BEFORE YOU FADE AWAY

CHAPTER 2: THE MISROUTED VARIABLE

THE MISROUTED VARIABLE

By the time Emma’s bus crossed into District 4, the glass towers of Arbour Heights had given way to low-rise brick blocks and sagging overhead power lines that hummed against the damp afternoon.

Inside the apartment, Emma was losing a war against the washing machine.

"Lily! I told you not to put the track sweaters in with the delicates!" Emma yelled over the violent, metallic rattling vibrating through the floorboards of the basement . She jammed her shoulder against the machine's rusted door, trying to keep the drum from jumping off the uneven concrete.

"I didn't! It was just the cotton ones!" Lily’s voice drifted down the narrow stairs, competing with the tinny pop music playing from her phone. "And the university portal closes in four hours, Em. The finance office sent a final cancellation notice."

Emma closed her eyes, resting her forehead against the cool, shaking metal of the washer. Her hair was slipping out of its claw clip, and her gray sweater carried a fresh detergent stain across the front. She was twenty-six, but looking at the stack of red-inked notices pinned to the refrigerator by a yellow plastic magnet shaped like a sun, she felt fifty.

Her kindergarten teacher's salary covered the rent and the groceries, but Lily’s data-analytics tuition was a mountain Emma couldn't seem to tunnel through, no matter how many weekend tutoring shifts she took.

The rattling stopped with a pathetic, wet clunk. The machine let out a dark hiss, gray soapy water pooling instantly around Emma’s worn sneakers.

"Perfect," Emma muttered, pushing herself up. "Absolutely perfect."

She grabbed a stack of old towels, dropping to her knees to soak up the mess. Her hands were rough, the skin around her knuckles red from the cold basement air. She didn't remember a time when her hands hadn't been working, cleaning, or holding someone else together. Her childhood before the highway crash was a smooth, featureless wall of white light. A blank slate. The doctors called it retrograde amnesia; Emma just called it a boundary. If she couldn't remember what she had lost before she was twelve, she couldn't mourn it.

A sharp, authoritative knock rumbled through the ceiling from the street-level door upstairs.

"Lily! Get the door!" Emma called out, wringing a soaked towel into a plastic bucket.

"In the middle of a timed calculus quiz, Em. If I log off, I will fail the module."

Emma sighed, wiping her wet palms on her jeans. Her lower back ached as she climbed the narrow wooden stairs. The apartment was a tight one bedroom divided into two by a thin drywall partition, a kitchen that smelled permanently of burnt toast, and narrow windows that looked directly out at the tires of passing cars on the asphalt above.

She unlocked the heavy deadbolt and pulled the door open, expecting the landlord with another notice about the plumbing.

Instead, a man wearing a sleek, black leather motorcycle jacket and a helmet with a mirror-tinted visor stood on the concrete landing. He didn't look like a standard postal worker. His uniform was completely blank, devoid of any logo or city emblem.

"Emma Hart?" the man asked, his voice low.

"Yes?"

The man didn't offer a digital signature pad. He reached into a reinforced courier bag, pulled out a thick, heavy cream envelope, and extended it toward her. The wax seal on the back was a deep, unreflective blue, catching the weak afternoon light.

"Priority delivery," the courier said.

Emma looked at the envelope. Her name wasn't on the front. In sharp, rigid, heavy black ink, a single name was written across the center:

“Ava Sinclair.”

"Wait," Emma said, reaching out to push the envelope back. "This isn't mine. There’s no one here by that name. You have the wrong address."

"The GPS routing matches this property," the courier replied, his tone flat. He dropped the envelope into her extended hand, turned on his heel, and took the stairs three at a time before Emma could clear her throat.

"Hey! Wait!"

The roar of a motorcycle engine drowned out her voice. By the time she stepped onto the top stair, the black bike was already merging into the heavy traffic of the avenue, disappearing beneath the shadow of the overhead rail lines.

Emma stood on the porch, the cold wind biting through her damp sweater. She looked down at the envelope. The paper felt heavy, textured like linen. She turned it over. The dark blue wax seal bore the image of a bird with its wings sharply clipped, pinned beneath a stylized letter *A*.

The name *Ava Sinclair* sat strangely in her mind, the old scar behind her left ear itch for the first time in months.

She pulled the door shut, locking the deadbolt with a firm twist.

"Who was it?" Lily called out from the kitchen, her laptop screen illuminating her face in a pale blue glow as her fingers flew across the keyboard.

"A courier," Emma said, her voice dropping as she walked into the small kitchen space. She didn't put the letter on the counter. She held it with both hands, her thumb running over the rigid edges of the wax crest. "He had the wrong address. But he wouldn't take it back."

"Did they leave a return address? We can just throw it back in the public drop box." Lily didn't look up from her screen. "Em, the tuition portal is lagging again. If the bank transfer doesn't clear by midnight, they drop my enrollment status for next term."

Emma didn't answer. Her eyes were locked on the heavy ink of the name. *Ava.* Without thinking, she slipped her thumb beneath the flap of the envelope, breaking the blue wax seal with a sharp, clean snap. She pulled out the single sheet of cream stationery.

The handwriting was aggressive, beautiful, and completely jagged like a hand trying to maintain perfect form while shaking from the inside out.

*Ava,*

“They are rewriting what happened in 2012. You are the only proof left…”

Emma’s breath caught in her throat. Her eyes skipped down to the next line, the ink digging deep into the expensive paper fibers.

“...Do not trust the public records. Do not trust anyone with the Sinclair name. Find the blind spots before they find you.”

The paper trembled slightly between her fingers. 2012. The exact year her parents had died on the northern highway. The exact year she woke up in a hospital unable to remember anything before twelve.

"Em?" Lily finally looked up, her brow furrowing as she noticed her sister’s face. "What is it? What does it say?"

Before Emma could answer, a low, smooth purr of an engine echoed through the narrow street outside. It wasn't the aggressive rattle of the courier's motorcycle. It was the heavy, rhythmic rumble of a luxury car pulling up to the curb, its tinted windows completely blocking out the remaining afternoon light.

The engine was cut out. The street grew deathly quiet.

Emma dropped the letter onto the wooden table, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She reached out, her hand gripping her sister's shoulder.

"Lily," she whispered. "Turn off the music.”