He wore a white shirt, slightly stained near the collar, a black windbreaker, and a lightweight bag slung over one shoulder. Clouded eyes. Pale skin. The face of a boy just beginning to mature.
At 6:30 in the morning, he walked to school with his gaze fixed upward, daydreaming. It was a strange habit, and even he couldn't fully explain it. His friends mocked him for it; he was the only one who could see the roof of the world. Above him, a vast canopy hung suspended, held aloft by immense roots that stretched skyward like the splayed fingers of an open hand, bearing the weight of something unimaginably large. The sky curved and bent in a seemingly endless sweep, stretching as far as the eye could reach.
Was he the only one who could see it? The only one who felt that the world above him was undeniably, terrifyingly real?
And yet, beneath all that wonder, he carried the ordinary weight of his own life, unpaid school fees, a family that rarely came home, and when they did, said nothing, falling asleep without so much as a greeting. He walked through the world alone.
The sun was just rising as he made his way to school, its pale light spreading thin over a misty horizon. The walk was long, nearly six kilometers, but his breathing was steady by the time he arrived, his body long since accustomed to the distance. He had measured it once, idly, on a morning much like this one.
He arrived just as the first lesson of the day had already begun.
The classroom walls had once been stark white. Now they were the colour of sand, grainy and dull, the paint worn down to a rough texture by years of neglect. The wooden chairs, once polished brown, had faded to a sickly yellow, their surfaces carved with the idle graffiti of generations past. The desks were large enough for two students and in worse shape than the chairs, some worn through entirely, eaten away over years of use.
Atama dropped into his seat near the middle of the room, ignoring the noise around him. Then a hand tapped his shoulder.
"Hey! Atama, want to go to the forest with us?"
Something lit up in his eyes. He twisted around to face the boy behind him. They used to go into the woods all the time, back when they were younger. Then they grew up, or pretended to, and the forest became something sealed off by some unspoken agreement with maturity. But the old excitement was still there, stirring beneath the surface.
"Where?" Atama asked, his face bright with something he rarely showed.
"Not far, west side of school. There's a river over there, and I… heard a rumour." Mer glanced around before leaning in closer.
"What rumour?"
He lowered his voice to a whisper.
"Rumour has it people bathe in that river. You know… beautiful naked women."
Mer grinned like he was hatching the most scandalous plan in history. But before either of them could react, the desk behind them lurched, a sharp, jarring bang. Both boys froze.
A girl sat there: brown hair cut short, a round face with small freckles scattered across her neck, and a stare that could have shattered glass.
"You fucking pervs," she said, teeth clenched. "That's why y'all are lonely as hell. Pigs."
Mer looked at her for a moment. Then, with the calm of someone who knew exactly what he was doing, he replied.
"Shut the fuck up. You're the reason we get a boner every day, that's why there's a job called stripper."
The girl exploded. Mer met her fury with equal measure. Within seconds, it had spiralled into the kind of argument that fills an entire room, voices sharp and rising, echoing all the way out into the hall.
Atama watched them for a moment. Then he stood and left.
It wasn't worth the headache. The fight was pointless, one of those endless battles where both sides mistake pride for principle and volume for victory. He knew what the right answer was. He suspected most people did. But knowing the answer had never stopped anyone from fighting.
With nothing better to do, he decided to wash his face. The hallway was nearly empty, just silence, and a few delinquents draped across the back rows of classrooms, where they didn't belong. No students, no teachers. Just the hollow echo of a building that had once been meant for something.
This school had a history. A dark one. A student, consumed by his own thoughts, had taken his life within these walls. The tragedy had hollowed the place out over time, parents stopped enrolling their children, and the ones who remained were the ones with nowhere else to go. Atama was one of them.
He stopped at a window and glanced outside. The ground was slick with rain.
"Such a gloomy day," he thought, and kept walking.
The bathroom door swung open.
They stopped.
Inside, a group of older students, thugs, by every measure, had cornered a smaller boy against the far wall. Atama took in the scene in a single glance, then stepped to the sink and turned on the faucet.
He knew the boy was being beaten. They had a history, though not the kind that warranted sympathy. The weakling was cunning, more so than people gave him credit for, and he had made enemies because of it. This was, in its own way, the natural result.
Atama drowned his hands in the murky water. At home, he rarely bathed properly, making do with trips to the river behind his house when school let out. The water here was no better, greenish, thick with grime, but it was water. He brought his wet hands to his face.
A shoe struck him in the side of the head.
It bounced off his skull and clattered to the tiles. Atama straightened slowly.
"Hey, shithead!" one of the thugs called. "Don't just stand there, help your buddy!"
The others laughed. Atama said nothing. He leaned back against the wall and looked at the cracked mirror above the sink. His reflection came back to him in pieces, broken across the fault lines of shattered glass.
The bathroom was small. The air sat hot and stale. The fluorescent light above flickered in an unsteady rhythm. He could hear his own heartbeat.
He wasn't an idiot. He knew what was coming. Seven of them, one of him, in this tiny room, no version of this ended well. His only real option was to play scared, stall, and find a way out.
Then a hand seized his shoulder.
His body moved before his mind did. The grip shoved him forward, and he spun with it, momentum carrying his fist in a sharp arc. It connected, hard, clean, against the jaw of the thug who'd grabbed him.
For a half-second, the room went still.
The thug staggered back, cupping his face. He looked up slowly. When his hand came away, there was blood on his lip, and his eyes were burning.
through his veins.
He had just made everything much worse.
* * *
Huff… huff…
He ran.
His clothes were damp, his sleeve smeared with someone else's blood. The corridor stretched ahead, and he took it at a full sprint, heart hammering, lungs clawing for air, as the sound of pursuit thundered behind him. Shouting, footsteps, the whole hall alive with it.
He ducked through a door.
The room was dark and abandoned. One window was cracked open, rain misting in through the gap. He pressed his back to the door, and a moment later heard them, a pack of footsteps rumbling down the hallway, voices cutting through the walls.
"Where's the brat hiding?"
"Try the empty classrooms. He can't have gone far."
"Stop bossing me around, shithead."
Atama's pulse was deafening. He crouched low and moved quickly to the teacher's desk, squeezing himself beneath it, back against the panel. He waited.
The voices came and went. He stayed still, watching the doorknob from across the room, his heart slowly finding a steadier rhythm. The shouting faded. The hallway fell quiet.
He exhaled.
He scanned the room, messy, unoccupied, textbooks scattered across the floor. The half-open window was still there, rain tapping softly at the frame. He crawled over and pushed it wider. The wood was rough under his hands, the iron muntins cold and slick with moisture.
He leaned out.
Below him, a narrow concrete canopy jutted from the wall. Not much of a ledge. The rain had picked up, and the surface glistened. If he stepped wrong, there was nothing to catch him.
He pulled back inside.
He crossed to the door instead, pressed his ear to it, and listened. Nothing. He wrapped his hand around the lever and turned it slowly, easing it down until the latch released. The door swung open a crack. Empty hallway. He opened it wider, stepped through,
And stopped.
There was someone standing directly in front of him. Close. Too close to have been there by accident.
Atama looked up.