Chapter 7 — The Echo Outside (Ending)
Cold rooms • A mother asleep • “We were already here”
He runs.
Her words spark fear, then a blaze within him, Doc Marten boots slapping wet concrete, breath razored thin, the stairwell’s damp walls smearing past like bruised light. He hits the street hard enough to taste metal. Neon slides over puddles; sirens stretch like threads; the city’s pulse follows, patient and close.
He doesn’t look back. He can’t. He cuts down Ninth, vaults a trash bag, shoulders through a flock of cigarette smoke and laughter, misses the train by a breath and takes the stairs two at a time anyway. He runs until his ribs are a cage for something wild that wants out, until the burn in his legs turns to glass.
Home is a third-floor walk-up with peeling paint, a hissing radiator that hasn’t given heat in weeks, and his mother sound asleep in her bedroom, her breathing soft and even beneath a pile of mismatched blankets. The apartment smells faintly of vodak and rain. His key fumbles, bites skin, finally gives. Inside, the dark is familiar—paint-stained mugs, a crooked lamp, the sketchbook shrine on the table like a throat he’s afraid to touch.
He throws the deadbolt. He waits. His breath saws the quiet into pieces.
Then—soft at first, like rain learning his name—the calling starts.
It threads under the window frame, rides the steam from the radiator, pools in the corners where the light never reaches. Voices layered, low and smiling. Not words, not exactly. Just the shape of his name, stretched thin and sweet as sugar on the tongue.
He edges to the glass. Outside, the streetlights blink as if drowsy. Across the way, a dark storefront mirror shivers. In his own window, a smear of breath blooms from the outside, fogging the pane in the shape of a hand.
“You can still leave,” someone whispers from the alley below—her voice, his name folded inside it. The syllables condense on the glass and drip like quicksilver.
Behind him, the old computer wakes on its own with a static twitch. The monitor glows a sick blue. The speakers crackle.
A hollow thunk, like a door opening somewhere you can’t see.
Then the message ping.
Once.
Again.
Again.
His ancient buddy list unfurls without being touched, names he hasn’t seen in years flickering online all at once, avatars blinking like lures in deep water. A new window blooms,no sender, no subject, only coordinates, then another, then five more. The familiar chirp stacks into a nervous, cheerful chorus.
Outside the window: “Dio,” they sigh, the street whispering with their mouths. “We were already here.”
Thunk. Ping.
Ping.
Ping. Ping. Ping.