He finds the phone on the kitchen counter.
She never leaves her phone.
He has lived in this apartment for — he counts, the way he counts everything, quietly, in the part of his mind that runs parallel to the surface — eleven weeks. In eleven weeks he has never seen her leave without it. The phone is the thing she reaches for before her keys, before her coat, before she has fully stood up from wherever she was sitting. It is the first thing she checks in the morning and the last thing she sets down at night and it has been on that counter since eight forty-seven PM and it is now past midnight and she has been gone for over three hours.
The axe is also gone.
He noticed the axe on the second day. It lived in the hall closet behind the coats, in the space where a normal person might keep an umbrella stand or a box of things they didn't need anymore. He had not asked about it. He had learned, in the years before this apartment and the years inside it, that the things you don't ask about are usually the things that matter most. So he had filed it: hall closet, behind the coats, present.
Tonight it is absent.
He stands in the kitchen holding her phone and understands that the two facts belong together.
He has Marcus's number because Delaney made him memorize it. In case of emergency, she'd said, which had struck him even then as an odd thing to say; the kind of thing that acknowledged an emergency was possible while making it clear she did not expect him to define what counted as one.
He thinks this counts.
He is shaking. He notices this the way he notices most things about his own body; as information, arriving from a slight distance, processed carefully. His hands are shaking and his chest is doing something that makes it hard to get a full breath and his eyes are—
He is crying.
He hasn't cried in a long time. He is not sure how long. Long enough that the feeling is almost unfamiliar, the specific heat of it, the way it doesn't ask permission.
✻ ✻ ✻
He dials.
Marcus picks up on the third ring, voice thick with sleep.
"Hello?"
"Hello?"
Viktor opens his mouth.
What comes out is not words. It is something before words, the sound a person makes when the thing they've been holding becomes too heavy all at once, when the careful architecture of staying quiet collapses because there is no version of staying quiet that doesn't result in something terrible happening to someone.
He is in the street now. He doesn't remember putting on his shoes. The night air is cold and the street is empty and the pavement under his feet is real and he is standing under a streetlight holding Delaney's phone with both hands because his hands won't stop shaking and he can't—
"Hello? Who is this?"
"Marcus." His voice comes out wrong. Cracked. Too young. "Marcus it's — it's Viktor."
Silence on the line. Then, carefully:
"Viktor. Okay. I'm here. What's happening?"
And Viktor, who has not spoken more than necessary in eleven weeks, who learned before he could properly name the lesson that silence was the safest language, who has been a notebook and a face and a prop and a half-brother and a tool and a ghost in various people's stories, Viktor tells him.
Not everything. Not in order. The words come out the way they come out when you've been keeping them too long — jagged, overlapping, not quite making sentences. The axe. She took the axe. The phone is here, she left the phone, she never leaves the phone. She said something last week about the address, about finding him, about finishing it, and he hadn't understood what finishing meant and now he thinks he does and he can't—
"Viktor." Marcus's voice has changed. Awake now. Fully awake. "Viktor, listen to me. Where are you right now?"
"Outside. The street. I don't — I just ran, I didn't know what else..."
"That's okay. That's the right thing. You did the right thing." A sound on the line; movement, a light switching on. "Do you know where she went? Do you have an address?"
"She said 5214. She said that address a lot. She had it written down."
A long pause.
"Okay." Marcus's voice is very controlled in the way voices get when the person using them is not controlled at all and is choosing the control deliberately. "I'm calling the police. Right now. From my phone. You stay on this line. Don't go back inside. Don't go anywhere. Just stay where you are under the light."
"Is she going to —" Viktor stops. Tries again. "Is someone going to get hurt?"
Marcus doesn't answer immediately.
In the pause Viktor can hear him breathing, can hear the specific quality of someone deciding how honest to be with a nineteen-year-old who is standing alone in the street at midnight already crying.
"I don't know," Marcus says. "But you called. That matters. That might be enough."
✻ ✻ ✻
Viktor stands under the streetlight.
The street is empty. The neighbourhood is the kind of quiet that doesn't know what's moving through it tonight. Somewhere a few blocks over, or maybe further, or maybe not far enough, Delaney is—
He presses the phone harder against his ear.
"Marcus."
"I'm here."
"I didn't know." His voice breaks on it. "I didn't know what she was going to — I thought it was just — she said it was journalism, she said we were just finding the truth, and I wanted..." He stops. The thing he wanted is too large and too embarrassing to say out loud: he wanted a sister. He wanted Elena. He wanted to matter to someone the way siblings matter, the way he'd watched from the outside of that for his entire life, and Delaney had offered him a door and he had walked through it without looking at what the door was made of.
"I know," Marcus says quietly.
"I'm sorry."
"Viktor." Marcus's voice is gentle in a way that makes it worse. "You're nineteen. You called. That's what matters right now."
Viktor sits down on the kerb.
He doesn't decide to sit — his legs just stop holding him, the way things stop when they've been holding too long. The pavement is cold through his jeans. The streetlight makes a circle around him, small and orange and present.
He holds the phone with both hands and cries properly, the way he hasn't since before the YouTube channel, before the crackers on Amore's counter, before all of it — the way a child cries, without strategy, without performance, just because the thing is too big and he is too small and someone on the other end of a phone is the only thing between him and the dark.
Marcus stays on the line.
He doesn't say it's okay.
He just stays.