One drunken night, Lu let Phaios crash on his sofa, waking to Phaios sobbing and staring at the walls he’d forgotten about. Phai didn’t say anything about the Asylum or Lu being insane, he’d only lingered on each adoring stroke and pieced together a thousand maybes Lu shouldered unconsciously.

“What if you found him?” Phaios croaked in the morning.

Lu shrugged, sitting up on an elbow, looking at his collage from Phaios’ perspective. He really did look crazy. Obsessed. “I’d probably… smile? Or cry. Actually,” Lu conceded, too tired for lies, “I’d probably just stare at him.” He pushed himself up to make them coffee, “sometimes I try to guess who’s the closest version to the real one,” he laughed at himself from the small kitchen and didn’t see Phaios tug the Grounder version off the wall, folding the napkin into his pocket and taking it with him when he left, still sniffling.

Lu knew his walls were heartbreaking. He knew he wore it outwardly too, his coworkers too kind and soft, no one else but Myrhina hitting on him, because he was so obviously taken, but he also suspected they saw his guilt at the edges, and because they didn’t know what it meant, they were careful and kind, but not curious. But when Phaios closed the door and left him alone in the cool morning darkness in the Mids, before Magenta district clicked on the sun lamps, with only the orange light from the algae pillars flooding in through his only window, Lu let himself consider what he would do if he discovered he was alone in the world, without his heart. Wouldn’t he have felt it? No, that was stupid. He wouldn’t know if he was alone or not until he found Adon. 

Rather than fight the quiet by himself, Lu scrolled through his contacts for what other people called friends. There was Myrhina, demanding him for a client meeting in the afternoon with three iced coffees and a cake he wouldn’t eat. There were the Grounders from Nika’s track, Gideon’s guys who’d been scrambled, Mykos and Troy, slummer fish and the kids his age who wanted to be uncles but succeeded only in becoming Orestes’ minions. There were old classmates he’d helped with assignments and gotten notes for missed classes from, then Nika and Phaios, and no one else. Not even Benny, or Junior, or Heranika were saved in his comms. 

He sighed and looked around his small home. If Adon never came, could he endure the grief? If Adon came now, could he navigate the humiliation. Lu flopped onto his couch with a conflicted frown. A warm home, that was what he wanted to give Adon, but he had no idea what one looked like. 

Probably there were people, like the chatter of a bakery. Lu rolled up and put on some soft music with an ambient atmosphere over the lo-fi track. He learned to bake, then accepted he was never going to be decent and learned to cook instead, filling his house with candid dinner parties to practice recognizing the sounds of a warm home. There was more laughter than he’d expected.

A warm home probably felt clean and safe. Lu scrolled through housekeeping hacks and rules, spent his paychecks on organizers and vacuums, and only allowed himself one drawer of art supplies at a time. He relocated the cluttered wall of printout- and worksheet-portraits to the inside of his closet door, framing his favorites and hanging a tasteful gallery of Adons he sometimes switched out for new ones he liked better. The rest he photographed and added to his Platform account, then slid into the paper recycler slot in his waste chute.

Warm homes didn’t need shadows of the past taking up every corner. He learned to decorate with lamps and kept everything in its place, and was only a little bothered when Phaios said his home looked like no one actually lived in it because it was too clean. 

☆

Lu updated his wardrobe to match the bustling Mids that had moved away from the techwear tassels and into neat-cut lines and minimal patterns. He filled his closet with bold shapes and neutral color palettes now that he was in the upper Mids, where neons were associated with youth and brash Sec-Offs and rowdy Grounders. The upper Mids wardrobe was meant to blend seamlessly from bland and serious work to bold glittering parties in the Arcade with just a few accessories. He bought their thin coats and boots made for quick runs down dry halls, tiptoing through wet grates, not the heavy-duty overcoats of the Wells, made to endure the long-term exposure of cold through broken corridors and torrential floods. 

The Mids didn’t need to plan much unless they had to align their Chroma arrival to an allotted ticket entrance time, or were taking gravity tunnels, but even then, they rarely had to leave their districts. They had parks and balconies and sunlamps and district leads proposing better recycling infrastructure and station accessibility for local rails. They had legal railbikes, and greenhouse groceries, and courtyard gardens, community center complexes with pools and recreation courts, game rooms, and cafes. They had banks run by Asylum Security who were there to protect people first, and even forgiveness centers to work off fines and fees through volunteering. The Ground was only offered warnings of calculated collapse, Sec-Offs who protected property, and Quartet kingpins who wilfully redrew election districts, targeting the inherited loans of children who had no rights of personhood. The growing disparity between the Mids and the Ground at the Midgate had been pointed out in memes, then jokes, and had cemented itself as an unfixeable aspect of modern life, a sad truth of Caldera’s existence, unavoidable and tragic. Lu ignored it, thoroughly obsessed with building a warm home for Adon who never arrived.

After his first year in Magenta, Lu’s neighbors began to offer him the customary nod and wave of recognition, though they still did not speak to him. He understood their distance was a politeness, as they did not speak to each other as well, but also a necessity, as they were all the workaholics who could not afford another relationship squeezed into their networks of hopeful exchanges. Any time they spent socializing risked their position, and so they were rarely home, stumbling into their units to shower and sleep and wake up to do it again. 

After his unit began to feel homey, decorated with throw-pillows and rugs, blue plaid blankets and an extra pair of slippers by the door, Lu finally moved on to the most difficult necessity of a warm home: the food. He only knew the one egg dish he still couldn’t find the name of, so he started with baking, but it wasn’t long before his neighbors were glaring at him again, this time for the smoke alerts and burnt-sugar smell. He moved from cakes to breads to dumplings to noodles, then started on the sauces, marinades, and all the ways he could preserve the greenhouse produce: fermenting, dehydrating, canning, and freezing in his tiny ice box, until he could mindlessly whip up a feast. On his twenty-fifth birthday, he threw together a dinner so impressive that, despite his victory at the race, Phaios showed up at his door, dragging Nika and a new person they introduced as Xeri behind him, shoving through the crowd of Lu’s new acquaintances to get to the buffet.

Lu smiled at friends from cooking classes and design contests from his couch with a single drink. His desk and wall of Adons had migrated into his walk-in closet with his new salary upgrade, which was the least Myrhina could do after taking credit for so many of his ideas. He was happy to move from personal assistant to assistant designer, though it was more of a lateral move and he was still at the bottom of the corporate chain, swinging back and forth by puppet-master command. He sighed and downed the last of his wine, wondering if Adon drank beer, or mead, or whisky, or vodka, or cocktails, or champagne, or whatever was offered, or nothing at all. 

Lu’s home looked warm, lit by amber bulbs and a few tastefully placed strips of colored lights dancing with the music as his new friends pecked at his food and delivered gifts and cards or asked for recipes with emphatic compliments. Lu imagined Adon among them, in a corner, chatting in a circle, dancing wildly between groups, so many ghostly versions just at the edges of his peripheral vision as Lu smiled and swayed and laughed and held his glass steady for the refill Phaios insisted on. He plopped back into his chair, the chaos in full swing, his forehead sweaty from dancing, turning the music up louder because a neighbor had reported a noise violation without noticing that he’d registered a permit. He smirked at the red retaliate report button and hit decline, then scrolled habitually through Caldera IDs without realizing fully what he was doing until Myrhina’s text interrupted him. She invited herself to his housewarming party because one of the few coworkers Lu had invited must have told her, probably Baus. Lu made sure he was tucked safely into a loud round of Ultimate Ground Racer Obstacle Run 7000, the whole party playing tournament style, with their games projected on his empty walls, the Midders trying their best even though everyone in the room knew it was going to be Lu vs. Phaios in the end, and when Myrhina arrived, Lu didn’t even wave. 

They cheered with progressively more drunken birthday wishes, the Midders’ hesitation around the Grounders waning as Phaios, Nika, and Xeri poured drinks and turned up music and shooed away the Sec-Offs, pointing to the registered permit log they had full access to but hadn’t bothered to check. Overall, it was a good birthday, a good start in a new place, and Lu ended it alone, drawing Adon blowing out twenty-five candles beside him.

He woke to a witness summons to the Wells court hall, citing Gideon’s potential parole and requiring a new Adult Testimony, now that Lu was officially his own Caldera Family Registry, no longer legally related to Gideon. He dressed and rehydrated, then went to the office location because the letter had been hand-delivered by a Sec-Off in Asylum military uniform and the letter sealed with the official Asylum crest of Caldera, the postal code number matching the office address, everything pointing him toward an official summoning. He arrived to find a crowd of Gideon’s Flock waiting. 

Uncles jumped on him, dragging Lu to Heranika and he remembered bitterly that his warm home was merely a facade.

☆