KRONOS MAW: RISE OF THE TEMPORAL ANCHOR
Chapter 2: The House That Holds...
The thing about home was that it asked nothing of him.
School demanded performance — the right expression, the right distance, the careful management of being seen without being known. The streets of New Lagos demanded navigation — the constant low-level alertness of moving through a city that didn't slow down for anyone. But home, their small two-floor house on Adeniyi Close, just existed around Alex like a quiet exhale. It didn't require anything from him except his presence.
Most days that was all he had to give.
He got back at half past three, dropping his bag by the door with a dull thud that echoed through the narrow hallway. The house smelled like the egusi soup Leah had put on that morning before leaving for work — slow-cooked, heavy with crayfish, the kind of smell that reached into your chest and held something there.
Alex stood in the hallway for a moment, just breathing it in.
Then he heard the music.
Faint, coming from upstairs — something with too much bass and lyrics delivered at a speed that suggested the artist had somewhere urgent to be. Becky's taste in music was, in Alex's considered opinion, a form of psychological warfare. He climbed the stairs, stopped outside her door, and knocked twice.
The music dropped.
"Come in!"
Becky's room was the opposite of his — organized chaos, which was somehow worse than actual chaos because it suggested the disorder was intentional. Textbooks open on the bed beside fashion magazines. A half-finished drawing on her desk. Clothes on the chair that she would claim were arranged by a system only she understood. She was cross-legged on her bed, a highlighter behind each ear, looking at him with the bright immediate attention she gave everything.
"You look terrible," she said warmly.
"Thank you."
"Bad day?"
Alex leaned against her doorframe. "Ordinary day."
Becky studied him the way she always did — too closely, too perceptively, with eyes that had somehow inherited Leah's gift for seeing past the surface of things. She was seventeen and occasionally Alex forgot that, because she had a way of sitting with information quietly before she spoke that felt older than her years.
"Emeka again?" she asked.
Alex said nothing, which was its own answer.
Becky's expression shifted — something moving through it quickly, sharp and protective, before she smoothed it back into casual. She picked up her highlighter and uncapped it with deliberate calm.
"One day," she said, "that boy is going to trip over his own ego and I hope I'm there to see it."
"Don't," Alex said.
"I'm just saying—"
"Becky." His voice was quiet but certain. "Leave it."
She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded once — a small, reluctant dip of her head that meant she was standing down but not surrendering the opinion. That was Becky. She picked her battles with the precision of someone who intended to win the war eventually.
"Mum left soup," she said, returning to her textbook. "And there's rice if you want."
"I know."
"She said to tell you she'll be back by seven. And that you should eat." A pause. "She said it twice actually. The second time she used your full name so I'm legally required to pass it on with full weight."
Alex almost smiled. It happened sometimes — a small involuntary thing that came and went before he could stop it.
"Tell her I ate," he said, pushing off the doorframe.
"Tell her yourself," Becky called after him as he headed back down the hallway. "I'm not your secretary!"
He ate alone at the kitchen table, slow and without appetite, because Leah had asked him to and that was reason enough. The soup was good — it always was. His mother cooked the way she did everything, with a quiet thoroughness that made the results feel inevitable.
He thought about her sometimes, the life she'd built around them. He didn't know much about his father — Leah had told him only that he'd left, offering the information once in a tone that closed all doors to follow-up questions. Alex had never pushed. He understood, in the wordless way children understand things that are never explained, that some information would cost his mother something to give and he refused to be the one to collect that debt.
What he knew was this: Leah had raised him, taken in Becky, worked long hours at the administrative office of a logistics company in Ikeja, kept their house clean and their refrigerator stocked, attended every school meeting he'd ever had, and never once — not once — made either of them feel like a burden.
Alex did not know how to be the kind of person who expressed gratitude naturally. But he knew how to notice things. And he noticed everything she did.
He washed his bowl when he finished, dried it, and put it back in exactly the right cabinet.
He was at his desk by four, textbook open, when his phone buzzed.
An unknown number. He stared at it, let it ring out, went back to his notes.
It buzzed again. Same number.
He ignored it again.
The third time he picked up, because three times meant either urgency or persistence and both deserved acknowledgment.
"Yes," he said.
Silence on the other end. Not empty silence — occupied silence, like someone breathing carefully on the other side.
Then a voice, low and deliberate: "You felt it this morning, didn't you. The clock."
Alex went very still.
"Who is this?" he said.
But the line was already dead.
He sat holding his phone, staring at nothing, the question dissolving into the afternoon quiet of the house. Outside his window New Lagos moved and hummed, entirely indifferent. Somewhere downstairs Becky had turned her music back on.
Alex set his phone face-down on the desk.
He looked at his watch.
It had stopped.
End of Chapter 2