The birds always come in threes. Theame Seste doesn't know that yet.
She's stopped keeping track of days. They melt into each other now, the way ice dissolves in a glass left too long on a nightstand — she couldn't tell you how long that glass has been sitting there, either.
Her apartment is small: one room, a kitchen, a bathroom where the faucet has been dripping on the same rhythm for two months now, patient as a metronome nobody asked for.
The first bird hits the window while she's asleep. She doesn't hear the impact — only the heavy silence that follows it, thick enough to wake her on its own. When she opens her eyes and goes to look, a small brown thrush is lying on the outer sill. Its left wing has come to rest slightly open, like it was trying to show her something in the last second of its life.
The second bird dies that same afternoon. Theame Seste is on the couch the last tenant left behind, staring at a brown stain spreading across the ceiling, when she hears it — a dry, wet sound, like a palm slapping raw meat. She goes to the window. Four floors down, on the cracked sidewalk, a pigeon lies balled up, gray and broken. And there, in the narrow gap between the two panes of her window — the gap where the grime collects — sits an old coin.
The third bird comes at two-thirty in the morning. An owl hits the glass like a rock flung from a slingshot, the sound so loud the neighbor upstairs pounds the floor in irritation. The window doesn't break. But outside, pressed into the glass, is the huge print of two wings spread wide — and beneath it, a reddish smear.
Owls don't fly into windows on their own.
Something is pushing them.
On the fourth day, she goes downstairs to take out the trash. In front of the building, an old woman is picking feathers up off the ground and dropping them into a clear plastic bag. She walks up to Theame Seste and holds out an old, dust-covered coin — identical to the one wedged between her windowpanes.
"Four have struck now, haven't they."
"Three. The last one was an owl."
"Four, dear. The first three are only messengers — they're the ones who announce it. The fourth is the one that got inside your home while you were down here with your trash." The old woman nods toward the coin between the panes. "It wants that. Keep it instead. You'll need it."
"What good would a coin do me?"
"You'll understand when you meet the Professor. On the bridge." The old woman's eyes don't blink. "The only way you'll get free of him is to press that coin flat against his face — the black one. The anthracite one."
Theame Seste looks up at her fourth-floor window. The broken blinds are still knocking against the glass, over and over, like wings that haven't figured out yet that it's over.
"If three birds hit your window three days running," the old woman says, "don't waste your worry on the glass. Save it for what comes after."
Then she's gone.
Somewhere above, faint but steady, Theame Seste can still hear it — a drip, keeping time.