Lucas didn't sleep well that night.
He lay on his back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, one arm folded behind his head. Aiden's room was quiet across the hall. The house was still. Outside, the occasional car passed, its headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling before disappearing.
He kept seeing it.
The hood slipping. The face underneath. That single second before the car carried him past.
*It couldn't have been Derrick.*
He turned onto his side.
*Derrick was home. Recovering. He said so himself.*
He turned onto his back again.
*But that face—*
He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead and held it there until the thought went quiet.
It didn't go quiet for a long time.
•~~~•
The following evening, Lucas walked to Derrick's house alone.
The streets were quiet, caught in that flat, colourless hour between afternoon and dark when the sky can't quite decide what it wants to be. He had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement ahead, turning the same thoughts over and over the way you do when you already know something is wrong but haven't yet found the words to say it cleanly.
By the time he reached the front door, he still hadn't found them.
He knocked anyway.
A few seconds passed. Then footsteps — light, unhurried — and the door opened.
Amelia's face brightened the moment she saw him.
"Lucas." She stepped back immediately, pulling the door wider. "Come in, come in — don't stand out there in the cold." She was already moving toward the kitchen before he had fully crossed the threshold. "Derrick is upstairs. He's been in that room all day, barely came down for lunch. It'll do him good to have a visitor." She glanced back over her shoulder. "Can I get you something? Tea? I made soup earlier — there's plenty left."
"I'm fine, thank you."
She gave him the particular look that mothers perfect over years of practice — the one that says *I don't believe you, but I'll allow it* — and waved him toward the stairs without another word.
•~~~•
The door to Derrick's room was closed.
Lucas stood outside it for a moment, one hand raised, not quite knocking yet. From inside — silence. Not the silence of sleep, but the particular silence of someone awake and still.
He knocked twice and pushed the door open.
Derrick was sitting at his desk, back straight, both hands resting flat on the surface in front of him. He turned when the door moved — unhurried, unsurprised — with the composure of someone who had heard the footsteps on the stairs and had a moment to arrange himself before the handle turned.
"Lucas." A slight tilt of his head. "Didn't expect you today."
"Thought I'd come by." Lucas stepped inside and let the door fall most of the way closed behind him.
He took in the room as he crossed it — the calendar pinned to the wall, its surface turned slightly away from the light. The neatly made bed. The window with its curtain half drawn against the evening. Everything orderly. Everything in its place. The kind of tidiness that looks less like a habit and more like a decision.
He dropped onto the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, and looked at Derrick.
"How are you feeling?"
"Better." Derrick's eyes moved over him with quiet attention. "You look like you didn't sleep."
"I slept fine."
Derrick said nothing to that. He simply held the same steady gaze, patient and unreadable, the way he had always been — even as children, even when everything around him was loud and uncertain, Derrick had always been still.
Outside, somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice. Then silence.
Lucas looked at him.
"I saw someone last night," he said. "On the road home from the trip. Moving fast. Dark hoodie pulled up over their face." He let a beat pass. "White hair."
Something moved in Derrick's expression — not much, barely anything — and then the corner of his mouth lifted. Not a full smile. Just the edge of one, settled there with the ease of someone entirely unbothered.
"Lucas." His voice came out patient and almost fond, the tone of someone explaining something gently obvious. "You spent two hours in a car after a full day outside. You were exhausted." He tilted his head slightly to one side. "White hair isn't rare. You probably saw a stranger and your tired mind filled in the rest." A pause. "You were half asleep."
Lucas looked at him.
Derrick looked back. Perfectly calm. The faint trace of amusement still resting at the corner of his mouth, like it had always been there.
Lucas let out a slow, quiet breath through his nose.
"Maybe," he said.
Just the one word. Flat and unhurried.
He didn't press it. He didn't reach for anything else. He simply sat there and let the silence do what silence does — and something in the room shifted, small and nearly invisible, the way a room shifts when a window is opened somewhere else in the house and the air moves without explanation.
•~~~•
"So." Derrick leaned back slightly in the chair. "How was the lake?"
And just like that, the weight of it lifted — mutually, wordlessly, the way two people can agree to set something down without either of them acknowledging that it was ever picked up.
Lucas let himself settle back on his hands.
"Good," he said. "Aiden found a duck."
Derrick raised an eyebrow.
"The duck found Aiden," Lucas corrected. "Chased him halfway across the field."
Something broke in Derrick's expression — a short, real laugh, quiet and genuine, the kind that arrives before you can decide whether to allow it.
"Was he alright?"
"Physically, yes. Emotionally he's still processing."
Derrick shook his head slowly, still smiling. "And William?"
"Watched the entire thing without moving." Lucas paused. "Didn't even put down his cup."
Derrick pressed his lips together, suppressing something.
"And the others?"
Lucas talked through the afternoon the way you recount something to a friend who wasn't there — loosely, without structure, picking out the moments that had stayed with him. The way the lake had looked in the early morning light, the sky sitting doubled on its surface. William laying everything out without ceremony. Chloe sliding rice balls to Aiden when she assumed no one was paying attention. The quiet hour he and Alon had spent lying in the grass, looking up through the canopy of leaves, not saying much of anything.
Derrick listened the way he always listened. Still. Attentive. Asking a question here and there, small ones, the kind that showed he was actually following rather than waiting for his turn to speak.
Then Lucas mentioned the strangers.
"We ended up with company for the afternoon," he said. "Two people from the nearest village. Aiden practically delivered them out of the forest personally." He shook his head at the memory. "An older man — calm, easy to talk to, ended up cooking with William like they'd known each other for years. And his son." He glanced up briefly. "Matthew and Andrew."
The room changed.
It happened fast — faster than a breath, faster than a blink. Derrick's eyes went wide and something erupted across his face, raw and sudden and entirely unguarded. Not surprise. Something sharper than surprise. Something with edges.
It was gone in under a second.
Pulled back. Smoothed over. The calm returned like a curtain drawn across a window — neat, deliberate, leaving no gap.
Derrick's hands rested in his lap, perfectly still.
"Sounds like an interesting afternoon," he said.
His voice was even. Unhurried. Level all the way through, not a single ripple in it.
Lucas held his gaze.
One beat. Two.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "It was."
He didn't say what he had just seen. He filed it away instead, carefully and without ceremony, the way you pocket something valuable in a crowd — and kept talking, his tone carrying the same easy weight as before, as though the air in the room hadn't just changed entirely.
But it had.
And they both knew it.
•~~~•
They stayed like that for another hour — maybe longer. The conversation drifted the way it does between people who have known each other long enough that silence is never uncomfortable, only occasionally necessary. Small things, mostly. Old memories. Plans that didn't exist yet. The kind of talking that isn't really about anything but means everything because of who you're doing it with.
At some point, Amelia appeared with two cups of tea and a small plate of biscuits, set them on the desk without interrupting, smiled briefly at Lucas, and disappeared again.
Derrick's cup sat untouched.
By the time Lucas stood to leave, the last of the daylight had gone from the window, the room settling into that particular dimness that comes just before someone reaches for the lamp.
"I'll come by again soon," Lucas said, pulling his jacket on.
"You don't have to," Derrick replied.
"I know."
"But you will anyway."
Lucas glanced at him. "Probably."
The ghost of a smile crossed Derrick's face.
Lucas opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. The floorboards were familiar under his feet — he had walked them enough times over the years that he knew exactly which one creaked and how to avoid it. He started down the stairs, one hand trailing the bannister, his footsteps quiet in the stillness of the house.
Halfway down, he stopped.
He turned and looked back up toward the landing. Derrick's door was closed. A thin line of light showed at the bottom, warm and steady.
*Something is off.*
The thought arrived without effort, the way things do when they have been forming for a long time and have only just reached the surface.
*It's been off for a while. But tonight—*
He stood there a moment longer, eyes on that line of light.
Then he turned and walked the rest of the way down.
•~~~•
Behind the closed door, Derrick didn't move for a long time.
The room was very quiet. The tea Amelia had brought sat cold and untouched on the corner of the desk. Outside, the last of the evening traffic moved past the window and faded.
He stared at the far wall, his expression distant — the look of someone working through something complicated in a place no one else can follow.
Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth curved upward.
*As expected.* The thought moved through him with something close to warmth. *He saw it. Sharp as ever — he saw it and said nothing. Kept it to himself.*
The smile held for a moment.
Then it was gone.
His jaw set. His eyes hardened — not with the blankness of calm, but with something underneath the calm, something that had weight and heat and hadn't been there a moment ago.
"Those bastards," he said quietly, to the empty room "...".
•~~~•
Lucas walked home slowly.
The evening had settled fully by now, the streetlamps casting their pools of yellow light across the pavement. He passed the same houses he had passed a hundred times, the same parked cars, the same corner shop with its lights still on. Everything ordinary. Everything exactly as it always was.
He barely saw any of it.
His mind kept returning to that second — that single, fractured second — when he had said the names and watched something real and uncontrolled move across Derrick's face before it was pulled back behind that wall of composure. So fast. So deliberate in the recovery.
*Matthew and Andrew.*
He turned the names over.
*Two strangers from a village nearby. Warm. Friendly. Generous with their time.* He thought about Matthew at the dinner table, the way his questions had moved — gentle, unhurried, never pressing, but always landing somewhere specific. The way Andrew had watched people when he assumed no one was watching him back.
And now Derrick's face.
That look.
*Does he know them?* The question arrived and wouldn't leave. *Did he know them before Aiden stumbled out of those trees with leaves in his hair and delivered them straight to our table? And if he did — from where? How?*
He turned a corner.
The questions pulled at each other, one leading to the next — the hooded figure on the road, Derrick's too-smooth denial, the body that had quietly become something stronger and steadier than anyone had been told to expect. The weeks of absence from school. The calendar on the wall with its circle of red ink.
*One thing, you could explain away.*
*Two things, maybe.*
He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and kept walking.
•~~~•
The next morning Lucas crossed the street to Alon's house.
The sky was pale and flat, the kind of blue that looks cold even when it isn't. His breath didn't quite mist but the air had a crispness to it that suggested the warmth of the previous days was gone. He walked with his hands in his jacket pockets, his thoughts only half on where he was going.
He rang the bell and waited.
A few seconds. Footsteps — quicker than Alon's, lighter.
The door opened.
Chloe stood in the frame, one hand still on the door handle. She was wearing a loose knitted jumper, her hair pulled back unevenly, the way it looks when someone has fixed it without really paying attention. She had clearly not been expecting company.
For a half second neither of them moved.
Then Lucas smiled — easy and unhurried.
"Hey."
One word. Entirely ordinary.
But Chloe's face did something involuntary and immediate. The colour rose to her cheeks before she could intercept it — a warmth that started at the jaw and moved upward, sudden and obvious — and her eyes went briefly to the side, checking the empty street as though someone might have witnessed it.
The street was empty.
"Hey," she managed. Her voice came out slightly quieter than she had intended.
From somewhere deep inside the house, sunk into the sofa by the sound of it, Alon's voice arrived with the particular laziness of someone who had been horizontal for a while.
"Who is it? — just let them in, why are you standing there?"
Chloe stepped back from the door, pulling it wider, her eyes finding the floor briefly before coming back up.
"Yeah — come in," she said. Quieter than usual. A little careful.
Lucas stepped inside.
The house was warm. The television was on somewhere ahead of him — he could hear it before he could see it, that low familiar murmur of daytime programming. The hallway smelled faintly of coffee and something that might have been whatever Chloe had been eating before the doorbell interrupted her.
He glanced toward the living room.
"What are you doing?" he called.
"Watching something." Alon's voice was entirely unbothered. "Come here — you need to see this."
Lucas stepped around Chloe — who moved to the side and appeared to find the wall extremely interesting for a moment — and walked through into the living room.
•~~~•
Alon was exactly where he sounded — stretched across the sofa with his legs up and his arms folded behind his head, looking like someone who had not moved in some time and had no particular plans to. The television across the room was showing a wildlife documentary, something about deep ocean creatures — strange, slow-moving things drifting through water so dark it looked like space.
Lucas dropped into the armchair beside the sofa.
"This is what I needed to see?"
"The fish," Alon said, without moving. "Look at the fish."
On the screen, something vast and pale and faintly luminescent drifted past the camera in absolute silence.
"...alright," Lucas said.
"Exactly."
They sat in companionable quiet for a while. This had always been one of the easier things about being around Alon — he never felt the need to perform conversation, never filled silence just to fill it. You could sit in the same room with him and say nothing for twenty minutes and it never felt like an absence of something.
Then Chloe appeared from the kitchen.
She had a plate of snacks balanced in one hand — biscuits, a few pieces of fruit, something wrapped in a napkin that Lucas couldn't immediately identify — and two drinks in the other. She set everything down on the low table between them with careful efficiency, straightened up, and glanced once at Lucas — just briefly, just long enough — before looking away.
"There's more in the kitchen if you want it," she said, to neither of them in particular.
Then she disappeared back down the hallway without waiting for a response.
Alon reached for a biscuit without looking away from the screen.
Lucas watched the doorway for a moment after she left.
Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and lowered his voice to the kind of level that isn't secretive but shifts the register of a conversation.
"Can I ask you something?"
Alon turned his head.
"Those two men at the lake," Lucas said. "Matthew and Andrew."
Alon's expression didn't change. But something in his attention sharpened — a subtle thing, the kind you'd miss if you didn't know him well enough to look for it.
"What about them?" he said.
"Did anything feel off to you?" Lucas turned his cup slowly between his palms, his eyes on the middle distance. "They were friendly. Easy to be around. Nothing you could point to directly." He paused. "But something sat wrong with me. The way they appeared. The questions at dinner — the way Matthew asked about parents, about family. It didn't feel like curiosity." He looked at Alon. "It felt like he was looking for something specific."
A long beat passed.
The documentary moved on to something else on the screen — a creature that produced its own light in the darkness, carrying a small bright point ahead of it through the deep like a lantern.
"I noticed," Alon said quietly.
Lucas waited.
"I didn't say anything at the time because I wasn't sure I wasn't imagining it." Alon exhaled through his nose and shifted slightly on the sofa, his eyes still on the screen. "But Andrew especially. The way he watched people when he thought no one was looking back." A pause. "Not like someone who's curious. Like someone who's checking something off a list."
The words arrived plainly and sat between them without decoration.
"Do you think they were actually from the village?" Lucas asked.
Alon was quiet for a moment.
"I think," he said at last, "that they were exactly as friendly as they needed to be."
Lucas held that.
Outside, a car passed and faded. The television murmured on. Everything in the room was warm and ordinary — the half-eaten plate of snacks, the low comfortable furniture, the faint smell of coffee still hanging in the air from earlier in the morning.
And yet.
Then the documentary cut.
It happened without warning — one moment a slow underwater world, the next a news desk, clean and bright and formal. The anchor sat with the particular composed stillness that means the story is serious before a single word has been read.
Alon sat up.
*"— authorities across multiple districts are reporting what is now being described as an escalating series of unexplained disappearances. In each case, individuals vanished without warning, without signs of struggle, and without any prior indication of distress. Investigations are ongoing, but officials have noted an unusual pattern linking the cases—"*
A pause. Brief. Deliberate.
*"— in every reported disappearance, the individuals were last seen in areas where abnormal and unseasonal weather conditions had recently been recorded."*
The screen cut to footage — cordoned streets, police tape moving in a cold wind, an aerial shot of a district Lucas didn't recognise. Then back to the anchor, composed and unblinking.
*"Authorities are urging the public to remain calm and to report any information that may be relevant to ongoing investigations. Meteorological teams have been deployed to affected areas, though officials have declined to comment on whether the weather anomalies are being treated as connected to the disappearances at this stage."*
The broadcast returned to its regular programming as smoothly as it had left.
The room was very quiet.
Alon was no longer lying down. He sat upright at the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees, staring at the screen with an expression that had gone still and unreasonable
Lucas said nothing.
He was thinking about the snow in the deserts — the news report Jackson had watched weeks ago, the spreading cold in places that had no business being cold. He was thinking about Joseph's house, the fire, the body recovered from the wreckage. He was thinking about a circle drawn in thick red ink on a calendar, pressed so deep into the paper it had nearly torn through.
About Derrick, sitting in a dim room with cold tea on his desk and something burning quietly behind his eyes.
Two days left, a voice in his memory said, to the empty street.
Lucas picked up his drink.
Outside, the morning's pale blue sky had shifted while neither of them was looking — the clouds gathering slowly at the edges, heavy and low, moving in the way that weather moves when it has already decided what it is going to do.
Neither of them mentioned it.
But neither of them looked away from the window for a long time.