The Young & The Doomed

No Surprises

Stella Marlow woke to the sound of silence.

For one suspended second, she lay perfectly still beneath the tangled sheets, staring at the water-stained ceiling of her apartment and trying to understand why the room felt wrong.

Then she saw the time.

"—No."

The word barely made it out before she was upright.

7:42 A.M.

Her shift at the Fairfield County Medical Examiner's Office started at eight.

Stella lunged for her phone on the nightstand, knocking over a half-empty glass of water and a paperback anatomy guide in the process. The screen was crowded with notifications: three missed alarms, a low-battery warning, and one text from her supervisor sent twelve minutes ago.

Mara: You on your way?

Her stomach dropped so fast it hurt.

"I'm going to die," Stella muttered.

The apartment offered no comfort. It was a one-bedroom above a laundromat on the edge of town, all thin walls, rattling pipes, and windows that never quite shut properly. The place smelled faintly of detergent from downstairs and the burnt toast she had made two nights ago and forgotten to throw away. Tuition bills sat in a neat, accusing pile on the kitchen counter beside a mug full of pens, loose change, and exactly one dead houseplant.

Stella swung her legs out of bed and immediately stepped on a textbook.

"Perfect."

She was moving before she had fully woken up—grabbing a towel, digging through the laundry basket for something clean enough to wear, checking the time every twelve seconds as though the clock might take pity on her and reverse itself.

It did not.

The shower lasted less than four minutes. She scrubbed shampoo through her dark hair with one hand while trying to remember whether she had an exam in Introduction to Criminal Justice that afternoon. Probably. She had highlighted half the chapter on forensic evidence at two in the morning, right before deciding she could close her eyes for just ten minutes.

Three alarms later, she had learned an important lesson about the difference between setting alarms and actually hearing them.

Steam clung to the bathroom mirror when she rushed out, nearly slipped on the tile, and caught herself against the sink.

Her reflection looked as startled as she felt.

At nineteen, Stella had the kind of face people often mistook for younger—wide hazel eyes, soft features, a dusting of freckles across her nose that refused to disappear no matter how much makeup she wore. Her hair was still damp when she pulled it into a loose knot at the back of her head. She shoved on black slacks, a gray shirt, and the faded cardigan she kept telling herself she would replace when she had money left over.

There was never money left over.

Her job at the medical examiner's office had come through her uncle Raymond, a retired deputy coroner who had made one phone call and, apparently, decided that was enough to reroute the course of her life. Officially, Stella was an autopsy technician assistant. She prepared examination rooms, cataloged clothing and personal effects, logged evidence, restocked supplies, cleaned instruments, and did whatever else the senior staff asked without complaining.

Unofficially, she was a first-year college student trying not to faint when confronted with the worst moments of someone else's life.

She was good at it, though.