CHAPTER FIVE
Shampoo.
It was not a room. Not really.
Gianni surfaced into a place that refused edges: gray thickness moving like poured sugar, a slow tidal drag that swallowed steps. When he tried to move his limbs, the world answered with a sticky, patient push, as if each motion required negotiation. Breathing felt transactional—air drawn in and measured against syrup threading his throat.
Before the voice, there was the smell: shampoo—the blue-capped, cheap-aisle kind—clinging, sweet and wrong in the way memory clings. It came on a wash of nostalgia and chemical tang, and for a second the scent itself was accusation and comfort both. He remembered the tiny scrape of a plastic bottle against wet skin, the dull press of a towel. The smell sat along the spine of the dream like a necklace.
Something warm leaned at his back. Not an arm so much as presence—breathing close, a heat that settled between shoulder blades. He did not turn. Presence here spoke first by proximity. Then the voices began to trade lines.
Child-voice, thin and precise: “Soap—too much soap. It stings the ears. It sticks.”
Adult-voice, flat and removed: “You split. You frayed. That is how it begins.”
They took turns like pendulums, not overlapping but dovetailing—one finishing a cadence the other had started, each phrase a measured instrument. The duet sounded rehearsed; it sounded intimate in a way that felt like trespass. The words were not whole sentences but shards, and the shards assembled into suggestion: return, hold, contain—every syllable a small, deliberate operation.
Between those shards came the click—never clean or bright, but stretched and pulled, a mis-recorded snap. It arrived like a stuttered metronome, warped and underwater. Each time it landed, the syrup-thick air shivered. The sound had weight and wrongness; it bent the rhythm of the voices.
Child-voice, naming the room the way a child names colors: “Warm, sticky, towel. You smell like river.”
Adult-voice, final, summing up: “You let things open. That was the error.” The water in the dream darkened. At first it was the color of old tea, then ink. The shampoo that had been bright and plasticky folded into something deeper, an oil that clung and blurred the surface. Gianni felt the drag increase, the syrup pulling his limbs like tide. He recognized the presence before the words finished: Dante’s shape in the memory, the precise way the boy’s shoulder sat under the towel, the exact scent he’d come to know through hands that had once tried to clean another’s skin.
“You do too much,” the child said—sensory, small, as if listing facts.
The adult’s voice supplied the contour, deadpan: “So I made the pieces hold.”
It was not threat so much as verdict. The duet leaned into the hush, and the final line slid under him, a soft, clinical promise: “They will come back.”
He woke as if he’d been yanked out of water. Air hit hard, sharp, and the taste of the shampoo lingered at the edges of his tongue—so real he could have sworn a towel was still warm against a shoulder. Morning light cut the blinds into pale knives across the scattered clutter. The apartment smelled like rain and old plastic and something faintly metallic from the pipes. A drip kept time somewhere, irregular and precise enough to grind at the nerves.
For a long minute he lay still, watching the ceiling, letting silence re-assert the shape of the room. When he moved it was gradual, as if his limbs needed coaxing into being. His hand found the visor on the desk and hovered. He almost picked it up—pulled the band over his palm, felt the familiar weight—but his fingers released. Too soon.
He tried the kettle; the motions betrayed him. The filter jar trembled, grounds rattling and punching against the steel rim, spreading cold and dark across the counter. He let them lie. A laugh escaped him like caught air: small, bitter, not a joke. “Good start,” he said to himself, voice coarse—an accusation from a man he scarcely wanted to know.
Only a couple of flashes rose like bruises in thought—Dante’s hair slick and clinging, the way a towel had snagged at a shoulder, a word half-remembered that felt like thanks but wasn’t gratitude. He pushed the fragments away with more force than the memory deserved and felt the pulse of his temples respond. The apartment pressed in all at once—the radiator’s faint tick, a neighbor’s feet hurrying down the hall, the metallic sigh of rain running into gutters. Each mundane sound pulled at the sticky residue of the dream until he could feel the click replay behind his ribs.
He moved slowly through the motions of staying alive. No grand endeavors: he set the mug to the kettle’s hum, rinsed his face, let the water pull the sweat from his skin. He skipped the deliberate, careful things—no coffee poured with ritual, no breakfast assembled—because his hands would not hold the small composure required. He left the grounds where they had fallen and walked the apartment like a man inspecting his own edges.
***
The shower came hours too late. He hadn’t planned to take one, but the air had grown thick, and the smell of dust and metal made his skin crawl. When the pipes coughed to life, the sound filled the whole apartment—an old, aching rumble that felt more alive than he did.
The first hit of water was almost cold. He didn’t flinch. Just leaned forward until his forehead met the tile and stayed there. Steam gathered fast, heavy and unclean, curling against the ceiling like a thing unsure of where to go. He let it smear the edges of the room, blur the light, blur himself.
Shampoo. The same generic bottle as always, the scent too sharp, too sweet. For a heartbeat it overlaid the one from the dream, and his hands froze mid-motion, fingers tangled in his hair. He waited for the smell to shift again—to rot, to thicken, to accuse—but it didn’t. Just plastic sweetness and heat.
He stayed until the water lost its temperature, turning thin and cold against his shoulders. Only then did he twist the knob, watching the last of the steam thin out until the walls looked bare again.
The drip of leftover water in the pipes followed him back into the room. The heater hummed. Then clicked off.
***
By the time the light had dimmed, the apartment had flattened into a single gradient of gray. The day dragged but refused to end, every hour folding into the next without event. Gianni sat at the counter, staring at the mug he’d never filled, the one still waiting by the kettle.
The hum returned. Too soft to register as sound, more a suggestion in the walls. He blinked, waited for it to resolve into something—anything—but it stayed shapeless.
Then everything cut.
The heater, the light, the low current in the air—all gone. The silence was so pure it made his heartbeat sound mechanical. He waited for the click.
It didn’t come.
That absence was louder than noise.
He counted seconds. Thought about getting up, didn’t. The apartment felt suspended, as if it might stay in this pause forever, like the city had forgotten him in mid-breath. He imagined the world outside frozen in the same dim frame—rain stopped mid-fall, neon half-born.
When the lights returned, they did so in stages: one flicker, a low whine, the hum building back into place. Nothing had changed. The kettle light blinked on again. The silence retreated but didn’t vanish.
He exhaled. His shoulders stayed tense for a while longer, as though the outage might come back to finish the job.
He stood, opened a window just enough to let the outside air in. The smell of rain drifted through, clean and cold, grounding. He left it open.
The hours refused to move.
Light thinned through the blinds, never bright, just that sickly gray that belonged to buildings like his. The city outside breathed in dampness, and every sound—pipes, motors, people—seeped through the walls as if testing how much space he had left.
He tried to distract himself. Straightened a stack of old flyers. Wiped a circle clear on the fogged window, then filled it again with his own breath. Checked the visor once, twice, didn’t turn it on. The motions were small and pointless, and he performed them with the precision of someone afraid to stop.
When he finally sat, the chair let out a sound like a sigh. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes tracing cracks in the floor. The air in the apartment had that faint electric smell from the heater’s wiring. It mingled with the lingering ghost of coffee grounds and made the back of his throat itch.
The dream stayed where it was—behind him, beneath him—but its residue colored everything. He found himself testing noises: the tick in the radiator, the echo from the pipes, the occasional metallic drip. Each sound felt slightly off, like a language trying to start again after forgetting its alphabet. He caught himself waiting for the click.
When it didn’t come, the silence felt earned and wrong at once.
He got up, paced the room again. The ceiling light flickered twice, struggling against the voltage. He didn’t fix it.
No food. No news feed. The visor stayed dark. He thought about messaging someone, just to make sure his voice still worked, but the idea shriveled before it reached his hands.
Afternoon flattened out to nothing. The walls pressed in with their quiet persistence, and his reflection in the window looked like a stranger sitting behind the glass.
When dusk started leaking in, the building changed timbre. Footsteps came and went. Somewhere, a door slammed with too much finality. Gianni rested his forehead against the cool surface of the window and watched the street lights bloom like wounds in the drizzle.
The day had not ended; it had only stretched thin.
His phone buzzed on the counter. The sound startled him more than it should have.
BIG G — 18:32
Finally got the ol’ noggin patched up. Technician says I’m good for another 500 hours or three bad jokes, whichever comes first.
Bring that battery pack when you swing by, yeah? I owe you ramen and questionable life advice.
Gianni read it twice, the second time slower. The absurdity of the phrasing—a joke only Gary could make about his own condition—punched a small hole through the heaviness. He exhaled through his nose, something close to a laugh but quieter, almost an acknowledgment.
He set the phone down, stared at the message until the screen dimmed, then picked up the fallen coffee filter from the counter and threw it away. It was nothing—just a bit of motion, a gesture to prove he still could.
Outside, the rain picked up.
Hours later, the sky had paled into a thin, wary gray. Rain had eased to a dull patter; the city smelled of wet concrete and old newsprint. Gianni woke slowly, the dream’s residue like fine grit under his skull. He lay there long enough to let the apartment’s small noises carve the room back into shape: a radiator’s tick, a door somewhere across the hall, the distant mechanical sigh of a tram. The ordinary things felt like stitches trying to hold him together.
He made coffee with hands that moved in borrowed routines. The kettle hissed and the mug warmed his palms, and for a span that lasted the length of a breath he let the warmth arrange him into something approximating composure. The visor lay where he’d left it, dark and patient on the desk. He didn’t touch it yet.
When the wall terminal—the ugly old city-issued slab he kept because sometimes free feeds bled into it—spat awake, it felt like an intrusion. He’d almost forgotten it was there until a thin, public voice filled the room, bland and practiced and wrong in its timing.
“—Sector Update for all citizens: please be advised—” the announcer said. The words moved like a script read to a camera that already knew it was lying.
The feed was meant to be background, civic noise. It landed on his kitchen counter like a pebble in a pond and the ripples spread. Routine bulletins. Weather. Transit delays. The voice was careful, flat, the kind of voice that meant to steady people and instead ironed the edges thin.
“—advisory for South Rail Sector: temporary communications blackout reported in pockets between Trade Row and the Lower Canals. Emergency crews responding. Residents in affected blocks advised to remain indoors. There have been isolated reports of equipment malfunctions and unverified energy fluctuations near maintenance conduits. There is no confirmed danger to the public—”
The words came slow and bureaucratic, but something in the phrasing put teeth on his ribs. South Rail. Gianni’s eyes went cold the way a door does when it recognizes a knock it has been expecting. He had seen those streets mapped a hundred times in the forums he haunted; he knew the market’s angles, the place where the tiles wore thin near the rail. Claymore’s sector. The name landed like a coin clinking onto a table.
The announcer continued and then the feed shuddered. For a breathless moment the public feed was pierced by something not meant to be public at all: a raw-sounding voice, close and panicked.
“—Unit SR-92 here—containment breach at—”
Static ate the last syllable. A second speaker cut in—short, clipped military tones—someone issuing coordinates, a radio clack. The spike of adrenaline in the voice made the hair along Gianni’s arms prick.
The feed snapped back to the monotone anchor, who resumed as though nothing had happened. “—situation currently assessed; emergency response teams are present. Please remain calm and follow official instructions—”
Gianni’s thumb slammed the slab off. The small motion was a match struck. The half-second of radio panic had done what the dream had only hinted at: it had given him a place to aim his fear at. SR-92—the code clicked in his head like a physical thing. He did not sit. He did not let the silence fold him flat.
He moved.
At the terminal he pulled up the map—old folders, old feeds—and began moving lightly, like testing the surface of water. South Rail’s grid spilled in: trade stalls, the vendor stairs, the corridor he’d watched in other clips. He overlaid the patrol tracks he’d logged once as a hobby—small acts of voyeurism, a private catalog of movement—and the geometry tightened. Claymore’s usual route intersected the reported area more than once. Not coincidental. Not reassuring.
His hands were not steady but they were fast. He tore a scrap from the corner of an old flyer. In quicker, less careful letters than before he wrote: SR-92 — South Rail. Check. He didn’t write a name. He folded the scrap and wedged it under the visor’s band—less a promise, more an anchor.
He skimmed the forums he trusted, tapped a handle, and posted a short, pointed probe: SR-92 pinged on open channel. “Anyone with local feed seeing unusual maintenance activity?” He didn’t sign his street name. The post was technical, surgical—the kind of question that pulled people into the light without dragging him out.
There was no time for paralysis; there was only the slow, activated ticking of preparation. He started choosing gear—visor in the strap, spare battery where it could be reached, a small first-aid packet tucked into the side pouch. His motions were practiced, imprecise, and there was a bright edge to them that hadn’t been there all day.
For a second he paused, as if asking himself whether this was courage or foolishness. He chose the latter with the same shrug he used for every bad decision that ended up being the right one. Then he slung the bag over his shoulder, pulled the coat from the hook, and moved toward the door.
Before he left he looked once at the dark visor on the desk, at the folded scrap beneath its band, and felt something like a small, private oath tighten in his chest. He closed the door behind him without making noise, the apartment exhaling into its own quiet.
He stared at the map until the lines stopped meaning streets and started meaning routes he had watched collapse before. Something in the pattern—a turn, a corner near the conduit stairs—woke an old reflex, the part of him that counted seconds between screams and sirens.
The apartment seemed to sharpen. Every surface took on definition: the grain of the counter, the dust along the sill, the faint static hum under the light. He felt his pulse syncing with the memory of the radio tone, a sound still echoing under his ribs.
He checked the clock. Six minutes since the broadcast. Long enough for the blackout to spread. Short enough that whatever had started was still in motion.
His body moved before his mind had language for it: pulling the folded jacket from the hook, switching the visor on just long enough to see the interface flare and die again, battery half-drained.
The glow flashed across his face and threw the room into relief—the mug, the kettle, the paper still damp with the word South Rail scrawled across it. Every object felt like it was watching him make the decision.
Waiting for confirmation wasn’t an option. This wasn’t about trust or loyalty; it was about rhythm. The timing was wrong in exactly the right way. Reports that clean never stayed clean unless someone wanted them that way. The thought clicked hard behind his teeth, familiar and precise—the same instinct that used to drag him into burning buildings before backup arrived.
He packed with the clarity of muscle memory. Visor, tools, a half-sealed medical kit. His fingers hesitated only once—over the folded scrap of paper wedged beneath the band. He smoothed it out, looked at the half-dry ink, and refolded it with deliberate precision, tucking it back where it belonged. The motion steadied him more than thought could.
He pulled the coat on. Checked the pockets by habit, the way someone checks a ritual. Then he paused at the door. The rain outside had thickened, falling in even sheets that blurred the neon signage across the street. A train horn moaned somewhere in the sector’s gut, low and animal, the kind of sound that made the city feel like one living thing.
He could already see the route in his head—flooded alleys, low rooftops, the maintenance stairs that cut into the South Rail underpass. The pattern was too clear to ignore. He’d always trusted patterns more than people.
Gianni exhaled once, sharp and final. The kind of breath that turns thought into motion.
He grabbed the visor.
Stepped out.