Gareth’s voice hit the kitchen ceiling and came back at him unchanged.

The tiles were cold under his palms.

He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the overturned table and his hands in his hair and the sticky warmth of something he was not going to name soaking through the knee of his pants, and he did the thing he always did when his brain was moving too fast for him to manage — he slapped himself.

Hard.

The flat of his palm against his own cheek, the sting precise and immediate and ’grounding’, and he sat there with the heat of it spreading across his jaw and breathed.

"Stop." To himself. Quiet. The voice of a man pulling himself back from the edge of a conclusion by the collar. "Stop. You are having hallucinations. You have been having hallucinations since the garden. Since those absolute ’idiots’ were — since that woman—"

He closed his eyes.

Opened them.

"Your mother is fine."

The kitchen was a mess. Plates on the floor. The corner table two feet from where it belonged. The overhead light illuminating the evidence of — of ’something’ — with the clinical, impartial brightness of a room that had no interest in his feelings about what it was showing him.

"Your mother went to bed." He was building the sentence as he said it, arranging the available facts into the architecture of something livable. "She made dinner. She said goodnight. You fell asleep at the table — you’ve been exhausted all week — and you knocked everything over when you woke up and you are currently sitting on the floor of your own kitchen having a breakdown about—"

He looked at the floor.

At the specific, undeniable quality of what was on the floor.

"I am not thinking about that."

He stood.

His legs worked, which was something.

He walked to the sink, turned the water cold, and put both hands under it and held them there until the sensation had the floor of his attention and the rest of it could be managed.

He breathed.

"Okay," he said, to the sink. "Okay. Fine. You’re fine. Everything is—"

His phone lit up on the counter.

He looked at the screen.

Yuna.

The name sat there in the notification bar with the green dot of a fresh message beside it, and Gareth looked at it for two full seconds with the specific, hollow relief of a man who has been handed a reason to stop thinking about one thing by being given something else to think about.

He picked it up.

Her message was three words and a location pin.

’Still here. Waiting.’

He dialed.

The phone rang once. Twice. A half-ring—

"Hello? Hello, Yuna — where have you—" He pressed the phone to his ear hard, pacing from the sink to the table and back. "You’ve been gone since the mall — I’ve been calling — you weren’t picking up — what—"

Her voice, when it came, had the slightly distant quality of a phone pressed against a surface rather than an ear.

"Oh — hi, Gareth—" Warm. Familiar. The voice he had known since he was seven, the voice that had talked him through every bad qualifying round and every worse examination and had been the fixed point he navigated by. "I was waiting for you, actually. I’m at the Hotel Marseta — in the Gadget, do you know the—"

Something happened on the line.

A sound.

Small. Brief. Not from outside — from ’her’, adjacent to the phone, the shape of it soft and involuntary.

"Ahn~"

"— district, so you should be able to—"

The call cut.

Gareth looked at the screen.

The call timer had stopped at forty-one seconds.

He called back.

Straight to voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

"What." He was already moving. "What. What is—"

He pulled up the map.

Hotel Marseta.

The pin dropped.

He looked at the distance indicator and stopped walking.

Four hours and thirty-seven minutes.

Across a border.

The country boundary sitting neatly between the pin and where he was currently standing in his own kitchen with damp hands and a knee wet with something he had decided not to identify.

"Are you—" He looked at the phone. At the map. At the pin sitting in the middle of a country he would need a passport to reach. "What are you doing there? What is she—"

His eyes moved.

Slowly.

Across the kitchen.

The state of it.

The specific configuration of a room that had contained a woman today and no longer did — the dinner she had made, the scattered dishes, the broken cup on the floor, the absence of her coat on the hook by the door which he now noticed with the delay of a person who needed to notice it and had been actively not looking.

His mother was not in this house.

He did not know where his mother was. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

He did not know where Yuna was.

He had a sound in his memory that he was not thinking about and a kitchen floor that he was also not thinking about and two women who were both, as far as he could determine, ’somewhere he was not.’

Gareth’s jaw set.

He turned and ran for his room.

The passport was in the drawer where it always was.

He was changed in four minutes — the practiced speed of a person who had spent years getting ready for early practice and had the muscle memory of fast departures — and he hit the front door with the passport in his back pocket and his phone in his hand and the front door key still swinging from the lock because he had not stopped to pull it out.

"TAXI."

The shout hit the residential street at an hour when residential streets are quiet and bounced off the terraced houses opposite and produced, eventually, a set of headlights at the end of the road.

He got in.

"Marseta. The quickest route."

"That’s—"

"Border crossing, yes." He was already looking at his phone. "I have a passport. The quickest route."