Emptiness envelops me like a blanket inside a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn. There are only dark violet neon lights, interrupted by occasional white strobes that freeze the moving bodies for a microsecond—capturing them mid-dance, mid-drink, mid-laugh—before releasing them back into the liquid darkness. The bass doesn't just play; it detonates through the floorboards, traveling up my legs and making my eardrums throb. I forgot my earplugs at home, and I know I'll be hearing phantom beats until Tuesday.

It's somewhere past midnight. Time moves differently in places like this—minutes stretch into hours, hours collapse into seconds. Lin just introduced me to Veronica, one of her ex-girlfriends, now part of what she calls her "distinguished alumni network”, a long dynasty of former situationships. 

"Is she the one who was really into public bathrooms?" I yell into Lin's ear after the woman rejoins her circle.

Lin grins with the satisfied expression of someone revisiting a particularly scandalous memory. "Museum bathrooms specifically. Girl had a thing for culture."

Much to my surprise, tonight has held no matchmaker offerings from Lin. Perhaps she's exhausted her roster of available men in the greater NYC area, or simply given up on Project Get Ethan Laid. I won't interrogate this mercy.

"Oh my fucking god, Ethan!" Lin suddenly shrieks directly into my ear canal. "I just saw the most gorgeous woman of my entire fucking life!"

I automatically scan the crowd, searching for Lin's type—usually alt girls with strong opinions about oat milk. Not my particular taste, but I can appreciate feminine beauty in an aesthetic sense. Still, coming from Lin, who once described herself as "The feminist modern Don Juan," this is a significant statement.

I don't need to search long for the mystery woman.

She’s standing by the bar and might as well be spotlit. While everyone else blurs into the collective mass of dancing bodies, she stands in perfect stillness, watching us with the patience as if everything else were just smoke. Dressed in black leather from neck to toe—not club leather, something more functional, that sits perfectly on every curve she has—she should disappear into the darkness. Instead, she's luminous.

Her hair is the giveaway: flowing yellow-gold that catches every stray beam of light, turning it into fire. It falls just past her shoulders like molten metal poured into the shape of a woman. Even from across the room, through haze and shadows and writhing bodies, that hair burns like a beacon.

Her face is... unsettling in its perfection. Mathematical. Like someone designed a face to be generically beautiful and succeeded too well. Even I feel a strange flush as her gray eyes lock onto mine.

"Don't look! Oh my god, could you be more obvious?" Lin grabs my shoulders and physically rotates me away from the bar. "You're staring like she's made of cocaine!"

"Sorry, sorry!" I shout back, though my neck wants to crane back around. There's something magnetic about her attention, something that makes my skin prickle with an emotion I can't name. Not attraction exactly—more like adoration.

"Fuck, she's coming our way!" Lin's voice pitches up an octave. "Act natural! Just—be normal!"

The woman in black cuts through the crowd like it's choreographed, bodies parting without her having to push or dodge. She moves with the fluid confidence of someone who knows exactly where they're going and why. The strobe lights catch her in fragments—a shoulder here, the swing of her hair there, those unblinking gray eyes fixed on me.

Why is she looking at me? I'm wearing eyeliner that Lin applied with aggressive enthusiasm. My shirt has a collar. There's no universe where I'm her target demographic.

She stops directly in front of us. Up close, that mathematical beauty is even more pronounced. Everything about her face is exactly where it should be, like she stepped out of a genetics textbook chapter on facial symmetry.

"Hi, I'm Lin and this is Ethan!" Lin recovers with the speed of someone who's hit on beautiful women in worse circumstances. "He's gay but so am I!"

I close my eyes. Murder. I'm going to murder Lin.

The woman's red lips curve into something that might be amusement. When she speaks, her voice cuts through the muffled bass like she's standing in perfect silence.

"Do you have a cigarette?"

"She does," I yell, pointing at Lin, desperate to deflect whatever this is. "But we can't smoke in here!"

Lin drives her elbow into my kidney. "I need one too! We can go outside!"

Without waiting for a response, the woman in black turns and heads toward the exit. We follow like pulled by invisible strings.

The club's rooftop smoking area is a relief—still dark, still loud enough to feel the music through the walls, but quiet enough that thoughts can form complete sentences. My ears ring in the sudden not-quite-silence, a high-pitched whine that'll last for days. The December air hits like a slap, sharp and clarifying after the swampy heat inside. 

The woman finds a corner near one of those tall outdoor heaters that glow like false suns. We cluster beneath its red light, our faces probably looking ghoulish in the upward illumination. Lin fumbles for her cigarettes with hands that shake slightly—from cold or excitement, knowing her, probably both.

"Thank you," the woman says as Lin lights her cigarette. She's looking directly at me again, like Lin is just convenient furniture.

"I fucking love your whole look," Lin gushes, gesturing at the leather ensemble. "Very dominatrix-chic. It’s perfect."

"Really?" The woman exhales smoke in a perfect stream. "These are just my work uniforms."

"Where do you work? A sex dungeon?" I blurt out before my brain can stop my mouth. The moment the words leave my mouth, I want to crawl into the East River. Lin's glare could strip paint. But the woman just chuckles—a sound that doesn't quite reach her eyes.

"I'm Alyx," she says, and with the music muffled, I finally hear it. The accent. That particular way of flattening vowels and swallowing consonants that I'd recognize anywhere. My heart doesn't just drop—it plummets through my chest and keeps going, possibly through all five floors of this building.

"Nice to meet a fellow New Babylonian."

The words hang in the air between us like a loaded gun. I am completely frozen, like a wounded deer in the jaws of a predator who knows his life can be measured in seconds.

Somehow, someway, I manage to answer. Not a coherent sentence, mind you, just a messy blur of words that tumble out unsupervised.

"What do you mean?" The words feel like they're being pulled from my throat by fishhooks.

"You lived in Saint Gregors, right? I lived pretty close by. Used to. Saint Anthony." She answers casually, and images of streets that existed only in memory flash before my eyes like a slideshow of an old movie.

"Wait, are you from... the place in Europe as well? New Babylon, you called it?" Lin finally catches up, her voice cutting through my paralysis. I never told her the name. She respected my boundaries, knew only small glimpses—just enough to create a picture, never quite in focus.

"Isn't the place... gone? You said there was a natural disaster," Lin continues the conversation for me. I'm still frozen, my tongue a dead thing in my mouth.

"Well," Alyx says, exhaling smoke that curls up into the red heater light like a question mark. "Something along those lines. Though 'natural' is an interesting word choice. The city survived well enough, just... changed. Not sure you'd recognize it anymore. But Saint Gregors still stands."

Hit after hit. Every word is a bullet piercing through a decade of carefully constructed armor. The air grows thick as wet cement. The woman in black doesn't seem to mind my silence; she just watches me with what I now recognize as a hunter's patience.

I stand abruptly. Finally, that fight-or-flight response kicks in. Late is better than never, I guess.

"I don't care about New Babylon. What the fuck do you want from me?"

Lin's shocked by my outburst—she's never heard this voice from me, raw and cornered. But Alyx remains unbothered, like she expected this exact reaction.

"Relax. I'm here to help you, Ethan." She flicks her cigarette away, the ember arcing through the darkness like a falling star.

"Listen. I was sent here with orders to track down a girl. My... intel led me to you, for some reason." Her gray eyes narrow slightly, as if trying to read my mind. "But you have a sister, don't you? Eighteen years old."

The words hit me like a physical blow. My spine feels like it's collapsing into itself.

"She's in grave danger. I want to help." She takes a step toward me, and I stumble backward, nearly knocking over someone's drink.

"No. Stay away from us. We have nothing you want!" The words tear out of me, and then my body finally catches up to my panic. I bolt.

I don't look back. I just run—out of the smoking area, through the club, past the bewildered bouncer, into the Brooklyn streets. 

The December air burns my lungs, but I don't stop. Everything feels like it's collapsing into a black hole in my stomach. Into a singularity. A void.

Streetlights blur past. Car horns blow as I dart across intersections. I don't know how long I run before my legs give out at a subway entrance, my chest heaving like I'm drowning on dry land. That's when I finally register my phone vibrating against my thigh. Ten missed calls from Lin.

"Are you okay?!" she screams the moment I answer. "What the fuck just happened? Where ARE you?"

"Is she with you?" I gasp out. Fuck, I can’t believe I left Lin alone with her.

"No! She just left and gave me her number. Said to tell you to call her!"

I'm already moving before she finishes the sentence, half-stumbling down the subway steps.

The train ride is agony. Every stop feels like an hour. My hands won't stop shaking. Tears are forming in my eyes. When I finally reach our building, I take the stairs four at a time, my legs screaming in protest. I'm running on pure adrenaline now, fumbling with my keys at the door.

The music is still playing through the doors.

How were they to know,
The river ever would bend?
Split apart at the end,
Enemies of the ocean.  

I don't knock. I can't. I throw open Molly's door, my heart hammering so hard I think it might crack my ribs.

And there she is. My Molly. Exactly where I left her, hunched over her desk, still sketching. Safe. Whole. Here.

"Why the fuck didn't you knock?" she says without looking up as I collapse onto the floor. 

In time, when the high will subside
Send in the jaws of life.