My apartment is quiet in the way a locked room is quiet?—
Safe. Controlled.
Faintly suffocating.
The hum of the wall processor has a tinny edge to it tonight, like the filters are grinding down their own teeth. The air smells recycled six times over, tinged with hot plastic and that sharp mineral scent of metal warmed just enough to be suspicious. No outside noise, no station babble, no drift from the neighbor’s unit. Just this boxed-in hush, draped over me like a weighted shroud pretending to be a blanket.
I don’t move much anymore. I sit. I tap. I work. That’s the routine. Keeps the blood from boiling.
The holo-net interface glows in front of me—half a dozen screens arranged in a collapsing tree of diagnostic branches and data clusters. Routing maps. Traffic flow reports. Ghost pings. Endless recalibrations of core bandwidth allocation for some mid-tier outpost I’ll never visit. My eyes are burning. Not just from the light, though that doesn’t help. They’ve got that sandpaper drag with every blink, the sting of too many hours spent filtering patterns that don’t matter through a brain that won't shut off.
I lean forward. Fingers hover. One final ping, one last reroute. Line code confirms the transfer. I log the shift.
That’s it.
Done.
No fanfare. No thanks. Just the flicker of the system dimming down and leaving my face lit in a smear of pale blue glow. My hands look bloodless in it—scars washed out, fingers twitching slightly from disuse and too much artificial tension.
The messages are waiting.
Cynna’s been busy.
They’re stacked on the comm panel like bright little landmines—personal, glowing, too damned cheerful. Her name’s all over the feed. Timestamp after timestamp after timestamp. Some of them have tags. “You okay?” “Seriously, Vrok.” “Answer me, asshole.” “I’m going to show up with soup and consequences.”
I don’t touch them.
I look at them, yeah. For a second too long. But I don’t tap. Don’t scroll. Don’t open.
Because if I open them, I’ll answer.
And if I answer, I’ll feel.
And if I feel?—
Well. That’s a whole other kind of hell.
So I ignore her with the kind of precision only guilt can sharpen.
I’ve gottengoodat it.
My shift ends, and silence rushes in.
Not gently. Not like a door closing. More like a vacuum breach. Fast. Total. Violent in the way stillness can be when you’ve been holding it back with noise. I sit there for a beat too long, watching the screens go dark, waiting for my reflection to flicker back at me in the black glass.
I don’t like what I see when it does.
Not because it’s monstrous. But because it’s small.
Contained.
Predictable.
This isn’t rest.
This isn’t solitude.
It’s a mirror.
