The chalk had scratched like a small animal trapped in the wall. White dust rose, drifted, settled into the grooves of old equations that no sponge could fully wipe clean. The teacher's voice was the sort that flattened everything it covered—formulas, dates, admonitions—until meaning was a polite rumor. Light ricocheted off the windows, too clean for a city like theirs, as if someone had polished the day for inspection.
Breuk sat by the window with his chin in his hand, lids half lowered, the posture of a boy pretending to sleep through a life he did not believe in. Outside, the reactor-sun had been tuned to afternoon: a careful brightness without heat. Flags flicked at their poles as if signaling ships that would never come. The trees along the fence whispered about distances that no one had measured honestly. Birds performed their narrow freedoms, unlicensed.
A slip of paper skated off the sill when a draft found it. It tumbled once, twice, then was taken whole by the air, lightly, the way a lie is often taken in a classroom. Breuk watched it fall and thought of the way water moves when it is not asked to work—lazy, certain, a private animal.
His gaze crossed the room and landed where it always landed if he let it: on Lig. Blond hair with the discipline of someone who never needed a mirror, uniform aligned against him like an ally, the kind of smile that made adults feel intelligent for understanding nothing. He was talking to a girl with a neat braid that had come slightly undone. Her cheeks were red with a kind of indignation that counted itself as innocence. Lig's head was tilted just enough to broadcast attention. His mouth shaped calm.
The slap landed like punctuation.
The girl's hand, the sound on skin—that swift ungenerous noise—then the breath after, ragged, and her flight through the door, badge swinging, braid breaking further. Lig did not chase. He did not flinch. He stood at the angle of someone who knows the camera is somewhere and has chosen a better profile. The smile stayed, smaller now, like courtesy on a gravestone.
Breuk's eyes widened, then shrank. He blinked the scene away and returned himself to the window as if the glass could absolve him of seeing. When he looked back, Lig was looking at him. Their gazes touched and scorched; Breuk let his fall, objecting to the intimacy of being known. A thread of sweat navigated his temple with the patience of old water.
Outside, the wind tried on different voices and settled on one that sounded like waiting.
After school, the reactor-sun slid toward its simulated evening, and the courtyard's noise thinned to the scuff and echo of shoes. Breuk and Lig walked home on the same line because it had always been that way. Bags hung from shoulders by habit. The city performed an impression of peace: vendors closing shutters, a stray ball trapped against a curb, the smell of tea pretending to be hunger.
"That went smooth," Breuk said, the corner of his mouth lifted to keep the words unserious. "Want me to shout Incomingnext time before it lands?"
Lig laughed small, a sound polished down to charm. Hands in pockets, he glanced at nothing in particular. "She needed it," he said. "I saw it too late."
"You're kind of an ass, you know that?"
"I know," Lig said. "And you're too honest. If you always show what you think, you can't win."
"I don't need to win." Breuk let his grin have warmth for a moment. "I just need it not to be boring."
"Then you're better off than most," Lig said, and meant it as a compliment and a verdict. Footsteps stitched the road behind their words. A stray dog nosed a gutter and decided against the world.
They reached the little bridge that had never learned to be ashamed of being small. Beneath it the river—a real one, not a pipe's logic—moved slowly under the day, clear enough to make a sky of its own. Breuk stopped and leaned on the rail, wood polished by the years of elbows. He looked at the surface, the way it held the light, and felt something he wouldn't say drift to the top and hover there, shy.
"Funny," he said. "How still it is. Like it's waiting."
Lig stood beside him, peered over, let the false sun catch his eyes and not change them. "Everything waits for something," he said. "Even you."
Breuk glanced sideways, half amused, half irritable. "And you? What are you waiting for, Lig?"
Lig kept his eyes on the water. The smile stayed because the smile was a habit, but something in the pupils went heavy, like a door remembering it had a lock. "For the moment when you stop waiting," he said.
They watched the river explain permanence to itself. A moth fought the air above it and lost. The reactor's light found a seam in the clouds and staged a last-minute reprieve. A child on a bicycle crossed the far end of the span without seeing them and without being seen.