Daylight did not improve the situation.

Zack had half-expected it to — had half-expected that the particular quality of night that made a glowing blade on a staircase seem like something other than a hallucination would dissipate with the morning, and he would find himself sitting at his kitchen table across from a piece of metal that was, in the unforgiving light of day, simply a piece of metal. Strange, perhaps. Unexplained, certainly. But reducible to something that fit inside the normal order of things.

The blade did not cooperate.

In the morning light coming through the window above the sink it looked different — less dramatic, the glow subdued to something almost subliminal, a luminescence you might miss if you weren't looking for it. But it was still there. And the warmth was still there when he put his hand near it, not touching, just close enough to feel the edge of it. And the sense of it — that quality of directed presence, of something that was not inert — was still there in a way that daylight did nothing to explain away.

He had been sitting at this table for approximately six hours.

He was aware that this was not normal behavior. He was aware of several things that were not normal about the last twelve hours, and he was filing them in the part of his mind that handled information he didn't yet have a framework for — not ignoring it, not analyzing it, just holding it until he knew what to do with it. This was a skill he had developed young and refined over years, the ability to compartmentalize not as avoidance but as triage. Deal with what you can deal with. Hold what you can't. Wait for the moment when the held thing becomes dealable.

The held thing was currently glowing faintly on his kitchen table.

He stood up, and his body registered six hours in a wooden chair with the comprehensive disapproval of a body that had also spent two hours hitting a bag before that. He rolled his neck. Moved to the sink and ran water and drank it standing there, looking out the window at the slice of Oakhaven visible from this angle: the back of the building across the alley, a fire escape with a bicycle chained to it, a strip of sky that was gray in the specific way Oakhaven sky was gray, which was less weather and more character.

He thought about Ren.

Not the way he usually thought about her, which was involuntary and total, the grief arriving like a system override. This was more deliberate. He was thinking about something specific: a conversation, minor enough that he had not thought about it since it happened, which was — he placed it carefully — about eight months ago, on a Sunday, when they had walked down to the Vael District because she wanted to look at something in one of the market stalls.

She had stopped outside a shop. Not the market stall she'd been heading to — a different place, a narrow storefront wedged between a laundromat and a place that sold nothing he had ever been able to identify. The sign above the door was old enough that the lettering had faded to illegibility. The window displayed an assortment of objects that had no obvious relationship to each other: clocks, fabric, things in jars, a taxidermied bird with glass eyes that caught the light wrong.

Ren had stopped and looked at it for a moment. He remembered standing beside her, hands in his pockets, waiting.

*Maren knows things,* she had said. Not to him, exactly. More to the window. The way she sometimes said things that were less statements than thoughts she'd let become audible by accident.

He had said something — *what kind of things* or *who's Maren* — and she had come back from wherever she'd been and smiled and said *nothing, never mind* and they had moved on.

He had not thought about it again.

He thought about it now.

He went to find his jacket.

---

He wrapped the blade in the jacket before he left the apartment — not because he thought this was an effective concealment strategy, the jacket was not particularly thick and the warmth radiated through it in a way that was perceptible to his arm, but because carrying a glowing object through Oakhaven in broad daylight seemed like the kind of decision that invited complications he didn't have energy for. The jacket made it look like he was carrying something wrapped in a jacket. This was marginally better.

Oakhaven in the morning was a different city than Oakhaven at three in the morning, and Zack had not been paying sufficient attention to the daytime version for long enough that it struck him now with a force that was almost physical. The noise of it. The density of people on the transit platforms, in the coffee queues, moving along the pavements with the particular purposeful shuffle of people who had places to be. The city did not know it was supposed to be quieter. The city had not been informed.

He took the long way to Vael without meaning to.

It happened because he turned right at the corner of Selt and Mourne instead of left, which was the more direct route, and the reason he turned right was that left took him past the transit stop on Brennan where Ren used to wait for him on the rare evenings he finished early enough to meet her coming off her shift. He had not gone that way since. He had reorganized his routes through this city around the places he was not ready to walk through, the way you reorganized a room around a piece of furniture you couldn't move yet.

The long way took him past the coffee place on Dassler where she had liked the cardamom thing they did in the autumn, which they were not doing now because it was not autumn, which somehow made it easier. Past the bookshop on the corner of Vael and Ninth whose window she had stopped at every single time they passed it without, as far as he knew, ever going inside. Past the wall on the Vael underpass where someone had painted something large and blue that he had never looked at closely because she had always been more interested in it than he was and looking at it now felt like looking at it wrong.

He looked at it now.

It was a figure, roughly human, standing with its arms slightly out from its sides in a posture that was either surrender or openness, depending on what you brought to it. The face was not detailed. The blue was the particular blue of something that had been repainted over several years, slightly different shades accumulating into a depth that a single application couldn't achieve.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he kept walking.

---

The shop was where he remembered it, wedged between the laundromat and the unidentifiable place, the sign above the door still illegible, the window still displaying its assortment of unrelated objects. The taxidermied bird was still there, glass eyes still catching the light at the wrong angle. He stood outside it for a moment the way he had stood on the staircase the night before, at another threshold, doing the same calculus.

He went in.

The interior smelled like old paper and something underneath that he couldn't name — not unpleasant, just specific, the smell of a place that had accumulated its own atmosphere over a long time and stopped apologizing for it. The space was narrow and deeper than the exterior suggested, shelves running floor to ceiling on both sides, the objects on them organized according to a logic he couldn't immediately parse. Light came from several sources, none of them overhead, all of them low and warm.

At the back, behind a counter that was itself covered in objects, a woman was writing something in a book.

She was old in the way that some people were old — not diminished by it, but concentrated. Like whatever she had been at forty had been distilled over subsequent decades into something more potent and less diluted. She had white hair pinned up with a thoroughness that suggested she'd been doing it the same way for sixty years and had no interest in changing. She did not look up when he came in.

*You can put it on the counter,* she said.

He hadn't spoken. He hadn't made any particular noise coming in. He stood in the middle of the shop and looked at her.

*The thing you're carrying,* she said, still not looking up. *You can put it on the counter.*

He walked to the counter and unwrapped the blade from his jacket and put it down.

She looked at it then. Set down her pen. Looked at it with the focused attention of someone assessing something they had a professional relationship with, which was not the response he had been prepared for. He had been prepared for skepticism, for the particular patience of someone who dealt regularly with grieving people who came in with unusual requests. He had not been prepared for recognition.

*Where did you find it?* she said.

*It found me,* he said. *It was on the steps of my building.*

She made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite surprise. *They do that,* she said, and did not explain what she meant by *they.*

He waited. She was still looking at the blade, not touching it, her hands flat on the counter on either side of it.

*What is it?* he said.

She looked up at him then, for the first time. Her eyes were the gray of the Oakhaven sky, and they did the same thing the sky did, which was give nothing away while somehow implying depth.

*What do you know about threshold objects?* she said.

*Nothing.*

*Then I'll be brief.* She straightened. *There are objects that exist at the boundary between states. Between living and not living. Between here and the place that comes after here. They're not common. They don't manufacture. They accrete — they form around the pressure of something unresolved, something that has enough weight on both sides of the boundary to pull an object into being at the intersection.* She paused. *This one is recent. A few months, I'd say.*

He felt something move in his chest.

*A few months,* he said.

*Give or take.* She looked at the blade again. *It didn't come from nowhere. Something on the other side of the boundary has enough unresolved weight to generate this. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.*

He put his hands on the counter. *Can it get me in?*

She looked at him. *In.*

*To the Void. The Static Void. Whatever it's called.* He had heard the name his whole life the way everyone in Oakhaven had heard it — background noise, urban legend, the thing people referenced when they were being dramatic about death. He had never said it with this much weight attached to it before. *Can this get me in there?*

The silence that followed was longer than he wanted it to be.

*Technically,* she said.

*That's not a no.*

*It's not a yes either.* She moved around the counter, not toward him, just moving, the way people moved when they were thinking and needed their body to be doing something. *The Void is not a place living people are meant to go. The boundary exists for reasons. Crossing it has costs that most people aren't equipped to absorb.* She stopped and looked at him directly. *You don't have a ratt. You have no training. You have no protection other than that object, and that object will get you in but it won't manage what happens once you're there.*

*I understand that.*

*I don't think you do,* she said, without hostility. *I think you understand the words. Understanding and knowing are different things.*

He held her gaze. *If I go in — is there someone in there to find?*

Another silence. This one different from the first — less considering, more careful.

*There could be,* she said finally. *The Void holds souls in transition. Before they complete the passage. For a time.* She paused. *How long ago did you lose someone?*

*Three months,* he said. *Eleven days.*

She nodded slowly. Not confirming, exactly. Acknowledging.

*Is it still possible?* he said. *After three months.*

*Possible,* she said, *is a complicated word when it comes to the Void.* She looked at him for a long moment. *The soul's persistence depends on factors I can't assess from here. The strength of the unresolved. The state of the person holding on. Whether the soul itself is — oriented toward staying or toward going.*

He thought about the feeling the blade had given him. The exhaustion. The practiced smallness. The waiting.

*If the soul wanted to disappear,* he said. *If that was — if that was a direction the soul was already moving in, even before. Would that make it harder?*

Maren looked at him with an expression he couldn't read.

*Yes,* she said. *That would make it considerably harder.*

He picked up the blade from the counter and wrapped it back in his jacket. His hands were steady. He noted this as a data point about his current state, which was: functional, contained, operating on the side of a decision he had apparently already made without fully consulting himself about it.

*What else do I need to know?* he said.

*More than I can tell you in one conversation.* She moved back behind the counter. *And most of what you need to know, you'll only learn by being there. Which is its own kind of problem.* She picked up her pen. *The blade will respond to your intention. Hold it and mean to cross, and it will show you the threshold. What you do after that is yours.*

He nodded.

*One more thing,* she said, without looking up from whatever she was writing. *The Void will manifest what's unresolved. Not just hers. Yours too. Whatever you're carrying that you haven't dealt with — it will find a shape in there. Be prepared for that.*

He thought about what he was carrying.

*I'll manage,* he said.

She made the sound again — the one that was not quite agreement.

---

He went back to the dojo.

Not the apartment — the dojo, because the dojo was where he thought, had always been where he thought, the physical activity of the space creating a kind of static that quieted the louder frequencies and let him hear what was underneath. He let himself in and stood in the middle of the floor and unwrapped the blade and set it down on the boards in front of him.

The room was empty and afternoon-lit, the neon not yet doing its work, the space looking more worn and more ordinary than it did at night. The bag hung on its chain. The mirror on the east wall showed him and the blade and the room behind them.

Maren's last words were still in his head: *whatever you're carrying that you haven't dealt with — it will find a shape in there.*

He knew what he was carrying. He had known it since the blade had given him her feeling — the exhaustion, the smallness, the waiting. What he was carrying was the specific guilt of a person who had loved someone completely and incorrectly, who had been present and absent simultaneously, who had looked at the surface of things and called it depth and never asked whether the depth was there.

The Void would make that into something he'd have to look at.

He was, he found, willing to look at it.

He picked up the blade. Not to cross — not yet, not tonight, there were things to do first, practical things, the kind of preparation that was available to him. But to hold it. To get used to the weight of it, the warmth of it, the way it sat in his grip. He moved through the basic forms — not dojo forms, not the sequences he'd practiced for years, but something slower and more exploratory, learning the balance of the thing, where its weight wanted to go, how it responded to intention.

It responded to intention. He had barely finished the thought when he felt it — a faint shift in the quality of the warmth, a slight increase in the luminescence, as if the blade was acknowledging his attention and reciprocating it. He filed this away.

He practiced until the room went dark around him and the neon started its work and Oakhaven became its night self again.

At some point he stopped and looked at the corner.

The chair. Small, wooden, slightly uneven. In the flat dark of the dojo it was just furniture. But he looked at it the way he was practicing looking at things now — not for the surface of them but for what the surface was doing. The chair was just a chair. But the fact that he hadn't moved it was not just a fact. It was a decision he had made and kept making, every night he came here, every night he didn't move it.

He had been waiting for something.

He understood now what he had been waiting for.

He looked at the blade in his hand. Thought about what Maren had not said — had declined to say, specifically — when he asked if the soul on the other side could still be found. She had said *possible* was complicated. She had said the soul's persistence depended on whether it was oriented toward staying or going. She had not said it was too late.

She had not said that.

He tightened his grip on the blade and held the thought that was underneath all the other thoughts, the one he had not let himself say directly since the night before: *she might still be there. And if she's there, I'm going to find her. And this time — this time — I am going to actually look at her.*

The blade pulsed once, warm and steady, against his palm.

He took that as something.