Forty-seven.
That was the number. Yaz had counted them three times now, lying on his back in the gray hour before the bell, his eyes tracing the grid of ceiling tiles above his bed. Forty-seven. Not forty-six, not forty-eight. Forty-seven exactly. The same number as the steps from the dormitory to the cafeteria, which he had counted in Chapter 3 without realizing he was counting. The same number that meant nothing and everything at once.
He had discovered something in the days since Mrs. Okonkwo's lie. Something small and private, like a stone you keep in your pocket and touch when no one is looking. Numbers did not lie. Numbers did not look away. Numbers did not say "your parents loved you very much" and then move their eyes to the wall because they could not hold your gaze while they said it.
Numbers just were.
Forty-seven tiles. Each one a square of stained white, some with cracks that looked like rivers on a map, some with water stains that looked like continents no one had named. He could trace the patterns with his eyes in the dark. He knew where each crack was, which tile had the brown spot in the corner, which one was slightly crooked because someone had replaced it badly years ago and no one had fixed it since.
This was his ceiling. His forty-seven tiles. His small certainty in a building full of uncertain things.
The bell came. CLANG CLANG CLANG. The sound that meant nothing had changed, would never change, would always arrive at six o'clock to tell him his body was not his own.
He got up. He dressed. He counted the buttons on his shirt (five) and the steps to the bathroom (twelve) and the number of children who were already awake and moving (seven, including himself).
The counting had started without his permission. Like breathing, like blinking, like the way his fingers tapped rhythms on his thigh when he was thinking. His mind had simply begun to do it, and now it would not stop.
Eighty-three.
That was the number of steps from the dormitory door to his seat in the cafeteria. He had counted them four days in a row now, and the number was always the same. Eighty-three steps at his pace, which was shorter than the older children's pace but longer than the younger children's pace because he had learned to walk efficiently, to waste no motion, to get where he was going without drawing attention.
Eighty-three steps. Past the common room door (twenty-two steps). Past the administrative hallway (forty-one steps). Down the stairs (fourteen steps, seven per flight). Through the ground floor corridor to the cafeteria entrance (six steps).
He did not know why he was counting. He only knew that it helped. That each number was a small stone placed in a line, and the line was a path, and the path was something he could walk without getting lost.
Breakfast was porridge. This was not a number, but it might as well have been. Porridge on Monday, porridge on Tuesday, porridge on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Eggs on Sunday. A rhythm as predictable as breathing, as heartbeats, as the forty-seven tiles that watched him sleep.
He sat in his usual spot. Third from the end, near the wall. The porridge had already skinned over. He broke the skin with his spoon. It reformed. He broke it again.
Tomás walked past with his tray. Older, harder, eyes like stones that had stopped caring about water. He did not look at Yaz. This was expected. This was a number too, in its way. The number of times Tomás had acknowledged Yaz's existence this week: zero. The number of times Yaz had expected anything different: also zero.
Zero was a useful number. It prepared you for nothing.
On the third day of counting, Yaz tried to count his heartbeats.
He was lying in bed, waiting for sleep that would not come, and the idea arrived the way ideas sometimes did. Quietly. Without warning. Like a bird landing on a fence and looking at you with one eye.
How many times has my heart beaten?
He pressed his hand to his chest. The rhythm was there, thub-thub, thub-thub, steady and warm beneath his palm. He started counting.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
The numbers came easily at first. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. He could feel each beat, could separate them, could give each one its own number like a name.
Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
But somewhere around forty, something happened. The beats started to blur. They came too fast, or he counted too slow, or his mind wandered to the ceiling tiles (forty-seven) or the footsteps to the cafeteria (eighty-three) and by the time he remembered to pay attention, he had lost his place.
Fifty-something. Sixty-something. He did not know.
He tried again. One. Two. Three. Four.
Lost it at thirty-eight.
Again. One. Two. Three.
Lost it at fifty-two.
His heart would not be counted. It beat too fast, too constant, too alive. It did not care about numbers. It did not wait for him to keep up. It just kept going, thub-thub, thub-thub, carrying blood to places he could not see, keeping him alive whether he wanted to be kept alive or not.
He lay in the dark, hand pressed to his chest, and thought about all the beats that had happened without him noticing. Millions of them. Maybe billions. Every second of every day for seven years. His heart had been working while he slept, while he ate, while he stood at the fence watching families that were not his. It had never stopped. It had never asked permission.
You can't count everything.
The voice came from the deep place. Warm. Patient. Almost amused.
Some things just happen. Some things are too fast to hold. That's what being alive is. Movement you can't control.
Yaz did not answer. He did not know how to answer a voice that lived inside his head and spoke like an older version of himself.
But he stopped trying to count his heartbeats.
Some numbers, it seemed, did not want to be known.
Sunday arrived gray and still. Yaz spent the morning in the common room, sitting in his usual corner while the television played its usual nothing. But he was not watching the screen. He was counting.
Children.
They moved through the room like fish in a tank, slow and aimless, bumping into each other and drifting apart. Some played with the old toys in the bin by the window. Some sat on the floor and stared at the carpet. Some talked to each other in voices that rose and fell like waves.
He counted them as they passed. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
A girl with braids (six). A boy missing a front tooth (seven). Two sisters who were always together, always whispering (eight and nine). The new arrival from last month, still crying at night, still looking at the door like someone might walk through it and take him home (ten).
By noon, he had counted eighty-four children in the Institut Esperança.
Eighty-four. All of them parentless. All of them wearing clothes that had belonged to someone else. All of them waiting for something that might never come. Letters, visitors, families. The things that turned children into sons and daughters, that gave them last names that meant something, that made them belong.
Eighty-four children, and not a single one had been picked up by a father with strong arms or had ice cream wiped from their wrist by a patient mother. Not a single one had been lifted onto shoulders to see the world from above.
Yaz wondered what the number would be next year. More? Fewer? Would some of them leave, adopted by strangers who had seen their files and decided to take a chance? Would others arrive, found or surrendered or simply left in places where someone would eventually notice?
The number was not permanent. That was the strange thing about it. Eighty-four today could be eighty-five tomorrow, or eighty-two, or a hundred. The children came and went like water through a drain. The building stayed. The number changed.
But I'm still here.
The thought was quiet, almost too quiet to notice. He had been here for seven years. Through every change in the number, every arrival and departure, every bell and every bowl of porridge. He had stayed. Not because he chose to stay, but because no one had chosen to take him.
Found, not surrendered. Still here. Still counting.
Monday brought a new kind of count.
Words.
Yaz decided to count every word that was spoken to him. Not words he heard, but words directed at him specifically. Words that required his name, or at least his attention. Words that acknowledged he existed.
The day started with Ms. Varga at breakfast. "Eat." That was one word. She was not looking at him when she said it, was speaking to the table in general, but her eyes had passed over his face for a moment, so he counted it.
One.
Morning lessons: Ms. Reyes called on him to answer a question about multiplication. "Yassine. What is seven times eight?" That was six words. He answered (fifty-six) and she nodded (no words) and moved on.
Seven.
Lunch: nothing. No one spoke to him. Zero words added to the count.
Still seven.
Outdoor hour: another child bumped into him near the fence. "Sorry." One word. Probably reflexive, not really meant for him, but technically spoken in his direction.
Eight.
Afternoon: a caretaker he did not recognize told him to move out of the hallway. "Over there." Two words.
Ten.
Dinner: Mrs. Okonkwo passed his table and said, "Eat something, Yassine." Three words, including his name. That felt different from the others. Warmer.
Thirteen.
Evening: nothing.
Lights out: nothing.
Total words spoken to Yassine Kwon on Monday, April 7th, 2152: thirteen.
He lay in bed and thought about the number. Thirteen words in sixteen waking hours. Less than one word per hour. Less than one acknowledgment per sixty minutes that he existed, that he had a name, that he was someone who could be spoken to.
Was that a lot? Was that a little? He did not know. He had no comparison. Maybe other children received more words. Maybe they received fewer. Maybe the number did not matter at all.
But it felt like it mattered. It felt like a small, cold stone in his pocket, smooth and hard, pressing against his thigh every time he moved.
Thirteen words. That was what a day was worth. That was what he was worth.
The Maestro said nothing. The deep place was quiet. Even the voice inside his head, it seemed, had no words for this.
The next day, Yaz calculated meals.
He did the math slowly, carefully, during morning lessons while Ms. Reyes talked about something that did not require his attention. He counted on his fingers under the desk, then counted again in his head to make sure.
Three meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Sometimes a snack in the afternoon, but not always, so he did not count it.
Three meals per day for seven years.
Seven years was... he had to think about this. Twelve months in a year. Seven times twelve was eighty-four. Eighty-four months. But months had different numbers of days, which was confusing, so he decided to use a simpler number.
Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Seven times three hundred and sixty-five was...
He lost track. Started over.
Three hundred. Seven times three hundred was two thousand one hundred.
Sixty-five. Seven times sixty-five was... four hundred fifty-five.
Two thousand one hundred plus four hundred fifty-five was two thousand five hundred fifty-five.
No. Wait. That was days. He needed meals.
Two thousand five hundred fifty-five days times three meals per day was...
Seven thousand six hundred sixty-five.
Seven thousand six hundred sixty-five meals. Give or take. Accounting for leap years and the days when he had been too sick to eat and the days when he had hidden food in his locker because he was not hungry but did not want to throw it away.
Seven thousand six hundred sixty-five bowls of porridge. Trays of gray vegetables. Glasses of water that tasted like the pipes that carried it. Seven thousand six hundred sixty-five times he had lifted a spoon to his mouth, chewed, swallowed, converted food into the energy required to continue existing.
And not a single one of those meals had been cooked by someone who loved him. Not a single one had been served on a plate chosen specifically for him, in a kitchen that was his, in a home where his name was written somewhere in ink that would not fade.
Seven thousand six hundred sixty-five.
The number was huge and small at the same time. Huge because it was a lot of meals. Small because it was only seven years. Only the beginning.
If he lived to be eighty, he would eat... he tried to do the math and gave up. Too many numbers. Too many meals. Too many years of lifting spoons to his mouth alone.
Numbers can measure what you've lost, the Maestro said, quiet and warm in the deep place. But they can also measure what's still possible.
Yaz did not know if that was comforting or terrifying.
On Wednesday, he calculated days.
He was eating breakfast, staring at the porridge he had stopped tasting, when the thought arrived. Simple. Inevitable. Like a door opening onto a room he had always known was there but never entered.
How many days have I been alive?
Seven years. Three hundred sixty-five days per year.
Seven times three hundred sixty-five was two thousand five hundred fifty-five.
Plus two for leap years. Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven.
No. Wait. He had been born in 2145. The current year was 2152. Leap years in between... 2148 and 2152 were leap years, he thought. That was two. So two thousand five hundred fifty-seven.
Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days.
He tested the number in his mouth, silently, feeling the shape of it. Two thousand. Five hundred. Fifty-seven. Not even three thousand. Not even a fraction of the number of days in a full life.
If he lived to be seventy, like the old people in the educational videos, he would have... seventy times three hundred sixty-five was... too hard to calculate. But it would be a lot. Twenty-something thousand. Maybe more.
And he had used two thousand five hundred fifty-seven of them already.
Gone. Spent. Vanished into the past that he could not remember and could not return to. Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days of waking and sleeping and eating and walking and breathing and waiting. Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days of standing at fences and pressing his forehead to cold glass and lying awake at night wondering who he was.
Was that a lot? Was that a little?
He thought about the old people he had seen on the street. Wrinkled and slow, moving like their bodies were tired of carrying them. They had lived twenty-something thousand days. Maybe more. They had used up most of their numbers, spent most of their time, and now they were waiting for the end with whatever days they had left.
And he had used less than three thousand.
Ten percent, maybe. Or less. His life was ninety percent still ahead of him, unspent, uncounted, waiting to happen.
The porridge sat cold in his bowl. The cafeteria noise washed over him like water he could not feel. He was seven years old. Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days old. And all of it, every single day, had been lived without anyone choosing to keep him.
You're not counting to remember, the Maestro said, gentle in the deep place. You're counting to hold on.
Yaz did not argue. The voice was right. The voice was always right, in the way that things that live inside your head know you better than you know yourself.
He was counting because the numbers did not leave. Because they stayed where he put them, solid and unchanging, like stones in a wall. Because they were his.
Forty-seven tiles. Eighty-three steps. Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days.
The numbers were a language he was teaching himself. A grammar of survival. A way of saying I am here, I exist, I can be measured without having to say it out loud.
Without having to wait for someone else to measure him first.
April arrived like something that had forgotten to announce itself.
Yaz noticed the change in small ways. The light through the dormitory window was different now. Warmer. More yellow and less gray. The air in the yard smelled different too. Wet earth and something almost sweet, like the buds on the dead tree that were not actually dead after all. They were just waiting. They had been waiting all winter, holding their green inside them, and now they were opening.
He stood at the fence on Thursday afternoon, fingers threaded through the chain-link, and watched the world wake up.
A woman walked past pushing a stroller. The baby inside was sleeping, its face soft and creased, its hands curled into tiny fists. The woman was humming something. Yaz could not hear the tune, but he could see her mouth moving, see the way her head nodded with a rhythm only she knew.
She did not look at the orphanage. She did not look at him. She just walked, humming, pushing her baby through a world that belonged to them both.
Do you remember being that small?
The thought was his own, not the Maestro's. It came from a place he did not like to visit, a place where the questions were too big and the answers were too absent.
He did not remember being a baby. Did not remember being found. Did not remember anything before the orphanage, the gray walls, the forty-seven tiles. His earliest memory was a smell. Bleach and something else, something that might have been oatmeal, in a room he could not picture clearly. He had been crying. Someone had been there, but he did not know who. Just hands. Just warmth. And then nothing.
Found, not surrendered. No documentation. No note. No name.
He watched the woman and her stroller until they turned the corner and disappeared.
I was that small once, he thought. Someone held me. Someone decided I was worth keeping alive.
But that someone had not been a mother or a father. That someone had been a stranger who found him somewhere and brought him here, to this building, to this fence, to this life of counting things that no one else counted.
The bell rang. CLANG. He pulled his fingers from the chain-link and walked back toward the building, counting his steps without meaning to.
Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.
The numbers were becoming automatic now. A habit. A reflex. The way other children bit their nails or twisted their hair or tapped their feet when they were nervous.
He counted because counting was something he could do. Because it did not require permission. Because it made the world smaller and more manageable, broken into pieces he could hold.
Forty-seven. The door. He went inside.
She appeared on a Thursday.
Or maybe she had always been there, and Yaz had simply never noticed her. That happened sometimes. You looked at a room every day for years, and then one day you saw a crack in the wall or a stain on the ceiling that had been there the whole time, waiting for you to pay attention.
Her name was Suki.
She was his age, or close to it. Japanese and Brazilian, someone had said once, though Yaz did not know who had said it or when. She had black hair cut short and eyes that were always watching something. Not watching like Yaz watched, cataloguing and counting and trying to understand. Watching like she was waiting for something bad to happen. Like the world was a thing that could not be trusted.
She sat next to him at dinner.
Not close enough to touch, but close enough to notice. Close enough that her tray was in his peripheral vision, her gray shirt, her small hands holding a spoon the same way he held his spoon.
He did not say anything. He did not know what to say. Children did not sit next to him. Children sat in their own places with their own friends and left him alone because that was what he had taught them to do by never talking to them first.
But Suki did not seem to need talking. She just sat. She ate her porridge in small, careful bites. She looked at the wall.
After a while, she said something.
"You count things."
It was not a question. It was a statement. A fact, delivered without judgment or curiosity, like saying "the sky is gray" or "porridge tastes like nothing."
Yaz's spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.
"What?"
"You count things." She still was not looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on the wall, on a spot where the paint was peeling in a shape that might have been a bird or a cloud or nothing at all. "I've seen you. Counting steps. Counting tiles. Moving your lips when you eat, like you're counting bites."
He felt his face do something. Heat rising. Shame, maybe. Or surprise. No one had ever noticed before. No one paid attention to what he did because no one paid attention to him at all.
"I count things too," Suki said.
And then she turned and looked at him, and her eyes were dark and quiet and not afraid.
"I count cracks in the ceiling. Above my bed. There are thirty-one."
"Forty-seven," Yaz said, before he could stop himself. "Above mine."
Suki nodded, as if this made perfect sense. As if two children comparing ceiling cracks was the most normal thing in the world.
"Forty-seven is more," she said. "You're luckier."
Yaz did not know if that was a joke. He did not know if Suki made jokes. Her face was still, her voice was flat, and there was nothing in her expression that suggested she was smiling underneath.
But something loosened in his chest. Something that had been tight for a long time, maybe since his birthday, maybe longer. A knot he had not known was there.
"Why do you count?" he asked.
Suki shrugged. A small movement, barely noticeable.
"Because it helps."
She went back to her porridge. Yaz went back to his. They did not speak for the rest of the meal.
But they sat together. And when the bell rang and they got up to leave, Suki looked at him one more time.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Same place."
It was not a question. It was not a request. It was just a fact, like the number of ceiling tiles, like the steps to the cafeteria, like the color of the sky.
Yaz nodded.
And for the first time in two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days, he felt like someone had seen him.
They sat together at outdoor hour.
The fence was cold beneath Yaz's fingers, the chain-link pressing its familiar diamonds into his palms. But today he was not alone. Today Suki stood beside him, close enough that he could hear her breathing, far enough that they were not touching.
She was watching the street. The same street Yaz had watched for weeks. The same pavement, the same buildings, the same people walking past without looking.
She did not say anything. Neither did he.
The silence was strange. Different from the silence of being alone. This silence had weight, texture, presence. It was a silence that meant something, though Yaz did not know what.
A pigeon landed on the bench across the street. It pecked at invisible things, its head bobbing, its feathers ruffled by the wind. Yaz counted its pecks without meaning to. One. Two. Three. Four.
"Twelve," Suki said.
He blinked. "What?"
"The pigeon. It will peck twelve times and then fly away. It always does."
Yaz watched. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
The pigeon flew away.
"How did you know?"
Suki shrugged. "I watch. I count. Things have patterns."
She said it simply, like it was obvious. Like everyone knew that pigeons pecked twelve times before flying. Like the world was made of numbers waiting to be noticed, and she was just the one who had noticed them first.
"What else do you count?" Yaz asked.
"Everything." Suki's eyes moved to the fence, to her own fingers threaded through the chain-link. "Steps. Breaths. The number of times Ms. Varga says 'quiet' during lessons. The number of clouds. The number of days."
"Days since what?"
Suki did not answer immediately. Her face did something Yaz could not read. A small movement, almost a flinch, almost nothing.
"Since I got here," she said finally. "Eight hundred and forty-two."
Eight hundred and forty-two days. A little over two years. She was newer than him, had lived less time in this place, had fewer numbers to count.
"Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven," Yaz said. "That's how many days I've been here."
Suki looked at him. Her eyes were dark and steady.
"That's a lot."
"I know."
They stood in silence again. The wind picked up, cold against Yaz's face, pushing his hair into his eyes. He did not move to fix it. Moving would mean letting go of the fence, and he did not want to let go.
"Why do you think we count?" Suki asked.
Yaz did not know. He had asked himself the same question, had wondered if he was broken in some way, if other children saw the world in numbers too or if it was just him.
"Because it helps," he said, using her words from before.
"But why does it help?"
He thought about it. Thought about the forty-seven tiles and the eighty-three steps and the seven thousand six hundred sixty-five meals. Thought about the way the numbers made the world smaller, more manageable, more his.
"Because numbers don't lie," he said. "Numbers don't change. You can count something and it stays counted. It doesn't leave or forget or tell you things that aren't true."
Suki nodded slowly. Her fingers tightened on the fence.
"Numbers are safe," she said.
"Yes."
"Numbers don't hurt you."
"No."
They looked at each other. And for a moment, Yaz saw something in Suki's face that he recognized. Something he had seen in his own reflection, in the ghost of his face on the window glass at night. A tiredness that was not about sleep. A knowing that was not about facts.
They were the same. Two children who had learned to survive by counting. Two quiet watchful kids who had found a language the world could not take away.
The bell rang. CLANG.
Suki let go of the fence. Yaz let go too. They walked back toward the building together, not touching, not talking.
But for the first time, Yaz did not count his steps.
He was too busy feeling something he did not have a number for.
The days blurred after that.
Yaz and Suki sat together at meals. Stood together at the fence during outdoor hour. Said nothing for minutes at a time, then said small things that meant more than they sounded.
"Forty-two clouds today."
"I counted forty-three."
"The one near the tree doesn't count. It's too small."
"What's the cutoff?"
"If you can see through it, it's not a cloud. It's just... fog that forgot to come down."
They did not laugh. Suki did not seem to know how to laugh. But something passed between them when she said things like that. Something warm and almost light.
Yaz thought about friendship. The word felt strange in his mouth, like a food he had never tasted. He did not know if this was what friendship was. Two children standing at a fence counting clouds. Two quiet voices in a building full of noise. Two pairs of eyes watching the same world from the same side of the same barrier.
Maybe friendship was simpler than he had thought. Maybe it was just this. Being seen. Being counted back.
She's like you, the Maestro said, on a night when the dormitory was dark and Yaz was lying awake thinking about nothing and everything. She found the same way to survive. But she didn't find the same thing you found.
Yaz did not understand.
She counts to disappear, the voice continued, gentle and sad. You count to exist. Same numbers. Different directions.
He thought about that for a long time. About Suki's face when she watched the fence, the way her eyes went flat and distant, the way she seemed to shrink into herself when adults walked past.
She counted to become smaller. He counted to become more.
Were they really the same? Or were they mirrors, reflecting opposite things?
He did not know. He was seven years old. He did not have answers to questions like that.
But he fell asleep thinking about numbers, and for once the numbers were not lonely.
On April fourteenth, Suki asked the question.
They were at the fence. Late afternoon. The light was golden now, that particular April gold that made even gray buildings look warm. Yaz was counting the cars that passed (eleven so far) and Suki was watching a woman walk a dog on the far sidewalk.
"Yaz."
He looked at her. She rarely used his name. It felt strange to hear it in her voice, like wearing clothes that belonged to someone else.
"What?"
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
The question landed in his chest like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples spread outward. He could feel them, moving through him, touching places he did not usually touch.
What did he want to be?
He had never thought about it. Not really. Children with families thought about growing up because growing up was a thing that would happen to them, a destination on a map someone else was drawing. They would become doctors or teachers or pilots or artists because their parents told them they could, because the world had a place for them, because the future was a door that was already open.
But Yaz did not have a map. Did not have a door. The future was a blank space where anything might happen or nothing might happen and he had no power to decide which.
"I don't know," he said.
Suki nodded. She did not seem disappointed by the answer.
"I don't know either," she said. "They ask us sometimes. The teachers, the caretakers. 'What do you want to be?' Like we're supposed to have an answer. Like we're supposed to know."
"What do you tell them?"
"Nothing. I just shrug." She demonstrated. A small lift of her shoulders, barely visible. "They stop asking after a while."
Yaz thought about the children beyond the fence. The ones with parents and homes and futures that had already been partially decided. They probably knew what they wanted to be. Or they thought they knew, which was close enough.
"Do you think about it?" he asked. "Being... something?"
Suki was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers moved on the chain-link, tracing the diamond pattern the same way Yaz's fingers did.
"Sometimes," she said finally. "But it feels like lying. Pretending I'll have a future when I don't know if anyone will..." She stopped. Did not finish the sentence.
But Yaz knew what she meant. Anyone will want me. Anyone will choose me. Anyone will look at my file and see something worth keeping.
"Maybe it doesn't matter," he said.
"What doesn't?"
"What we want to be. Maybe it matters more that we'll be something. That we'll exist. That we'll still be here, counting things, watching things, being... us."
Suki looked at him. Her eyes were dark and quiet and something else. Something he had not seen before.
"That's a strange thing to say."
"I know."
"It almost makes sense, though."
Yaz did not respond. He did not know if it made sense. He just knew that the Maestro was warm in the deep place, and the light was golden on the fence, and Suki was standing beside him, and for one moment the future did not feel like a blank space.
It felt like a question he might someday learn to answer.
Three days later, they called Suki to the visitor's room.
Yaz found out at breakfast. A caretaker he did not recognize came to their table and tapped Suki on the shoulder and said something in a low voice that Yaz could not hear. Suki's face did something. A flicker. A tiny movement that might have been hope or fear or nothing at all.
She got up. She followed the caretaker. She did not look back.
Yaz watched her go. His porridge sat untouched in front of him, the skin already forming, and he did not break it.
The visitor's room. That was where families came. Where parents-who-might-become-parents sat across from children-who-might-become-theirs and decided if the fit was right. Where fates were determined in conversations Yaz had never been part of, would probably never be part of, because his file said "found, not surrendered" and "no documentation" and those words were not the kind of words that made people choose you.
He ate his porridge without tasting it. He went to lessons without hearing them. He counted nothing because his mind was full of something that was not numbers.
She might leave.
The thought was cold. Not angry, not sad, just cold. Like the fence in winter. Like the glass when he pressed his forehead to it.
Suki might leave. Someone might want her. Someone might sign papers and fill out forms and take her away from this building, away from the forty-seven tiles and the eighty-three steps, away from the fence and the counting and the silence that they shared.
Away from him.
He did not see her at lunch. Did not see her at outdoor hour. The fence felt different without her beside him. Longer. Emptier. The diamonds pressed into his fingers the same way they always did, but the sensation was not the same.
He counted the cars (fifteen) and the clouds (thirty-seven) and the pigeons (three) and none of the numbers helped.
Is this what it feels like? he thought. Losing someone?
The Maestro was quiet. The deep place offered no answers.
Yaz stood at the fence until the bell rang, and then he walked back to the building alone.
He saw her at dinner.
She was sitting in her usual spot, tray in front of her, hands in her lap. She was not eating. She was staring at the wall, at the spot where the paint was peeling in a shape that might have been a bird.
Yaz sat down beside her.
He did not ask. Asking felt wrong, felt like pushing, felt like demanding something she might not want to give. So he just sat. And waited. And looked at the wall with her.
After a long time, Suki spoke.
"A family came to see me."
Her voice was flat. Neutral. The voice of someone describing weather or walls or the number of ceiling tiles.
"They asked me questions. What I liked to do. What my favorite color was. If I was good at school."
Yaz said nothing.
"I didn't know how to answer. I just... sat there. Looking at them. They smiled a lot. The woman had nice teeth."
She stopped. Her hands moved in her lap, fingers twisting together, untwisting, twisting again.
"They said they'd think about it. That they had other children to meet. That they'd be in touch."
"Oh," Yaz said. It was the only word he could find.
"I don't know what I want," Suki said. "I don't know if I want them to pick me or not. I don't know if I'd be good at... being someone's daughter. Having a family. Being normal."
Her voice cracked on the last word. Just slightly. A small fracture that closed almost immediately.
"You'd be good at it," Yaz said.
Suki looked at him. Her eyes were wet, but the tears were not falling. They just sat there, holding on, refusing to let go.
"How do you know?"
He didn't. He didn't know anything about being someone's child, about having a mother with nice teeth, about leaving this building and starting over somewhere else. He only knew that Suki counted things and watched things and said things that made sense in ways that normal things didn't make sense.
"Because you pay attention," he said. "And people who pay attention... they figure things out."
Suki did not respond. She looked at him for a long moment, and then she looked back at the wall.
They sat in silence. The cafeteria noise washed over them. Children laughed and argued and dropped trays and said things that did not matter to anyone except the people saying them.
And Yaz thought about numbers.
Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days he had been here. Eight hundred and forty-two for Suki. The difference was one thousand seven hundred and fifteen. That was how much longer he had waited. How many more meals he had eaten alone, how many more nights he had counted ceiling tiles, how many more times he had stood at the fence and watched families that were not his.
If Suki left, the number would keep growing. One thousand eight hundred. One thousand nine hundred. Two thousand. The gap would get wider and wider, and eventually it would be so wide that she would forget what it felt like to stand at a fence and count clouds with someone who understood.
She would have a family. She would have a mother and a father and a room that was hers and a name that meant something. She would stop counting things because she would not need to anymore.
And Yaz would still be here. Counting.
You don't have to know what you'll become, the Maestro said, soft in the deep place. You just have to know that you'll be.
You'll be something. You'll be someone. Even if it takes longer than you want. Even if the numbers get very large before they start to matter.
You'll be.
Yaz closed his eyes. Felt the warmth spread through his chest, the same warmth that had been there on his birthday, the same warmth that spoke to him in the dark.
He did not know what he would be when he grew up. Did not know if he would ever leave this building, ever have a family, ever stop counting things.
But he would be. He would exist. He would take up space in the world, would breathe and eat and sleep and count and wait.
Seven years behind him, a lifetime ahead.
And all of it, every day, would have to be walked alone.