The walk to the bus stop was different that morning. Leo wasn't just tired; he felt like a spy living a double life. The gray, concrete world around him—the exhaust-stained buildings, the trash blowing in the gutter, the weary faces of the other early-morning commuters—seemed like a faded photograph. His real life, the vibrant, glowing, lucrative one, was hidden behind his bathroom door.
Before he left, he'd delivered the two crates of freshly labeled Clarity to Mr. Kim. The old man had been waiting, opening the corner mart an hour earlier than usual. He inspected the new labels with a critical eye, grunted in what Leo took to be approval, and paid him in a thick stack of twenty-dollar bills without a word. One hundred and forty-four dollars. Leo had stuffed the cash into his backpack, feeling the dangerous, thrilling weight of it against his spine all morning.
His bank account still read $13.97. He was living entirely in a cash economy now. A secret economy.
At the warehouse, the drone of the conveyor belts felt louder, the fluorescent lights harsher, the air staler. He took his place on the line, Sal and Marco flanking him like always.
"Dude, you look wiped," Marco commented, grabbing the first box of the day. "Party hard last night?"
Leo just grunted noncommittally. How could he explain that he'd spent the night running a smuggling operation into another dimension? "Something like that."
The hours crawled by. Leo's body went through the familiar motions of scanning, lifting, and stacking, but his mind was miles away. He was designing new labels in his head. He was strategizing bottling efficiency. He was wondering if other things from the forest could be valuable. Could he sell the glowing moss? The weird, sunset-colored flowers? Was the wood from the silver-barked trees special? His reality had expanded so dramatically that the confines of the warehouse felt physically suffocating.
Lunchtime arrived. Leo sat in the breakroom, the wad of cash in his pocket a warm, secret promise. He listened to the usual complaints. Sal was worried about his car's transmission. Marco's rent was going up. These were the exact same anxieties that had haunted Leo's every waking moment just two days ago. Now, they felt… distant. He felt a pang of guilt for his detachment, but it was overwhelmed by the sheer, liberating power of his new secret.
The afternoon brought a fresh wave of misery in the form of a shipment of kitty litter. Huge, forty-pound boxes of it. Heavy, awkward, and prone to splitting open and dusting the entire line with a fine, chalky powder. It was universally hated work.
"Ah, crap," Sal groaned as the first pallet arrived. "It's a cat litter day."
They worked in sullen silence, their muscles straining. Leo hefted box after heavy box, his back already starting to ache, undoing all the good work the magic water had done for his posture. Sweat trickled down his temples, mixing with the pale dust. He felt the old, familiar grind settle back into his bones, a reminder of the life he was still, technically, living.
Then came the moment.
It happened around two in the afternoon. Their supervisor, a man named Henderson with a clipboard and a perpetual scowl, came stalking down the line. Henderson was a petty tyrant who seemed to derive his only joy from asserting his minor authority over the workers.
"Moreno! Pick up the pace!" he barked at Marco. "Rizzo! Stop daydreaming and stack properly!"
He stopped behind Leo, who had just placed a box on a pallet. Henderson jabbed a thick finger at it.
"That's crooked," he snapped. "Straighten it. Do I have to teach you how to stack a box? My five-year-old can stack a box better than that."
Leo looked at the box. It was maybe a centimeter off. It was utterly meaningless. In the grand scheme of the universe—a universe that now contained, for Leo, at least two separate dimensions—the slight angle of a box of cat litter was so profoundly insignificant that the order to fix it was an insult to the very concept of existence.
A year ago, Leo would have mumbled, "Yes, sir," and fixed it. A week ago, he would have bit his tongue, his stomach churning with resentment, and fixed it.
Today, something inside him did not bend. It broke.
He turned slowly to face Henderson, his expression calm. He saw Henderson not as a figure of authority, but as just another man. A loud, unhappy man in a cheap tie.
"No," Leo said. The word was quiet, but it landed in the noisy warehouse with the force of a bomb.
Marco and Sal stopped working. The low hum of the conveyor belt suddenly seemed very loud.
Henderson's pasty face flushed with red. "What did you say to me?"
"I said no," Leo repeated, his voice even. "I'm not fixing the box. I'm done stacking boxes."
He reached up and unclipped the box-cutter and scanner from his belt, placing them carefully on a nearby railing. He then began to untie the laces of his steel-toed boots.
"What do you think you're doing?" Henderson sputtered, his voice rising in disbelief.
Leo sat down on the edge of the pallet, pulled off one boot, then the other. He stood up in his socks. He then pulled the gray 'Global Fulfillment Logistics' shirt over his head, leaving him in his plain undershirt. He folded the company shirt neatly and placed it on top of his boots.
"I quit," he said, looking Henderson directly in the eye. The simple declaration felt like a magical incantation, a spell of liberation. A massive, invisible weight lifted from his shoulders—a weight far heavier than any box of kitty litter.
He didn't wait for a response. He simply turned and started walking. In his socks. Down the long concrete aisle, past the rows of shelving filled with products he would never touch again, past the stunned faces of his coworkers. He could feel Henderson's apoplectic gaze on his back, but he didn't care. He walked straight toward the main exit, his stride light and free.
He pushed open the heavy door and stepped out into the bright, smoggy afternoon. The air had never smelled so sweet. The future was terrifying, uncertain, and hinged entirely on a secret water source in his bathroom.
And it was all his. He was free.