The words came through a door that was not quite closed.
Yaz had learned about doors. Which ones creaked. Which ones stuck. Which ones the adults forgot to pull all the way shut because they were tired or distracted or simply did not think about children listening. The door to Mr. Henriksen's office was the third kind. It drifted, always, leaving a gap the width of two fingers. A gap that was also a window. A window into the parts of the world that were not meant for him.
He was on his way to the bathroom. Or he had been. But the voices had stopped him, the way a hand might stop you, reaching out from the dark.
"The Kwon file," someone was saying. A woman's voice. Tired. Official. "No documentation at all. Nothing."
Yaz pressed himself against the wall. The paint was institutional green, slightly peeling, cool against his shoulder. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. Thump. Thump. Thump. Like someone knocking on a door from the inside.
"Found case?" That was Mr. Henriksen. Flat. Efficient. The voice of a man who filed children like papers.
"Found, not surrendered." The woman again. "No note. No name. Just genetic markers. Korea and Algeria, the report says. Assigned name at intake. That's all there is."
Found.
Not surrendered.
The words hung in the air. Yaz could almost see them, floating through the gap in the door like dust in a sunbeam. But these words did not float. They sank. They settled somewhere deep in his stomach, heavy as stones dropped into water.
"Age estimate at discovery was... three months. Maybe four. Hard to tell with the malnourishment."
A pause. Papers rustling. The particular silence of people who were looking at information and not at each other.
"And no leads? In four years?"
"Seven," Mr. Henriksen corrected. "He's been here seven years. Arrived at age... approximately four months. Now seven years old. March fifteenth birthday, assigned."
Assigned.
The word stuck to his ribs like cold porridge.
"Right. Right." More papers. "Well. Keep the file where it is. Nothing to be done."
Footsteps approached the door. Yaz did not think. He moved. Backward, silent, around the corner, pressing himself into the shadow of a supply closet that smelled like bleach and old mops. His breath came in small, careful sips. His hands were shaking. He did not know why they were shaking, only that they would not stop.
The footsteps passed. Faded. Gone.
He stood in the shadow for a long time.
Found, not surrendered.
The words would not leave. They circled in his head like the pigeons that landed on the bench across the street, pecking at invisible things, never quite settling.
Found meant someone had looked for him. Had seen him. Had picked him up from wherever he had been lying and decided to do something about it.
Surrendered meant someone had given him away. Had handed him to the state, to the system, to the endless gray hallways of the Institut Esperança. Had made a choice.
But he had not been surrendered.
He had been found.
Which meant no one had chosen anything. Not to keep him. Not to give him away. He had simply been. A thing left somewhere. A package without an address. A question that no one had meant to ask.
His legs felt strange. Wobbly. Like they belonged to someone else and that someone else was tired. He walked back to the dormitory slowly, counting the steps (forty-seven, the same as the ceiling tiles) and trying not to think about the words.
He thought about them anyway.
The next morning arrived gray and ordinary.
Breakfast was porridge. The cafeteria was loud. The clock on the wall ticked its endless tick, tik tik tik, like a heart that would never stop even when everything else did. Yaz ate without tasting. He watched the room without seeing. The words were still there, sitting in his skull like furniture that would not move.
Found, not surrendered.
Assigned name at intake.
Assigned. Not given. Not chosen. Assigned. Like a number. Like a room. Like a bed.
He wondered if Yassine Kwon was even a real name. If it had belonged to someone once, someone who had died, someone whose file had been closed so that his could be opened. He wondered if he was wearing a dead person's name the way he wore dead people's clothes. The sweater with the small hole in the elbow. The pants that had been too big and were now almost fitting. Things that had belonged to someone, once, before they belonged to him.
Maybe even "him" was borrowed. Maybe there was no him at all. Just a space where a person should have been.
Mrs. Okonkwo passed through the cafeteria. She wore her usual colorful headwrap today, orange and gold, a splash of life in the gray. Her bracelet clicked softly as she moved. Clk clk clk. Little wooden sounds. Comforting sounds. The sounds of someone who came from somewhere, who had a history, who knew where her name came from.
He watched her stop to speak to a younger child. Émile, the French-Senegalese boy who still cried at night. She bent down, her hand on his shoulder, her voice low and warm. Yaz could not hear what she said. He did not need to. He could see the way Émile's shoulders relaxed. The way his face changed. The way he looked at her like she was something solid in a world made of water.
Yaz had looked at her like that once. When he was smaller. When hope still felt like something you could hold.
He pushed his porridge around his bowl. The skin had formed again. He broke it. It reformed. He broke it again.
Maybe she knows.
The thought arrived sudden and sharp. Mrs. Okonkwo had been here longer than any of the other caretakers. She had watched Yaz for years. She noticed things, saw things, remembered things. Maybe she knew about the file. About the "found, not surrendered." About the name that was assigned instead of given.
Maybe she could tell him where he came from.
The porridge sat untouched. His stomach was doing something strange. Tightening, loosening, tightening again. Like a fist that could not decide whether to open or close.
He waited.
He found her in the late afternoon.
She was in the common room, folding blankets that the younger children had left in heaps on the floor. Her movements were slow and deliberate. There was something peaceful about watching her work, something that made Yaz think of birds settling on branches, of water finding its level. She did not look tired. She looked like someone who had made peace with tiredness, who wore it like a familiar coat.
He stood in the doorway. She did not look up immediately. She folded one blanket, then another, her hands moving in the same pattern each time. Smooth, fold, smooth, fold. A rhythm. A certainty.
"Mrs. Okonkwo?"
His voice came out smaller than he wanted it to. She looked up. Her eyes found his. Those eyes. Warm brown and tired, but not too tired to see. The eyes of someone who noticed.
"Yassine."
The way she said his name. Gentle. Unhurried. Like the name was a small living thing she was being careful not to crush.
"I have a question."
She set down the blanket. Turned toward him fully. Her bracelet clicked once, twice. "Yes?"
The words were there, in his throat, but they did not want to come out. He felt suddenly foolish. What if she laughed? What if she looked at him the way Tomás had looked at him when he mentioned his birthday? What if she said "So?" and meant it?
But she did not look like someone who would say "So." She looked like someone who was waiting. Patient. Present.
"Where did I come from?"
The question fell out of him, heavier than he expected. It lay on the floor between them like something dropped. He could not pick it back up.
Mrs. Okonkwo's face did something. A small movement. Her eyes flickered, just for a moment, to a point somewhere above his head. Then back. The warmth was still there, but something else was there too now. Something he did not have a name for.
"You came here," she said. "To the Institut. When you were very small."
That was not what he had asked. He knew that she knew it.
"But before that," he pressed. "Where was I before that?"
The pause was long. Longer than a normal pause. It stretched between them like a hallway, like a corridor he could not see the end of. He could hear the clock on the wall. Tik. Tik. Tik.
"Your parents," Mrs. Okonkwo said finally, "loved you very much."
The words should have been warm. They were shaped like warm words. But something in them was wrong. Something in the way she said them, in the way her eyes moved just slightly to the left, away from his face, toward the wall.
"How do you know?"
He had not meant to challenge her. The question came out before he could stop it. Hard and small and pointed, like a stone thrown without aiming.
Her hands moved to the bracelet on her wrist. She touched the wooden beads, one by one, like she was counting them. Like counting was something that made things easier.
"Because all parents love their children," she said. "That is what parents do."
But you don't know my parents. You never knew them. Nobody knew them. The file said no documentation. Found, not surrendered. Nothing.
The words stayed inside him. He did not say them out loud. But he felt them, burning in his chest, pushing against his ribs. She was lying. Or not lying, exactly. She was saying something that sounded like truth but wasn't. Filling a hole with cotton when what he needed was stone.
"Oh," he said.
Just that. Just "oh." A small, flat sound.
Mrs. Okonkwo's face changed again. Something crumpled behind her eyes. Guilt, maybe. Or pain. Or the particular sadness of someone who wanted to help but did not know how.
"Yassine..." she began.
But Yaz was already walking away. His feet knew where to go even when his head did not. Down the hall. Around the corner. Past the classrooms with their empty desks and the windows that showed the gray sky and the world he could not reach.
She had lied to him.
Not a mean lie. Not a cruel one. A gentle lie, soft as the blankets she folded. A lie meant to protect.
But he did not want protection. He wanted to know.
The next three days, he watched.
He learned the rhythms of the administrative office. The times when Mr. Henriksen left for lunch (12:15, always). The times when Ms. Varga was on duty and therefore distracted (afternoons, when her eyes went glassy and she stared at nothing). The times when the hallway was empty, when the children were at lessons or outdoor hour or dinner, when a small boy could stand in the shadows and not be seen.
The file was in there somewhere. His file. The file that said "found, not surrendered" and "no documentation" and "assigned name at intake." The file that held whatever tiny pieces of his past still existed.
He tried to get close twice.
The first time, he made it to the door of the office before Mr. Henriksen appeared around the corner, his gray suit making him look like a piece of furniture that had learned to walk. Yaz pretended to be looking for the bathroom. Mr. Henriksen had pointed down the hall, his voice empty, his eyes already somewhere else.
The second time, he actually touched the door handle. Cold metal under his fingers. His heart racing so loud he could feel it in his teeth. But then footsteps came, and he had to leave, and the handle slipped from his hand like something he had dreamed.
He was seven years old. He was small and quiet and invisible. These were usually advantages. But the file was locked behind a door that adults opened, and adults did not open doors for children like him. They did not open anything.
His frustration grew. It sat in his stomach like something undigested. He stopped eating as much at meals. He stopped sleeping as well at night. He lay awake listening to the other children breathe, staring at the ceiling he could not see, counting tiles he knew by heart (forty-seven) until the numbers stopped meaning anything.
Found, not surrendered.
The words played on loop. A song with no melody. A question with no answer.
Where did I come from?
Who left me there?
Why?
Saturday arrived with the particular silence of a building with fewer adults in it.
Weekends were different. The rhythms changed. Some of the caretakers had days off. The children were less supervised, more free to wander, more likely to disappear into corners and not be noticed. Yaz had noticed this before. He had filed it away in the part of his brain that collected useful information. Now he put it to use.
The basement stairs were near the kitchen. They were not locked. They were not forbidden, exactly. Just unused. The kind of place adults forgot existed because they had stopped seeing it years ago.
Yaz had seen it.
He went down.
The stairs creaked under his weight. Crk. Crk. Crk. Each step a small announcement. He moved slowly, staying close to the wall where the wood was more stable, where the sounds were quieter. The air changed as he descended. It became heavier, damper, thicker with the smells of old things. Dust. Mold. Paper. Machine oil from the boiler room.
At the bottom: a hallway. Long and dim, lit only by a single bulb that flickered every few seconds like an eye that could not stop blinking. He counted the flickers. One. Two. Three. Four. They came at irregular intervals, which should have bothered him but somehow didn't. Some irregularities were more honest than patterns.
Doors lined the hallway. Most were closed. One, at the end, stood slightly open.
He walked toward it.
The storage room.
He knew that was what it was before he pushed the door wider. The smell told him. Old furniture and cleaning supplies and the particular mustiness of things that had been forgotten. He stepped inside.
The darkness was almost complete. But his eyes adjusted, slowly, and shapes began to emerge. Stacked mattresses against one wall. Broken chairs. Boxes, many boxes, piled on top of each other like a city made of cardboard. In the corner, something that might have been a shelf or might have been a grave for objects that had no other place to go.
He breathed.
The air tasted like dust and time. Like things that had been waiting.
Near the boxes, he saw something else. Not objects. Papers. Stacks of them, yellow with age, bundled with string or shoved into folders that had come loose at the seams. Archives. Records. The paper memories of the Institut Esperança, going back decades, maybe longer.
His hands were shaking again.
Somewhere in those papers, there might be a file with his name on it. A file that said "Kwon, Yassine" or maybe just "Unknown Male, Infant, Found." A file that held the only evidence that he had ever existed before this building, this yard, this fence.
But the papers were too many. The light was too dim. And even as he stood there, he heard footsteps above him, the heavy tread of adult shoes on adult floors, and he knew he could not stay.
Not today. But soon.
He backed out of the storage room. Closed the door carefully. Silently. Walked up the stairs with his heart in his throat and his mind full of paper and dust and the particular shape of forgotten things.
The file was there. Somewhere. He was sure of it.
He just had to find it.
Sunday was gray.
Not the soft gray of clouds that might rain, but the hard gray of a sky that had given up. Yaz sat by the window in the common room, pressing his forehead to the glass the way he had done so many times before. The cold bit into his skin. Familiar. Grounding. Real.
Outside, the street was empty. The bench across the road was empty too, though sometimes (he would learn later, in a different chapter of his life) an old man sat there, feeding pigeons, waiting for nothing. Today there was no one. Just pavement and buildings and the distant hum of automated vehicles carrying people to places they wanted to go.
He thought about the storage room. About the papers. About the file that might or might not exist, that might or might not tell him anything, that might or might not matter.
He thought about Mrs. Okonkwo's lie. The way she had touched her bracelet. The way her eyes had moved.
He thought about the words. Found, not surrendered.No documentation.Assigned name.
And then, slowly, quietly, in the part of his brain that lived deeper than words, he thought something else.
I have no before.
The thought was not like other thoughts. It did not arrive with edges or corners. It arrived like water, spreading, filling every space it could find, seeping into places he had not known were empty.
I have no before. No parents who loved me. No story that explains me. No reason for being here except that someone found me and someone else decided to keep me and now I am Yassine Kwon, age seven, Dormitory A, bed three from the window, forty-seven tiles on the ceiling, eighty-three steps to the cafeteria, and that is all there is.
His chest hurt.
Not the sharp hurt of a cut or a bruise. The deep hurt. The kind that lived in the space between your ribs where your heart was supposed to be but instead there was just... something. Something heavy and shapeless. Something that had been there so long he had stopped noticing it, the way you stopped noticing the sound of your own breathing. Until you did notice. And then it was all you could hear.
He pressed his forehead harder against the glass. The cold intensified. He welcomed it. Pain you could feel on the outside was better than pain you could not explain.
Who am I?
The question came without permission. It rose from the deep place, the warm place, the place where the voice had whispered to him on his birthday. It rose and it sat in his mouth like a stone, too heavy to swallow, too big to spit out.
Who am I?
He did not know. He had never known. He had been asking without asking for seven years, and no one had answered, and now he was asking out loud, inside his own head, and there was still no answer.
Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I?
That night, in the dark, he said it aloud.
The dormitory was quiet. Nineteen other bodies breathing their own small breaths. The radiator clicking its useless song. Tink. Tink. Tink. The orange glow of the night light near the door. Everything the same as every other night. Everything exactly as it always was.
But Yaz was not the same.
He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling he could not see, and he opened his mouth, and he whispered.
"Who am I?"
The words left him and went up into the darkness. They did not echo. They did not come back. They just went, like birds released from a cage, like letters sent to addresses that did not exist.
"Who am I?"
Louder now. Still a whisper, but a stronger one. A whisper with muscle.
"Who am I?"
And then, from the deep place, from the place where the warmth lived, from the space behind his eyes and below his thoughts, something answered.
You're the one asking.
The voice was not his own. Or it was his own, but older. Wiser. Like an echo of someone he might become, traveling backward through time to speak to him now. It was warm. It was calm. It was patient in a way that felt like sunlight felt, when the clouds moved and suddenly there it was, touching your face.
You're the one asking. That's more than most.
Yaz's breath caught.
Most people never ask. They accept the names they're given. They believe the stories they're told. They never look at the files they're not supposed to see. They never stand in doorways and listen. They never climb down basement stairs. They never ask.
But you asked.
And that's the beginning. Not the answer, not yet. But the beginning. The first step toward something that is yours.
The warmth spread through his chest. Soft. Quiet. Like a blanket that was not scratchy, like a hand that did not hurt.
He did not know if he was hearing things. If he was making things up. If his mind had finally broken under the weight of all the questions.
But he did not feel broken. He felt... seen. Not by anyone in the room. Not by anyone in the building. But by something inside him, something that had been waiting, something that had finally found a crack in the door and slipped through.
I have no before, he thought. No parents. No story. No reason.
But I have this. I have the question. I have the asking.
And maybe, somehow, I can make the rest.
He closed his eyes.
The darkness was still there. The weight was still there. The empty space where a past should have been was still there, hollow and aching and vast.
But underneath it, in the deep place, in the warm place, something had taken root. Something small. Something stubborn. Something that was his.
He had no past. No parents. No story. He was a boy made of absence, shaped by the things that had not happened to him, named by strangers, found and not surrendered, existing without explanation.
And somehow, he would have to fill himself in.