Chapter 1

Noah stepped off the train like a man being returned to a crime scene.

The platform was half-swallowed by fog, the kind that made the city feel half-formed. Stone buildings jutted like ribs from the hillside above the tracks, and bells from the nearby cathedral rang a minute too late, like the town couldn't quite commit to time. His suitcase bumped behind him as he walked, wheels useless against the slick cobbles.

The city hadn't changed — of course it hadn't — but it wore itself differently in the winter. Less color. Less sound. Just the whisper of wind between shuttered cafés and the odd dog barking from a balcony above. Noah passed a woman smoking under an archway, her coat fur-lined and expensive. She didn't look at him.

That was the first mercy of returning: no one here knew what had happened. Not yet.

His building stood on a narrow street behind a university bookstore, part of a row of ancient, leaning apartments that looked like they'd survived a siege or two. Three floors, stone stairs, no elevator. His keys didn't work at first. He muttered under his breath and jiggled the lock until it gave a reluctant sigh and clicked open.

Inside, the air smelled like old plaster and toasted bread. He was halfway up the stairs when a voice called out behind him:

"You're Noah?"

He turned, startled. A figure leaned over the banister above him — bleach-blond hair, oversized jumper, bare feet, a mug of something steaming in one hand. They raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah," he said cautiously.

"Cool. Emrys. Flatmate. I took the bigger room. You looked like the type who wouldn't argue."

Noah blinked. "You're not wrong."

"I usually am," Emrys said brightly, turning and disappearing around the corner. "Come up. It smells like death down there."

Noah dragged his suitcase the last flight, his shoulder already sore. The flat had uneven wooden floors and ceiling beams that would decapitate anyone taller than average. It was surprisingly clean. A big window faced the street. His room — the smaller one — was barely wider than the bed, but the radiator worked and the window locked.

He dropped his bags, sat on the edge of the mattress, and let the silence stretch. Not real silence, though — never that. Just the soft murmur of wind and footsteps and the echo of everything he hadn't said to anyone in months.

There was a knock at his door.

"I'm not naked," Emrys said, opening it anyway. "But you might wish I were. You hungry?"

Noah stared at them.

"I have half a croissant and a truly offensive amount of pickles," they added.

"I'm good."

"You're lying," Emrys said. "You have that look."

"What look?"

"The I'm-too-dead-inside-to-be-hungry-but-still-painfully-human look. Very Paris 1974."

Noah let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "Did you rehearse that?"

"I improvise. But thanks for thinking I'm the type to prepare."

They leaned in the doorway for a second longer, studying him.

"Everyone's broken here, by the way. You're not special. But you do have nice eyebrows, which is something."

With that, they left.

Noah lay back on the bed, jacket still on. The radiator hissed. The ceiling creaked. In the hallway, Emrys was humming something old and off-key.

It was better than silence. But not by much.

**************

By nine a.m., Noah was standing in line with a clipboard and a pen that didn't work.

The campus admin office was located in the basement of the Philosophy building — an architectural afterthought with low ceilings and fluorescent lighting that hummed like a nerve. There were stacks of forms no one wanted to fill out and a single woman at the counter who seemed permanently on the edge of telling someone to die quietly.

"Name," she said without looking up.

"Noah Rowe."

She shuffled through a stack of papers. "Transfer?"

"Yes."

"Abroad?"

He hesitated. "Yeah. Boston."

She found the file, stamped it once, and handed it to him with all the ceremony of discarding a receipt. "Room 214. Seminar starts today. Don't be late."

The hallway outside smelled faintly of mildew and chalk. Noah folded the paper and slipped it into his coat pocket, avoiding the other students whose energy already felt too loud, too confident, too young. He passed a mirror in the stairwell and didn't recognize his posture.

On the main quad, winter was pressing hard against the iron railings and stone fountains. He saw cliques forming on benches — jackets puffed up like armor, cigarettes pinched between gloved fingers. Laughter like teeth. Everyone had somewhere to be.

Noah had been here once. Not this university, but here — the feeling of belonging, of future, of motion. Before the collapse. Before she—

Don't.

He cut off the thought like slicing a thread.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn't need to look. There were only two people who still texted him: his mother and Saskia. One out of guilt, the other out of cruelty. He kept walking.

Room 214 was on the second floor of an older building where the halls were too narrow and the air smelled like dust and wet stone. He paused outside the seminar room. Through the leaded glass door, he could hear voices. Laughter. A debate. Someone quoting Rilke.

He stepped inside.

The room had tall windows with cold light spilling through. Old wooden desks arranged in a rough circle. Books piled on a side table. The professor — a thin man with a coffee stain on his sweater and a gaze like a crow — nodded to him without interrupting the discussion.

Noah slid into the nearest empty seat. No one looked at him twice. The group was mid-argument about authorship and longing, and he had nothing to add. He kept his eyes down, hands in his lap, breathing evenly. He knew how to disappear.

"Mr. Rowe," the professor said suddenly.

Noah looked up.

"What does desire demand, in your opinion?"

The room turned toward him. Eyes. Waiting.

He hadn't read the assignment. He hadn't slept much. His mind gave him nothing useful.

"Desire doesn't demand anything," he said flatly. "It just waits until you ruin yourself over it."

There was a pause. Then someone snorted. A girl with blunt bangs said, "Dramatic, much?"

The professor only nodded. "Tragic, not dramatic. Sit with that."

The discussion moved on. Noah exhaled through his nose and stared out the window. Snow had begun to fall in light, sarcastic flakes.

The seminar room breathed like an old church — thick with dust, whispers, and arrogance.

"Kafka didn't hate people," someone argued across the circle. "He hated the system."

"No," a girl in a leather jacket shot back, "he was the system. That's the point. It's all self-loathing."

Noah sat near the back, half-listening. His desk was slightly uneven. The wood had been carved with initials from decades ago — MB + HL trapped in a heart that looked more like a cracked fruit. He traced it with his finger, absently.

The professor — Marek, according to the syllabus — stood at the window, smoking a pen like a cigarette. His eyes flicked across the room with the kind of gaze that catalogued weaknesses for fun.

"Who here has ever loved someone they couldn't speak to?" he asked suddenly.

No one answered.

He smiled. "Then you understand Kafka."

Noah glanced toward the door just as it opened.

Two figures stepped in without apology. The class barely paused. Just a ripple of turned heads — and then the conversation resumed.

The first was tall, dressed in dark grey. Blond in the way a wolf might be — silver, not sun-kissed. He walked with a kind of stillness, as though movement was a favor he granted to physics. His face was unreadable, almost too symmetrical.

The second followed — softer lines, warm brown eyes, tousled hair, something unbuttoned at the collar that shouldn't have looked deliberate, but did. He carried a worn leather notebook, didn't speak, didn't smile.

They took the empty seats near the window.

No one said their names.

Noah tried not to look — not out of shyness, but because something about them felt... off-kilter. Like they didn't quite belong to the same world as the rest of the class.

The professor didn't acknowledge their arrival.

Instead, he circled back to the original point: "Desire. Obsession. Boundaries."

He looked directly at Noah. "Tell me, Mr. Rowe. Which breaks first?"

Noah swallowed.

He hated being looked at.

He especially hated being seen.

"Boundaries," he said, because it sounded detached.

"Not always," Marek said. "Sometimes desire erodes slowly. You don't notice the collapse until you're buried."

A few students chuckled.

The boy with brown eyes was sketching again, fast strokes on soft paper.

Noah looked down at his own notebook. Blank.

He didn't look back at the twins.

And they didn't look at him.

**************

The radiator clicked like a dying insect.

Noah stood in the small kitchen, peeling the plastic off a sad-looking sandwich and eating it over the sink like a fugitive. The flat was mostly dark, the glow from the stovetop light casting long shadows across the cracked tile. Emrys was on the couch, half-curled like a cat, phone in one hand, legs dangling off the side.

"You eat like you just killed that sandwich's family," they said without looking up.

"It tastes like it deserved it."

Emrys snorted. "We have actual food, you know. Well — ingredients. Food in progress."

Noah didn't respond.

He rinsed the crumbs down the drain, flicked the faucet off, and leaned against the counter. The silence stretched.

Eventually, Emrys said, "So. First class?"

"Fine."

"You say that like you just got off trial."

"I might've," Noah muttered.

Emrys set their phone down and rolled onto their stomach. "You're hiding something, and I respect that. I also hope it's murder. I like murder. Keeps things spicy."

Noah raised an eyebrow. "You always talk like that?"

"Only when I like someone. When I don't, I'm worse."

A pause. The radiator groaned.

"I sat near the back," Noah offered, as if that explained everything.

Emrys nodded. "Where the ghosts sit."

Noah tilted his head.

"Campus has ghosts," Emrys said matter-of-factly. "Not real ones. Well — maybe. But the other kind. People who show up, hover, vanish. Always a story. Always something weird behind the eyes."

Noah didn't answer.

Emrys studied him for a long moment. Then they said, too casually:

"You see them today?"

"Who?"

"The twins."

Noah blinked.

Emrys smiled like they'd caught him flinching. "Ah. You did."

"They sat near the window," Noah said flatly. "Didn't say anything."

"They rarely do." Emrys rolled over onto their back and stretched. "That's Adrian and Elián. They're in third year. Rich, gorgeous, never alone. I mean that literally — I don't think I've ever seen them apart. Creepy twins kind of vibe, but hot enough to get away with it."

"People always talk about them?"

"They're easy to mythologize." Emrys's voice softened. "Last year, there was this girl — I don't know her name, no one does anymore — she dated one of them. Or both. Hard to say. Then she stopped showing up. Dropped out. Disappeared. People made up reasons, but..."

They trailed off.

Noah waited.

"Anyway," Emrys said briskly, sitting up, "don't stare back when they stare first. That's all I'm saying."

"I wasn't planning to."

"No one ever is."

Emrys stood, stretched, and padded barefoot toward the hallway.

At the door to their room, they turned and added, "You don't look like the type they go for, by the way. You look like the type who watches them go for someone else."

Then they disappeared behind the door, leaving only the click of wood and the hiss of the radiator.

Noah stayed in the kitchen, sandwich forgotten, one hand still gripping the sink.

He wasn't sure why his pulse had picked up.

The city at night was quieter than he remembered.

Noah stood outside the apartment with a cigarette between his fingers, the smoke curling in delicate ribbons toward the starless dark. The stones beneath his boots were slick with frost, and the air was the kind that got inside your lungs like regret — sharp, necessary.

Across the narrow square, the library building loomed like a mausoleum, its Gothic windows arched in judgment. Only one light remained on — high in the second floor, behind the curved panes.

He'd needed air. He told himself that's all it was. He hadn't been thinking about what Emrys said. About them.

He lit the cigarette with one hand, fingers shaking slightly. Not from cold.

The square was still. One parked bicycle. A trash bin full of crumpled paper cups. Somewhere distant, a tram bell rang, lonely and irrelevant.

Then the light in the library went out.

But the window didn't go dark.

Two silhouettes remained, backlit faintly by some secondary glow. Tall figures, still as statues. One leaned against the frame. The other stood slightly behind, angled as if whispering something just out of reach.

Noah froze.

He couldn't see their faces.

Couldn't even be sure it was them — just shapes, shadows, bodies half-submerged in the night.

Then, one of them moved.

Turned.

Even from across the square, even through two panes of glass, Noah felt it — the direction of the gaze. Like a finger pressed to the center of his chest.

The cigarette burned unnoticed between his fingers.

A second passed.

Then two.

Then he looked away.

He crushed the cigarette against the railing, exhaling roughly.

By the time he looked back, the window was empty.

The square was still.

And the light was gone.