The Wind Through the Missing Wall

Lorna Saddler's building sat above a launderette that looked like it had lost an argument with time and then kept showing up anyway.

Mira stood across the road with her hands in her pockets, staring up at the second-floor windows while a dryer vent coughed warm lint-scented air into the cold afternoon. The sign downstairs had once been blue and now existed in several related shades of surrender.

“Great,” she muttered. “Crime, regret, and fabric softener. My three favourite genres.”

She crossed when nothing was coming, which in this part of town meant trusting that the distant van would remain distant and the local cyclist would continue believing himself immortal. The buzzer panel by the front door had four names on yellowed strips of tape. One had peeled halfway off. One was written in biro directly on the metal. One just said FLAT 2. The top bell read SADDLER in cramped capitals.

Mira pressed it.

Nothing.

She pressed it again. Waited. Pressed it a third time, harder, like increased bitterness might improve conductivity.

The speaker crackled. A woman’s voice, tired and close to the mic. “Yes?”

“Hi. It’s Mira Cole.”

A pause. Long enough to feel familiar.

Then: “Right. Yes. Sorry. Come up.”

The door clicked. Mira let herself in.

The hallway smelled like damp plaster and detergent. Up one flight of stairs, brown carpet worn flat in the middle, banister tacky with old gloss paint. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat, which was annoying. She would have preferred righteous anger. Anger had shape. This felt more like being dragged toward a dentist appointment by a string tied to one of your teeth.

Lorna opened the flat door before Mira knocked. She looked older than forty-six in the way guilt ages people unevenly, adding years to posture more than face. Grey threaded through her hair. Cardigan buttoned wrong. Bare feet in slippers that had given up pretending to support anything.

For a second they just looked at each other.

Mira had been seventeen last time. Furious, thin-skinned, vibrating with the private conviction that if the world insisted on reading her as ordinary then the world could get stuffed. Lorna had sat her in a folding chair in a storage unit and asked if she was sure. Mira had said yes too fast. She remembered that much with horrible clarity.

Now Lorna stepped aside and said, “Come in.”

The flat was small and crowded with objects that looked too ordinary to be trusted. Mugs on the windowsill. A stack of old phones. A box of loose keys. A chipped ceramic dog on the radiator. Mira didn’t know which, if any, contained pieces of people. The thought made the room feel wrong around the edges.

“I saw the news,” Mira said.

Lorna nodded once. “Tea?”

“No.”

“Right.”

Mira stayed standing. Lorna seemed to take that as fair.

“They emptied the unit,” Mira said. “Did they take everything?”

“Yes.”

“My camera too.”

Another pause. “Yes.”

There it was. Said aloud. Small word. Horrible effect.

Mira folded her arms because otherwise her hands were going to start doing things. “Okay. Brilliant. Love that.”

“I was going to contact people.”

“When?”

Lorna winced, not dramatically, just enough to register. “I should have sooner.”

“That is not a time.”

“No.”

The dryer below thudded through the floorboards. Somewhere outside a car alarm chirped and stopped. The world remained offensively itself.

Mira looked around the room and found she was suddenly furious with every object in it. The mug by the sink. The neat stack of takeaway menus. The coat hanging off a chair. How dare this place look like someone lived in it normally.

“You should’ve told me six months ago.”

“Yes.”

“You should’ve maybe not taken my entire social existence and put it in a disposable camera when I was a teenager having an ego-based nervous breakdown.”

Lorna met that. Didn’t defend herself. “Yes.”

That took some of the air out of the rage, which was inconvenient. Mira preferred people who argued back. Easier to organize yourself around.

“So what now?”

“I don’t know who took it,” Lorna said. “Not for certain.”

“Not for certain is not the same as not knowing.”

Lorna rubbed a hand over her face. “Someone who understood what was there. It wasn’t random. They ignored cash, electronics, tools. They went straight for the collection.”

“Who understands what was there?”

“A small number of clients. A smaller number of people who bought from clients. People talk.”

“Bought.” Mira laughed once, too sharp. “Cool. Great. Love a secondary market.”

Lorna’s mouth tightened. “I stopped that years ago.”

“Did you.”

“Yes.”

Mira believed that she believed it, which was not the same as useful.

She was about to say something else—something mean, probably, something deserved and not especially constructive—when a movement through the window caught her eye. She turned.

Across the street, outside the launderette, a man had sunk down onto the curb like his joints had all renegotiated at once. Early twenties maybe. Dark jacket, dark hair, headphones hanging around his neck instead of over his ears. One hand pressed hard over his mouth. The other braced on the pavement.

“Someone’s—” Mira stepped closer to the glass. “Is he drunk?”

Lorna came to the window beside her and looked down.

The change in her face was immediate and strange. Recognition, yes, but also something like dread. “No.”

“Does he need help?”

“He’s one of the resonance types.”

Mira looked at her. “Meaning?”

“He feels people.” Lorna kept watching the man on the curb. “Not current emotion. The deeper things. He must have passed too close.”

“Too close to what?”

Lorna answered without looking away. “To me.”

That landed badly in the room.

Down on the pavement, the man pulled in a breath like it hurt and let it out through his teeth. He wasn’t making a scene. If anything, the restraint was worse. Mira knew that body language. The very British posture of trying to collapse privately in public.

She was already moving toward the door before she’d decided to.

“Mira—”

“What?”

Lorna glanced at her. “Be gentle.”

Mira stared. “That’s not usually the note people hit first with me.”

“No,” Lorna said. “I know.”

The stairs down felt steeper than they had on the way up. Mira took them fast anyway, out into the detergent-and-cold air of the street. Up close, the guy looked less drunk and more overloaded, like every sound had edges.

“You all right?” she said.

He looked up.

And he looked at her.

Not through her. Not past. Not with that slight snag and slide she’d trained herself not to notice because noticing it every single time would kill a person. He looked right at her face and stayed there.

It hit so hard she almost missed his answer.

“Depends,” he said. His voice was flat in a way that sounded expensive, like dryness honed by use. “Are you real or am I having some kind of decorative collapse?”

Mira blinked. “Bit rude.”

“Sorry. Worst moment of my day. Manners slipped.”

Something in spite of everything nearly made her laugh.

Up close she could see he was sweating despite the cold. His jaw was locked. He looked like a person holding a live wire inside his own chest and trying not to let anyone else notice the light.

“Do you need an ambulance?” she asked.

“No.”

“Water?”

“No.”

“Someone to dramatically hold your hand while you reassess your relationship to consciousness?”

That got the smallest possible change around his mouth. Not a smile. The idea of one.

He dropped his hand from his mouth. “You’re one of hers.”

The words landed low and exact.

Mira went still. “Excuse me?”

He nodded vaguely upward, toward the flat above the launderette. “Lorna. You’ve got that same…” He shut his eyes for a second, searching for the shape of it. “Missing-wall feeling.”

Against her better judgment, Mira sat down on the curb beside him. The concrete was freezing through her jeans immediately. Traffic moved at the end of the road. A woman pushing a buggy glanced in their direction and kept going.

“What does that mean?” Mira asked.

He opened his eyes again and looked at her, and there it was a second time: the impossible fact of being directly registered.

“Like you pulled out a wall and the house is still standing,” he said. “But the wind goes straight through.”

Mira stared at him.

A stupid number of things happened in her body at once. Her throat went tight. Her fingers curled into the sleeves of her coat. She became abruptly, embarrassingly aware of her own face, as if it had started doing things without filing the paperwork first.

So naturally she said, “Cool. Very poetic. You should do birthday cards.”

The line came out mostly right. Dry enough. Manageable.

But he saw the miss anyway. His eyes flicked once to her hands.

“Yeah,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

“No you don’t.”

“No.” A beat. “I don’t.”

They sat there for a second in the aftershock of that. Mira could hear the dryers below the launderette kicking into a new cycle, all mechanical churn and trapped heat. Somewhere behind them, upstairs, a window shut.

He leaned back against the wall carefully, like he was returning to his body in stages. “You should probably not stand this close to me if you want a normal afternoon.”

“Bit late for that, I think.”

“Fair.”

She looked at the headphones around his neck. “Those actually do anything?”

“No.”

“Fashion, then.”

“Barrier.”

“Against?”

“People assuming I’m available.”

“Are you?”

He looked at her. “Obviously not.”

That one did make her laugh, short and involuntary. It bounced off the brick and vanished into the traffic noise.

For the first time in three years, someone had said something and her body had answered before she could supervise it. That was almost more unsettling than the looking.

“So what are you?” she asked.

He exhaled through his nose. “Unlucky, mostly.”

“Same.”

“I get emotional nadirs,” he said, like he was naming a plumbing issue. “Worst moments. Deepest drops. Rough radius of ten meters depending how bad your life’s been.”

Mira processed that. “That is… disgusting.”

“Correct.”

“You walk around feeling strangers’ worst day?”

“Worst minute, usually. Occasionally worst ten years compressed into one handy sensation. Very convenient. Great for mingling.”

“And Lorna’s is what, exactly?”

He gave a small, humorless glance toward the building. “A lot.”

Mira followed his look upward. Guilt had weight, apparently. Enough to knock a person onto a curb.

“You came here on purpose?”

“No,” he said. “That would suggest appalling planning on my part rather than ordinary bad luck. I was walking home.”

“From?”

He looked at her for half a second too long. “Away.”

“Helpful.”

“I’m having a rough afternoon. Try to meet me where I live.”

“On the pavement?”

“Emotionally.”

That nearly got her again. She hated that. Not because he was funny, exactly, but because he was running on the same frequency she used when sincerity got too close to the skin.

A silence opened. Not comfortable. Just present.

Then he frowned slightly, still looking at her. “You really can’t tell?”

“Tell what?”

“That you’re… strange.”

Mira barked a laugh. “Cheers.”

“No, not personality-wise. Though obviously I reserve the right to update that assessment. I mean socially. There’s no top layer. No first read. You’re all depth and no packaging.”

She went still again.

He noticed. Winced. “That was worse, wasn’t it.”

“Amazing, actually. Love to be described like an unbranded yogurt.”

He put his head back against the brick and shut his eyes. “Sorry.”

The apology was real and tired and not trying to make itself useful. That made it harder to swat away.

“Did Lorna tell you what she does?” Mira asked.

“Didn’t need telling.” He opened his eyes. “Your low reads like her work.”

Mira looked down at the pavement between her trainers. There was gum worked into the concrete in pale constellations. A cigarette end flattened into the curb.

“I gave it up,” she said before she meant to.

The confession sat there, stupid and irreversible.

He didn’t pounce on it. Didn’t ask why. Just waited.

“At seventeen,” she added, because if you were going to destroy your own dignity you might as well provide timestamps.

“That tracks.”

“Rude.”

“Not judgment. Just…” He made a vague motion with one hand. “Seventeen’s a terrible age to make permanent decisions based on atmospheric humiliation.”

She turned to look at him properly. “You really do do birthday cards.”

That got him a real smile, tiny and crooked and gone almost immediately, like even his face didn’t fully trust it.

The building door opened behind them. Lorna stepped out, cardigan pulled tighter around herself. She looked from one of them to the other with the expression of someone entering a conversation she had accidentally created years earlier.

“I’ve made tea anyway,” she said, to no one in particular.

“Congratulations,” Mira said.

The guy pushed himself to his feet with the care of someone whose nervous system had not yet signed off on verticality. He was taller than she’d thought sitting down. Too thin in the face. Tired eyes. He gave Lorna a look that contained more information than Mira could read and clearly less than he wanted it to.

Lorna said, softly, “I’m sorry.”

He looked away first. “Yeah.”

Mira got up too. The street tilted back into ordinary shape around them. Cars. Cold. Launderette. A pigeon attempting crimes near a drain.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

He hesitated. Briefly. Noticeably.

Then: “Silas.”

Something in the pause snagged, but not enough to catch. Mira filed it away because she filed everything away, especially when she pretended not to care.

“Mira,” she said.

“I know.”

Right. Of course he did. He’d felt the architecture.

Lorna stood in the doorway with the tea cooling behind her and the whole ugly little street holding still around the three of them for one strange second.

Mira shoved her hands back into her pockets. “So. Someone stole a storage unit full of people’s first impressions.”

Silas looked at her.

“I want mine back,” she said.

The words felt ridiculous out here, on a pavement that smelled of detergent and exhaust. Which probably meant they were true.

Silas’s face didn’t change much, but his attention did. It sharpened.

Lorna closed her eyes for a second, then opened them. “I don’t know who took it.”

“But you know something.”

A beat.

“Maybe,” Lorna said.

Mira let out a breath through her nose. “Fantastic. Love an answer that sounds like a haunted filing cabinet.”

Silas glanced between them. “You should probably start with who had access.”

Lorna looked tired enough to fold in half. “I had clients. A few repeat ones. People talk. Sometimes they traded impressions. Sometimes they sold them. I tried to stop that.”

“Tried,” Mira repeated.

“Yes.”

“And did any of your clients happen to include someone creepy, desperate, and logistically competent?”

Silas said, dryly, “That narrows humanity down almost not at all.”

Mira pointed at him. “There he is.”

Lorna rubbed at the side of her wrist. “Come upstairs. Both of you. If we’re going to do this, we should do it sitting down.”

Mira looked at Silas. He looked at the building like it had personally offended him.

Then he touched the headphones at his neck, not putting them on. Just checking they were there. Barrier acknowledged.

“Fine,” he said.

And because apparently this was her afternoon now, Mira followed the woman who had helped erase her and the man who could feel the empty shape of what was missing back up the detergent stairs, with the stupid, impossible fact of being seen still moving through her like weather.