"If we act like everything's fine long enough, maybe the gods will believe us."POV: Bowen

  The day began with a limp noodle packet and a looming, persistent dread, the kind that crept in on little cat feet and settled comfortably in every corner of Bowen's mind. He stood adrift in the middle of the kitchen, holding a battered, grease-stained dle in one hand and a crumpled, barely legible receipt in the other. Before him yawned the gaping, judgmental maw of the junk drawer, which was stuffed to overflowing with the flotsam of several years' failed organization attempts.

  "Okay," he muttered, squinting into the mess, trying to pretend he was looking into the abyss when he knew full well the abyss was looking back. "We've got at least four half-used lighters, three mystery keys, a shrine bead I definitely didn't steal, and—what the hell is this? Is this part of the fan or part of the heater?" He turned the metal scrap over in his hand, hoping for divine inspiration.

  The drawer, in a fit of abysmal stubbornness, refused to answer. Typical.

  With a sigh of immense and practiced resignation, he dug deeper, rummaging past a stack of expired coupons and a bent birthday candle. Ah. There it was. A soy sauce packet. Slightly crusted, suspiciously stained, but he thought, just maybe, probably still edible.

  Victory.

  Bowen turned, triumphant, just as Riven shuffled past behind him like a ghost. His hoodie was drawn tight, his eyes hollowed out like he hadn't slept since the Merge, or possibly ever, or possibly in some previous life. He moved through the room like a guy running on twenty percent battery and a pylist full of regret, leaving a thin trail of dust and bad feelings in his wake.

  Bowen froze mid-stir of the noodle water. Tracked him. Said nothing.

  Because here's the thing about living with someone who's maybe haunted, possibly chosen, and definitely emotionally repressed: You don't ask. Not directly. Not unless you want to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the aftermath.

  You wait for the opening. You watch for cracks in the armor. You feed them noodles and pretend not to notice the ash they track in.

  Riven disappeared into the bathroom. The door clicked shut behind him with a sound as final as a gunshot.

  Bowen turned back to the stove. Nudged the burner higher like an artist adding a final, precarious brushstroke to a masterpiece. Whispered under his breath, "Yeah. Totally fine. Everything's fine."

  A soft rattle interrupted him, raising the hair on the back of his neck.

  He turned and there it was again—one of the feathers. Scarlet. Sharp-looking. Banced precariously on the corner of the bookshelf like it meant to be seen. Like it had been left for him. Like it had been waiting, patient and smug, for him to notice it.

  Bowen stared at it.

  "You weren't there five minutes ago."

  The feather, in its infinite sass, did not respond.

  He tossed the soy sauce packet on the table. He trudged back to the drawer and rummaged through its shameful mess, pulling out a paperclip chain and a fan of outdated tapes. He snatched the packet back up and pced it on top like a work of modern art. Or garbage. To Bowen's eye, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

  The feather still hadn't moved.

  Bowen sighed. Tossed the dle in the sink and turned toward the cabinet.

  The pce was too quiet. Riven had been in the bathroom for a long time. Bowen's hand hesitated on the door.

  The feather still wasn't moving.

  He pulled down bowls and set the table for two.

  The soy sauce packet stared at him with all the authority of a war general. He relented, tore it open, dumped it in.

  The feather was still there.

  "You're pushy today," Bowen said, as if arguing with the feather would somehow make everything less strange, less precarious, less like they were pying a game they didn't know how to win.

  He went to find more bowls.

  The door should have stayed locked.

  It didn't.

  A loud bang shocked the air, reverberating through the apartment with the finality of a meteor strike, as if the universe had just thrown up its hands and decred subtlety overrated. It was followed immediately by the unmistakable thump of boots and the careless jingle of Too Many Bracelets.

  "OKAY LISTEN," Terra's voice rang out like a siren as the door swung open, giving Bowen barely a second to flinch. "This is not my fault. But I am here, and I am hungry."

  Bowen turned with the weariness of a man who knew this routine all too well. "You climbed the fire escape again, didn't you."

  "Don't limit me," she called back, already halfway to the kitchen, shedding her jacket and several questionable charms in her wake, like a breadcrumb trail of poor decisions. "I also brought pastries. Possibly legal."

  Riven emerged from the bathroom looking like he was still somewhere between the living and the dead, just in time to narrowly avoid a flying bag of still-warm, vaguely almond-scented croissants.

  He blinked once.

  Didn't catch the bag.

  Just... blinked again.

  "Hey, ghost boy," Terra said, flipping a braid over her shoulder and dropping onto the couch like she owned it. "You sleep or did you just astral project all night and forget to return to your body?"

  Riven sat at the table without a word.

  Bowen arched a brow at her. The feather remained a silent witness on its shelf.

  Terra's smirk faltered. Just a flicker. "...Damn. He's at level seven."

  "Yeah," Bowen muttered. "Been hovering there for a few days."

  Terra leaned forward, elbows on knees, expression sharpening beneath all the eyeliner. "You talk to him?"

  Bowen shrugged with the resignation of someone who knew the effort was mostly futile. "About as much as anyone talks to a locked shrine door."

  "He answer?"

  "Sometimes he knocks back."

  That earned a slow nod. "Huh."

  Terra popped a croissant in her mouth and looked around the kitchen, unimpressed. Then she started rummaging through their fridge like a raccoon in an ex's apartment. "Okay, but I have questions. Like, you and him, what is this? A roommate situation or a death cult?"

  "The death cults have better snacks," Bowen said, flicking a look over to Riven, who was staring through the table as if it wasn't there. "And they clean up after themselves."

  "Not the ones I've heard of." Terra pulled out a carton of milk, sniffed it, made a face, and put it back. "Electricity any cheaper since the Merge? Or are you fighting the gods with half-rate power?"

  "Three brownouts this week," Bowen said with a sigh, almost but not quite a ugh. "So I guess that means we're winning."

  "Typical," Terra said, nodding like she expected nothing better from the universe.

  She sat beside Riven, and he didn't flinch. He didn't speak. Lank and unmoving, eyes buried beneath the shadow of his hood, he looked like a story that had forgotten its ending.

  Bowen leaned over to her, whisper-low: "He's been praying. Like... really praying. I think he actually believes something's listening."

  Terra, mid-bite, paused. Chewed. Swallowed. Then, dead serious: "Then maybe you should start believing something's listening, too."

  Riven got up so abruptly the chair wobbled. He left the kitchen, pulled the door of his room shut behind him, and was gone.

  They were on the roof, half an hour after Terra had raided the fridge and decred their spice rack a hate crime. Riven was off somewhere—shrine or shadows or both. The quiet between them was familiar, comfortable in the way worn shoes or bad habits could be. Bowen leaned against the ledge, hands jammed into his pockets. He watched the sky for birds that didn't fly anymore. Terra sat on the ledge with one leg dangling over the edge, cigarette in one hand, a pastry in the other. Her eyeliner was already smudging. Deliberate or from crying earlier—Bowen wasn't sure. Didn't ask.

  "You ever feel like you're the NPC in someone else's apocalypse?" she asked suddenly, eyes focused on nothing and everything at once.

  Bowen snorted. "Only every Tuesday."

  "I broke up with Reya st night," she said, her tone caught between casual and catastrophic.

  He blinked, feigning surprise. "I thought you already broke up with Reya."

  "I did. Three weeks ago. But she brought muffins and cried on my fire escape, and—shut up."

  "I didn't say anything."

  "You thought something."

  Bowen raised both hands, the universal gesture for well, you got me. "Guilty."

  Terra flicked ash into the wind. "It's like—I keep thinking if I just stay long enough, someone's gonna choose me. Like really choose me, not just orbit for a while then vanish into the next apocalypse." Her voice was brittle, a delicate thread spun too fine and stretched too thin.

  He looked at her, studied the way her entire being seemed to be an act of defiance against the universe. "Reya wasn't the one."

  "No. But she almost was." Her voice cracked just slightly. "And almost is the worst kind of love."

  They sat with that.

  Bowen kicked a loose bolt off the edge of the roof. It pinged against the fire escape below like a distant heartbeat, a hollow echo of something that had once been alive.

  "You're not just someone's almost," he said firmly, with more conviction than he felt. "You're... ridiculous. Loud. You always smell like cloves and chaos. But you're real."

  She side-eyed him, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. "That was halfway to being a compliment."

  "I'm neurodivergent. You get one compliment per quarter. Use it wisely."

  She ughed, a bright, clear sound that cut through the smog. It sounded real.

  Then: "You think Riven's okay?"

  Bowen's smile dropped, reality setting back in.

  "No. But I think he will be. Eventually." He wanted to believe that his words could make it true.

  Terra nodded. Quiet for a moment as if the world had paused to listen in.

  Then: "If it's a god, I'm seducing it."

  Bowen didn't blink. "Kinunnos will eat you."

  She grinned, wicked and bright and unapologetic. "Then I'll go down spicy."

  Bowen managed a ugh, soft and surprised, then flicked a look at the door. As if reading the room or his thoughts, Terra tossed him the pack of cigarettes and slid off the ledge.

  As she left, her voice, a taunting lilt, drifted back like smoke: "I'm taking leftovers. Don't wait up unless you want me to." Then, quieter. Almost a whisper. "Seriously, though. He'll be okay?"

  Bowen nodded. A silent promise, but to who, he wasn't sure. He watched her go, a hurricane unto herself, before lighting a cigarette and exhaling into the sky. He took the stairs down, one deliberate step at a time, sorting through his thoughts like the junk drawer. They still didn't fit. Didn't make sense. Nothing did, not really, but he pretended otherwise.

  The apartment was still, as if holding its breath. The feather hadn't moved.

  He grabbed a jacket and left.

  The city felt different when Riven wasn't walking beside him. A little too raw, too exposed, as if Bowen had lost his compass and was just pretending to know the way. The streets stretched wide and uneven, full of empty spaces he didn't know how to fill, and the air seemed a little too cold or maybe his breath was just louder without Riven's next to it. Everything felt off. Too bright in some pces. Too quiet in others. Like the background music of his life had dropped half its instruments and was trying to fake it. Bowen and Terra moved through the crowd like seasoned pros—dodging puddles, street vendors, and roaming whispertech hawkers trying to sell "signal crity charms" made from melted bottle caps. Familiar moves in a city full of ghosts and gods and all the other things that might one day break them.

  Terra walked like she owned the sidewalk, all sharp elbows and too-loud commentary. She flicked a leaf off Bowen's shoulder, then immediately stole the wrapper from his snack. The wind whipped loose strands of hair across her face and she squinted through it like she could dare the sky to do worse.

  "You're brooding," she said, stuffing the wrapper in her back pocket with all the nonchance of someone who didn't know how not to be in motion. "You brood even louder than Riven. I didn't know that was possible."

  "I'm not brooding. I'm observing." He sounded defensive even to himself.

  "Ah. So you're emotionally brooding, not physically. Got it."

  He didn't answer. Just kept walking. She jogged two steps to catch up and bumped their shoulders together. Somewhere across the street, a child's ughter rose up and then vanished like it was lost to the wind. Like anything good in this city.

  "You always do this," she said, undeterred. "He gets weird, you get weirder. It's like trauma leapfrog."

  "I just don't like it when he looks like that."

  "Like what?"

  "Like he's already halfway gone and just forgot to mention it."

  That shut her up for a few steps. They passed a kid selling old-world vinyl charms. Passed a broken vending machine someone had filled with moss. It came together in fshes and fragments, and Bowen felt the weight of everything he couldn't catch.

  Then Terra said, quieter, "He's always been weird, B. You just don't want this to be different-weird."

  Bowen stopped.

  "Don't call me that."

  "What, B?"

  He gave her a long look. "You know exactly what I mean."

  Terra grinned. Didn't apologize. "Fine. Bowen. You don't want this to be the kind of weird that takes him away. But maybe it's too te."

  He looked at her. Really looked.

  "You think I don't know that?"

  She blinked.

  He kept walking.

  They rounded the corner past a stack of old mailboxes, past a pop-up shop promising three-week fortunes and nine-day marriages. Past other people's lives. It all felt thin and insubstantial, like the world had only half-heartedly put itself into pce this morning. They left their street, its mess and noise and faded paint, until it blurred behind them, the ghosts and gods and children with nothing better to do. Until Bowen pretended they had nothing better to do. Until it was just them, just Terra with her cigarette and her questions, and him with neither.

  Until it was back to where they began.

  The rooftop was always their reset button, their rooftop, a pce where the world couldn't find them unless they wanted it to. A little broken around the edges, a little rusted in its corners. Half-covered in graffiti, half-held together by the kind of willpower that ughed in the face of physics and the sort of welded dreams that had been forgotten even by the people who had welded them in the first pce. It was the kind of pce that pretended not to hear secrets if you didn't shout them. The kind of pce that pretended not to care. But Bowen cared—the scuffs and scrapes and chipped paint were familiar, and familiar was almost enough.

  He leaned against the railing, arms folded as if to hold himself still. Terra sat cross-legged on an overturned milk crate, bancing a piece of chalk on one finger like a tiny weapon of mass distraction, or maybe mass destruction. Depending on her mood. Depending on the day.

  "He used to talk to me," Bowen said, voice low and almost lost to the city. "About nothing. About everything. Stuff that didn't matter and stuff that didn't pretend to matter." He stared out over the ledge, eyes skimming rooftops and not seeing them. "It was never about what we said—it was that he said anything at all."

  Terra didn't interrupt. Didn't move. She knew this quiet, knew how to leave it alone.

  Bowen did, too, but he was done with silence. He wanted to be.

  "Now it's just..." He paused, and the pause was heavy, thick enough to drown in. "Silence. And feathers."

  A soft breeze curled past. Cold for this early in the season. Cold for this early in their lives, Bowen hoped. He watched it move through the city like it had purpose and a pn and knew where to go and what to do when it got there. Like it was listening. Like it cared.

  Terra finally spoke. "Do you believe in gods?"

  He didn't answer right away. Wouldn't. Couldn't. Maybe wasn't sure. Maybe didn't want to be.

  "I believe in Riven," he said.

  She looked over, surprised by the crity in his voice, by the way it didn't match the fuzz and fog of her thoughts. "That wasn't the question."

  "It was the only answer that matters."

  A long silence. Terra spun the chalk in her fingers again, an orbit of something too light to be a weapon but too strong not to be.

  "If he's praying to something," Bowen said, "I'll fight it for custody."

  She snorted, but there wasn't any bite in it, no teeth, no sharp edges.

  "You'd lose."

  "Obviously." He smiled, but it was a paper-thin smile, a pceholder until the real thing showed up. "But it'd remember me."

  Bowen ran a hand through his hair, suddenly very restless and very here in a way he didn't want to be.

  "I just don't want to lose him to something I can't punch."

  And that was it.

  That was the truth he hadn't been able to say until now. The truth that had been waiting for him to catch up. Not even to himself. Not until right now.

  Terra's voice was soft, the kind of soft that didn't need to be loud to be heard. "That's the scariest kind of monster, isn't it? The one you can't protect someone from."

  Bowen looked at her, eyes rimmed in the kind of ache that didn't need words. The kind that was too big for them. Too big to be anything else.

  "Yeah," he said. "That one."

  They stayed there a little longer, on their rooftop, their reset button, a little broken and a little rusted like the people who sometimes called this city home. The quiet stretched out and wrapped around them. Not awkward. Not entirely easy, either.

  Finally:

  "I hate it when you're right," Bowen said, trying to sound annoyed and failing.

  She caught it. Didn't let him. "Which means you must hate it all the time."

  He flicked a look at her. "You have no idea."

  They both smiled at that. Real smiles. The kind that hurt and helped.

  Then:

  "Walk me back?"

  He shrugged, but was already standing, already moving. "Yeah. I can do that."

  They took the stairs, the fast way down, and stepped back onto their street. On the street, the world waited for them, with its noise and its near-misses and its almosts, and they wove through it like they belonged here—which was another way of saying like they didn't.

  When they reached the apartment, it felt different. Even from outside, Bowen could tell.

  The apartment had gone quiet. Not the usual kind of quiet it had grown used to, the sleepy buzz of everything slowing down at night, winding down to lull the city toward uneasy dreams. Not the static hum of whispered news reports coming through too-loud speakers and the streetlights outside fizzing like they might burn out before morning. This was other quiet, an unfamiliar silence that had its own weight, its own heaviness. It was the kind of silence that made each breath louder, the kind that made your ears strain to catch even the faintest sound. The kind that felt like holding your breath underwater, waiting for the surface you couldn't reach. Bowen sat on the floor of his room, back against the bedframe, Riven's old pendant turning over and over in his hands like a thought he couldn't stop having.

  He'd taken it apart earlier—swapped one of the wire loops, tightened the spiral core. He didn't say why. Not even to himself. Not even in the way that didn't need words. He told himself it was just routine maintenance. Not protection. Not desperation. Definitely not some st-ditch attempt to hold Riven together with copper and spite when nothing else seemed strong enough to do it. Outside the window, wind moved—wrong. Too slow, too present. Like it had never moved before and was trying to learn. Trying to watch him. Bowen looked up. The window was open. It hadn't been five minutes ago.

  He got up slowly. Shut it. Latched it. Paused, listening again to the strange silence that filled his ears with static. A whisper of movement behind him. He spun, fast, heart climbing halfway up his throat, halfway to choking him. No one. Just his room. Just shadows. Just shelves of half-finished projects and too many coffee cups.

  He turned back.

  And caught it—

  In the reflection of the mp's curved base.

  A figure.

  Not Riven.

  Not human.

  There.

  Gone.

  His breath locked. He looked again. Nothing. He exhaled. Shaky. As shaky as his thoughts, as shaky as the sense he tried to make of them. Muted to himself, muffled to the silence, "Okay. If you're real—back off."

  Nothing. No response. No gods or ghosts telling him what he wanted to hear. What he didn't want to hear. He sat back down, trying to feel steady, trying to feel settled. Picked up the pendant again. Stared at it. "This is fine," he said. "Everything's totally fine." The words fell around him, fell into the quiet that didn't promise him anything, didn't promise anyone anything.

  Bowen turned them over in his head, over and over like the pendant still in his hands.

  This is fine.

  Everything.

  Totally fine.

  This is—

  Something brushed his face, too light to be anything, too heavy to be nothing. He swatted it aside, back into the nothing that already crowded his space, already crowded the room.

  The apartment had gone quiet. The city had gone quiet. The whole world had gone quiet like it was waiting for the words to stop, waiting to see what he did when they finally did. He sat surrounded by it. By other silence, other quiet, a kind that made him strain to listen, strain to hear anything but his own forced breaths and his own forced thoughts. He looked at the window, at the tch that wasn't broken, the tch he knew he'd shut and double-checked and probably triple-checked. A trick of the wind, he told himself. A trick of the silence. He tried to believe it.

  A feather nds on Bowen's knee and he can't ignore it.