Chương 2: A Night Walk

Lloyd had only just left the hospital and was making his way home through the evening city. The street greeted him the way it always did at this hour — indifferently and without ceremony. The street lamps were already burning at full strength, casting blurred yellow circles onto the wet asphalt. Somewhere in the distance a car passed, its headlights briefly lighting up the corner of a building before disappearing around a bend.

It was quiet — not that dead silence that unsettles you, but the calm, evening kind, when the city simply catches its breath between day and night. When the daytime bustle has already faded and the night hasn't yet picked up speed. A brief pause. Lloyd liked exactly that.

"Almost forgot." He shoved his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small case for his wireless earphones — flat, slightly worn at the corners, with a barely visible scratch on the lid. He opened it carefully, took out both earphones and put them in. Then he pulled out his phone and checked the time first thing. 20: 40.

"They kept me longer than usual today." He opened the music app and started his favourite playlist. A moment later a familiar rhythm poured from his ears straight into his head — quiet, steady, exactly the kind you need when you're just walking and not really thinking about anything in particular. Or thinking about everything at once, which amounts to the same thing.

The music didn't drown out the world — it simply placed itself between him and the city like a thin transparent film, through which everything was still visible, just a little softer. A little further away. He was about to put his phone back in his pocket when a notification lit up the screen. A message. From his father.

"Lloyd, could you pick up a loaf of bread and two bottles of milk on your way home. I might not make it back tonight. Swamped with work." Lloyd rolled his eyes.

"Now I have to go to the shop too. I just want to fall onto my bed and sleep forever." With a trace of sorrow in his expression he turned off the screen and put the phone back where it came from.

"Well, on the bright side — it's on my way." He walked slowly, almost slouching — hands in his hoodie pockets, chin slightly lowered, gaze drifting between the ground and the sky. He was in no hurry. There was nowhere to hurry to and no reason to. The road was soaked with rain. The asphalt gleamed under the street lamps like a dark mirror, and in the puddles the lit windows of the upper floors were reflected — blurred, rippling, as if alive.

Every gust of wind wrinkled those reflections, turned them into shapeless smears, then gathered them back together. From the trees lining the pavement, dry leaves fell slowly. Not all at once — one by one, two by two, quietly and without rush. Orange, yellow, some already touched with brown. One had stuck to the wet asphalt right under his foot. Lloyd automatically stepped around it — didn't tread on it, though he could have. It just happened that way. Autumn.

The best weather for Lloyd — because it causes the least amount of problems. Not too hot, not too cold. Gets dark early, which means fewer people on the street. It smells of damp and leaves — a smell he'd long since grown used to and which for some reason always had a calming effect. Didn't energise him, didn't unsettle him — just calmed him. Like something very old and very reliable. Just the sound of rain, just the wind, just autumn. Nothing extra.

He walked, listened to music and watched the sky, in which stars were already appearing here and there — faint for now, tentative, pushing through the thinning clouds. The sky above a city is never truly black — too much light from below. But right now, in this brief evening interval, it was dark blue, almost violet at the horizon. Somewhere to his side a car sped past too quickly — its wheels hit a puddle and the leaves all around whirled upward, spun for a second and settled back onto the asphalt.

Lloyd didn't even turn around.

"I'm sixteen already. Time to find some kind of part-time work." The thought wasn't a new one. He came back to it regularly — much the same way you probe a sore tooth with your tongue. Not because it's pleasant, but because it happens on its own. Money was needed not in some abstract sense, but concretely. And he understood perfectly well that a sixteen-year-old with no experience, no connections and no particular talents didn't have much room to manoeuvre.

He turned the options over in his head — lazily, without enthusiasm, the way you sort through old things in a desk drawer.

"Courier? On your feet all day, pennies per delivery. Thrilling prospect." He grimaced.

"Warehouse? Even better. Lugging boxes around for eight hours straight for the same pennies." Somewhere on the next street a café sign glowed — warm orange light, the smell of coffee reaching even here, barely catching, cut through by the damp air. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Waiter? Smiling at people who look straight through you. No thanks." He breathed out. None of the options grabbed him — they all seemed equally grey, equally endless and equally far from whatever it was he couldn't quite put into words. He just knew he wanted something different. What exactly — he didn't know yet.

"Fine. I'll think about it tomorrow. Tonight — shop, home, sleep." He shifted his gaze back to the road ahead. On the horizon a dull white glow had begun to appear. As he got closer it took on shape — a building, one wall of which was almost entirely glass. Through it, as if through an aquarium, he could make out shelves of products, colourful labels, lit-up fridges along the far wall, sweet stands by the entrance. All of it glowed from inside with an even white light — a little too bright for the dark street.

But that's exactly why shops always looked like lighthouses in the dark. Just lighthouses telling you to come buy some milk. The shop. The place where he had to interrupt his comfortable route for a few minutes. He approached the entrance and the glass doors slid apart automatically — quietly, smoothly, with a soft hiss. A wave of warmth came out, along with fresh bread and something sweet. After the autumn air it felt almost sharp — too warm, too bright, too many smells at once.

Lloyd blinked for a moment, then adjusted. He took a bag from the stand at the entrance — thin, transparent, printed with the chain's logo — and made his way through the shop. Inside it was quiet. Not empty, but nearly. In one of the aisles an elderly woman was methodically comparing two packets of grain, holding them at arm's length and squinting. Somewhere deeper in the store background music played softly — something completely neutral, without melody or meaning, just sound.

Lloyd pulled one earphone out and tucked it in his pocket. He walked on with the other still in. Bread — a loaf, dark, still warm to the touch. He took it from the shelf and held it in his hands for a few seconds — it was pleasantly heavy and smelled the way bread is supposed to smell. Milk — two bottles, from the fridge along the far wall. The fridge hummed quietly and cold air drifted from it even through the closed doors. He put everything in the bag and stopped in the middle of the aisle.

"Well, since I'm already here..." His gaze caught the sweet stand by the till. He walked over, picked up a lollipop — strawberry, in a red wrapper — and dropped it into the bag on top of the milk.

"For the effort." He made his way slowly between the aisles toward the till, letting his eyes wander along the shelves without much interest.

"More than a hundred years have passed, and the shop hasn't changed at all." Same shelves. Same layout. Same logic of the space — bread at the back, so you walk past everything else first. A tried and tested system, old as the world. Whatever happened outside — whatever barriers cracked and whatever creatures came through from other worlds — inside a shop it would always be the same. Milk at the far wall. Tills at the exit. Chewing gum next to the payment terminal. He reached the till and stopped.

"Except for this, of course." Behind the till stood a creature in a green uniform shirt and a matching green cap with the shop's logo. About a hundred and fifty centimetres tall, no more. Pink, in some strange shade — not bright, but muted, like faded coral. A single eye looked straight at Lloyd from within a green socket — attentively and, it seemed, quite pleasantly. Instead of hands — something resembling tentacles, also pink, thin, and mobile, each ending in something like soft fingers.

Right now one of them had deftly picked up a bottle of milk and brought it to the scanner — confidently, routinely, as though it had done this a thousand times. Lloyd laid the products on the belt and watched the creature work — neatly, methodically, without unnecessary movements.

"Something like that would be hard to get used to after a hundred years of sleep." A hundred-odd years ago, when the barrier first cracked, people probably fainted at the mere sight of creatures like this. Now — green uniform, till, barcode scanner. Mundane. Almost funny. The world changed, the creatures slotted into it, put on uniforms and started scanning groceries. And people got used to it. People always get used to things — that's probably the one thing they're genuinely good at.

The cashier finished scanning the items and spoke in a thin, almost childlike voice: — That'll be sixty-seven credits. Lloyd nodded and held his phone to the terminal. A payment beep sounded. He grabbed the bag and headed for the exit. The doors slid open again — the hiss again, the night air again, the smell of rain and leaves again. After the warmth of the shop the street felt sharper — cooler, darker, more alive.

He put the second earphone back in and reached into the bag, found the lollipop, unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth. Strawberry. Good company for a short walk. Lloyd set off again along the wet road — home. The entrance hall greeted him without much warmth. It was an old building — one of those put up before everything that happened to the world, and not particularly well looked after since. The outside walls were grey, peeling in places, with cracks that appeared on their own and were never filled in.

The front door of the entrance hall squeaked — loudly, at length, with that particular sound only found on doors that have been needing oil for a long time and haven't received any. In one corner of the ground floor someone had left graffiti — a crooked inscription whose meaning had long since dissolved under layers of other people's additions. The light bulb on the ground floor had been out for several weeks.

Lloyd had long since stopped reacting to it — he just went by memory, knowing which step was higher than it looked and where the banister wobbled if you leaned on it. The wooden steps creaked underfoot — each one on its own note, like an out-of-tune instrument. The entrance hall was an entrance hall. Nothing personal. He climbed to the third floor, stopped in front of the familiar door and knocked — three times, as always. Didn't ring the bell, just knocked — the bell worked, it had simply become habit.

From behind the door came footsteps — light, quick, clearly not an adult's. The lock clicked. The door swung open. In the doorway stood a girl of about fourteen. Black hair, a bob cut almost to the shoulders — a straight fringe, the ends curling slightly inward. A simple white pyjama top with small stars on the sleeves. Bare feet, despite the fact that the hallway was clearly not warm — she never wore slippers, as far back as Lloyd could remember. But what stood out most were her eyes.

Blue — not pale, but deep and vivid, an almost unreal shade. And right now they were looking at Lloyd with undisguised delight. — Brother! You're here already?! You're early tonight. Lloyd winced. — It's actually nine o'clock. His sister let out a gasp — theatrical, eyes wide. — Oh, sorry. Time flies so fast. You blink and a hundred years have gone by. She giggled — quietly, lightly, as though she'd surprised herself a little with her own joke — and dashed back to her room, leaving the door slightly ajar.

From behind it came sound immediately — some melody and the rustle of pages. Lloyd watched her go. Sighed. And stepped inside.