JONAS

The apartment smelled like recycled air and something else, something that made Jonas press his spine against the wall near the door. His father sat in the chair by the window where the light from the street signs outside—those new holographic ones that shifted from English to Spanish to Mandarin—painted his face in rotating colors. The beer can in his hand was the kind with the temperature display on the side. It read 4°C. It had read that for twenty minutes.  Jonas held his backpack straps. The straps cut into his shoulders but he didn't set the bag down.

"You gonna stand there all night?" His father's voice came out slow, the words separated by breaths that Jonas could hear from across the room.

"I'm going to Marcus's," the teenager replied.

"Like hell."  The can hit the wall three inches from Jonas's head. The impact sensor in the wall flickered a brief orange warning light that meant the landlord's system had registered possible damage. His father stood. The chair scraped. 

Jonas knew that sound the way other kids knew their mothers' lullabies.  The first blow caught him across the mouth. He tasted copper. The second hit his ribs and he folded, tried to make himself smaller, tried to disappear into the wall that was already logging the disturbance, probably sending data somewhere, to someone who wouldn't come.  When it stopped, Jonas stayed on the floor. 

His father walked past him toward the kitchen. The refrigerator opened, its interior light scanning what remained of the week's rations, the automated voice suggesting recipes nobody would cook.

Jonas got up. His mouth filled with blood and he swallowed it because spitting would make noise.  His mother's door stayed closed. It had stayed closed for three days now.   Sometimes he heard sounds from inside. The clink of metal on glass. The flick of a lighter. The small gasp of breath. He used to knock. He used to press his ear to the composite material and listen for signs that she was still alive in there. Now he just walked past.  He walked past now.  In his room, which was really just a storage area with a cot where they used to keep things before they sold everything that mattered, he touched his lip. Blood came away on his fingers. He opened his backpack and looked at what he had: two shirts, a pair of pants, his school tablet with the cracked screen, the charging cable, a protein bar he'd saved from lunch, and thirty-seven dollars in his account. His balance hovered in his peripheral vision whenever he blinked his right eye, the implant every kid got at birth now, the one that tracked everything, displayed everything, connected everything.  He blinked the balance away.

His father's voice carried through the thin walls, saying something to the television, which was showing the news about the water crisis in Michigan Sector or the new transit system that would take people from Toronto to New York in forty minutes or something else that had nothing to do with this apartment, this life, this moment.

Jonas sealed his backpack. He stood near his door and listened. 

His father moved to the bathroom. The door closed. The fan came on, one of those old ones that rattled, that hadn't been upgraded with the silent magnetic models everyone else had.

He walked to the front door. His hand touched the biometric lock and it read his palm and opened without sound. The hallway stretched in both directions, doors on both sides, each one containing its own constellation of people who hurt each other or ignored each other or got through the days in whatever way they could manage.  The elevator had a screen that showed ads while you descended. Beauty treatments. Vacation packages to the moon colony. Investment opportunities. All the things that existed in a world that had nothing to do with him. 

A woman got on at the thirty-fourth floor. She glanced at his face, at the blood on his lip, and then looked at the ads. Her eyes didn't return to him.

The street opened like a mouth. September heat rose from the pavement even though the city had installed those cooling panels five years back, the ones that were supposed to regulate temperature and reduce the urban heat island effect. They hadn't worked. Or they'd worked for the downtown core where the towers stretched up into the clouds, where people lived in the kind of apartments that had windows you could actually open, where the air filtration was top-tier and the water was guaranteed clean.  Here, the street hummed with the sound of delivery drones and the old cars that people still drove if they couldn't afford the neural-link vehicles. 

A food cart on the corner sold synthetic meat on a stick. The vendor's face was hidden behind a mask that filtered the air and displayed his payment code.

Jonas walked. He didn't know where. His feet took him down blocks he knew, past the school where he hadn't been in two weeks, past the corner where Marcus used to wait for him before Marcus's family moved to Buffalo Sector for work. The street lights recognized his implant and logged his movements. Somewhere, in some database, his path was being recorded. A fourteen-year-old boy. Moving through the city at night. No parent tracking him. No safety protocol engaged.

No one stopped him.

He found himself near the old St. George subway entrance, the one they'd closed when the new underground maglev opened. 

Kids gathered here now. The ones who didn't have anywhere else. They sat on the steps or stood in clusters, their faces lit by their devices or by the glow of things they smoked or swallowed or injected.  A girl looked at him. She was maybe sixteen. Her hair was shaved on one side and long on the other, and she had a tattoo of a barcode on her neck, one of those statements about corporate control or surveillance or freedom that people got when they wanted to say something without saying it.

"You looking?" Her voice was flat. Transaction, not conversation.

"Looking for what?"

"Whatever you need."

Jonas touched his backpack straps again. The weight on his shoulders had become part of him already. "I need a place to sleep."

She laughed, but not like something was funny. "Don't we all."

Someone called her name, Simone, and she walked away, disappearing into the cluster of bodies near the entrance where the darkness swallowed everyone who went down those steps.

Jonas sat on the curb. A cleaning bot rolled past, its sensors detecting trash, its mechanical arms reaching and sorting. It paused near him as if trying to determine whether he was debris or human. Then it moved on.  He pulled out the protein bar and ate half. The other half he put back. He didn't know when he'd eat again.  The night stretched out like a threat. Above him, the towers rose into the sky where lights blinked in windows, where people sat in their living rooms watching their screens, where families ate dinner at tables, where children had rooms with doors that locked from the inside instead of the outside.  He thought about going back. He thought about the apartment and the closed door and his father's hands and the sound of his mother's lighter. He thought about the ways a person could disappear while still breathing, while still technically alive.  Then, he thought about nothing. He made his mind go blank the way he'd learned to do when the blows came, when the words came, when the nights stretched on and there was no one coming to make it stop.  A car passed. Then another. The city breathed around him, indifferent and vast.  Jonas closed his eyes and tried to remember a time before this. But there was nothing there. Just the sense that he'd been born into something that had already broken, that his life had started in the middle of a collapse, and that no one, not the teachers who saw the bruises, not the neighbours who heard the sounds, not the systems that tracked his every movement, no one was coming to pull him out.  He opened his eyes. 

The girl with the barcode tattoo stood at the top of the subway steps, looking down into the darkness.  Then she descended, and Jonas was alone with the bots and the drones and the thousand indifferent windows that surrounded him on all sides.

▰  ▰  ▰

The first week, Jonas learned about hunger.  Not the kind from missing lunch. Not the kind that meant waiting until dinner. The kind that made his hands shake when he stood up. The kind that turned his thoughts into a single word repeating: food, food, food, food.  He'd spent his thirty-seven dollars in three days. A meal at the automated dispensary. A night in a pod hotel—one of those coffin-sized units stacked forty high, where you paid by the hour and the door locked if your account ran dry. A charging cable for his tablet when the old one failed.  After that, he learned.  The grocery stores had security drones that hovered near the exits, their cameras tracking every item, every person, every movement. But the loading docks in the back, where the delivery trucks came before dawn, those had blind spots. Boxes sat on pallets. Some of them broke open. 

Some of them spilled their contents onto the ground, and the workers, tired, underpaid, thinking about their own problems, didn't always notice when a protein bar or a fruit pack went missing.

Jonas crouched behind a dumpster at four in the morning and waited. His breath made fog in the air even though it was September, even though the climate models said Toronto should be hotter. The cold came anyway.

A worker emerged from the truck, arms full of boxes. He stacked them on the pallet and went back inside. 

Jonas counted to ten. Then he moved.  His fingers closed around three bars. He shoved them in his backpack and walked, didn't run because walking was invisible and running was a signal, round the corner, down the alley, into the maze of streets where the city's grid broke down into older neighbourhoods that predated the planning algorithms.  He ate one bar immediately. His stomach cramped around the food like it had forgotten what to do with sustenance.  

▰  ▰  ▰ 

The second week, he learned about sleep.  The pod hotels required payment. The shelters required identification, questions, a whole system that meant adults looking at him, recording him, maybe sending him back. He couldn't go back.  So he learned the warm places. The subway ventilation grates that blew hot air up from the tunnels below. The alcoves behind buildings where heating units exhausted their warmth. The parks where the security patrols didn't come until dawn.  He slept in two-hour segments. His body learned to wake at the sound of footsteps, at the change in light, at the sense of another person's presence nearby. Sleep became something stolen, like the food, like everything else.  One night he found a parking garage. Level seven was under construction, closed off with temporary barriers that didn't connect to the main security grid. He climbed over. Inside, the concrete space was dry and out of the wind. He spread out his jacket and lied down.  Something skittered in the darkness. Rats, probably. Or the small cleaning bots that sometimes malfunctioned and wandered into unauthorized areas. He didn't care. The concrete was hard but it wasn't moving. For five hours, he didn't move either.

▰  ▰  ▰ 

The third week, he learned about money.  

The girl with the barcode tattoo, Simone, found him near the old subway entrance. 

He was sitting on the steps, trying to repair his tablet's screen with a kit he'd lifted from an electronics shop. The crack had spread like a river system across the display.

"You still here?" She sat next to him without asking.

"Where else?" Jonas said.

"Most kids go to the shelters. Or back home."

Jonas didn't answer.

She watched him work on the screen. "You need money."

"Everyone needs money."

"I can show you how to get it."

He looked at her. The barcode on her neck caught the light from the street. "What's the cost?"

"Smart question." She smiled, and the smile was tired, older than her face. "No cost for the information. What you do with it, that's on you."  She told him about the delivery runs. The shops in the towers downtown needed people who could move fast, who didn't ask questions, who could carry packages from point A to point B without getting flagged by the security systems. Kids were good for this. Kids could slip through crowds. Kids didn't trigger the same alerts as adults.

"What's in the packages?"

"Does it matter?"

It did. It didn't. Jonas couldn't tell anymore.

She gave him a contact code. "Message him. Say I sent you. He'll set you up."

The man's name was Vikram. He operated from an office that wasn't an office, just a room above a restaurant, accessible through a back entrance that required three separate unlock codes. When Jonas arrived, Vikram looked him over the way someone examines a tool they're considering buying: "You run track in school?"

"No," Jonas said.

"Can you run?"

"Yes."

"Can you keep your mouth shut?"

Jonas nodded.

"Twenty dollars a delivery. You take the package from me. You go to the address. You hand it to the person there. You don't open it. You don't ask what's inside. You don't tell anyone what you're doing. Clear?"

"Clear."

The first delivery was to a tower on Bay Street. Jonas carried the package in his backpack—small, wrapped in brown paper, no heavier than his tablet. He took the maglev downtown. The train was packed with morning commuters, all of them staring at their devices or at the ads that played on the train's windows, showing them better lives they could purchase.  The tower's lobby was all glass and steel. Red plants grew in vertical gardens along the walls—real plants, not the synthetic ones they used in most buildings now. 

A security guard sat behind a desk, his eyes augmented with the kind of implants that let him see body temperature, heart rate, stress levels.  

Jonas walked to the desk. "Delivery for unit 4507."

The guard scanned the package with his handheld device. Whatever code Vikram had embedded in the wrapping passed inspection. "Elevator's on your right."

The unit belonged to a woman in her thirties. She wore clothes that probably cost more than Jonas had ever held in his account. She took the package without looking at him, without saying anything except "Wait here." She went into another room. Came back with a credit chip. "For your trouble."  Five dollars. 

Jonas took it and left.  He made four deliveries that day. Eighty dollars plus twenty in tips. More money than he'd ever earned.  On the way back to Vikram's, he stopped at a food dispensary and bought a real meal -- not a protein bar, not scavenged fruit, but rice and vegetables and synthetic chicken that had been cultured in a lab but tasted like something his mother used to make, back when she still made things, back before the spoon and the lighter and the closed door.  He ate until his stomach hurt.

▰  ▰  ▰ 

The fourth week, he learned about escape.

The kids near the old subway entrance passed things around at night. Pills that came in unmarked bottles. Powder in plastic bags. Liquids in vials. They spoke in code about what each one did, which one made you forget, which one made you float, which one turned the world soft around the edges.

Jonas watched them from a distance. He told himself he wouldn't. He told himself he was different, that he was just doing what he needed to survive, that once he had enough money saved he'd find a real place to live, go back to school, build something that resembled a future.  But the nights were long. And the concrete was hard. And when he closed his eyes he saw his father's hands and heard his mother's lighter and felt the weight of every day pressing down like the city itself was trying to crush him into the pavement.

A boy named Marcus—not his Marcus, a different one—sat next to him one night. "First time's free."

"I'm good," Jonas said.

"Everyone says that." Marcus held out a pill. Small. Blue. "Just makes the night go faster. You'll sleep better."

Jonas looked at the pill. He thought about the parking garage and the two-hour segments and the way his body never fully relaxed anymore, never fully trusted that he was safe.  He took the pill.  It didn't make the night go faster. It made the night disappear. One moment he was sitting on the steps, and the next moment the sun was up and six hours had vanished like they'd never existed.  He felt empty. He felt nothing. For the first time in weeks, he felt like he could breathe without the weight.

The second time wasn't free. Ten dollars. But he had money now. He had deliveries.  The third time was fifteen. The fourth was twenty. The prices went up as his need went up, as his body learned to expect that emptiness, that nothing, that brief window where the world stopped pressing down.  By the fifth week, Jonas was making deliveries every day and spending half his money on things that made the nights bearable. The other half he spent on food, on the occasional pod hotel when the cold got too severe, on a new jacket when his old one tore.  He never saved anything. There was nothing to save for. The future was just more nights, more concrete, more cold.

Simone found him one evening near the subway entrance. 

He was waiting for Marcus, the dealer Marcus, to arrive with his supply.

She sat next to him: "You look like shit."

"Thanks," Jonas said.

"I'm serious. You're losing weight. Your eyes look wrong."

"I'm fine."

"That's what everyone says right before they're not fine."

Jonas pulled his jacket tighter. The temperature had dropped again. October now. The heating season approaching. "What do you want?"

"I want to tell you something." She stared straight ahead, not at him. "I had a brother. Two years older than me. He ran away when he was fifteen. Started doing deliveries. Started taking stuff to make it easier. Three months later, they found him in an alley near Queen Street. Heart stopped. Paramedics couldn't bring him back."

Jonas said nothing.

"He was a good kid. Smart. Funny. Just ended up in a bad place with no way out." She turned to look at him now. "You remind me of him."

"I'm not your brother."

"I know." She stood up. "But you're someone's brother. Someone's son. You're fourteen years old and you're killing yourself in slow motion, and everyone around you is just watching it happen."

Marcus arrived then, the dealer Marcus, walking down the street with his backpack full of products, his face showing nothing, giving nothing away.

Simone looked at Jonas one more time. Then she walked away, disappearing into the crowd.

Jonas bought his pills. He took them back to the parking garage. He swallowed two instead of one because two made the emptiness last longer.  The concrete was hard beneath him. His breath came shallow. Somewhere above, in the towers, people lived their lives in rooms with heat and light and doors that locked from the inside.  Down here, Jonas closed his eyes and let the nothing take him, and for a few hours, he didn't have to be himself anymore.  He didn't have to be anyone at all.

▰  ▰  ▰

Winter intruded on Toronto the way it always did, sudden and merciless. The city's weather modification systems kept the downtown core manageable, but out here, in the neighbourhoods where Jonas moved through his days, the cold settled in and stayed.  He'd stopped counting weeks. Time had become something else now. A series of moments between deliveries. Between doses. Between the parking garage and the streets and Vikram's office and the towers where people lived behind glass.  His tablet still worked, barely. The crack had spread across the entire screen, splintering into fractal patterns that sometimes made it hard to see the delivery addresses. But he could still receive Vikram's messages. Still navigate the city. Still function.  Function. That was the word he used now. He wasn't living. He was functioning.  December brought snow. Real snow, not the synthetic kind they used for the winter festivals downtown. It fell grey from a grey sky and turned to slush on the streets within hours, mixing with the exhaust from old vehicles and the chemical runoff from the cooling systems.  Jonas wore three layers now. His original jacket. A sweater he'd found in a donation box outside a church. A hoodie he'd bought with delivery money. None of them were enough. The cold got through anyway, settling into his bones, making his hands shake even when he wasn't hungry, even when he'd just taken his pills.  The shaking got worse.

Vikram noticed during a pickup one afternoon. "You sick?"

"No," Jonas said.

"You look sick. You're losing me money if you can't make deliveries."

"I can make deliveries."

Vikram handed him the package. "This one's important. High-value client. Don't fuck it up."

The address was in the financial district. One of the new towers that had gone up after the integration, when American investment had flooded north and rebuilt half the city. The building's exterior was covered in solar panels that shifted to follow the sun. Self-sustaining. Self-contained. A vertical city within the city.  Jonas took the maglev. The train was heated but he couldn't stop shaking. His reflection in the window looked back at him, hollow cheeks, dark circles, hair that hadn't been cut in months. Fifteen years old now, though he'd missed his birthday without noticing. No one had noticed.  The tower's security was tighter than most. Facial recognition at the door. Biometric scan in the lobby. 

A guard who looked at Jonas like he was something that had tracked dirt inside.

"Delivery for unit 8823," Jonas said.

The guard scanned the package. The code cleared. "Service elevator. Don't touch anything."

The elevator rose so fast Jonas's stomach dropped. Through the transparent walls, he watched the city fall away beneath him, the streets becoming lines, the cars becoming dots, the people disappearing entirely into the geometry of urban planning.  The doors opened on the eighty-eighth floor. The hallway was silent. Carpeted. The kind of silence that came from excellent insulation and the absence of neighbours who fought, who screamed, who slammed doors.  Unit 8823. Jonas pressed the bell. A chime sounded inside, musical and distant.

A man answered. Fifty, maybe. Suit that probably cost more than Jonas would make in a year. Eyes that looked at Jonas the way the security guard had looked at him, like something unpleasant that had wandered in from outside.

"Delivery," Jonas said.

The man took the package without a word. Didn't offer a tip. Just closed the door.

Jonas stood in the hallway for a moment. Through the windows at the end of the corridor, he could see the lake. Frozen. White. Stretching to the horizon where it met the sky in a line so clean it looked drawn.  He wondered what it would be like to live up here. To wake up to that view. To have heat and light and silence and safety. To be so far above the streets that the problems down there became invisible.  Then he got back in the elevator and descended.  

By January, Jonas had stopped eating regularly. Food required planning, required stopping, required caring about whether his body continued to function beyond the next delivery. The pills were easier. They filled the space where hunger lived. They made everything simpler.

Marcus, the dealer, had new products now. Stronger things. Things that came in needles instead of pills.  "Better bioavailability," Marcus said, which was a word he'd learned from somewhere, probably from one of the medical databases everyone could access if they knew where to look. "Hits faster. Lasts longer. More efficient."

Jonas looked at the needle. He'd told himself he wouldn't. Pills were one thing. But needles were different. Needles were a line, and once you crossed it, you couldn't uncross it.

"First one's twenty," Marcus said. "After that, thirty."

"I'll think about it," Jonas said.  But thinking was hard now. Thinking required energy Jonas didn't have. His deliveries were taking longer. His hands shook so much he sometimes dropped the packages. Vikram had yelled at him twice. Had threatened to find someone else.  Jonas needed the delivery money. He needed it for the pills. But the pills weren't working like they used to. His body had learned them, adapted to them, required more to achieve the same nothing.  

He found himself back at the old subway entrance three days later. 

Marcus was there, waiting, like he'd known Jonas would come: "You ready?"

Jonas held out his arm.  The needle went in easy. Easier than he'd expected. A small sting. A moment of pressure. 

Then, Marcus pushed the plunger and something that wasn't pain and wasn't pleasure but was something flooded through Jonas's veins like a wave of silence and the world went soft. The cold disappeared.  The hunger disappeared.  Everything that had been pressing down, pressing in, crushing him into smaller and smaller versions of himself, all of it lifted, and for the first time since he'd left the apartment, since he'd walked out that door, Jonas felt like he could breathe.  He settled down on the steps because standing was suddenly complicated. The city moved around him in patterns that made sense and didn't make sense. People walking. Drones flying. Lights changing. All of it connected in ways he'd never noticed before, all of it part of some larger system that he was also part of, that he'd always been part of.  Time did something strange. Skipped forward. Skipped back. He was on the steps and then he was in the parking garage and he didn't remember walking there.  He lied on the concrete and watched the ceiling. Pipes running across it. Cables. Infrastructure. The bones of the building visible where they hadn't bothered to hide them.  His breath came slow. His heart beat in his chest like something distant, like something happening to someone else.  He closed his eyes.  

When he opened them again, the light had changed. Morning, maybe. Or evening. He couldn't tell.  His tablet buzzed. A message from Vikram. Three deliveries. Three addresses. Time-sensitive.  Jonas stood up. His legs felt wrong. Like they belonged to someone else. But they worked. He could walk. He could function.  He made two of the three deliveries. 

The third one, he got lost. Turned down the wrong street. Ended up in a neighbourhood he didn't recognize somewhere beyond Bathurst. Towers that all looked the same. Windows reflecting clouds reflecting other windows.  His tablet screen was completely dark now, except for one corner where the addresses still glowed. The crack had finally killed it.  He sat down on a public bench with a solar charging station and a recycling chute and a small screen that displayed news feeds no one read. The screen was showing something about the water crisis. About supply chain disruptions. About political tensions between the northern and southern sectors.  None of it mattered.

A woman walked past with a child. 

The child looked at Jonas. 

The woman pulled the child closer and walked faster.

Jonas understood. He knew what he looked like now. He'd seen his reflection in the tower windows, in the train glass. He looked like the kids he used to avoid back when he still went to school. The ones who sat in corners. The ones who didn't make eye contact. The ones everyone knew were in trouble but no one knew how to help.  The ones everyone had already written off.  His tablet buzzed again. 

Vikram: Where are you? Client is pissed. You're done.

Jonas stared at the message until the screen went dark.  Done.  He walked back to the old subway entrance. The sun was setting now, turning the sky orange and purple and red. Colours that felt like a bruise. Marcus wasn't there yet. Wouldn't be there for another hour, probably.  Jonas sat on the steps and waited.

Simone appeared from somewhere. She looked older than she had in September. Or maybe Jonas just saw things differently now. Maybe everyone looked older when you saw them through the lens of your own decay.

"You're still here," she said.

"Where else?" Jonas said.

She sat next to him. Didn't say anything for a while. Just sat there while the city moved around them, while the drones flew overhead, while the delivery bots rolled past on their programmed routes.  "My brother," she said finally. "The day they found him, he was in an alley off Queen Street. Just lying there. Someone called the paramedics but by the time they arrived, he was gone."

Jonas didn't respond.

"The paramedics wrote in their report that it was bound to happen. That kids like him, kids on the street, kids using—they don't last. Everyone knows it. So when it happens, no one's surprised. They just shake their heads and move on with their lives."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I don't want to shake my head about you." She looked at him. Her eyes were wet but she wasn't crying. Just wet. "Because someone should care what happens to you, even if it's just me, even if it doesn't change anything."

"It doesn't change anything."

"I know."

Marcus arrived then. He had his backpack. His products. His business face on.

Simone stood up. She looked at Jonas one more time. Then she walked away, down the street, disappearing into the crowd like everyone eventually disappeared in this city.

Jonas bought what he needed. He bought more than he needed because why not. Because tomorrow would come whether he saved money for it or not. Because planning for a future required believing in a future, and he'd stopped believing in anything except the next moment, the next breath, the next time the nothing would take him away from this.  He went back to the parking garage. Level seven. His corner where the concrete was less cold, where the ventilation duct blew warm air, where he'd left his backpack with everything he owned in it.  He sat down. Laid out his supplies. Prepared what needed preparing.  His hands shook so badly he almost couldn't do it. But he'd practiced. He'd learned. His body knew the motions even when his mind had stopped directing them.  The needle went in.  The plunger went down.  The wave came.  But this time it was different. This time it was bigger. This time it wasn't a wave but an ocean, and Jonas was drowning in it, and drowning felt like flying, and flying felt like falling, and falling felt like finally letting go of everything he'd been holding onto just to stay alive.  His breath came shallow.  Then shallower.

Then, not at all.

▰  ▰  ▰ 

They found him on a Tuesday morning.  A maintenance worker checking the construction site on level seven. He saw the backpack first. Then the body.  He called security. 

Security called the paramedics. 

The paramedics arrived in six minutes, an automated ambulance that navigated the city streets with precision, its sensors already scanning for life signs before it even stopped.  There were none.  They loaded Jonas onto a stretcher anyway. Protocol required it. They wheeled him to the ambulance, which drove him to the hospital, where a doctor confirmed what the sensors had already reported.  

Dead on arrival. Cardiac arrest. Cause: overdose. Fentanyl, probably, mixed with something synthetic the database didn't recognize. The new compounds changed every month. The labs couldn't keep up.  The doctor made notes in the system. Age: fifteen. No emergency contact. No permanent address. The facial recognition software matched him to school records, Jonas Whitfield, last attended classes in September, multiple unexcused absences, case referred to social services, no follow-up performed.  The system flagged him as another statistic in the ongoing crisis of unhoused youth. The crisis everyone knew about. The crisis that appeared in government reports and news feeds and advocacy campaigns. The crisis no one had solved because solving it required resources and political will and a fundamental restructuring of systems that were easier to maintain than to fix.  

The body went to the morgue. The medical examiner's office tried to locate next of kin. They found an address for Jonas's parents. The system pinged the apartment. No response.

A social worker went in person. Knocked on the door. Waited.

Jonas's mother answered. She looked at the social worker through eyes that couldn't quite focus, that couldn't quite process what was being said. Her son. Dead. Found in a parking garage. Would she like to come identify the body?  She closed the door.  The social worker knocked again. No response.

Jonas's father never answered at all. According to the building's security logs, he hadn't been home in three days. Working, probably. Or drinking. Or somewhere else doing something else that didn't involve dealing with the news that his son had died alone on a concrete floor with a needle in his arm.

The body stayed in the morgue for a week. Then two weeks. No one came to claim it.  The city had a procedure for this. For the unclaimed dead. For the people who left the world without anyone to mourn them. A cremation. A file in a database. A brief note in the public records that someone named Jonas Whitfield had existed and then stopped existing and here were the dates that marked the boundary between those two states.  The news feeds picked up the story for a day. 

Teen Dies of Overdose in Parking Garage.

Youth Homelessness Crisis Claims Another Life.

System Failures Leave Vulnerable Children at Risk.

The articles featured stock photos of alleyways and needles and teenagers who weren't Jonas. They quoted officials who expressed concern and promised action. They included statements from advocacy groups calling for better funding, better services, better everything.  By the next day, the feeds had moved on to other stories. A policy announcement. A celebrity scandal. The weather.  

In the comments sections of the news sites, people left their reactions. Some expressed sympathy. Some blamed the parents. Some blamed the system. Some blamed Jonas himself: personal responsibility, poor choices, why didn't he just ask for help.  The comments accumulated like sediment at the bottom of a river. Then they stopped. Then everyone forgot.  Except for a few people who hadn't forgotten. Who couldn't forget.

Simone saw the news feed on her tablet. She was sitting on the steps of the old subway entrance, same as always, when Jonas's name appeared in her recommendations. The algorithm knew she'd been near him. Knew they'd talked. Knew enough to suggest this story might be relevant to her interests.  She read it twice. Then she turned off her tablet and sat there for a long time, not moving, not crying, not doing anything except existing in the space where her brother had existed and where Jonas had existed and where dozens of other kids existed right now, hovering at the edge of the same cliff, waiting to fall or jump or be pushed.  She thought, maybe about going home. She thought, maybe about calling someone. She thought, maybe about doing something, anything, that would make this matter, that would make Jonas's death mean something more than just another data point in the city's statistics.  But there was nothing to do. No one to call. No way to make it matter when the entire system was designed to absorb these tragedies and continue functioning without pause.  So she sat on the steps and watched the city move around her, the drones and the bots and the people hurrying to jobs and appointments and lives that would continue regardless of who died in parking garages or alleyways or wherever else the invisible people went to stop being people.

Marcus, the dealer, heard about it from another customer. He shrugged. Said it happened. Said you couldn't save everyone. Said Jonas had made his choices and choices had consequences.  Then he went back to business. Had deliveries to make. Had a bottom line to protect. The market didn't care about sentiment.

Vikram found out when the police came to ask questions. Did he know Jonas Whitfield? Had Jonas been making deliveries? What kind of deliveries?  Vikram said he'd hired the kid for a few legitimate courier runs, nothing illegal, hadn't seen him in weeks, didn't know anything about drugs or trouble. 

The police nodded and left. They had more important cases to pursue.

In the towers downtown, the people who had received Jonas's deliveries went about their days without knowing the courier was dead. Why would they know? He'd been invisible to them when he was alive. Death didn't make him more visible.

The man in unit 8823 received his next package from a different courier. Didn't notice the difference. Didn't notice anything.

At Jonas's school, a teacher saw the news. She remembered him vaguely as a quiet kid, bruises sometimes, who stopped coming to class. She'd meant to follow up. Had meant to ask if everything was okay. Had meant to do a lot of things.  She sat at her desk and looked at her roster. Forty-three students. How many of them were like Jonas? How many were slipping through cracks she couldn't see?  She closed her eyes and thought, maybe about filing a report. About flagging at-risk students. About doing something.  Then she opened her eyes and graded the next assignment. Because what else could she do? The system was too big. The problems were too complex. She was just one teacher with forty-three students and not enough time to save any of them.

In the apartment where Jonas had lived, his mother sat in her room with the door closed. The lighter clicked. The spoon heated. The needle went in.  She didn't think about her son. Thinking required a clarity she didn't possess anymore, a connection to reality that had broken years ago, piece by piece, hit by hit, until she existed in a space adjacent to the world but no longer part of it.

His father came home three days after the social worker's visit. He saw the notice taped to the door, official letterhead, request for contact, urgent matter regarding his son.  He tore it down and threw it away.  Inside the apartment, he opened a beer. Sat in his chair by the window. Watched the holographic street signs cycle through their languages, announcing street names and advertisements and reminders about civic obligations no one followed.  If he thought about Jonas, he didn't show it. If he felt anything, it stayed buried beneath years of accumulated rage and disappointment and the kind of pain that turns people into the thing that causes pain in others.  The can was cold in his hand. The temperature display read 4 degrees Celcius.  He drank until it was empty. Then he opened another.

▰  ▰  ▰ 

In the database where the city tracked its citizens, Jonas Whitfield became a closed file. Date of birth. Date of death. The sparse facts of his existence compressed into metadata that no one would ever access again. The parking garage was cleaned. The construction continued. By spring, level seven opened for business. Cars parked where Jonas had died. Their owners walked to the elevator, took it up or down, went about their lives without knowing the history of the concrete beneath their feet. The old subway entrance remained. Kids still gathered there. Some of them were new. Some of them were the same kids who'd been there when Jonas was alive. They sat on the steps and smoked and swallowed and injected and did what they needed to do to survive another night.

Simone still came by sometimes. She didn't sit on the steps anymore. She stood at the top and looked down into the darkness where the closed subway tunnels stretched out beneath the city. She thought about her brother. She thought about Jonas. She thought about the dozens of other kids whose names she'd known and who were gone now.  Then she walked away because there was nothing else to do. 

The city continued. The towers rose higher. The technology got smarter. The systems got more efficient. The gaps between the people who had everything and the people who had nothing grew wider.  

And every day, somewhere in Toronto, another kid was born into hard times. Another kid learned that no one picks their parents, no one picks their life. Another kid discovered that when you fall through the cracks, no one catches you. They just shake their heads and say it was bound to happen.

And everyone goes on with their happy lives.

The drones kept flying. The bots kept cleaning. The city kept functioning.  In the databases where statistics accumulated, the count of victims incremented by one.  Then by another.  Then by another.

And the world kept turning, indifferent and vast.