silence.
He was also, technically, a high school sophomore who needed to get to English class before Ms. Chen marked him absent.
He jogged. It felt foreign and excellent. His sneakers squeaked on the floor.
Beside him, Saka jogged with the resigned dignity of a very tall person who had accepted that jogging was never going to look normal on him. Behind them, Faya walked at a pace that was technically a brisk walk but covered the same ground as their jog, which was the kind of spatial efficiency she deployed without thinking about.
Room 113. English Literature. Ms. Chen's class.
Aka put his hand on the door handle and— Something changed.
Not in any way that 847 teenagers would have noticed. The air didn't shift. The lights didn't flicker. Nothing moved. But Aka went very still in the way that only he went still — the complete absence of motion that wasn't relaxation but was instead everything in him listening.
Something had noticed them.
Not a person. Not anything in the school. Something that existed several layers of reality above Jefferson High and its fifty-minute intervals, looking down through layers of existence the way someone might look down through clear water at a coin on the bottom.
He recognized it the way you recognize a smell before you remember what it is.
Old. Very old. Older than the concept of "old."
Another avatar.
"Aka." Saka's voice, very quiet. He'd felt it too. Of course he had — heaven's will, the realm above even the void in terms of creation, even if not in terms of authority. Saka felt things arriving the way Aka felt things that had already been there forever.
Aka released the door handle.
"How far?" Saka asked.
Aka looked at the ceiling, which was an old habit and a useless one — the distance wasn't vertical. But something about looking up helped him parse the vectors. "Not close. Not yet.
It's..." He searched for a word. "Curious."
"Curious about what?"
Faya had her phone out. Her note said: US?
"About whether we're real," Aka said.
"Whether we're actually doing—" He gestured at the hallway, the lockers, the fluorescent lights, the faint smell of floor wax. "—this."
Saka processed that. His golden eyes, tamped down to something close to brown with effort, moved slowly from the ceiling to Aka to Faya. "Is it a problem? Right now?"
"No," Aka said. "Right now it's just watching."
WE SHOULD STILL GO TO CLASS, Faya's phone said.
She was right. Whatever was watching them from somewhere above the observable universe, being late to Ms. Chen's class was still a concrete consequence with concrete social costs, and they were on attempt forty-seven, and the goal was lunch.
Aka opened the door.
Twenty-three students turned to look at the three of them.
He tried to smile. The tiles under his feet leaned away.
Progress, he told himself. Some of them are only leaning slightly.