The next morning, sunlight slanted through the curtains, soft and golden—mocking in its cheerfulness. I perched on the edge of my bed, tugging my uniform over my shoulders, but the warmth in the room couldn't reach the chill coiled in my chest.
Yesterday played on repeat like a scratched reel: Ruvane flying across the corridor, Dad's guarded eyes, and the look on Yinoh's face when I'd accused him of lying. Each memory pressed against me, relentless, as if the world had shifted while I wasn't looking, leaving me behind.
I tried to build a wall of excuses. Maybe the assessment was just luck. Maybe my adrenaline had spiked. Maybe Ruvane was off-balance. I clung to those thoughts like a child clutching a nightlight, but the guilt was faster, coiling around my chest like a tightening chain. Every harsh word I'd hurled at Yinoh felt like a stone sinking into my stomach, growing heavier with every breath.
I opened the front gate, slinging my bag over my shoulder, and saw him just ahead. Yinoh.
His usual lazy gait and messy hair were there, his oversized headphones dangling around his neck like a familiar anchor. But the air around him felt different—sharp and closed off.
"Hey, Yinoh!" I called out, jogging a few paces to catch up with his stride. I tried for a casual, easy tone—a yesterday-never-happened kind of voice.
No answer. Not even a side glance.
He just kept walking, his jaw set and his eyes fixed straight ahead on the horizon as if I were a ghost he hadn't noticed yet. Without breaking his pace, he lifted his heavy headphones over his ears, and I watched his thumb deliberately crank the volume rocker on his phone all the way to the top.
The sudden wall of silence hit me harder than Ruvane's shove ever could.
He's mad.
The walk to the bus stop felt like a mile-long punishment. Every step between us made the quiet feel louder than any argument. We didn't speak. He didn't look back. When the bus finally hissed to a stop, he didn't head for our usual spot at the back. He slid into a seat near the front, staring out the window, leaving our space empty.
Once we reached the gates, I lost him in the rising tide of the morning crowd—a blur of midnight blue and white uniforms that seemed to swallow him whole. I hurried into the classroom, my breath catching as my eyes darted instinctively toward his desk.
But the seat was a hollow ache in the room. No bag, no books, no sign that he had ever arrived. It was just an empty square of wood, cold and mocking under the morning sunrays.
I froze for a long second, the vacant chair feeling like a hole in the room. I lowered myself into my own seat, the quiet of the classroom pressing down on me, amplifying his absence. My mind was still a mess of "what-ifs" and "I'm sorrys" when the teacher's voice cut through the fog.
"Five minutes to prepare," she announced, the rustle of test sheets sounding like dry leaves.
I reached into my bag, my hand sweeping through the main compartment. Nothing. I frantically rummaged through the pockets, tossing notebooks aside, patting every inch of nylon as if sheer force could make my supplies appear. My fingers slid over empty spaces again and again.
My pencil case was gone. Probably sitting on my desk at home, right where I'd left it in my rush to catch Yinoh.
"Begin now," the teacher said.
The sound of pens clicking and pencils scratching began in a synchronized wave. I stared at the blank page, my heart hammering against my ribs. I felt paralyzed, my fingers stiff and useless, every second stretching into an eternity of failure.
Then—a tap on my shoulder.
I whipped around, my breath hitching. It was Yinoh.
He wasn't looking at me. His eyes were locked firmly on his own paper, his expression calm and steady. But his hand was extended across the aisle, holding out a spare pen.
I took it, my fingers trembling as they brushed his. He didn't say a word. He didn't offer a smile. He just went back to his work.
But in that simple, wordless gesture, the knot in my chest loosened just enough for me to breathe. A silent, unshakable vow took root in my mind: I have to make this right.
I'd endure a thousand awkward silences. I'd let him push me away ten more times. It didn't matter. Yinoh wasn't just my friend; he was the first person who had ever truly believed in a Threadless kid. And I had accused him of pitying me.
I gripped the pen—his pen—and started to write.
-----------
The lunch bell rang, but it wasn't a relief; it was a sentence. Yinoh was on his feet before I could even stack my notebooks, exiting the room without a backward glance. I scrambled after him, maintaining a respectful, painful distance. Not beside him. Behind. A shadow that had forgotten how to follow.
In the cafeteria, the divide was absolute. He sat with his soccer playmates—loud, laughing, and untouchable—while I sat alone at a scarred plastic table. I felt the cold weight of the extra yogurt milk in my pocket, a peace offering that now felt like an insult. I kept my hand over it, hiding it away. It wasn't time.
Then the air in the room shifted.
Ruvane appeared, his swagger replaced by a stiff, halting gait. He was a mosaic of bandages, a living testament to the surge of power I couldn't explain. Guilt crawled up my throat, hot and suffocating. I lowered my head as he approached, bracing for the inevitable humiliation, the public lashing I knew I deserved.
"Suits you well."
The voice wasn't Ruvane's. It was Yinoh's. He was standing directly behind the bully, his eyes cold and devoid of their usual warmth. Ruvane froze; he knew better than to challenge an Arkan-bearer of Yinoh's caliber, especially one who looked ready to snap. With a silent, venomous look, Ruvane turned and limped away.
Yinoh's gaze finally flicked to mine. For a heartbeat, the distance disappeared—and then he turned his back on me and walked out.
I abandoned my tray and bolted. I found him exactly where I expected: beneath the massive camphor tree by the athletic field. It was one of our sanctuaries, the one place where the hierarchy of Upper Iris didn't matter. But today, the geography has changed. He didn't wait for me to sit. He moved to the opposite side of the gnarled, thick trunk, putting a wall of ancient wood between us.
He leaned back, staring up at the clouds with an intensity that made them seem like the most interesting things on Earth. I sat on my side of the tree, the rough bark pressing into my spine, the wood between us acting like a wall and a bridge all at once.
There was a long silence, filled only by the distant shouts from the soccer field. Then, I spoke—finally, quietly, and without a shield.
"I'm sorry."
The breeze rustled the leaves above us, but Yinoh said nothing.
"I was angry... and stupid. And maybe just scared," I admitted, my voice barely louder than a whisper. "I thought you were helping me because you felt bad for me. And I—I hated feeling like I was weaker than everyone else again. I took that out on you."
Another silence followed. But this one felt different. It wasn't the sharp, jagged silence of the morning; it was softer, like the air after a storm.
"I didn't mean what I said, Yinoh."
Still no reply, but I kept going. The words felt like a fever I had to break; I had to empty the glass before it shattered.
"You were there by my side the day I failed the Weave," I whispered, the silence of the woods pressing in on me. "You stood your ground against Ruvane when nobody else would even look at me."
I leaned my head back, letting it thud gently against the rough bark of the trunk. I closed my eyes, letting the phantom weight of the memory settle. "You didn't deserve what I said."
Finally, the bark vibrated as he shifted.
"I know I didn't."
His voice was low and steady, coming from the other side of the world. "But I'm used to you being dumb sometimes."
I blinked, a spark of the old 'us' flickering to life. "Hey—!"
"I mean emotionally dumb," he corrected, and I could hear the smirk in his tone. "You're good at solving equations, Hashy... just not the ones inside your own head."
A small, genuine chuckle escaped me, and I heard him echo it.
With zero ceremony, Yinoh stood up, circled the tree, and plopped down right beside me. His shoulder bumped mine, solid and warm. Without a word, he reached into his pocket and held out a small bottle of yogurt milk.
I stared at it for a second before taking it. "Thanks."
"That's my 'apology accepted' gift," he shrugged, leaning his head back against the tree just like I was. "It's a thing now."
I pierced the foil with the straw and took a long sip. The tart, familiar sweetness was the best thing I'd tasted all week.
We sat there like that, shoulder to shoulder, watching the clouds together. To an outsider, it looked like nothing had happened. But everything had changed. It wasn't just about the argument or the silence anymore; it was the healing. The unspoken bond that survived the weird things that happened.
We didn't need a dramatic speech. We were just Hasphien and Yinoh again.
Just as we were meant to be.
----------
By dismissal, the weight between us had thinned into something almost familiar. I caught Yinoh waiting by the doorway—hands in his pockets, staring at a poster on the wall as if he hadn't been standing there for ten minutes. Without a word, our steps synced the moment we crossed the school gates.
The walk home was draped in amber sunlight. We didn't talk much—it was a comfortable silence, the kind that didn't need to be forced. Yinoh yawned, stretching his arms behind his head until his joints popped.
"You good now?" he asked, his voice casual but his eyes searching.
I nodded, feeling a genuine lightness. "Yeah. Thanks, Yinoh."
"Cool. I'll see you tomorrow, Hashy."
"Yeah. See ya."
We parted at the gate, the familiar weight of the exhausting day finally beginning to lift from my shoulders. I stood there for a heartbeat, watching Yinoh's silhouette retreat down the street toward his own front gate before I turned toward mine. My mind was already drifting, lured by the promise of a warm dinner and the heavy, dreamless sleep I so desperately needed.
But the moment my hand reached for the iron latch, the air died.
A sudden, icy chill slammed down my spine—a jagged blade of intuition that instantly froze the breath in my lungs. I forced myself to stand completely still, waiting until I heard the distant, familiar click of Yinoh's front door shutting across the way. We had just barely made up. His exhaustion was written in the line of his shoulders, and I couldn't let him see me like this. I didn't want him to have a single other thing to worry about.
Once the street was quiet, I pushed our heavy gate open, and the first cord of true dread snapped tight in my chest.
The house, usually a sanctuary of warm hearth-light and the familiar scent of old books and freshly cooked rice, felt suddenly, violently alien. The silence hanging over the yard wasn't empty—it was actively waiting.
My eyes locked onto the front door. It was ajar, a jagged sliver of absolute darkness cutting straight through the wood frame. It was barely an inch, but it was more than enough to scream a warning. Dad was obsessive, a man who lived by the precise, rhythmic click of a deadbolt and the rigid security of a sealed room.
He never left a door open.
I stepped onto the porch, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I reached out, my fingers trembling as they brushed the wood. The door swung inward with a slow, heavy groan, and my stomach dropped into a cold abyss.
The room had been completely hollowed out.
Drawers had been ripped from their tracks and discarded like husks; bookshelves were toppled, their contents scattered like shrapnel across the floorboards. The couch cushions had been slashed with surgical precision, spilling white foam like synthetic guts. The air here was unnaturally thin and freezing, biting at my skin with the sharp, coppery tang of ozone. It wasn't just a mess—it was a forensic dismantling.
"Dad?!" I screamed, the sound tearing through the sterile quiet as I bolted into the wreckage.
I tore through the house—the kitchen, the study, his bedroom. Everything was a jagged mess of splintered wood and shattered glass. In his private office, the wall painting had been swung wide, the safe behind it cracked open like a hollowed eggshell.
But as the initial shock faded into the quiet, the details of the room began to tell a terrifyingly calculated story. Despite the shredded furniture, there were absolutely no signs of a physical struggle.
The delicate porcelain cup Dad had been using sat perfectly upright on the side table, the dregs of his afternoon coffee entirely undisturbed. There was no broken glass from a desperate fight, no scuff marks on the floor, and no blood. The violent chaos in the room wasn't the aftermath of a brawl—it was the frantic, angry search of an aggressor who had realized, too late, that whatever they were looking for wasn't here.
And then I saw his lab keys. They were sitting neatly on the kitchen counter, placed deliberately right next to his biometric pass. He never left the house without them. Never.
A cold, hollow ache spread through my chest as the realization settled in. He hadn't been overpowered. He hadn't been caught off guard. He had known exactly who was coming for him, and when they knocked, he had simply walked out the door with them willingly.
He had expected this. And he had left me behind.
The panic wasn't just a feeling; it was a physical assault. My chest tightened, my ribs narrowing until they felt like a cage of iron bars, refusing to let my lungs expand. I tried to gasp, to pull in just one scrap of air, but the oxygen felt like lead in my throat. I slumped against the ravaged couch, my knees giving out entirely. I was a passenger in my own skin, trapped in the terrifying stillness of a body that had forgotten how to move.
Suddenly—a chime.
It didn't echo in the room. It resonated deep inside my skull, a clean, crystalline beep that sliced straight through my panic. A cold flicker of neon blue washed over my vision, and the world updated.
An interface manifested within my eyes, overlaying the wreckage of the hallway with scrolling lines of translucent data.
[ Program fully installed and activated. ]
[ Host adrenaline spike detected. ]
[ Initiating emergency diagnostic... ]
"What—? No! Not now!" I sobbed into the quiet, the light of the screen reflecting in the wetness on my cheeks. I swiped frantically at the air, trying to drive away the glowing text that hovered inches from my face. "What is this? Get out of my head!"
My fist passed through the light like smoke, slamming hard into the wooden coffee table. The physical pain was a dull roar compared to the agony in my chest. The interface didn't blink. It didn't care about my grief. It simply waited for the countdown to finish, a cold digital parasite watching a boy break.
[ Scanning... Please wait. ]
[ Status: Critical. ]
[ Threat Level: Severe. ]
"STOP!" I bellowed, my voice cracking under the strain.
Suddenly, the cold blue shattered. The interface flashed a violent, blinding gold that filled every corner of the room, turning the wreckage of the living room into a silhouette of white fire.
[ Transport Protocol Initiated. ]
[ Subject: HASPHIEN MAXENCE. ]
My stomach lurched with the sickening sensation of a high-speed elevator drop.
The floor beneath me didn't just glow—it rendered. A grid of neon-blue light snapped into existence, vibrating through the floorboards. It was a high-frequency geometric array, a shifting mesh of coordinates and humming data-streams.
The air around me began to pixelate, the edges of the living room fraying into streaks of light and binary static. I tried to jump, to claw my way back to the solid earth, but the gravity in the room had completely shifted. A high-intensity magnetic pull pinned me directly to the center of the array. My vocal cords felt like they'd been muted by a software command; I opened my mouth to scream for help, but no sound escaped.
Through the blinding glare of the pixelating room, the gate violently slammed open.
Yinoh was there. He must have heard my screams from across the street. His blurred silhouette was frantically sprinting toward the porch, his face a distorted mask of confusion and raw, unadulterated panic. He reached out, his fingers stretching to within inches of the geometric light—
But he was a second too slow.
[ Countdown: 0. ]
[ System Disconnect. ]
I stopped fighting. I closed my eyes and let the light take me. The world didn't just fade; it collapsed into a roar of white noise, and the house vanished entirely.