Who sent me the box of Pulses thirty years ago?

I'd asked myself that question so many times it had eventually stopped sounding like a question at all. It had become part of the box itself, same as the dark wood, the metal corners, the lock I'd never been given a key for. I lay on the bed in my apartment, separated from the bar by a single wall. I stared at the crack in the ceiling above me, trying to recall, once more, the day I first laid eyes on that box.

It was June eighth, and I'd just been released from the orphanage.

The afternoon was hot, the street reeked of scorching asphalt, and I was walking toward the gate with a backpack holding my underwear, two pairs of pants, three shirts, and a toothbrush. In my hand I gripped a phone showing directions to the ReFab workshop, the one my orphanage had an arrangement with. That's where I was supposed to start my new life. Work there, and live above it too. I was fifteen, and I still didn't know that one day I'd call this my lucky day.

Besides a man resting on one of the benches, there wasn't a living soul in sight. His thinning blond hair was combed back, baring a wrinkled forehead, standing out against the color of his clothes. His face was buried in his phone screen, his left palm resting on a sports bag. Cars drove past on the street behind him.

"Continue straight for thirty meters," the navigation app announced from my hand. The gate doors opened, I took a deep breath, and stepped through them into the real world.

"Hello," I greeted the man, and he lifted his head toward me and blinked, as if trying to focus.

"They've got a room ready for you above the workshop at ReFab," he said instead of a greeting, patting the empty spot on the bench beside him. "Sit with me a moment, Vey."

That wasn't a question, and it wasn't an order either. It was just a statement of what was about to happen, capped off with my name.

"Continue straight," the navigation repeated, but I froze mid-step. This man had been waiting here for me, and I couldn't understand why. That familiar feeling spread across the back of my neck, the one I always got in moments like this. As if my entire brain was trying to hide itself deeper inside my skull.

A hint of a smile appeared on the man's face.

"Are you from ReFab?" I asked the first question that made even a little sense. Though it seemed unlikely they'd send someone from the workshop all the way out here for me.

"Unfortunately not, Vey," the man answered, the corners of his mouth stretching wider. "Please, sit."

So how did he know my name? I only asked myself that question silently, and then spent the next thirty years regretting that I hadn't asked it out loud. I didn't believe he would have answered me, but at least I would have known I'd done everything I could.

Instead, I sat down beside him. He didn't look like someone dangerous. The longer I studied his face, the more it seemed like he was working hard to appear calm, while something else entirely was going on underneath.

"You're going to listen carefully, Vey," the man lowered his voice and glanced around himself. I glanced around too, but there was nothing nearby except cars passing on the street across from the orphanage gate.

"There's a box of Pulses in that bag. First, it's absolutely vital that..."

"What Pulses?" I interrupted him, and he sighed. That question sounds just as absurd to me now as if someone had asked what the Loop even was.

"It's absolutely vital," the man continued, ignoring my question, "that you take one every two weeks. Repeat that back to me, Vey."

"Why the hell would I do that?"

Another sigh.

"Because as long as you keep taking them, you'll age far more slowly than everyone else. Second, you can't tell anyone about them."

I opened my mouth for another question, but this time the man was faster.

"Because if anyone finds out what's in that bag, they'll kill you first, and then me."

I scrunched up my face and shook my head. Back then, I thought it was some kind of drug trick, the kind of terrifying story we used to get told at bedtime. A motorcycle roared past on the road nearby, and the man glanced around again. For a moment it seemed like he was more frightened of the world outside the gate than I was.

"There's an old television in your room. Turn it on at ten and you'll believe me," he whispered.

"I don't want your pills. I just want to start working and live my life quietly outside that fence behind me," I repeated what they'd been drilling into my head at the orphanage this past year.

"Please, just do what I'm telling you. Watch the news, and then decide what to do with them. Please, don't leave them here."

That please sounded different. Urgent. Desperate.

"If you leave them here, I've failed."

Fine. I definitely didn't want this old man to get hurt because of me. That wasn't the feeling I wanted to start my new life with. I made up my mind. I'd take the damn Pulses, whatever they were, wait for the news, and then throw them into the nearest dumpster.

I nodded, and he nodded back. Then Mr. Mysterious pushed himself up off the bench with effort and shuffled off toward the crosswalk.

"Continue straight for thirty meters."

There was no reason to stay there any longer. I had to check in at ReFab, so I slung the bag over my shoulder and headed in the recommended direction. I glanced back one more time at the man who'd just changed my life, but he didn't even turn to look at me. As if we'd never spoken at all. I never saw him again after that.

At ten that night, I sat on the mattress in my new room above ReFab. A television older than I was stood on a metal cabinet across from the bed, its faulty pixels driving me half mad. One of them glowed red, right in the center of the news anchor's forehead.

The Loop's logo glowed behind her.

"As of today, each of us gets the same shot at a longer life," she announced with a smile. "The Loop is launching its first public Pulse lottery."

A small pale purple tablet appeared on screen, an eight embossed at its center. It looked exactly like the thousands I'd found in the box a few hours earlier.

The anchor kept talking about two extra weeks of life. About fairness. About how Pulses would no longer be a privilege reserved for the richest people and board members. From now on, every Loop user would get a chance to win.

At the orphanage, they'd never told us about Pulses. They taught us how to count a paycheck, operate machines, and spot someone trying to slip something into our drink. No one bothered explaining how the rich extended their lives. We were children, and no one imagined Pulses would ever reach kids like us.

I stared at the sports bag by the door and wondered how many lives could fit inside it.

I took my first Pulse before midnight that night. I saw Lucky for the first time, but back then he was just a big snail from a strange dream.

I blinked, and the old television screen vanished. I was staring at the crack in the ceiling above my bed again. I'd returned from the world in my head back to the reality of my room behind the bar.

Thanks to Lyra, I now knew the Pulses hadn't come from some dead relative, or a mystery benefactor. Someone from the Loop had sent them to me. Someone who'd been there from the very beginning.

The music that usually seeped through the wall from the bar into my room had gone quiet. My phone showed just past midnight. The bartender was closing early. He did that when he wasn't feeling well, or when he'd had too much to drink. It wasn't often, but it happened.

I rolled onto my side and pulled the folder of my drawings out from under the bed, flipping to the very first one I'd ever drawn. Corven sat in it, leaning back in an armchair. Everything besides his face was blurry. I'd been filling in those drawings, Pulse by Pulse, like a puzzle assembling itself over years. Each new sketch revealed a little more detail, a few more small things. An old desk, a corkboard covered in papers I couldn't read, a cabinet in the corner of the room behind him.

I ran a finger over Corven's blurred face.

The door shuddered in its frame.

Before I even realized I'd stood up, I was already in the main room, by my apartment's front door.

A second blow knocked a chunk of plaster loose from the frame. It hit the floor, chips of cement and sand scattering in every direction.

"She's in there," a man's voice said from the other side of the door.

"Oh, shit," I breathed, and panic and the instincts that had kept me alive this long began taking control of my body. Suddenly it was clear why the music at the club had stopped so early. The Pulses. I had to grab the Pulses and disappear, while there was still even the slightest chance of it.

With the next blow, the door panel buckled, and the end of a red crowbar appeared in the gap between the frame and the door. The wood began to crack, and I knew I had seconds at most. I lunged through the open doorway into the bedroom and scanned for my only escape route from the apartment — the fire escape beyond the open bedroom window, leading down into the courtyard between the skyscrapers.

I threw my weight against the nightstand, beneath which the box lay hidden in the floor. It scraped across the old floorboards with a screech. At the same moment, the door in the next room gave a final crack and crashed to the floor with a thud. The silence that followed was broken by a metallic clatter of something dropping to the floor right after. Thick gray smoke, reeking of burnt dust, spread through the next room of my apartment. It hissed as it rolled toward my feet. Footsteps sounded beyond the door, along with a loud electronic crackle.

"She's next door," the man's voice said again, and the crackling grew louder.

My stomach clenched, and the world around me slowed and narrowed to four fixed points. My eyes tracked them, my brain scrambling to assemble them into a plan.

The box. The folder of sketches. The phone. The window.

The box under the floor gave me freedom. It's what let me live, what meant I never had to work. I could have a room like this one. I lunged toward the floorboard hiding my fortune. My hands shook, nails digging into the narrow gap between the boards.

Why did Lyra betray me?

My frantic mind hurled that question straight into my face, but I ignored it. A shot rang out, and I yelped. A rubber projectile buried itself in the plaster just beside me. I gasped a breath, and the smoke flooded my lungs.

"Hands behind your head, face the wall," the man said again into the silence.

The phone would give me away. I couldn't pull the box loose. That left the folder and the window. Wrapped in smoke, breath held, I felt my way to the bed. My hand found the folder of sketches, and I ran for the window.

Another shot rang out, and a sharp pain shot through my shoulder. I only registered it for a fraction of a second, right as I dove through the window out onto the fire escape.

"After her," the voice ordered, and a sharp whistle cut through the air past my head. Footsteps of running men sounded behind me. I was about to bolt downward, but I spotted two more men in the open space below. So I started climbing higher instead, toward the next apartment.

I had exactly one advantage: speed. The men chasing me were weighed down by helmets, bulletproof vests, heavy pants. They weren't dressed for sprinting up narrow stairs, and even though I'd left my shoes somewhere by the bed, I didn't feel the cold iron beneath my toes at all. A floor up, I ran along the iron grating of the fire escape running along the apartments, all the way to a window into the hallway.

I tucked the palm of my uninjured arm into my sleeve and tried to ignore the grating swaying beneath my feet in rhythm with the men running up behind me. I threw all my weight into the window. The glass scattered into the hallway, and I squeezed past the shards jutting inward from the frame, trying not to land on any of the ones scattered on the floor. I turned left. As far as possible from my apartment, toward the building's second exit. It was an old building. Over the years it had stood there, it had been renovated so many times that its hallways now resembled an anthill, a tangle of passages, entrances, and exits.

At the first turn I went right, and at the end of the hallway I ran down a staircase leading to the building's old, unused garages. To my relief, the garage was as abandoned as always. Before long I felt warm, dust-covered asphalt beneath my feet. The city swallowed me whole, and I did everything I could to put distance between myself and what I'd left behind.

I ran. A stitch stabbed at my side and my lungs burned, but I didn't stop running. I knew I'd shaken them off long ago, that no one was chasing me anymore, but I couldn't help it. All that adrenaline needed somewhere to go, and I didn't know what else to do with it. I ran, with no idea where. I kept running until the blood on my torn-up feet finally forced me to stop, and a single thought settled into my head, one that made me feel that same strange darkness spreading all the way down into my bones.

Without Pulses, I'll be dead in two weeks.