Chapter 1: Under the Desk
The living room floor was a battlefield of half-packed boxes. Some were neatly labeled Alex’s Stuff in her own loopy script; others were just scribbled in frantic marker, the tape peeling up at the corners like restless tongues. A single, abandoned suitcase lay open near the fireplace, its contents—a tangle of jeans, sketchbooks, and a single lonely sneaker—spilled out like a betrayal. The air smelled of stale coffee and the faint, lingering scent of Ellie’s perfume, now just another ghost in the room.
From her vantage point on the arm of the sofa, Alex Vance watched the impossible geography of her mother’s foot. Ellie was seated in her favorite armchair, a colossal, weathered leather thing that groaned under her weight. One bare foot, longer than a city bus, was planted flat on the floor, the pale skin of her arch like a curved hillside. The other was drawn up, her knee level with Alex’s perch. The sheer scale of it never got old, or maybe it did, and that was the whole problem.“Veil,” Alex said, the word too loud in the quiet room.
Ellie’s thumb, which had been stroking the ridge of her own kneecap, stilled.The nail alone was the size of a car door.She didn’t look down. Her gaze was fixed somewhere on the far wall, on a photograph of the four of them—Jules grinning, Ellie serene, Jess looking mildly annoyed, and Alex, then ten, perched on Ellie’s shoulder like a restless bird.“No,” Ellie said. Her voice wasn’t a shout. It was a low, tectonic rumble that moved through the air and up through the sofa frame, vibrating in Alex’s bones.
“You didn’t even let me finish.”
“I don’t need to.” Ellie finally looked down. From Alex’s perspective, it was like watching a celestial event: the slow, deliberate tilt of that familiar face, the dark hair a curtain shifting against a sky of ceiling.Her eyes, vast and deep-set, found Alex. “You want to move to the tiny-only enclave.You want to transfer your credits to their college. You want a ‘normal’ life.” She infused the last word with a weary dismissal that made Alex’s teeth clench.“Yes.” Alex stood up, balancing on the soft cushion of the sofa arm. “Everyone there is my size, Ellie.Five feet.Six feet. Not two hundred and seventy. I wouldn’t have to check an app just to see if it’s safe to walk to the kitchen. I could go to a party without someone needing to text the host to watch their step.”
“You have a home here.” Ellie’s voice softened, but it was the softness of granite.“A safe home.We have systems. The walkways, the alerts—”
“The alerts are so you don’t accidentally kill me!” The words burst out, sharper than she intended.She saw Ellie flinch, a minute tightening around those enormous eyes. Alex pushed on, her heart hammering.“It’s not living.It’s surviving. I want to live somewhere where a dropped coffee mug is a mess, not a flash flood. Where a hug doesn’t require climbing gear.”
Ellie’s sigh was a gust of wind that stirred the pages of a stray magazine on the floor.“Alexandra.You are eighteen. The world is not built for you. Out there, beyond our fences, it’s dangerous in ways you can’t even conceive.”
“I’m not talking about ‘out there’! I’m talking about Veil.It’s designed for us.It’s secure. It has laws.”
“Laws didn’t save your cousin.” The statement dropped into the room, heavy and final. Ellie’s jaw tightened, a ripple of muscle in a cliff of a face.
Alex knew the story.Everyone did. A tiny cousin, before the stricter protocols, visiting a giant-uncle’s house.A misplaced foot.An instant. It was the family horror story, the ghost Jess and Alex were raised to outrun. It was also Ellie’s ultimate trump card, and she hated her for playing it now.“So I never get to leave?” Alex’s voice cracked. “I stay in my room, in my little human-scale pod you designed, forever? Just because I might get hurt?”
“Because you might get ended,” Ellie corrected, her tone turning stern, the one she used when lessons were non-negotiable. “This isn’t a game, Alex.This is gravity and mass and inattention. You are the most precious, fragile thing in my world.I will not let you place yourself in that kind of vulnerability. The answer is no.”
The finality was a physical wall.Alex felt it hit her. She stared at the immense face above her, at the love and the fear and the iron will etched into every line.Arguing further was useless.Ellie’s mind, once set, was a closed system.
“Fine,” Alex muttered. She turned and hopped down from the sofa arm, landing with a soft thud on the safe-path matting that crisscrossed the living room floor.
“Where are you going?”
“My room.” She didn’t look back.
“We are not finished, young lady.” The rumble was back, a warning tremor.
“You are,” Alex said, barely audible, and kept walking. She felt the pressure change in the room as Ellie shifted, as the very air was displaced by her movement, but no hand came down to block her path. Just the weight of that disappointed, worried gaze between her shoulder blades all the way to the hallway.
She’d barely cleared the doorway when a hand shot out from the adjacent alcove and grabbed her wrist.Jess.
Her older sister pulled her into the shadowy space beside the grandfather clock—a regular human-sized one, a curio in this house of giants. Jess’s brown eyes were wide, her long hair tied up in a messy bun.“Are you insane?” she hissed. “I could hear you from my room. You sounded like you were picking a fight with a mountain.”
“She’s not a mountain, she’s my mom,” Alex snapped, pulling her wrist free. “And it wasn’t a fight.It was a declaration. One she vetoed.”
“Of course she vetoed it.Alex, Veil? Do you have any idea how furious Jules and Ellie would be if you actually went?”
Alex leaned back against the wall, the cool plaster a relief.She studied her sister’s worried face. Jess, the pre-med student, who saw the world as a series of potential accidents waiting to happen. “Yeah,” Alex said quietly, all the fight leaking out of her, replaced by a cold, clear resolve. “I know exactly how furious they’d be.”
Jess’s eyes narrowed, catching the shift.“Alex.No. Whatever you’re thinking, just… no.”
Alex just looked at her, saying nothing. The silence stretched, filled only by the distant, earth-tremor hum of Ellie moving in the living room, the shuffle of a box being shifted.
Jess swallowed, her dry, cynical humor nowhere in sight.“You’ll break their hearts. And you’ll probably get yourself killed.”
“Or,” Alex said, pushing off from the wall, “I’ll finally get to live.”
She walked past Jess toward her bedroom door. She didn’t need to look back to know Jess was still standing there, a silent sentinel of dread.The plan was already crystallizing. The half-packed boxes were a pretense now, a cover. She’d take the case that was already open.She’d take the cash she’d saved from selling her digital art online. She’d take the late-night bus that stopped at the edge of the giant-district, the one that connected to the tiny rail line.Ellie thought she was protecting something fragile.Maybe she was. But glass could cut, and Alex was done being stored safely on a shelf. The fear in Jess’s eyes, the steel in Ellie’s voice—it was all just fuel. She closed her bedroom door softly, the click a tiny, decisive sound in the vast, quiet house. Outside, the first shadows of evening began to stretch, long and deep like promises, or like warnings. She didn’t bother to turn on the light. She already knew what she needed to pack.