Chapter 2. Spindle (Part 3)

The night he came was colder than most.

The neon outside bled across the damp cobblestones in streaks of pink and violet, throwing restless light through the window. Somewhere below, a bottle shattered, followed by laughter sharp enough to cut.

Her mother arrived with him just past midnight. The door opened to the smell of beer and cigarette smoke clinging to their clothes. Zoya didn’t wait for instructions — she was already on her feet, phone in one hand, headphones in the other. She slipped into the closet, pulling the door until only a thin line of light ran along the edge.

From the muffled voices outside, she could tell he was taller than most of her mother’s customers. His voice carried a low, gravelly weight, the kind that made the thin walls seem thinner.

“I’m a big deal, you know,” he said, the scrape of a chair against the floor following his words.

“I can bypass the Spire’s security. You know the Spire? Oh right, you wouldn’t, you’re just a whore ha!”

Her mother laughed, the brittle kind that never reached her eyes. The rustle of a bag followed, and then the soft hiss of a beer can opening.

Zoya pressed the headphones tighter over her ears and opened Snake on the phone. The pixel snake flickered and turned, swallowing dots in the small glowing world she controlled. It was easier to focus on that than the clink of bottles or the sound of her mother’s voice dipping low.

Minutes bled into an hour. The voices outside grew softer, then faded entirely. She let herself relax, curling into the corner, eyes slipping closed.

She woke to sunlight knifing through the slats in the closet door. The air inside was heavy with stale beer and the faint tang of sweat. She blinked until her vision cleared.

Her mother was gone.

The man from last night was still there, seated cross-legged on the floor. He was hunched over a laptop, its metal casing dented at one corner, stickers peeling along the edges. The screen’s glow painted his face in ghost-light, making the shadows under his eyes look deeper.

From her narrow view, she caught fragments:

The steady clatter of keys under his fingers.

The faint smell of burnt electronics, like overheated plastic.

The chain around his neck, thin and dull with age, disappearing into his shirt.

Every so often, he laughed under his breath.

“Huh… shit.”

Then, suddenly, the laugh stopped. His head jerked toward the laptop, eyes narrowing.

He reached for the beer beside him, missed, and knocked it over. Amber liquid spread across the floorboards, seeping under the laptop’s corner. Swearing, he yanked a small black device from the side — a modem — and threw it toward the kitchen. It skidded to a stop under the shelf with a hollow clink.

His movements turned sharp, urgent. He pulled on his jacket, his boots. A cigarette dangled unlit from his lips.

Then, without warning, the closet door swung open.

Zoya’s pulse hammered in her ears. She didn’t move. The coats hung thick between them, their smell of dust and perfume wrapping around her like a shield.

He didn’t notice her.

Instead, he shoved the laptop into the space at his feet. The edge of the metal casing caught her lip, a sudden flare of pain followed by the copper taste of blood. She flinched, a sharp breath escaping her — but no sound.

He slammed the door shut. Moments later, the front door rattled on its hinges as he left.

The laptop lay warm beside her knee, still humming faintly.

The man never came back.

Two days later, Zoya saw his face on the television bolted to the wall of the noodle shop across the courtyard. The grainy image showed him sprawled in a tangle of weeds at the edge of the canal, skin pale, eyes staring at nothing. The newscaster’s voice was flat, the kind used for stories that were just another line in the daily crime reports.

By the time she climbed the stairs back to Barrack No. 75, the image had etched itself into her mind — not because she felt sorry for him, but because it confirmed something important: he was gone. And the laptop in her closet no longer belonged to anyone but her.

She didn’t touch it right away. Instead, she let it sit where he’d left it, beside the pile of blankets she used for a bed. Every so often she glanced at it, imagining what might be inside. Sometimes she reached out and rested her fingertips on its cool metal shell, as if the touch alone might give her an answer.

The days blurred.

Her mother had left again, vanishing into the late-night streets with the careless promise to be back “soon.” She’d been gone before, but this time felt longer. The food in the room ran out on the third day — the last heel of bread gone hard, the last tin of sardines scraped clean with her finger.

Hunger came first, settling in her stomach like a tight knot. She’d been hungry before; she knew how to wait it out, how to drink water to trick her body.

But boredom — that was worse. Boredom crawled under her skin, gnawed at her thoughts, made her restless enough to pace the room. It kept her awake at night, staring at the shapes the streetlight made on the peeling walls.

By the fifth day, she began having dreams. In them, the laptop wasn’t just a thing — it was a doorway. Sometimes she saw it in the middle of an endless black hallway, its screen glowing with symbols she couldn’t read. Sometimes it was heavy in her hands, humming like a living thing. Always, when she tried to open it in the dream, she woke before she saw what was inside.

On the seventh day, she found the modem.

She’d been digging through the shelf under the kitchen counter, looking for anything edible, when her hand brushed something small and hard wedged in the corner. She pulled it out and recognized it instantly — the same device she’d seen him yank from the laptop before he’d left. Scuffed black plastic, a crack running along one side, faint sticky residue clinging to its edge. A dry whiff of beer rose from it when she turned it over in her hand.

The adapter plug was still in the wall socket, the cable coiled on the floor like a snake waiting to be picked up.

She sat back on her heels, the modem in one hand, her empty stomach cramping, her mind buzzing.

Hunger, she could endure.

Boredom, she could not.

The Opening of the Machine

Zoya sat cross-legged on the floor, the laptop in front of her like a sealed chest from a storybook.

It was heavier than she remembered — dense, cold under her palms, the metal casing carrying a faint scent of dust and something sharper, almost medicinal. Stickers clung to its surface: faded logos, numbers, a single jagged spiral in red that looked hand-drawn.

Her small fingers traced the scratches along the edges. The weight of it wasn’t just physical; it felt important, like it had a gravity of its own, a pull that had been growing stronger with each day she’d resisted opening it.

She glanced at the door. It was locked, not that it mattered much — the lock could be forced with a shoulder. The only sound in the room was the occasional drip from the bathroom tap. Outside, the courtyard hummed faintly with distant voices, muffled laughter, the bark of a stray dog.

She hesitated.

Her hands were trembling, but not from hunger. She pressed the latch and lifted the lid.

The screen was dark, coated with a film of dust that caught the light from the window. Her reflection hovered in it — pale face, freckles standing out like constellations, hair falling in uneven strands across her cheeks. She pressed the power button.

For a moment, nothing.

Then a low, mechanical whirr stirred under her fingertips. The sound deepened as fans spun to life. A thin strip of light flared along the edge of the keyboard, washing her small hands in cold, alien glow.

Lines of text scrolled too fast for her to read — commands, symbols, fragments of words in languages she didn’t recognize. The boot-up wasn’t smooth; it coughed, flashed, hesitated.

Her pulse quickened.

She reached for the modem, slid it into place with a satisfying click. The connection icon in the corner of the screen pulsed like a heartbeat. She plugged in the adapter; a tiny charging light blinked awake.

Zoya had never used a laptop before. She didn’t know where the certainty came from, but her fingers seemed to understand things her mind didn’t. Within minutes she was learning the rhythm of the touchpad, the logic of the menus. She tried things — double-clicking, dragging — and the machine obeyed.

Within an hour she could navigate its file system. She learned which folder symbols were doors to more rooms, which menus were corridors leading somewhere else. She found the network panel, hovered over the Connect button, then pressed it.

The pulsing icon went steady. She was online.

A thrill ran through her chest.

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