The last employee left at seven forty-two.
Kai knew because he'd been counting. Not out of paranoia — he'd abandoned paranoia in his third year, when he realized that constant vigilance cost more than it protected. It was habit now. Cataloging exits, faces, schedules. The kind of thing the brain does when it's been trained long enough to never fully stop.
The empty office had a different quality. The air changed when people left — became more honest, somehow. Less weighted with the collective effort of everyone pretending Mondays made sense.
He opened the document on the second monitor.
The Ashes of the First King — Book III, Chapter 29. The king had just lost the last city. He was standing in the ruins of something he'd built with his own hands, and Kai needed to find the right sentence for that moment. The sentence that wasn't about the city. That was about what happens to a man when everything that proves he existed becomes rubble.
He stared at the blinking cursor for a stretch of time he couldn't measure.
Then he wrote: He did not weep. Weeping presupposes someone to witness it.
He read it back twice. Left it.
The books were the only place where work didn't feel like work. Marketing had structure, had metrics, had the clean satisfaction of a problem solved within known parameters. The books had no parameters. Sometimes Kai would write a scene and come away with the strange sensation that he hadn't invented anything — had only transcribed something that already existed somewhere he couldn't name. His editor called it narrative instinct. Kai called it not sleeping enough.
The phone vibrated on the desk.
Aki.
He answered before the second pulse.
"You're at the office." Not a question. Aki's voice carried the specific tone of someone who'd spent years learning to read absences — the younger son of a family where the older always had somewhere to be that wasn't home. "It's almost nine."
"I'm writing."
"The ash king?"
"The same."
A pause. Aki was probably in the kitchen of his tiny apartment near the university, surrounded by thermodynamics notebooks and dinner remains. Kai had the mental map of that apartment precise enough to draw from memory — the window that never closed properly, the stack of books beside the bed that never shrank because Aki bought faster than he read, the shelf holding all three volumes of The Ashes of the First King with spines already worn from opening.
"Are you going to kill him at the end?" Aki asked. "The king."
"I haven't decided yet."
"You're lying. You already know. You always know and keep pretending you don't so you won't spoil it."
Kai didn't respond, which was a way of responding.
Aki laughed — the short kind that meant he'd hit the mark. "Fine. I'll wait." A different pause this time, with different texture. "Hey... Something weird happened today in class."
"Weird how?"
"The professor threw a pen at me. You know when someone tosses something in your direction when you're distracted, to catch you off guard?" The tone was casual, recounted like an anecdote. "I caught it. Only I shouldn't have been able to. I had my back turned."
Kai went completely still.
The cursor blinked three times in the open document.
"The pen hit my hand before I turned around," Aki continued, with the specific lightness of someone recounting something they've decided isn't important. "Weird, right? Probably reflexes. The body develops things on autopilot."
"Probably," Kai said.
The voice came out exactly as it should. Same volume, same cadence, the right inflection of someone agreeing with a reasonable hypothesis. Ten years of practice produced that kind of precision — the ability to respond with his entire body while the mind was somewhere else entirely.
Where the mind was: cataloging. Analyzing. Asking how long this had been happening and how many other things Aki had normalized before mentioning this one.
"How's thermodynamics going?" Kai asked.
The conversation continued for another eighteen minutes. Aki complained about the professor, recounted how a lab partner had accidentally exploded an experiment, asked if Kai would manage to show up for their mother's birthday next month. Kai answered everything. Asked the right questions, laughed at the right moments, promised the birthday.
When he hung up, the office had grown quieter.
He didn't return to the document immediately. He sat with the phone in his hand, looking at the dark surface of the desk, and ran the calculation in his head — not because he needed to, but because the brain did that on its own when processing something it didn't want to process. Aki was twenty-two. He'd spent his entire life inside the radius of protection Kai had built around the family without anyone knowing it was a radius of protection. A whole life of calculated distance, of visits frequent enough not to raise suspicion and rare enough not to create dependence.
A whole life betting that what was buried would stay buried.
Aki had caught a pen before turning around.
Kai set the phone on the desk. Opened the side drawer, retrieved the tea mug he'd forgotten there hours ago — cold now, unusable. Held it with both hands anyway.
It was a purposeless gesture. He knew that. The mug was cold, the tea was cold, holding it warmed nothing. But there was something in the circularity of the object, in the symmetrical weight distributed across his palms, that the brain found before consciousness did. Something that didn't belong to offices or to Mondays or to Kai Sterling and his ten years of carefully constructed life.
He stayed like that for a moment he didn't measure.
Then he returned the mug to the drawer, went back to the document, and wrote the next line.
What does a king hold, when there is no longer a kingdom to hold?
The cursor blinked.
He had no answer.