The hallway was chaos.
Students everywhere. Pushing, laughing, shouting like the world depended on being loud. Backpacks swinging, shoes squeaking on tile, voices overlapping into a wall of sound that pressed against my ears.
A river of noise and movement, and I was just a rock trying not to get swept away.
I pressed against the wall. Let them flow past. Counted seconds between heartbeats to stay calm.
Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.
Why are they always so loud?
In Aventic, loud meant danger. Loud meant alarms screaming across the compound. Loud meant Dumans at the gates. Loud meant someone was dying, or about to die, or already dead and no one had noticed yet.
But here, loud just means... being normal. Kids being kids. Friends shouting across corridors. Laughter that wasn't covering up fear.
Noise that didn't mean anything except that people were alive and happy and completely unaware of how fragile that was.
I didn't understand it. Probably never would.
"Hey! Nams!"
A voice cut through the chaos. Familiar. I'd heard it somewhere before—yesterday, maybe.
I looked up.
A boy was pushing through the crowd toward me. Dark hair falling over one eye in a way that looked accidental but might have been deliberate. Slightly out of breath, like he'd been running. Grinning like he'd just found something precious that he'd been searching for.
He stopped in front of me. Bent over for a second, hands on his knees, catching his breath.
"You remember me, right?" He straightened up. His eyes were bright and anxious at the same time. "From yesterday? First day? I introduced myself? Vjaret? Yaret? The one who—"
"Calm down, Vjaret. I remember you."
The one who'd introduced himself with an apology, like his existence was something he needed to excuse.
"Good! Good." He nodded rapidly, his hair bouncing with the motion.
"I was worried you'd forgotten. You had that look—you know, the spaced-out look, like you were somewhere else entirely—and I thought, 'Great, he probably doesn't remember anyone from yesterday. I'm going to have to reintroduce myself. That's going to be awkward. He's going to think I'm weird.'"
He was still talking. Rapid. Nervous. Words tumbling out like he was afraid the silence would swallow him if he stopped. Like he needed to fill every gap with sound because silence meant something different to him too.
Why is he so nervous? Is it me? Do I make people nervous? Or is this just how he is—a constant hum of anxiety disguised as conversation?
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I've forgotten how normal people act.
"—and then I saw you standing here, pressed against the wall like you were trying to disappear into it, and I thought, 'Now or never, Vjaret. Just go talk to him. What's the worst that could happen?' So here I am. Talking. Still talking. I should probably stop talking."
He stopped. Looked at me expectantly. Waiting for something—a response, a reaction, a sign that he hadn't just made a complete fool of himself.
I stared at him.
What am I supposed to say? Is there a script for this? In Aventic, conversations were brief. Orders. Reports. The occasional dark joke before a mission. No one ever just... talked. No one ever filled silence with words that didn't matter.
"Okay," I said.
He blinked. His whole face shifted from anxiety to confusion. "Okay?"
"Okay, you're here and talking."
Like an idiot. That's what I sounded like. An idiot who'd forgotten how to have a normal conversation.
But I smiled inside. Just a little. Just enough to feel the unfamiliar tug of something that might have been amusement.
"Oh." He processed this. Turned it over in his mind like he was trying to decide if it was an insult or an invitation. Then grinned again.
"Right. Okay. Good. I'll take it. So—walk with me. I need to get to class and I hate walking alone. It's boring. And sad. And people look at you weird when you're alone, like they're wondering what's wrong with you."
It wasn't a question. He just started walking, gesturing for me to follow, already talking about something else. Like he assumed I'd come with him. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Why would I—
I followed.
Why am I following? I don't know this person. I don't know this school. I don't know why anyone would want to walk with me when they could walk with literally anyone else.
But here I am. Following a boy with too many words down a hallway full of strangers.
We walked through the hallway together. He talked. I listened. That seemed to be our rhythm already—him filling the space, me occupying it. It wasn't uncomfortable. It was almost... easy. Like slipping into a role I didn't know I'd been cast in.
"So yesterday," he said, dodging a group of girls who were looking at their phones instead of where they were going, "after you left, Geo ma'am gave me a whole lecture about being late. Again. Third time this month. She said if I'm late one more time this week, she'll make me write lines for a full month. A FULL month, Nams. Do you know how many lines that is? I did the math. It's a lot."
"Sounds harsh."
"It's Geo ma'am. Everything is harsh with her." He sighed dramatically. "But whatever. It was worth it."
"Worth it?"
"Yeah." He glanced at me. "I got to talk to you. And you didn't laugh at my name. Do you know how rare that is?"
"That's worth a month of lines?"
"Totally." He grinned. "I'm good at writing lines. I've had a lot of practice. I'm bad at making friends. Trade-off."
Making friends. Is that what this is? Is he trying to be my friend? Does he know what he's signing up for?
I thought about Marcus. About how easy it had been to be friends with him. About how I still wasn't sure which was worse: that he was gone, or that something was walking around in his body.
I thought about Cari. About how someone could be that much of an idiot in the most serious situations. About how he never cared about authority or rank or who he was supposed to show respect to.
Can I do this again? Can I let someone new in? What if they die too? What if they get replaced by something wearing their face? What if I have to leave them behind the way I left everyone else?
We reached his classroom. He stopped at the door, one hand on the frame, already half-inside.
"This is me." He pointed inside. "Room 9. Boring classes. Mean teachers. Occasional fire drills from when I 'accidentally' set things on fire."
He set things on fire. Of course he did. The nervous boy with too many words was also a fire hazard. That tracked.
I nodded. Started to turn away. The conversation was over. That's how conversations worked—they ended, and you walked away, and you didn't look back.
"Hey." His voice changed. Quieter. The nervous energy drained out of it, replaced by something that sounded almost vulnerable. "Nams."
I looked back.
"You eat lunch alone, right?"
I blinked. The question caught me completely off guard. "How do you—"
"I saw you. Yesterday. Under that big tree near the back field." He shrugged, suddenly awkward, like he'd admitted something embarrassing. "I eat alone too. Usually. My spot's on the roof—great view, very peaceful, excellent for existential contemplation—but sometimes they lock it and I have to find somewhere else."
The roof. Of course he eats on the roof. The boy who sets things on fire and rambles when he's nervous and notices when people space out mid-conversation. Of course his spot is the roof.
"Maybe..." He hesitated. His eyes darted to the side, then back to me. "Maybe we could eat together sometime? If you want. No pressure. Just... company."
I thought about it. About the tree. About eating alone with my back against the bark and my eyes on the sky.
"Sure." The word came out before I could stop it. Before I could think about it.
His face lit up. Like I'd given him something precious.
"Yeah? Tomorrow? Lunch?"
"Okay. I guess."
"Great! Awesome! It's a plan! A real plan! With confirmation and everything!" He was already backing into the classroom. "Tomorrow, lunch, my roof if it's open, your tree if it's not. I'll find you. I'm good at finding people. It's one of my few skills. See you, Nams!"
He disappeared into the room. The door swung shut behind him. I could still hear his voice through the wood, already launching into some new conversation with someone else.
I stood there for a moment. The hallway was quieter now—most students had filtered into their classrooms. The chaos had settled into the ordinary hum of a school in session.
I just agreed to eat lunch with someone. Voluntarily. A person I barely know. A person who talks too much and sets things on fire and eats on roofs. A person who looked at me and saw someone worth talking to.
What's happening to me?
The bell rang. Loud and sharp. Time to move.
He talks too much. Even more than yesterday. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's just a Vjaret thing.
I walked to my next class. The hallway stretched ahead, empty now. My footsteps echoed on the tile. Outside the windows, the sun was climbing higher, painting the world in shades of gold and green.
Maybe nothing. Maybe something. I don't know.
But for the first time in a while...
I'm curious to find out.
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