Sia's POV

  My whole world was spinning.

  I don't remember the steps that carried me there. I don't remember what Mom said on the way, or whether she said anything at all. I don't remember the streets we ran through or the faces we passed or how long it took. Those things exist somewhere in the gaps of that night, lost in a stretch of time my mind decided not to keep.

  The only thing I remembered was the voice.

  I found this phone next to a body.

  The bridge came into view before I was ready for it.

  The river sat dark and still beneath, swallowing whatever light fell onto it from above. Streetmps threw pale columns down toward the water, barely grazing the surface before the bck swallowed them whole. An ambunce was parked at the road's edge, its red light rotating in slow, wordless sweeps that painted everything in intervals. Red. Dark. Red. Dark. The kind of light that doesn't illuminate so much as remind you, over and over, that something has gone wrong here.

  It wasn't silent the way a romantic film is silent. It wasn't chaotic the way a nightmare is chaotic. It was something worse than either. It was numb. The specific numbness of a body that has decided, without consulting you, that feeling everything at once would be too much to survive.

  My feet were burning. I hadn't noticed until I slowed down. Some distant part of my mind registered the pain moving up through my soles, the pavement having taken something from me over however many blocks I had run. I kept walking anyway.

  A small cluster of people stood near the broken section of fence at the riverbank, positioned at the careful distance of people who want to witness something without being implicated in it. Their voices reached me before I reached them.

  "I heard the police couldn't recognize the face."

  "Yeah. It was pretty bad."

  No no no no

  The word formed somewhere inside me and went nowhere. I pushed through the cluster without looking at any of them, past the broken fence, the cold air coming off the river pressing against my wet face like a hand.

  Two women in uniform stood beside a stretcher near the ambunce. The shape on it was covered in white cloth, completely still, the fabric catching the rotating red light and releasing it in slow pulses. Like breathing. Like the cruelest possible imitation of it.

  I ran toward it.

  I didn't know what my face looked like. I didn't know my eyes had swollen nearly shut, or that my hair was pulled loose from running, or that the people standing around me were watching with the particur helpless pity reserved for someone they can see is about to break. I only knew the stretcher. I only knew the white cloth. I only knew the desperate, cwing, animal need to see the face underneath it.

  "Are you her retive?"

  One of the women was speaking. I turned toward the voice. She was looking at me with something careful in her expression, the practiced steadiness of someone accustomed to standing beside the worst moments of strangers' lives.

  I tried to say yes. My throat had stopped working. What came out was a nod so small I wasn't sure she'd seen it. Mom was somewhere behind me, her whole body shaking from the running, her breath coming in ragged pulls. I couldn't look at her. I couldn't look at anything except the white cloth and the shape beneath it.

  The two women gnced at each other. That gnce. The weight of everything they weren't saying passed between them in the space of a second and I felt it like a hand closing around my throat.

  "Can you identify the body?"

  "Can I—" My voice broke in the middle and I had to push past it. "Can I please see his face?"

  They looked at each other again. That look again. I wanted to scream at them.

  "Please," I said. The word came out smaller than I meant it to. "Please just let me see."

  The night was so cold. The kind of cold that comes off dark water and lives in your bones. The red light kept turning. Red. Dark. Red. Dark. Mom's crying had become a sound I was hearing from somewhere underwater, distant and warped.

  They pulled back the cloth.

  The face was unrecognizable.

  I don't mean that as an expression. I mean it the way doctors mean it. Whatever had been done to her had been done with a thoroughness that removed the possibility of recognition entirely. Deep cuts yered over deeper ones. Bruising so extensive it had merged into something continuous, covering everything, erasing the features beneath. The kind of damage that doesn't happen by accident. That requires intent. That requires time.

  A girl standing nearby made a choked sound and turned away from the stretcher, doubled over.

  I stood completely still.

  The cold from the river pressed against my back. The face was gone. But the dress wasn't.

  "Arya?"

  The word left me before I had decided to speak it. Mom's head snapped toward me with a speed that seemed to cost her something physically. Her hands found my shoulders and closed around them with everything she had, fingers digging in hard enough to hurt.

  "It's not Rio." Her voice had stopped being a voice. It was something underneath voice, something rawer than that. "Say something, Sia. It's not Rio, right? Tell me it's not Rio—"

  "It's not him." The words came out barely above a whisper. "It's not Rio, Mom."

  She made a sound I had never heard from her before and will never forget. Her grip on my shoulders loosened as something left her all at once, relief and grief arriving together in the same breath, indistinguishable from each other.

  I watched her face change.

  And underneath my own relief, in a pce I didn't look at directly, something else moved. Something quiet and dark and immediate. Something that looked at Arya's ruined face and thought, clearly, without flinching—

  That's what you get for getting close to my Rio

  It was gone as quickly as it came. Dissolved before I could examine it. Before I could be held responsible for it.

  But it had been there.

  I turned to the two women. My voice came out shaking in a way I couldn't control, dried out from hours of crying, every word costing something.

  "Have you seen a boy? He was wearing the same uniform as her."

  They looked at me.

  The red light swept across their faces, illuminating and releasing, illuminating and releasing. Something moved through their expressions that I didn't have a name for. Something that lived in the space between sorrow and dread.

  The feeling hit my chest like ice water.

  "What?" I stepped forward. "What is it. Tell me. Is he okay? Where is he? Did something happen to him, please just tell me—"

  "Please don't panic." Her voice was careful. The voice of someone choosing each word individually. "There was a boy with this girl. He has already been taken in the other ambunce."

  She paused.

  The pause sted too long.

  "We suspect he was assaulted."

  The world stopped producing sound.

  I was aware of my feet on the pavement. The cold. The river behind me. The red light still turning, still indifferent, illuminating everything in slow intervals. Mom making some sound beside me that I couldn't process. The women watching my face with that practiced, helpless sorrow.

  We suspect he was assaulted.

  The word sat in the center of my mind and refused to become what it meant.

  The road to the hospital exists in my memory as a series of disconnected images. The interior of an ambunce. Lights passing overhead in white streaks. Mom's hand somewhere near mine, gripping without speaking. The city moving past the small window in blurs of orange and white, completely indifferent, having no idea what was traveling through it.

  I was running before we had fully stopped.

  The hospital corridor was too bright. White floors, white walls, fluorescent lights that fttened everything into a harsh clinical sameness that felt obscene after the dark of the riverbank. Nurses looked up as I passed. I didn't slow down. My legs were stumbling over things I didn't register. The emergency unit. Every wrong door I pushed through took something else from me.

  And then I found the room.

  I stopped in the doorway.

  The boy on the bed was not the Rio I knew.

  That was the first coherent thought I had, standing there in the too-bright light of that room. He was not the clumsy ughing boy who ran through the garden. He was not the boy who smiled even when things were hard, that particur smile that made every room feel warmer just by existing in it. He was not the boy whose sleeve I used to hold on the way to school.

  The boy on the bed was barely recognizable.

  Deep bruising had spread across his face and settled into the hollows of it, distorting the features I had memorized without meaning to over fourteen years of looking at them. His ribs were bound. His hands, his legs, his mouth, all of it wrapped or sutured or swollen into something that didn't look like him. Something that barely looked like a person.

  Mom crossed the room immediately, her hands reaching for him before she had fully arrived at his side.

  A doctor appeared beside me. White coat. Careful eyes. He looked between me and the bed.

  "Are you his retive?"

  "Yes." The word cost me everything I had left.

  Something flickered in his expression when I said it. He looked at me for a moment, then at the bed, then back at me. The look of someone preparing to say something they have said before and never gotten used to.

  "I don't know how to break this to you," he said quietly. "But we fear your brother was assaulted. The marks on his body." Another pause. Longer than the st. "And on his private areas. They indicate it."

  I didn't move.

  The room kept existing around me. The lights kept humming. Mom was at the bedside making sounds I couldn't hear properly. The doctor's mouth was still moving, more words still arriving, none of them nding.

  We fear your brother was assaulted.

  The marks on his body.

  We fear your brother was—

  It has to be a dream.

  It has to be a dream.

  It has to be a dream.

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  AnnouncementHey Guys, sorry for the te upload. I got quite sick in the past few days. But I will be posting regurly now. And also if you wanna read chapters advanced, you can check nout the link below. I will also be posting illustrations there.

  https://kuupress.com/read/even-boring-lives-have-endings