The train pulled into Terminus before dusk.

  Melody stepped off onto the station platform and shook the pins and needles from her legs. She took her first breath of the metropolitan air—something wet, mucoid, redolent of exhaust and a dying summer—and called again, left another voice message. Then she typed in his address and started off on the route plotted by her phone.

  In right angles she navigated through a sea of cement and steel and glass. Streetlamps masqueraded themselves among single-file sidewalk trees, manholes billowed sulfur into inching motorcades bound for upper townships. The ghost of a construction site stalked from above, static, while all around Melody reflections of the sun sank into imitated horizons. She made it roughly two blocks before shedding her hoodie and stuffing it down a trash can.

  Every fifteen minutes or so she retried his phone, stopping only when she heard, in place of her brother’s now-familiar, rushed, overly-economical greeting of “I’m-not-here-leave-a-message-thanks”, a robotic female voice that informed her, “This customer has reached their voicemail limit. Your message could not be delivered. Good-bye.”

  She tended north. It was dusk and then it wasn’t. Buildings shrank and pedestrians aged in reverse. Briefcases and suits became backpacks and plaid shirts, and grass fields and lecture halls took the place of office towers and luxury hotels, and here on the grounds on the very university her brother had dropped out of, on the campus of the Continuate’s oldest academic institution, Melody’s brain sprang on her something she’d read on the prospective students’ welcome page, back during some indecisive September, about how the school was “... situated in the heart of the Third Division’s capital city ...”, a statement which she now saw for the lie that it so plainly was, for it was no heart (and could never be so) but rather the stomach, the gastric organ of a proper anatomy (of which the financial district was the bowels, and Terminus the rectum) through whose tract she was now forcing herself upwards, against peristalsis, like the bilious half-digested regurgitant she was, posing to herself questions with answers she didn’t know, or care about, such as:

  Which building was the dormitory he’d lived in during his freshman year? Did he ever really explain to her why he dropped out? Was he still working at the same job? Was the address she was heading to now actually up to date? Why couldn’t her school Uptown have food trucks like the ones she saw here?

  To such contemplations she committed less than a fifth of her full attention, the rest of which she dedicated to more pressing matters, chief among them (what else?) her brother’s complete and infuriating silence.

  The last stretch of her trip took her into a quiet residential area, no more than ten minutes away from the university, populated mainly by short and narrow houses with chain-link fences and iron-barred windows. She crossed the road to avoid a dirty mattress on the sidewalk on which someone had spray-painted: DO NOT TAKE!! BED BUGS!!!

  On the intersection of Flintlock and Petrichor she turned into the latter, and knew right away which house it was, even from that distance, long before she got close enough to confirm its faux-gold numbers, the rusting 5, the flaking 8; and when she finally stood before the only house on the street large enough to accommodate the twenty-something university students she knew her brother lived with, she tried his number one last time, scoffing bitterly when, to no surprise, the robotic voice answered, same as before.

  She hung up and approached the brick facade of her brother’s last known residence. She tried the front door, knowing it’d be locked. She rang the doorbells, one for each floor, knowing nobody would come.

  Then she took a seat on the dirty worn-out couch on the lawn, taking care to avoid the empty beer cans and butt-filled ashtray, and rested her chin on her luggage handle, and sat there for a long time, watching the darkened street, the infrequent passersby, hoping that each shadowy figure might reveal itself to be, once they passed under the light of the adjacent streetlamp, her brother’s, but of course none ever did; and it wasn’t until after one of these strangers turned into the cement walkway—a returning tenant, at whose approach she stood up, to ask about her brother (“Sorry,” he said, walking past, taking his keys out. “Don’t know him.”); and over whose shoulder she then proceeded to hover, as he slid and turned his key in the lock; and after whom she, catching the door with her shoe a second before it closed, having incorrectly assumed he would hold it open for her, followed in—that Melody Quick finally managed to infiltrate 58 Petrichor Ave.

  On the ground floor she counted twelve rooms. In the central area was a shared kitchenette where dishes and pots sat soaking in the sink under a cloud of fruit flies. Everyone was either out, or hiding in their rooms—she couldn’t tell which. It was too quiet, especially for a place with so many university students under its roof. No music, no conversation, not even the shuffling of feet.

  She climbed the stairs up to the second floor, where across from a vacant bathroom (toilet and sink only, no shower) she saw a closed door labelled UNIT C, the letters written in marker on a strip of masking tape. She tried the knob but it wouldn’t turn. She put her ear to the door and heard two distinct voices, loud enough to be identified but too faint to be understood. She thought one of them might’ve belonged to a child.

  She continued up the stairs. On the third floor, past an open door labelled UNIT D, there were two additional rooms, as well as another kitchenette, smaller, cleaner than the one downstairs. She continued up the stairwell and opened the final door and stepped out into the night air. On the roof, whose tar surface caved in slightly in the center, a pair of lawn chairs next to a plastic white patio table looked out at the Somnhaven skyline.

  She took out her phone again, but this time the only thing on its screen was an animated icon of a cartoon battery, its eyes a pair of Xs, swinging from a noose. Melody reprimanded herself for not charging her phone during the train ride and then made her way down the rusty stairs of the fire escape on the back of the house (peering once into Unit C—five more rooms inside, at least—as she walked by its windowed back door, which was also, naturally, locked) and found herself in a small parking area where a sign warned potential parkers that the area, of which two-thirds was occupied, by a new black BMW and an aged red hatchback, was FOR TENANTS ONLY—OTHERS SUBJECT TO PROSECUTION.

  Melody circled back to the front of the house, to the couch on the lawn, and sat down. Every time the front door opened she glanced up but it was never him. She asked a few times about her brother but, as with the tenant who’d let her in earlier, none of them knew his name. At some point she stopped asking.

  She sat for a long time. She grew restless. She got up and walked to the door and waited for someone to open it again, intent on a second traversal.

  Had her brother moved without telling her or their parents? Possibly. Maybe his number had changed too. When was the last time she’d spoken to him? She’d seen him in person last … well, it was Christmas, she knew that, but which Christmas? (And had it been one where she had still been alive?) Melody struggled to settle the incongruous balance of years, plus eight months, and, looking down at her sneakers as if written on them were some harmonization of her own chronologies, didn’t notice the sound of feet descending the stairs, or the sight of the handle turning, the door opening, and no sooner did she snap out of her trance than hear her own name—

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  “Mel.”

  —or, at least, the first syllable of it, by which only a choice lot were permitted to address her, a name in full in the mouths of that privileged few, one member of whom stood before her now, her older brother, Noel Quick, his hand still holding open the door, his mouth hanging slack in rudiment to many an opener before collapsing, after that initial mutual stupefaction, into the only question anyone could possibly ask, which as:

  “What are you doing here?”

  But to this query he would receive no proper answer—not on this night; and certainly not on the ones that followed—from his sister, who crossed the open doorway between them, forcing him back as she moved in, raving: “Where were you? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting outside for you! I’ve been out here the whole night! And I’ve been calling you since morning! Are you avoiding me? What—don’t want to deal with me? Don’t want to be bothered by your own sister you haven’t seen in—Hey, hey! Are you even listening to me?”

  After taking a moment to unfreeze: “Sorry. I just woke up.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m kind of nocturnal right now.”

  “Don’t you have work?”

  “Yeah. But I sleep during the day.”

  “Seriously? How long have you been doing this?”

  He paused to think. “About a year now.”

  Ashamedly: “Come on, Noel …”

  “No, it’s not—Mel, what are you doing here? Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened. I’m just … I ...”

  And in her efforts to formulate any reasonable predicate she must’ve taken far too long, for in that wordless interval her brother’s expression had time to circle from concerned to uncomfortable and then back to concerned again before resolving into a poor imitation of composure, a clumsy attempt at donning an older-sibling demeanor that no longer fit him, through which Noel managed, finally, to advance the dialogue, even if happened to be with a line as silly as:

  “This is kind of unexpected.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be, if you’d answered your phone.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Uh … NTR,” (National Trans Republic), “obviously? How else do you think?”

  “Coulda flown here. I dunno.”

  “I didn’t fly here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Left Uptown in the morning. Train got into the city just before dark. And then I walked here.”

  “All the way from Terminus? Why didn’t you cab it? Or at least take the subway?”

  “Walk didn’t take that long. I’m pretty sure I spent more time waiting outside. You know, on that filthy couch? With my luggage? All by myself, at night? In the middle of this unfamiliar city? An-and with”—leaning in, sotto voce—“lit-tle sis-ters on the loose?”

  “Okay, okay. I know. I’m sorry, Mel. How many times I gotta apologize?”

  “That was the first time you said ‘sorry’, you—” She shut her eyes and swallowed the oncoming outburst. Her brother thought about correcting her but then thought better of it. She opened her eyes. “Whatever. Look, let’s just”—as a tenant squeezed by between the siblings (“Sorry, ‘scuse me”), the third one to do so since their conversation began—“get out of this doorway first. Where’s your room?”

  He led the way. She followed him up the stairs.

  “Where were you going before?” Melody asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Where were you headed when you opened the door?”

  “Nowhere. Just out.”

  “What, like for a walk?”

  “Yeah. Like for a walk.”

  On the second floor Noel took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door to Unit C, waving Melody in with an exaggerated flourish that helped nothing in stemming the twitch that was now beginning to persist under her left eye.

  Here comprised fewer rooms than the first floor, more than the third. Against one wall next to the fridge was a small breakfast table with two lawn chairs. Against another a worn-out two-seat couch. Shoes lay scattered before the closed doors of their owners. The area was, she supposed, in the absence of anything else of note, no more or less clean than the rest of the house. Melody followed Noel to his door, which he unlocked but hesitated to open.

  “Can you wait here a sec?”

  Melody cleared her throat. “Yeah.”

  “Thanks.”

  He opened the door slightly, just wide enough for him to slink in without her being able to see inside, and shut it as soon as he entered. Melody stood and looked around. In the glass window of the back exit she glimpsed something that was either her own reflection or the apparition of her past self coming down the fire escape stairs. From behind his door came muffled his sporadic footfalls, his uneasy ruffling, his voice when he asked her:

  “So? Somnhaven? First impressions?”

  “It’s noisy. And it smells.”

  “Yeah. You get used to it.”

  “I walked through your old campus. Have to say, I’m jealous of those food trucks. You got hot dogs, burgers, Chinese, burritos. You know what we get Uptown? One diner. One diner and that’s it. No other options if you’re sick of cafeteria food. And believe me, I am sick of cafeteria food.”

  “After only a week of it? I didn’t get sick of dorm food until like, midterms, at least.”

  She said nothing. He felt a chill, pivoted accordingly. “Um, how was the train ride?”

  “It was okay.”

  “Did you get to take in all the”—affecting—“magnificent sights and natural beauty the ‘Glorious Third Division’ has to offer?”

  “I guess. It was mostly just boring. I slept a bit. You know, when I wasn’t busy trying to get ahold of you.”

  “You got to see the Concavity though, at the very least?”

  “I was sitting on the other side. I didn’t get a very good look.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “It’s not like you’ve been up there yourself.”

  The door opened again, all the way this time. “No. You’ve probably seen more of the division in half a day than I have in half a decade.” He tried to smile.

  His room was even smaller than she’d imagined. There was enough room for a writing desk and a dresser and a twin mattress on the floor and little else. She suspected that even her dorm room was bigger, but until the floor was clear of all her brother’s random crap—clothes, textbooks, various optical discs and assorted plastic cartridges—she couldn’t say for certain.

  “It’s quaint,” she said.

  “You don’t know what that word means.” He scratched the back of his head. “Did you eat?”

  “No.”

  “You must be hungry.”

  “I’m not.” Which was the truth, even though it shouldn’t’ve been, having eaten nothing all day.

  “There’s a lot of stuff open late around here. We could grab—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.” She pointed to a spot on the floor. “You missed one.”

  “Oh.” He picked up the empty beer can and put it in an overflowing plastic bag and tied the bag closed.

  And in the lull that followed, Melody confirmed between them the presence of a growth that had been, up until that point, only as real as her suspicions had made it out to be; but was now, mortifyingly, something concrete and irrevocable; and no matter how many times the Void turned the month back it could not erase the reality, the truth that persisted regardless of where she was or wasn’t, that the silence between the siblings—once proof of a childhood spent together under the same roof—had grown—contrary to some stubborn part of her brain which maintained that such a thing was not possible among immediate family, especially not for them, goddammit—uncomfortable.

  Melody picked at her collarbone. “Hey, Noel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t tell Mom and Dad about this, okay?”

  “Um, yeah. Okay.”

  And then …

  And then what?

  What else was there left to say?

  A question to which either of them—or, really, any other imbecile, Quick or no Quick—might’ve answered: “Plenty! There’s still plenty to say! What, you kidding me over here?”

  But seeing as how neither sibling was willing to put forth, or challenge, the apprehensions that each, within themselves, held back and, in the other, sensed as something caustic and near rupturing, nothing of any consequence was exchanged, or furthered, between them for the rest of the night—which ended, as would the nights ensuing, with Melody, on her side, turned to the wall, in a bed that smelled of another, bobbing in and out of shallow sleeps, buoyed from sinking into any proper depth by the sounds of her brother at work (the clacks and sighs of his livelihood, of his visual and mechanical interfacings with Syllabary), unsure in this hypnagogic limbo whether she was saying out loud words she could never say (“I missed you so much”, or “It’s really nice seeing you again”, or “Holy shit big brother, I think time has seriously gone and fucked itself”) or merely pre-dreaming about saying them; and Noel, in response to his sister’s shuffling and kicking, asking her, on several occasions over several different nights, if she wouldn’t prefer the light off, or if she’d rather he move out into the common area to work, suggestions to which she always gave the same unintelligible answer, an anesthetized jumble of half-words and sluggish grunts, noises that could just as well have been assent as dismissal, but which clarification didn’t seem worth rousing her further to pursue.