The hollow bloom

Chapter 2: Everything I Carry

Mira's POV

Day One, Six Days Before The Outbreak, Early Morning To Night, Residential District

My alarm went off at four forty five, same as it had every morning for the last six years, and I was already awake before it finished its first cycle. I never needed it, not really. My body had learned to wake before the sun the way other people's bodies learned to sleep in. I silenced it before it could ring a second time and reach for it, half asleep, before I remembered why.

Theo's door was still closed. Good. That meant he was still asleep, which meant his heart wasn't doing that thing it did some nights where he'd lie awake listening to it, too scared to tell me. I stood outside his door for exactly four seconds, the way I did every morning, just long enough to hear the small, steady sound of him breathing through the gap under the frame. Then I went to make his breakfast before mine, because that was the order things went in now. It had been the order for eleven years.

I don't remember much about the year our mother died. I was thirteen. I remember the funeral was on a Tuesday, and I remember Theo was seven and didn't understand why everyone kept hugging him, and I remember someone from social services asking me, gently, if there was another family member who could take us in. There wasn't. Not one who wanted the responsibility of a heart condition and a teenager's grief in the same house. So I learned to cook eggs the way our mother used to, and I learned Theo's medication schedule better than I knew my own class schedule, and somewhere in there I also learned to run.

Running was the one thing that was only mine. Everything else, the meals, the appointments, the late nights doing homework at the kitchen table with one ear listening for Theo's breathing to change, all of that belonged to both of us, to the life I'd built around keeping him alive and unafraid. But running was different. When I ran, there was no one to take care of but myself, and for however many minutes it took to finish a circuit of the track, I let myself be nothing but a body moving fast through the world.

It was the thing that had made me good enough to go pro. It was also the thing I sometimes hated myself for loving, because loving it meant there was a small, quiet part of me that wanted to be somewhere Theo wasn't. I never told anyone that. I barely let myself think it in full sentences.

By the time I got back from my morning session, Theo was up, sitting at the kitchen table in his school uniform, pushing eggs around his plate without eating them.

"You're not eating," I said, dropping my bag by the door.

"I'm not hungry."

"Theo."

He looked up at me, seventeen years old and already too good at reading the exhaustion I tried to hide. "I took my pills. I'm fine. I just don't want eggs again."

I wanted to argue, the old reflex rising in my chest before I could stop it, the same fear that lived there permanently now, quiet but never gone. Every skipped meal, every tired look on his face, every time he pressed a hand to his chest without meaning to, some small animal part of me flinched and thought, is this it, is this the day. I'd learned to breathe through it. Mostly.

"Fine," I said instead, sitting down across from him. "No eggs tomorrow. I'll figure something else out."

He gave me a small, grateful smile, the kind he only gave me, like I was the only person left in the world he trusted not to make a big deal out of things. I wanted to hold onto that smile longer than the two seconds it lasted.

My coach texted while I was rinsing the dishes. Training moved up an hour, some scheduling conflict with the facility. I read it twice, doing the math in my head, recalculating Theo's ride to school, his appointment that afternoon, the grocery run I'd promised myself I'd finally do today. It was a small thing. It was always a small thing, one more adjustment layered on top of a hundred others, and most days I could absorb it without much thought. Today, for reasons I couldn't name, it sat heavier than it should have.

I told myself it was just tiredness. I told myself a lot of things were just tiredness these days.

At the facility, my coach ran me through drills until my legs burned in that familiar, almost comforting way, the kind of pain that meant something, that I'd chosen. Between sets I caught myself glancing at the muted television mounted in the corner of the gym, the news anchor's mouth moving soundlessly beneath a banner about some incident downtown. A gas leak, the caption said. Evacuations underway in a three block radius. Nothing unusual, the kind of story that ran for a day and disappeared.

I didn't think about it again until that evening, walking Theo home from his appointment, when we passed two police cars blocking off a street that had been open that morning. An officer waved us around without explanation, his face tight in a way that didn't match "gas leak."

"Weird," Theo said, glancing back over his shoulder as we walked.

"Probably nothing," I said, because that was the kind of thing you said to a seventeen year old with a heart condition, whether or not you believed it yourself.

That night, after Theo had gone to bed and I'd checked, twice, that his door was still cracked the way he liked it, I sat at the kitchen table and finally let myself feel the shape of the day. The rescheduled training, the blocked street, the tight faced officer, none of it added up to anything on its own. But something in me, the same something that had learned to read Theo's breathing through a closed door, felt the air shift in a way I didn't have words for yet.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself that a lot, in the six days that followed, right up until the morning it stopped being something I could tell myself at all.