The day erupted with mechanical protests, Elia’s voice cutting through the morning peace like a hacksaw. The fucking boiler, Jord thought darkly, his knuckles whitening around the banister. I’ll reduce it to scrap before the sprint’s end.

  ‘I’m coming!’ He descended into the cellar’s damp throat, hands moving with the cursed familiarity of a man tending an abusive lover. The panel groaned open; a twist, a thump, and the cursed beast fell silent. Elia’s ‘Thanks!’ ricocheted off cobwebbed walls, sharp with relief.

  Grumpiness clung to Jord like a second skin as he shuffled kitchen-ward. Light bloomed at his touch, revealing Irena’s abandoned dough rising like a phantom under cloth. The coffee ritual began – a daily libation to Toyan the Splendid, that mythic butcher-explorer whose colonial appetites had gifted Meridia this bitter sacrament. Jord raised his chipped mug in mock salute. To conquest and caffeine, he thought, swallowing tar-thick brew that tasted of ash and wakefulness. Addiction was too pretty a word – this was survival, plain as the tremor in his arm.

  Once dressed, he considered stopping by the old man’s mini-market, but the realisation hit – he still hadn’t asked when he’d be paid, and going back to beg didn’t sit well with him. That killed that plan quickly. He sighed, shoved his hands into his pockets, and marched on.

  On his way, a couple of urchins lingered near the curb, eyes flitting between indifferent passers-by.

  ‘Sir… sir, got some spare?’ One of them, a little boy, held out a cap that held few marks, a pittance that almost could not buy them a meal.

  Jord hesitated – his own pockets weren’t exactly deep. But he always kept a little set aside for moments like this. He remembered what it was like growing up, seeing friends fall through the cracks, some never climbing back out. Being in the red was one thing. Having nothing was another entirely.

  ‘Here.’ He dropped a couple of marks into the boy’s cap and ruffled his hair before moving on.

  Above, the stars lingered – Stars winking through daylight’s veil. Jord blinked, but the anomaly slipped his mind like water through a rusted sieve.

  At the gate, the usual procedures – checkpoint, clearance, nods exchanged – and then onto Track Three. Lapo was already there. Jord checked the time. Breaking even. ‘You’re timely,’ he remarked, as though punctuality were a mild vice.

  Then, both of them started warming up along the track.

  ‘Sir, I wondered, why just the two of us, where are the others?’ Jord matched his stride.

  ‘I requested special training dispensation from the Ministry. We’ve got the month to ourselves. Need to polish you up before the delegation forms opinions about our department capability. And we need to improve your ability to look the part. Can’t have a dockhand spill all the beans on his first day, no?’

  ‘Am I to be presented as a guard unit?’ Jord pressed, seeking clarity.

  ‘To them, you’ll be presented as one example of a mobilisation force. In the role of a pacificator, or know as military police. And if you wondered, such activities will be compensated.’ Lapo’s pace quickened as he spoke.

  ‘About the pay...’ Jord ventured, ‘when might I expect it? Nothing urgent, just planning ahead.’

  Lapo’s raised eyebrow carried a tone. ‘I can arrange something, Monday’s the earliest. Bureaucracy moves at its own pace, powered by prayers and paperwork.’

  The day dissolved into a sweat-slicked sacrament. Sabre drills became hims; target practice, a litany. By dusk, Jord’s body screamed its heresies – muscles apostate, lungs burning like censers.

  ‘Adequate,’ Lapo pronounced, departing without ceremony.

  Homeward, Jord reeled – a drunkard in a journey. Above, the false stars multiplied, their light now a viscous glow that pooled in the cobblestone cracks. The brightest one swelled, a tumour on the sky’s pale cheek. He paused, nausea rising – not from exhaustion, but the wrongness of their arrangement, angles too acute, rhythms discordant. Like teeth, the thought rose unbidden. Like teeth in a jaw too wide to –

  The epiphany shattered as metal screamed and screached against brick. Jord whirled toward the sound's provenience – a red car kissed a building’s wall.

  He approached in careful increments, the sound of his boots stepping on cobblestone. The driver – an elderly woman – slumped against her seatbelt, unharmed save for the look of wildness in her eyes. There was no blood and no broken glass. Only the reek of scorched rubber and something sharper, metallic, that clung to the back of Jord’s throat.

  ‘Madam?’ He eased the door open, hands raised in placation. Her gaze fixed not on him but on the sky, her pupils dilated to swallow the iris whole.

  ‘…the angles,’ she rasped, spittle glistening on chapped lips. ‘Can’t you see? The angles are all wrong–’ Her fingers clawed at the wind-shield, nails scraping against glass. ‘–teeth in the dark. The teeth in the dark–’

  Jord stepped back, the woman’s hysteria mining at his resolve. He fumbled for his phone, the emergency operator’s voice tinny through the receiver. ‘Low-speed collision. Elderly driver. Delirious… No, no visible injuries.’

  He waited, spine pressed to damp brickwork, as sirens wailed closer. The stars throbbed anew – wrong, so wrong – their light seemingly to paint the whole word in muted colour. The woman’s ravings crescendoed: ‘They’re coming through the c–’

  Paramedics shouldered past, their uniforms blindingly white against the gloom of Jord’s mind.

  Jord melted into the crowd, the woman’s cries chasing him down the alley like starved hounds. ‘You’ll see! You’ll all see when the sky splits and–’

  He walked faster. Above, stars pulsed, the vast distance seemingly shrinking.

  Yet the woman’s words coiled in his ears long after the paramedics’ vans had vanished, slithering through his thoughts as he navigated Thamburg’s labyrinthine alleys. Above, the false stars continued to swell – a cluster of festering lights that twisted one’s mind if stared at too long, their edges warping sanity like smoke over flame.

  The Boltworks loomed, its balconies elongated like fangs ready to strike. Jord’s second shower scalded him raw, but the water couldn’t sluice away the day's events. Teeth in the dark. He scrubbed until his skin blushed angry pink. You’ll see when the sky splits.

  Downstairs, Feliko’s newspaper rustled like dry insect wings. Irena hummed a folk tune out of key. Elia glanced up from his tinkering – gears and springs spread like entrails across the table – and froze.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a wraith,’ Elia said.

  Jord forced a brittle laugh. ‘Just a… senile driver.’

  Elia’s gaze lingered, sharp. ‘Senile drivers don’t leave you grey.’

  Supper passed in leaden silence. Jord pushed boiled meat around his plate, the woman’s face superimposing itself over his mother’s. The angles are wrong, she’d hissed. Now the kitchen’s geometry felt suspect – walls leaning at impossible gradients, the ceiling’s cracks mapping constellations he dared not name.

  Sleep, when it came, was a fevered thing.

  – the car’s paint bleeds upward, becoming the –

  – the woman’s fingers elongated, her claws scraping glass that –

  – the sky ripped like fabric, revealing –

  Jord woke gagging, sweat pooled in the hollows of his collarbone. Dawn’s first light seeped through the window.

  The walls breathed. Jord reeled down the hallway, shoulder slamming in the walls in a staccato rhythm. His fingertips burned with freezer-ache cold, yet his arms left smears of phantom fire in the air – contradictions that liquefied reason. A framed family photo crashed to the floor, glass shards blooming like frozen lightning. Why does the floor tilt? Why does the air taste of–

  Irena appeared, her appearance a painting of fury – lips parted for reproach – then it morphed into mute horror. Her palm met his forehead, her expression grave. ‘Gods burn, you’re a furnace!’ Her voice felt heavy, almost unintelligible to Jord’s mind. ‘Sit. Now.’

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  He stumbled after her, knees buckling in time with the floor’s unnatural undulations. The kitchen tiles leached what little warmth remained in his bones. Then, with help, he was made to sit on a wooden chair.

  ‘Drink.’ She thrust a glass into his trembling hands. Water slopped over the rim, droplets seemed to hiss as they hit his scorching skin. Pills followed – chalky bitterness that stung his throat like an angry bee. The world stabilized, briefly, into something resembling coherence.

  ‘You’re in no state to–’

  ‘I have to.’ Jord’s voice emerged raw.

  Irena’s face contorted – a mother’s fear warring with decades of Meridian stoicism. ‘Whatever devil’s got its hooks in you, boy, it’ll chew through your marrow before noon.’

  Jord stood, the chair screeching backward. His reflection in the window warped – a fun-house mockery, limbs elongated, eyes smudged pits. Just the fever, he told himself. Just the–

  A sound cut through the lie. Not a sound – a vibration felt in the molars. The same frequency as the woman’s ravings. The same pitch as the stars’ silent scream.

  The world dissolved in a cascade of static – not darkness, but a sickly prismatic smear, as if the air itself had turned to oil. Jord’s knees buckled. The floor rushed up, cold and unyielding as a mortuary slab. His temple struck tile with a wet crack, pain blooming fractal-bright behind his eyes.

  Irena’s scream pierced the haze, warped and distant – a voice wadding through mud. Mum, he tried to say, but his tongue lay leaden, metallic blood pooling beneath his cheek. Shadows writhed at the edges of his vision, not shadows, he realized, but teeth, endless rows of them, gnashing in a rhythm that matched the throbbing in his skull.

  He felt false stars pressing down, their light a treaccherus syrupy. Jord’s breath hitched, lungs fluttering like trapped moths. He tasted copper and something older, fouler – a primordial rot that seeped from the cracks between time.

  Irena’s hands gripped his shoulders, her voice splintering into fragments:

  ‘–ambulance–’

  ‘–Gods, stay with me–’

  ‘–Elia! the phone, now–’

  Jord’s fingers twitched, carving feeble arcs in the spilled water. The vibrations returned – deeper now, resonating in the marrow of his teeth. They’re here, he thought, or perhaps the stars whispered it through him. The ceiling peeled back, revealing a maw of pulsating light, its edges serrated and hungry.

  Consciousness frayed, a thread snipped by cosmic shears. The last thing he heard was not his mother’s cries but the sound of the universe laughing – a wet, gurgling chorus that defied all geometry.

  Time performed a peculiar sleight of hand – one moment, Jord lay crumpled on the kitchen floor; the next, he found himself in a hospital room that had seen better days. Cracked windows told tales of deferred maintenance, missing panels spoke of limited resources, and a lone wooden chair stood sentinel for visitors.

  His eyes traced the room's boundaries, finding himself alone behind a closed door with its glass panel. No call button presented itself, leaving him to wait anxiously, watching shadows beyond the glass moving, until finally, a white-clad figure appeared.

  ‘Ah, you’re finally awake. Just a moment.’ The man – sporting a neat brown crop of hair – consulted his notes until he found what he sought. ‘Can you tell me your name, sir?’

  ‘Jord... Jord Whittaker.’

  ‘Good, very good. And the date?’

  ‘Friday?’

  ‘A bit more precise, month and year, if you can.’

  ‘May of the one-hundred-thirty-seventh?’

  ‘Good. Now, if you wish, I can call your family.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The doctor returned with Elia, who practically flew to Jord’s bedside. ‘Oh, thank Gods!’

  ‘Good to see you. But... what happened?’ Jord said, frowning at the jagged memories that resurfaced in his mind.

  ‘You collapsed! You were rambling, something about a car, and… and teeth in the dark.’

  The words sent ice through Jord’s veins as if he’d been plunged into frozen waters. ‘Please, please. Don't say those things.’ He pleaded, arms wrapping around himself protectively.

  The doctor drew Elia aside, exchanging words beyond Jord's hearing. After a brief conference, Elia returned to his bedside.

  Jord steadied himself with a deep breath. ‘When can I go, good sir?’

  ‘A day at most, don’t worry, just routine to confirm you won’t slip back.’

  The night passed peacefully – no nightmares, no convulsions – leading to his discharge with a curious warning about avoiding intermittent lights and that if he felt anything amiss, he should call for help. Jord thanked the staff and left.

  Back home, Elia prepared tea and biscuits in the kitchen, the siblings settling into chairs side by side.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jord. I…’ Elia took a breath. ‘I know it was hard for you to join the guards after what happened. But… I-I didn’t think it would…’ Tears traced paths down Elia’s freckled face.

  Jord squeezed his younger brother’s shoulder gently. ‘Don’t… I think it’s just the… exhaustion,’ he offered softly, carefully avoiding memories of recent events. ‘I… thought I could shoulder past it all, and... well, I couldn’t. Seems I'm but a man.’

  They shared tea and biscuits in comfortable silence until Jord ventured softer talking points, ‘So, what goes… did you try to hit on that girl, Lumina, was it?’ Elia's cheeks flushed immediately.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Elia mumbled, studying the table intently.

  ‘Oh?’ Jord's tone lifted teasingly. ‘Not yet? How come? Seemed your type: Passionate, outspoken, intelligent... And that thing with the pamphlets? The… ’ he scrunched his face in theatrical remembrance, ‘She asked to give you something about… erosion?,' he finished with conspiratorial emphasis.

  Jord then took a slow sip of tea, the picture of exaggerated innocence. He let the moment stretch before casually remarking, ‘So… did she finally let you catalogue her rock collection? Or are you still lingering at the sedimentary small talk stage?’

  Across from him, Elia flushed to the tips of his ears. ‘It’s not – we’re collaborating. Professionally.’

  Jord grinned, setting his cup down with a deliberate clink. ‘Ah yes, the ol’ “professional collaboration” ruse. Worked wonders for Mum and Dad, didn’t it? Feliko, could you please pass the tectonic wren–’

  A biscuit flew, bouncing harmlessly off Jord’s shoulder.

  ‘Shut up!’ Elia groaned. ‘She’s running a geology outreach stall. Needed help with… diagrams.’

  Jord dodged another biscuit, laughing. ‘Diagrams! Of course! Nothing says romance like cross-sectional stratigraphy. Darling, let me show you my bedrock–’

  Elia buried his face in his hands. ‘You’re vile. I regret every childhood secret I ever entrusted to you.’

  Jord softened, nudging him. ‘Come on. She’s clever. She’s got that… intensity. Like when you used to take apart radios to “see where the voices lived.” You’re both mad in the same way.’

  Elia peeked at him through his fingers, reluctant but unable to hide the small, satisfied smile creeping onto his face. ‘…She did lend me her annotated copy of Subterranean Meridia. Margin notes in three colours.’

  Jord mock-gasped. ‘Three colours?! Proposal’s overdue, then. Do you need a wingman? I’ll wear my parade uniform, say you’re a heroic civic engineer.’

  Elia snorted. ‘You’d combust within minutes. Last time you “helped”, you told Valkan’s sister I bred exotic snails.’

  Jord grinned, wholly unrepentant. ‘And she bought it! You’ve got that… molluscan charm.’

  Elia shoved him, laughing. ‘Piss off.’

  Jord chuckled but then fell quiet, his gaze drifting toward the window. Beyond the glass, the city lights flickered, stars pulsing faintly in the distance. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. ‘…She’s good for you. Better than… all this.’ He gestured vaguely as if trying to encompass the weight of everything left unsaid.

  Elia followed his gaze, uneasy. ‘Jord– ’

  ‘Pass the biscuits,’ Jord interrupted briskly. ‘If I’m stuck here convalescing, I’m eating all the sweets.’

  Through the aftershocks of his collapse, Jord’s thoughts turned to something far more mundane – the promised payslip. A glance at his phone revealed it was already Tuesday, a day past the scheduled payday. Missed calls from both Lapo and Mara cluttered his log, though their measured persistence suggested his hospitalisation had been duly noted.

  The matter of payment logistics nagged at him. In his previous role, Altrasto – that cheerfully tippling paymaster – had managed things with clockwork precision. What was it he always said? “Day of pay, day of happiness”? The memory of Altrasto’s fondness for drink brought a slight smile to Jord’s lips; who was he to judge another’s love affair?

  Shaking off the reminiscence, Jord dialled Mara’s office number.

  ‘Hello, is this Whittaker? Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine and well... more or less. I called to inquire about the provisional pay Lapo arranged – and the bonus for the operation.’

  ‘Didn't I tell you?’ Mara’s words sent his heart leaping into his throat.

  ‘No? Is there a problem regarding my absence?’ His voice wavered ever so slightly.

  ‘No, no – we checked with your doctor, and that’s already resolved. Your payslip is loaded onto your smart card. You can withdraw it at any bank connected with the Ministry – practically all of them. Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, is it alright if I come back tomorrow?’ Jord ventured, earning a sharp look from Elia.

  ‘So soon? Isn’t that a bit... excessive?’ Surprise tinged Mara’s tone.

  I need the money, Jord thought. ‘It’s just how I am – I prefer to be doing something. I can’t, in good conscience, be seen as missing too much work.’

  ‘Well, if you say so. My personal recommendation would be for you to rest. But you know better; your doctor cleared you. So, be my guest. If you wish, I’ll inform Polazit.’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Have a good day.’

  ‘Good day. And do try to rest, though.’

  As the call ended, Elia’s concern bubbled over immediately. ‘You sure? Isn’t that a bit... too soon?’

  ‘I’m sure, don’t worry,’ Jord replied, though inwardly he mused, and I need to ask Lapo what the hell is happening to me.

  The remainder of the day unfolded in gentler rhythms – quiet reading, light-hearted banter with Elia, who’d taken the day off, and a joint, albeit futile, attempt to coax the temperamental boiler back to life. Their combined technical knowledge proved insufficient, and a coin flip between self-education and professional help determined their course. Fate chose education, sending Elia out with Jord’s smart card to procure technical manuals that soon had both brothers squinting at diagrams and debating interpretations.