The morning sunlight streamed through the curtains, landing in a warm stripe across the bedside table.

A young woman lying on the bed reached out her right hand, fingers searching the familiar surface of the table for something that was not there.

The confusion that crossed her face was immediate — the particular disorientation of a person whose morning routine had been interrupted before it had even begun. She jolted upright, now fully awake and aware of her surroundings.

Grey and white dotted curtains. A small sturdy table on the right side of the bed by the window. A medium sized closet on the left, shortly followed by the bedroom door. The room was not large — three metres wide at most, compact and functional in the way that one bedroom apartments tended to be.

She sat still for a moment, blinking at the curtains.

Then it occurred to her. She was seeing them clearly. Every thread, every dot, every fold of fabric where the morning light caught the weave. Clearly, and without the pair of glasses she had just spent thirty seconds searching for.

Sighing, she pushed back the covers and padded out of the bedroom toward the bathroom. The apartment was small but complete — a living room, a kitchen, a storage room, a hallway, a separate bathroom and toilet, and the bedroom she had just left.

The bathroom was not attached to the bedroom, which on most mornings was a minor inconvenience and on this particular morning felt oddly fitting, as though even the short walk down the hallway was giving her time to adjust to something.

She entered the bathroom and looked into the mirror.

No glasses. Perfect, unaided clarity looking back at her.

A surge of memories from the night before came flooding in all at once.

Her last examination as a senior high school student, finished and done with. The walk home through damp streets after the rain.

Her father home earlier than expected, a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. Dinner, quieter than usual, with the television off. And then her parents — both of them, carefully, kindly — telling her that they had decided to separate.

That they had grown apart over the years, that every attempt to find their way back to each other had not worked, and that the decision had been made with love and with thought and with the two of them very much still a family in every way that mattered.

She had sat at the table and listened and said very little. She had helped clear the dishes. She had gone upstairs to her room, sat in her study chair, and looked out of the window at the rain soaked street below.

And then a sound echoed in her mind.

She had been bounded to a system.

A beautiful and famous system, it had called itself, with one singular purpose — to make her known to the world. It had rewarded her immediately with a newbie pack, and among the items inside had been two passive skills that were now, apparently, very much active.

Perfect Memory. Perfect Eyesight.

She reached out and turned on the tap.

**July 24th, 2020**

**Friday**

**Jean International High School, Class 3B**

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

The sound of the analogue clock above the writing board was the only sound heard in the classroom alongside the sound of pens scratching paper, as students of Class 3B of the Jean International High School wrote their last examination as high school students.

Victoria checked the time again for the 4th time.

After answering the last question, she placed the pen down and went through the paper just to make sure she made no mistakes. Confirming there were no errors, she arranged the papers and placed them on the desk.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour paper with only 26 minutes left.

Looking around, she saw Evelyn, who was on her right side, two desks away, with her head on the desk.

"Ahh, it seems she finished early this time," Victoria said with a surprised look on her face. After all, history was considered by some a very unpredictable subject, especially when answering question sets by the history teacher, Mr. John, who was known for setting questions outside the school's teaching curriculum. One had to rely on other teaching materials as well.

Turning her head to her left side, she found other students writing, with some finished. Class 3B had a total of 36 students — 15 boys and 21 girls — and in all, only 25 pupils showed signs of completing the questions, with the rest not done.

Victoria leaned back slightly in her chair, careful not to make a sound that would disturb the remaining students. She glanced once more at the clock. Twenty-three minutes now. She folded her hands neatly on the desk and let her eyes drift toward the window.

responded

Outside, the sky was a pale, washed-out blue, the kind that usually meant the rains were not far off. A mango tree at the edge of the school compound swayed lazily in the afternoon breeze, its dark leaves catching the light. Victoria watched it for a moment, letting her mind wander torespondedest of the day would look like — the first afternoon in three years with no revision notes to read, no past questions to attempt, no sleep to sacrifice.

It felt strange. Liberating, but strange.

A quiet shuffling pulled her back. One of the boys near the front, Samuel, was pressing his pen down with visible urgency, his handwriting growing messier with each passing minute. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Samuel ha,d spent most of the revisi"on week playin"g football behind the dormitories, and Mr. John's questions had a particular way of punishing those who underestimated them.

The invigilator, a lean woman named Mrs. Aubrey, stood at the front of the room with her arms crossed and her eyes moving slowly across the rows. She was strict, but fair — the kind of teacher who would not add a single extra second to the time, not even out of pity. Everyone in Class 3B knew that.

Evelyn stirred. She lifted her head slightly, turned to look at Victoria with half-opened eyes, and offered a small, tired smile. Victoria returned it. They had been friends since eighth grade, the kind of friendship built not on loud laughter and shared secrets alone, but on sitting side by side through hard things — through difficult teachers, through family troubles whispered between classes, through the particular exhaustion of wanting to do well and not always knowing if you had.

Today, at least, Victoria felt she had done well.

"Time's up!" Mrs. Aubrey's voice cut cleanly through the room.

The remaining students dropped their pens immediately, some with relief, others with the frustrated slump of those who had not quite reached the end. Scripts were gathered row by row, and the classroom that had been silent for hours suddenly filled with the noise of chairs scraping back, of exhaled breath, of voices returning to bodies that had held them in all morning.

"How was it?" Evelyn asked, appearing at Victoria's side as they filed toward the door.

"Good, I think," Victoria said. "Mr. John surprised us with that last question on the Berlin Conference, but I had read around it."

Evelyn groaned. "I left that one blank."

"You'll be fine," Victoria said, and she meant it.

They stepped out into the corridor, and the heat of the afternoon met them fully. Around them, students from other classes were already pouring out into the compound, some cheering, some still looking dazed. It was finished. High school was finished. The realisation settled over Victoria not like a wave, but like a long, slow exhale.

She said goodbye to Evelyn at the school gate, promising to message her on Mevo later, and adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder before stepping out onto the main road.

The walk home was thirty minutes on a good day — longer when the afternoon traffic clogged the intersection at Calloway Bridge and delivery cyclists spilled onto the pavement, weaving between slow-moving cars with insulated bags strapped to their backs and earphones trailing from their collars. Today, Victorare ia did not mind the prospect of the long walk. If anything, she welcomed it. Her mind needed the open air.

The first few minutes took her past the row of shops that lined the stretch just outside the school, a barbershop where two men sat outside on folding chairs debating loudly about the Harwick United match from the previous weekend, and a small diner from which the smell of fried onions and toasted bread drifted out onto the pavement in warm, insistent waves. Victoria's stomach re sponded immediately. She had eaten nothing since the cereal bar she'd had that morning before leaving the house, too anxious for examination day to manage anything more.

She told herself she would eat when she got home.

She pulled out her phone as she walked — a mid-range Android she'd had for two years, its screen cracked at the bottom right corner from a drop. She had four notifications. One was a Mevo message from her mother sent thirty minutes ago: How did it go? Call me when you're out. The message had the small blue double tick that meant her mother had sent it, read her own sent message approximately four times, and was now waiting. One was a low battery warning at seventeen percent. One was a news alert she didn't bother opening. The fourth was a Mevo notification from the Class 3B group — a notification that, when she tapped it, revealed that Evelyn had sent a meme to the group chat approximately nine minutes after the examination ended, followed by eleven laughing reactions from classmates who had clearly all been on their phones the moment they stepped out of the hall.

Victoria stared at the meme for a moment. It was an image of a man sitting at a desk, staring blankly at a piece of paper, with the caption: Me reading the last question and pretending I understand it.

She locked the screen without reacting, which she knew Evelyn would notice and interpret correctly.

She would call her mother when she got home.

At the junction, she waited at the pedestrian crossing alongside a woman with a pushchair and an elderly man in a flat cap who stood with his hands folded behind his back, studying the traffic light with the focused patience of someone who had been waiting at crossings for seventy years and had made a kind of peace with it. The light took longer than usual. A motorbike courier jumped it early, earning a short blast of a horn from a passing saloon car. Nobody on the pavement looked particularly surprised.

Victoria crossed when the signal changed and continued down the road.

This stretch was quieter — residential, lined with terraced houses and low brick garden walls. Some of the walls had wheelie bins pushed against them, others had terracotta pots with plants that had survived the summer and others that had not. 

She passed the corner shop where Mr. Halversen, a broad-shouldered man with a grey beard he kept very neatly trimmed, was restocking the newspaper stand outside. He glanced up as she passed.

"Last day?" he asked.

"Last day," she answered.

He nodded once, the way people nodded when they approved of something without wanting to make a fuss of it, and went back to the newspapers.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out without breaking her stride. It was another Mevo notification — this time a direct message from Evelyn, separate from the group chat.

you didn't react to my meme

Victoria typed back with one thumb: I saw it.

Three dots appeared immediately, which meant Evelyn was already composing a response. Then: that means you related to it and you don't want to admit it

Smiling, Victoria put the phone back in her pocket without replying.

The sky above had been shifting all afternoon. The town of Crestfield sat in a valley between two low ranges of hills. The pale afternoon light had given way to something heavier — a flat, even grey that pressed down from the hilltops and moved steadily across the rooflines. Victoria glanced up at it. She had perhaps fifteen minutes before it became a real problem. She quicken,ed her pace slightly.

Her mind drifted back to the examination. The question on the Caldwell Reforms had caught her off guard at first

She remembered the brief flicker of panic when she turned to that page, the way her thoughts went momentarily blank and unhelpful — but then the reading she had done two nights before, from a supplementary book she had found on the school library's back shelf, came back to her in steady fragments. The political tensions of the 1930s. The failed vote. The compromise that restructured everything afterward. She had written well. She felt certain of it in the quiet, careful way she trusted most.

She thought about Evelyn's meme and felt the familiar mix of amusement and quiet concern that came with knowing a friend too well. She hoped the rest of Evelyn's paper had carried enough weight to balance whatever she had left unanswered.

She turned off the main road onto a narrower street, this one cobbled in the older style that the town council kept promising to repave and never did. The cobblestones were uneven in places, worn smooth in the center and rough at the edges, and Victoria had long since learned exactly where to step to avoid the ones that rocked underfoot. A group of younger kids were further up the street, three of them, taking turns kicking a ball against a garage door with the repetitive dedication that only children and professional athletes ever truly committed to. One of them, a small girl in an oversized hoodie with a football club logo faded beyond identification, paused to watch Victoria pass. Victoria gave a small wave. The girl considered this for a moment and then went back to the ball.

Her phone buzzed again. She did not take it out this time. She already knew it was Evelyn.

Victoria slowed without meaning to.

Three years of this walk. Morning and afternoon, five days a week, through the cold terms when she wore her coat all the way to her chin and the warm terms when the lime trees smelled faintly sweet in the early morning and the long examination term when she walked home with her head so packed with revision that she barely registered the route at all. She had complained about it endlessly — to her mother, to Evelyn, in voice notes on Mevo sent at eleven at night when she was too tired to type properly.

The distance. The cobblestones. The hill on the last stretch that her legs had never fully forgiven.

But standing beneath the lime trees now, with high school behind her and everything else still unformed and ahead, she felt something she had not expected.

She would miss it.

The specific rhythm of this route, the way it moved from the noise of the main road to the quiet of the residential streets, from Calloway Bridge's steady hum of traffic to the cobbled street with its impractical stones, to the smell of whatever Mrs. Hargrove next door was cooking that always reached the pavement before Victoria reached the front door, as reliable and grounding as anything she knew.

These small, unremarkable things that had quietly held the shape of her days together for three years without her ever pausing to be grateful for them.

She was grateful for them now.

She took her phone out one final time before she reached her street. The Mevo notifications had stacked up — four more messages from Evelyn in the direct chat, and fourteen new reactions in the class group, where someone had apparently started a thread about what everyone was doing for the rest of the summer. She read none of them. Instead she opened her mother's message again — How did it go? Call me when you're out — and typed back simply: Coming through the door soon. I'll tell you everything.

She locked the screen and put the phone away.

The first drop of rain landed on her forearm just as she reached her street. Then another on the back of her hand. Then the sky made its decision fully, and the drops became a sudden, steady fall that darkened the pavement in spreading patches and rattled softly against the wheelie bins and the terracotta pots and the lime tree leaves overhead.

Victoria broke into a run, her bag bouncing against her back, her trainers hitting the wet pavement in quick, uneven rhythm. She was laughing by the time she reached her front door — laughing the way she sometimes did when something caught her all at once, not because it was funny exactly, but because there was simply no better response — and she pushed the door open just as the rain came down fully behind her.

She entered the living room.