Modus Vivendi

003 nobody's daughter

FIVE DAYS AGO.

LONDON-522

✷

How do you measure something that doesn't exist?

Past midnight, the unfortunately nondescript and ever-forgotten Hay Street was at a standstill, silent except for the distal wail of sirens on the main road, but otherwise stagnant and without a pulse. Only one working lamp post lit the pavement, its weak glow illuminating a boarded-up shop front that hadn't seen a single patron in years. The apartments stacked above the shops on the ground floor housed occupants of the perpetually inebriated variety, needles and sallow skin and eyes as vacant as the sidewalks even in the daytime. As far as anyone else was concerned, Hay Street had always been this way, eternally frozen in time.

A flash of silver sliced through the darkness, and Sabine came rippling out of the dark in a burst of glowing light. A palm-sized spot on her chest burned, cold metal searing against warm, thrumming skin. Sabine rubbed at it absently as she sheathed her sword and dug around her pockets for her house keys. After they'd come through the door, all she felt was the cold. She couldn't remember what happened to the device her mother had fastened around her neck. Either the silver tab—which Sabine had come to learn was the only key to opening the portal-door—had disintegrated upon coming through the luminescent portal, or her father had confiscated it off her.

Her fingers brushed the shell of the hard drive, and a horrible, dreadful feeling knotted in her guts. How do you measure something that doesn't exist? Before Sabine could name the emotion, her fingers snagged on the key ring. She fished it out, quickly letting herself into the heavily graffitied foyer of her apartment building, lit by a single sulphurous bulb swinging on its cord, and hurried up the winding staircase.

The front door of apartment 4F1 swung open with a plaintive groan. 

Sabine shucked off her combat boots and placed them neatly in the corner, atop the wooden shoe rack, filled with creased Jordans and dirty trainers jutted from the lip of the shelves like bad teeth. Then she wandered into the slumbering apartment, socked feet padding soundlessly against the carpet, afraid to stir the silence.

Through the open door at the end of the dead-ended corridor, she could see the computer screen lit up, cleansing the dark room in a neon-blue ennui. At the cluttered desk were a set of silhouetted shoulders hunched over the keyboard, the slow rise and fall of someone who'd fallen asleep mid-task. Sabine found herself drawn into the blue glow of the room.

In the picture that made up the login page, she could make out the smiling faces of two boys, gap-toothed grins striving against dark skin.

Sabine drifted across the room to press her hand against the bright blue static of the screen, stepping over piles of library books and dirty laundry strewn across the floor, the disordered fingerprint of living. Two boys in the pool, clinging to each other like a raft in the middle of the ocean, cherubic cheeks pressed together, the electric blue of the water glistering under the sun. Though by now adulthood had sloughed the youth off his face and darkened the circles around his eyes, Sabine recognised Donovan's lopsided grin. The other, she had no clue about, though she could see the ghost of uncanny resemblance. A brother, perhaps, or a close cousin. Sabine could smell the pungent chlorine, could feel the water lapping against her skin, the gelid chill of immersion seeping into her bones, the walls of the bedroom morphing in periphery until she, too, was there, kicking her feet in the stirring water, the chipped tiles brushing against her elbows. Could hear their laughter amid the splashing, a liquid echo in the shell of her ear.