Thursday, August 15
8:17 A.M.
Allston, Boston
Mered woke with the stale feeling of having never really fallen asleep.
For a few seconds he stayed where he was, one arm folded over his eyes, blanket half off his legs, the room dim behind his eyelids. His mouth tasted dry. His neck hurt. There was a hard little pulse of pain behind his right eye that matched his heartbeat and made him regret every choice he had made over the last week, starting with agreeing to extra shifts and ending with staring out his window like an idiot at two in the morning.
He let out a breath through his nose.
"Yeah," he muttered to the ceiling he still wasn't looking at. "That was smart."
The apartment was quiet in the way Boston apartments rarely were. Not silent—never silent—but quiet enough that he could pick apart the sounds one at a time. Pipes in the wall. A bus grinding somewhere farther off. A door below him closing with a hollow thud. Someone walking down the hall in shoes with a hard heel.
Normal.
Mostly.
He pulled his arm away and blinked up at the ceiling. Same faint water stain in the corner. Same hairline crack near the smoke detector. Gray morning light pressing through the blinds in narrow bands. The room looked exactly like it had every other morning since he'd moved in.
That helped more than it should have.
Mered turned his head toward the window.
Closed.
Blinds down.
Nothing hovering outside.
No strange light suspended over the street.
No impossible movement. No feeling that the air itself had shifted and forgotten how to fit back together.
He shut his eyes again and rubbed a hand over his face.
Overworked, he told himself.
That was all.
Too many late nights. Too much screen glare. Too much coffee on too little food. He'd gone to bed with his nerves wound tight and his brain still running. That was enough to make ordinary things look wrong. People saw weird things when they were tired. Shadows moved. Lights blurred. Your mind stitched patterns together because it hated uncertainty more than it hated being wrong.
He sat up slowly.
The headache sharpened for a second, then settled into a throb behind both eyes. He waited with his elbows on his knees until the room stopped leaning quite so hard to the left.
"Need sleep," he said to nobody. His voice came out rough. "That's all."
He stayed there another moment, looking around the apartment.
A chair with yesterday's hoodie over the back. His keys on the counter beside a folded receipt and a takeout menu he kept meaning to throw away. The small kitchen sink with one glass in it. The microwave clock glowing 8:17. His sneakers near the door, toes pointed in opposite directions like someone else had kicked them off.
Everything looked ordinary enough that he almost laughed at himself.
Almost.
Because under that first, easy glance, something felt lightly misaligned. Not enough to point at. Not enough to name. Just a thin, irritating sense that the room had been put back together from memory by someone who had only seen it once.
Mered frowned.
His backpack was on the floor beside the couch.
He was fairly sure he had left it on the chair.
He looked at it for a few seconds, waiting for the certainty to come. It didn't. Maybe he had dropped it there when he got in. Maybe he was remembering the night before that. Maybe it had always been there and his brain was still trying to invent a problem so it could justify how off he felt.
He stood, regretted it immediately, then shuffled toward the bathroom.
The floor was cold under his feet. He splashed water on his face and braced both hands on the sink, staring down until the dizziness passed. When he looked up, his reflection looked as tired as he felt—eyes slightly bloodshot, curls flattened on one side, jaw shadowed darker than usual because he'd skipped shaving yesterday.
"You look terrible," he told himself.
The mirror version said it back in silence.
He reached for his toothbrush, squeezed on toothpaste, and froze for half a second.
His hand had moved. He knew it had moved. But in the mirror, for a blink, it felt late.
Not fully late. Not enough that anybody else would notice. Just enough that the image catching up to him seemed to take one careful step too many.
Mered stopped.
The toothbrush hovered in his hand.
He stared at his reflection. The reflection stared back.
A beat passed. Then another.
Nothing.
He let out a quiet sound somewhere between annoyance and embarrassment.
"Okay," he said. "No. We're not doing that."
He set the toothbrush down, gripped the edge of the sink harder than he needed to, and lowered his head.
Lack of sleep.
That was still the answer. The only answer. He was not about to stand in his own bathroom at eight in the morning turning a delayed blink into a haunting.
After a minute, he brushed his teeth, washed his face properly, and went to start coffee.
The machine gurgled awake with more protest than effort. While it worked, he opened the fridge and looked inside without seeing much of it. Eggs. Half a bottle of hot sauce. Some leftover rice. A takeout container he should probably stop trusting. He shut it again and leaned one shoulder against the counter.
Sunlight pushed between the blinds and laid bright bars across the floorboards. Dust moved through them in slow drifts.
He watched it too long.
Something about the light bothered him.
Not the color. Not the brightness. Just the feeling of it on his eyes, a faint, needling sensitivity that made him want to squint even indoors. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Fantastic."
The coffee finished. He poured a mug and took it black, too hot, standing there in his T-shirt and sweats with one hand around the ceramic while the steam hit his face. The first sip hurt, which helped. It tasted burnt. Also helpful. Burnt coffee from a cheap machine in a cramped apartment was real enough to lean on.
By the second sip, his thoughts had found their shape again.
He had been exhausted.
He'd seen something odd in the sky because the city was full of lights, reflections, planes, drones, and every other kind of thing that looked one way from far enough away and another up close. Then he'd gotten in his head. That was all the rest of it was. Fatigue. Stress. The human brain turning one strange second into a whole experience because it couldn't stand loose ends.
That explanation fit.
It fit well enough that he almost believed it completely.
Almost.
His phone was on the kitchen counter, screen dark. He picked it up, expecting dead battery, but it lit immediately under his thumb. Forty-three percent.
A stack of notifications waited for him.
He frowned and unlocked it.
Two missed calls.
Three messages from Aaron.
One from his cousin Hana.
A weather alert from overnight he ignored.
Mered tapped Aaron's thread first.
Aaron
1:41 A.M. You good?
1:44 A.M. Bro?
1:52 A.M. Why'd you send me that
Mered stared at the screen.
Below those messages was one from him.
At 1:39 A.M.
He hadn't opened the thread yet, and still his stomach tightened.
He tapped.
The message sat there plain as anything:
Mered: you ever get the feeling something is looking back through the light
He read it once. Then again.
No typo-ridden half-sleep nonsense. No drunk text, because he hadn't been drinking. It was too coherent, too specific, and he had absolutely no memory of sending it.
His thumb hovered over the screen.
"What?"
He checked the timestamp again. 1:39 A.M.
That was around when he'd still been by the window. He remembered standing there. Remembered the wrong-moving light. Remembered the awful, slippery second when the street below had seemed to bend out of shape without actually changing.
He did not remember picking up his phone.
He scrolled up as if context might appear and explain it. Nothing. Their last conversation before that had been hours earlier—Aaron sending a video, Mered reacting with a single laughing emoji, the usual.
He backed out and opened Hana's message.
Hana
2:07 A.M. Are you awake?
That was it.
No follow-up. No explanation.
He checked her call log. No missed call from her. Just the message.
Mered looked at the time in the corner of the screen, then at the microwave. Both read 8:24.
He opened his photos next, because he didn't know why he was doing any of this now except that unease had already gotten a foot in the door and was shoving its shoulder through.
There was a new photo from last night.
Timestamped 1:38 A.M.
He opened it and felt the tiny muscles along his back lock up.
It was his window.
Or mostly his window.
The frame was there, and the glass, and the blurred suggestion of the street beyond, but the image had been smeared by motion or bad focus or a hand shaking at the wrong moment. Light had stretched across the dark in a long pale streak, too bright at the center, fading at the edges. The buildings outside were warped into indistinct shadows. Reflected in the glass, barely visible, was part of his own face and shoulder.
No, not reflected.
Mered zoomed in.
The shape was wrong for a reflection. Too far back. Too centered.
He stared harder until the pixels broke apart.
Then he swore softly, locked the phone, unlocked it again, and looked once more. This time it was only what it should have been: a bad low-light photo taken by an exhausted person with unsteady hands and a cheap phone camera trying to focus on darkness.
He exhaled.
"See?" he said aloud, though there was nobody to convince except himself. "Exactly. Tired."
But his voice had gone flatter.
He set the mug down and rubbed his palm over the back of his neck.
A memory tugged at him then—not complete, just the sense of standing still in the dark with the strange pressure of being noticed. Not watched from the street. Not watched from another apartment.
Something less reasonable than that, which was exactly why he shoved it away.
He tapped Aaron's message again and typed:
Mered: Fell asleep. Weird night. Ignore me.
He looked at it, then added:
Mered: Was half-dead tired
That sounded normal enough. He sent both.
Aaron responded almost immediately.
Aaron: Half-dead people usually text less creepy stuff
Aaron: You at least alive now?
Despite himself, Mered gave a short breath of a laugh.
Mered: Unfortunately
The reply bubbles appeared, disappeared, then came back.
Aaron: A true tragedy
Aaron: you working today?
Mered: Later
He left it there.
The exchange helped. A little. Conversation dragged things back into proportion. People said weird things late at night. Friends made jokes. Morning came and every bad thought looked smaller under it.
He picked up his mug again and turned toward the window.
As he did, something in the glass of the microwave door moved.
Mered stopped.
It was only a reflection—part of the room thrown dimly back at him in the dark pane.
Counter. Sink. Stripes of morning light.
And, for the briefest second, the impression of someone standing near the apartment door.
His whole body went still before his mind caught up.
He turned.
The door was shut. Locked. Chain still in place.
No one there.
The apartment behind him was empty.
He stood listening so hard the headache flared again. Pipes. Street noise. A car horn somewhere distant. The hum of the fridge. Nothing else.
After a few seconds, he forced himself to move. He walked to the door, checked the lock anyway, then glanced through the peephole into the hall.
Empty.
He stayed there longer than he wanted to admit.
Finally he stepped back, one hand still on the knob, and laughed once under his breath without humor.
"Sleep," he said. "I need sleep and a better hobby."
The words landed thinly in the room.
He went to get dressed for the day because routine was safer than thought. Jeans. Dark sweatshirt. Socks from the clean laundry pile because he hadn't folded it yet. He kept glancing at the phone on the counter without touching it.
When he reached for his watch beside the bed, he paused.
It was already on his wrist.
Mered stared at it.
He was almost certain—almost—that he had picked it up from the nightstand.
No. He checked. The nightstand was empty except for his charger and a receipt.
He looked back at his left hand. The watch sat there like it had always been there, cool against his skin.
He didn't remember putting it on.
For a few seconds he just stood in the middle of the room, jaw tight, not moving.
Then he closed his eyes.
There were explanations for that too. Habit. Muscle memory. He'd put it on automatically while thinking about something else. People did that all the time. Drove places and barely remembered the route. Locked doors without consciously noting it. Reached for familiar objects with half their mind somewhere else.
Normal.
Still normal.
He opened his eyes and looked toward the window again.
The blinds trembled very slightly, though he could not hear a draft.
Not enough to mean anything. Old building. Thin windows. Heat kicking on somewhere.
Mered grabbed his phone, keys, and bag in one sweep. The movement felt abrupt even to him, like his body had made the decision before the rest of him had.
He slung the backpack over one shoulder and headed for the door.
On the way out, he caught his reflection in the dark TV screen across the room.
He stopped.
His own face stared back at him, distant and faint in the black glass.
A second later, it blinked.
Mered had not.
The room seemed to narrow around that single fact.
Then a bus roared past outside, making the window shiver in its frame, and the reflection broke apart into light and shadow so quickly he could not swear to what he'd seen.
He stood there with his hand clenched around his keys.
"This is probably nothing," he said quietly.
He did not sound convinced.
He opened the door, stepped into the
hallway, and pulled it shut behind him a little faster than usual, as if leaving the apartment first might let him decide what any of it meant later.
But even as the latch clicked into place, one thought stayed with him all the way to the stairs:
Something had changed.
Whether it was the room, the night, or him, he still couldn't tell.