“There you go,” Jane muttered, ducking her head slowly out from underneath Matt’s arm. The boy made a face and stumbled, sliding into the corridor wall.

“Wassda party?” he asked, more slur than words. He made a grab for a handhold that wasn’t there but luckily Jane was quicker than an untrained drunk and managed to catch him before he fell.

“Keys,” she demanded.

“Wha?”

“Keys,” she repeated, “You idiot.”

“Oh. Hi Jane,” he muttered. His hand fumbled around in his pocket and it took a whole ten seconds to close around his keychain. “What you… what you want my…?”

“Thanks,” said Jane, snatching them out of his hand. She leant forward and wriggled the key to Matt’s room into the lock, which was made more difficult by the fact that she was also supporting most of Matt’s weight.

“In you go,” she announced, as the door swung open into a breath of cold air. She hobbled the two of them inside with relative ease and flicked the door closed with her leg. The curtains were open and the glow of the party fires was still bright enough to give her a general view around the room. She rotated her drunken cargo towards his bed.

“Lay down, shoes off,” she commanded Matt, who instead collapsed, fully clothed, on top of his blankets. Jane rolled her eyes, and for a moment contemplated whether she felt regretful enough to remove Matt’s boots for him. A second later, he began to snore, and she decided he probably wouldn’t care. She sighed, gazing down at him, unconscious and asleep.

“This wasn’t the plan,” she muttered under her breath, to him and to herself, but the fake clairvoyant remained blissfully unaware. Jane exhaled, somewhere between an irritable sigh and a groan. Well, there was no point in saying sorry now – the idiot wouldn’t remember it. Still face down, Matt fidgeted slightly, murmuring something indistinct. Jane shook her head and, with only a single backwards glance to make sure he was alright, padded softly from the room. She’d dragged him inside – maybe that counted. She’d ask Wally.

As she went to close the door, a roar of voices echoed in from outside – indistinct at first, but then louder. “SIX- FIVE- FOUR- THREE- TWO- ONE-”…and then there came flashes, bursts of light and explosive bangs, intermingling with a chorus of cheers. Jane shook her head and smiled at the unconscious figure she’d pulled out of the snow.

“Happy New Year dumbass,” she chuckled, closing the door behind her.

*

The computer lab was dark, save for the glow of a single screen – an unrelenting torrent of white‑blue light, illuminating the slouching body of the man before it. Edward Rakowski. Alone, like always. His fingers tapped and tripped along the keyboard, a sound as steady as rain and equally comforting. Everything else might leave him, nobody might want him. But his work remained. What did Mentok used to say? “My dullest thoughts are your epiphanies”? Arrogant, but accurate. Even after 5.6 standard drinks, Ed’s brain functioned – he was still useful, still had purpose.

Even if he would always be alone.

Ed worked in silence – the computer an extension of his hand, the Internet an extension of his mind. Information, data, pieces, assembled here and there. Trivial and important, it all fitted in somewhere. Maybe he was an aberration in that regard.

He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. There were no breakthroughs coming tonight. He could feel that already. Still, there must be something to do, some minor goal he could- of course. Ed leant back in his chair, fingers dancing, searching absentmindedly in pursuit of an insignificant goal. On and on – through and through. Lists built, lists scratched.

Suddenly, he noticed something. Something odd. He shook his head, as his mind processed the data and abruptly postulated an idea. A strange idea, an odd, bizarre suggestion, but yet… Alone, in the dark, Ed frowned. How peculiar. Surely that doesn’t… Yet even on a whim, worth investigating.

His fingers clicked from side to side, keyboard and mouse, further down into the rabbit hole. And slowly, a tightness spread throughout his chest. Trepidation. Dread.

There was no way. This couldn’t be right.

But it was. One after the other, after the other, he found them. More and more of them. Dozens; hundreds. A thought became a question, became a hunch, because a fear, became a pounding, shrieking, terrible realisation.

“Oh God,” he whispered, as panic flooded screaming through his mind. He raced into his email, his fingers trembling, his arms shaking-

And then suddenly he stopped.

Frozen.

Paralysed.

Unmoving, unblinking. His eyes wide, terrified. Still, completely still – save for the slightest, momentary twitch.

Then the twitch stopped, and he stood. In a single, fluid motion, Ed rose from his chair, reached over and turned off his computer. He turned and calmly walked across the lab and out the door. He strode briskly through the darkened corridors, past the closed-off rooms, the sleeping students. He turned up the stairs, moving quickly, with purpose. Round and round and round, up and up and up, until he reached the mouth of a bare and barren stairwell, having come as high as he could climb. Ed pushed open the metal door and stepped out, barefoot, into the cold.

Without a single word or sound, he walked slowly across the rooftop, further and further forward, until he was standing on edge of the building looking out into open space. His eyes were wide, his pupils desperate and frozen – and yet he never glanced down. His arms remained loose, relaxed by his side. He didn’t shout or cry, didn’t call for help. And he only hesitated, ever so slightly, when he took that final step off and out into nothingness.

At 3:54am, Edward Rakowski walked off the highest point of Morningstar.

*

Bzzz

In the darkness, Matt groaned. Barely conscious, his hands fumbled down the length of his pants into his pocket, his fingers grasping clumsily around the cold metal of his phone. Begrudgingly, he pulled it out. Head still face-down in his pillow, he dragged the phone up until the screen was right in front of his eyes, which recoiled and stung at the sudden assault of light. Through bleary delirium, Matt tried to focus, to make sense of who on Earth was messaging him at this ungodly hour …

Ed (1)

Matt blinked, slow and painful, his dry tongue moving gingerly over parched lips, his head pulsating dangerously. His fingers stumbled through the unlock pattern, his eyes reluctantly adjusting to the glare, groggily taking in Ed’s text. He groaned – what was this? Stupid Ed. Matt’s eyes drooped. His vision blurred, and his head rolled back onto the pillow, the phone slipping from his grasp as he retreated into unconsciousness. It dropped onto the carpet with a muffled thud, and lay there as the sound of Matt’s snores filled the room. Forgotten, the light from the screen faded into darkness – still showing a final message.

A single word.

Dawn