Yuna looked out the window.

The city was the same city it always was.

She did not know why she kept waiting for it not to be.

---

Practice was harder than the day before.

Her coach was in the other kind of mood, the quiet focused kind that was somehow more demanding than the loud kind, and he watched from the side of the gym with his arms folded and said very little and the team felt it and moved accordingly. She ran the drills and felt her body doing what it knew how to do and tried to let the muscle memory of it push everything else to the background.

It almost worked.

She was mid-rotation in the third set when she felt it again.

It was brief. Just a second, maybe less. The pressure at the edge of her awareness that had no direction and no source, the same feeling from the dream, the same feeling she’d had twice before in her life that she could name and had not named to anyone except Minjung just now and even then not completely.

She landed wrong. Not badly, not an injury, just a fraction off, and her coach looked at her from across the gym with an expression that asked a question without asking it.

"Again," he said.

She went again.

It didn’t come back. She finished the set clean and the coach moved on and nobody said anything and she stood at the edge of the court with her hands on her knees catching her breath and told herself it was fatigue, it was the bad sleep, it was the dream sitting in her chest throwing off her concentration.

She almost believed it.

---

Her father was at the curb at seven.

She got in and the door closed and the city moved past the windows and he had tea in the console again, the same kind, canned and warm.

She didn’t pick it up right away.

"You’re thinking loud," her father said, which was something he said occasionally and which she had never quite been able to explain to anyone who hadn’t heard it because it was not a thing that should have made sense and did.

"Sorry."

"I didn’t say stop."

She looked at the street. A woman was walking a dog that was too large for the leash. A light changed. Someone was sitting on the steps of a building with their head in their hands.

"Dad," she said.

"Mm."

"Did you ever feel something you couldn’t explain?" She paused. "Not intuition. Not a feeling about a person or a choice. Something — outside. Like something was there that you couldn’t see."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he might do what he sometimes did, which was hold a question for a day or two before answering it as though he’d needed to verify something internally before he was willing to speak. But then he said:

"Once."

She looked at him.

He was watching the road, both hands on the wheel, his face in the particular neutral expression he wore when he was being precise about something.

"When your grandmother was sick," he said. "The last year. I was at the hospital, late, and I was sitting in the corridor and I felt—" He stopped. Considered. "Like the air changed. Like something was standing just past what I could see." He paused again. "She passed that night."

Yuna was quiet.

"I told myself it was exhaustion," he said. "Stress. The mind making shapes out of nothing." He glanced at her briefly. "I still don’t know if that’s true."

The car moved through the city. The lights went past.

"Why are you asking?" he said.

She picked up the tea. It was warm in both hands the way it had been the night before.

"Just thinking," she said.

He nodded and looked back at the road and did not push, which was the thing about him, the steady thing, the thing she had built a lot of herself against without knowing she was doing it.

She leaned her head against the glass. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

The city moved past, lit and indifferent and full of its thousands of lives, and she held the tea and looked at it and thought about pressure and dreams and the orange sky over everything, and the feeling she’d had on the court, and the way the glass had broken right before she woke.

She thought about her father in a hospital corridor feeling the air change.

She thought about Minjung’s grandmother and the dreams that don’t leave.

She did not think about what any of it meant. Or told herself she didn’t.

The car turned onto their street.

Home was a lit window on the fourth floor. Her brother’s curtain moving. Her mother’s silhouette in the kitchen, already moving between the counter and the stove.

She watched it as they pulled up to the curb and thought about the feeling from that morning, the one she couldn’t name, standing outside the moment and seeing it clearly enough to know it was good.

She had that feeling again now.

It still felt like memorizing.

---

She fixed her brother’s toothbrush before bed.

He would put it back crooked in the morning. She would fix it again. This was the shape of things.

She lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to the apartment settle around her — the soft sounds of her parents’ television going quiet, the creak of the hallway when her father made his last round to check the locks, the particular silence of a place where people were sleeping.

She thought about the dream.

Not the images. Not the fire or the sky or the dark shapes in the streets. The feeling before the glass broke. The presence she had felt in the building, patient and specific, nothing like the aimless dread of ordinary nightmares.

It had felt, she realized, like being found.

She did not know what to do with that.

She closed her eyes.

She waited for sleep the way she was waiting for other things lately, with a patience that was starting to feel less like calm and more like the stillness before something moved.

Outside, the city was what it always was.

She slept.

---