Lilith rode her bike straight to the café.
At the very least, she told herself, if she was going to be a dropout she should still have a job.
On the way there, something nagged at the back of her mind. She had said things in that classroom: specific, precise things about Belle's mother, that she had absolutely no business knowing. She had never visited Belle's home. She and Belle had never shared a single civil conversation. So where had that information come from?
It had just… bubbled up. Like something rising from a depth she didn't know she had.
"Must have heard it somewhere," she muttered to herself. "Probably overheard something and filed it away without realising. That's all."
She pedalled faster.
The strange thing was, she couldn't shake it.
She had spent the last ten minutes trying to convince herself she had simply overheard something about Belle's mother at some point, a conversation in a corridor, a rumour she had forgotten.
That was the logical explanation. That was the only explanation that made sense.
But the truth, the part she kept skipping over, was that the information hadn't felt like a memory.
It hadn't felt like something retrieved. It had felt like something that rose. Like it had always been sitting just beneath the surface of her, waiting for the right moment of anger to push it up and out of her mouth.
She didn't like that.
She didn't like what it reminded her of.
One who knows, the book had said.
She pedalled faster and stopped thinking about it entirely.
When she arrived at the café, she slowed at the entrance. Something was different. Workers were moving in and out carrying equipment, new furniture was being unloaded from a truck, and scaffolding had gone up along the left wall.
"Looks like the boss got a good contract," a co-worker said, appearing beside her, watching the activity with raised eyebrows. "He's been spending like crazy these last few hours."
"Well, that means a salary increase, I hope," Lilith said.
The co-worker turned to look at her and snorted. "Yeah, I hope too. Our boss is stingy as hell." She paused. "By the way, you're quite early today. No school?"
Lilith smiled without answering and went inside to change.
She had just finished tying her apron and was reaching for her bonnet when the changing room door opened and her boss walked in.
"Good day, boss."
"Good day, Lilith." He didn't quite meet her eyes.
"Is there anything I can help you with?"
"You're fired."
Lilith's hands stilled on the bonnet.
"I'm sorry, I don't think I heard you correctly."
"You did. You're fired."
"Wow."
Just that one word. Because it was all she had.
Her boss reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, setting it on the bench beside her. "Your salary. Half the month's pay, I'm not owing you anything."
Lilith looked at the envelope. She picked it up slowly.
Half. After everything. Half.
"I genuinely hate to do this," her Boss said, and for a moment he actually sounded like he meant it. "You're one of the best workers I've had. Reliable, never late, never complained. But —" He exhaled.
"Your schoolmates came here this morning. Jasmine and Belle. They offered to sponsor my renovation, the whole thing, on one condition." He shook his head slowly. "That I let you go. I'm sorry, Lilith. This business is all I have."
He walked out.
Lilith stood in the changing room for a long moment. She removed the apron. Removed the tag. Folded them both neatly and set them on the bench. Then she tucked the envelope into her bag and walked out without a word.
Fired from her job.
Dropped out of school.
Trial tomorrow.
She got on her bike.
She didn't move immediately.
She just stood there with one hand on the handlebar and the envelope in her bag and the sounds of the renovation continuing behind her like she hadn't just been dismissed from the only stable thing in her life.
Workers shouted to each other. Something heavy was being moved. Somewhere inside, her co-worker was probably already covering her shift without knowing why.
The world had not paused for this.
It never did.
She thought about the years she had spent in that café. Early mornings before school. Late evenings after. The way she had learned exactly how each regular customer liked their order.
The quiet satisfaction of doing something well even when nobody particularly noticed. She had been good at this job. She had been reliable and present and consistent in a way that her life outside those walls rarely allowed her to be.
And it had taken Belle and Jasmine approximately one morning to erase all of it.
Pathetic, she thought. Then, which one of us, though.
She got on her bike and rode.
"Didn't know they could stoop this low," she said quietly, to nobody. "Patheic. Truly pathetic."
She rode to the clearing behind her school, the quiet place where almost nobody went. She had never understood why people avoided it. As far as she was concerned, they didn't know what they were missing.
She dropped her bike, walked to her usual spot, and lay down in the grass, closing her eyes.
The silence settled around her like something gentle.
She stared up at the sky through the gap in the trees.
It was a genuinely beautiful afternoon. The kind that felt almost offensive given the circumstances, blue and warm and unhurried, completely indifferent to the fact that her entire life had been dismantled before lunchtime.
A bird moved through the gap above her. Clouds drifted past slowly.
She replayed the day in pieces.
Miss Melinda at the classroom door. The seven administrators and their papers. Standing for two hours while they read her failures aloud one by one like a grocery list. Mr Aryan locking the door and talking about what he wants from her in his cunning ways.
The cafeteria and Jasmine's shrug and Belle's high five. The envelope with half her salary. The apron folded neatly on the bench because even when everything was falling apart she couldn't stop herself from being tidy.
"Why", she thought again. Not dramatically. Just genuinely, quietly, in the way she asked it when she was alone and didn't have to perform strength for anyone.
"Why does it keep being me."
She had no answer. The sky had no answer. The bird was long gone.
She closed her eyes.
"Why does it have to be me," she said to the sky again. "What did I actually do? Every single thing is happening so fast I can't even process it. I just wish, just once, everything would slow down. Stop hitting me for five minutes."
She raised one hand and made a dramatic gun with her fingers, pointing it at her own chest.
"Bam. Bam. Bam."
She let her hand drop.
"Funny, right?" she whispered.
Her eyes were getting heavy. Her whole body ached in the specific way that had nothing to do with physical pain. She felt the pull of sleep tugging at her from somewhere deep, and she almost let it take her —
Then she remembered.
She sat up fast.
"Absolutely not."
She couldn't afford drifting into another scary place in her dreams, not at this moment.
She reached into her bag and found the second bottle of pills. Different from the others, these were the ones that kept sleep away entirely. She shook two into her palm. Just two.
She wasn't going to make the same mistake she had made that morning with the other ones. These were really strong pills used to drive away sleep.
She pulled a canned caffeine drink from her bag, put the pills on her tongue, and washed them down.
Caffeine plus those pills. That would be more than enough to keep her awake through tonight and through whatever tomorrow brought. She would sleep, properly sleep, only after the trial was over. Whatever the outcome.
She stood and walked toward the cliff at the edge of the clearing.
She always came here. Always stood at this exact spot, looking down into the mist that swallowed everything below. The area was technically off-limits. A sign said so. Lilith had never paid that sign much attention.
Nobody knew what was at the bottom. She had once suggested the school fund a proper investigation of the area, a research project, something official. The proposal had been dismissed before she'd even finished making it. She hadn't been surprised. Scholarship student. No money. No influence. Why would anyone listen?
"I wonder what's down there," she murmured, like she always did.
The mist offered nothing back.
She didn't know why she kept coming here.
Or maybe she did and just hadn't said it out loud yet. There was something about standing at the edge of something unknowable that made her own problems feel slightly less enormous.
Whatever was down there in that mist, whatever the bottom of this cliff looked like, it was a mystery that had nothing to do with her. It asked nothing of her. It didn't care about her scholarship or her trial or her half salary or her parents who had never wanted her surname to touch her name.
It just existed. Quiet and deep and indifferent.
She found that comforting in a way she couldn't explain to anyone.
She leaned slightly forward, just slightly, the way she always did. The mist swirled below like it was breathing.
"I wonder –", she thought, for the hundredth time.
She wondered until she stopped wondering and just stood there, empty and still, which was the closest thing to rest she was going to allow herself today.
She stood there until her thoughts dissolved into each other and time stopped making sense.
"Ding, ding, ding."
She blinked.
"6:00 p.m."