Thursday came whether he was ready or not.
Peter spent Wednesday at the Sanctum. Twelve hours in the chamber with Strange, running correlations, mapping signal layers, arguing about methodology in the shorthand they'd developed — part physics, part mysticism, part mutual irritation elevated to a functional language.
They made progress. Small, grinding, incremental progress.
Strange decoded a portion of the destination's mystical profile. The target reality had a ley line network — crude, unstructured, but extensive. Natural magical channels running through the planet's crust like veins in a leaf. Some were active. Most were dormant. A few were damaged in ways that Strange said were "consistent with systemic neglect over millennia."
Peter mapped the electromagnetic fingerprint in finer detail. Pre-industrial, confirmed. No artificial RF emissions. Atmospheric composition nearly identical to Earth's — breathable, temperate in places, extreme in others. Axial tilt suggested pronounced seasons.
One detail stuck with him.
The seasonal data was wrong.
Not wrong like miscalculated. Wrong like impossible. The signal indicated seasonal cycles that didn't correspond to any standard orbital model. Summers and winters of wildly varying length — years, potentially. Decades. As though the planet's relationship with its star followed rules that had nothing to do with axial tilt or orbital distance.
Magic. The seasons were governed by magic. Or by whatever broken piece of Atlas infrastructure was buried in that world's foundations.
Peter had stared at that data for twenty minutes, rechecking his math, before the implications settled in.
A world where winter could last a generation.
He thought about the Wall. The darkness behind it. The cold.
He thought about it for exactly as long as he could stand, and then he closed the notebook and told Strange he was leaving for the evening.
Strange had looked at him — one of those looks that lasted a half-second longer than casual, loaded with things he chose not to say — and nodded.
"Thursday," Strange said.
"Thursday."
"Say hello to your aunt."
Peter had paused in the doorway. Strange didn't do pleasantries. Strange didn't acknowledge the personal lives of people he worked with. The fact that he remembered — that he'd registered the detail at all — said more about the situation than any data readout.
"Yeah," Peter said. "I will."
---
He went home first. His apartment, not May's.
He needed to shower. He needed to change into clothes that didn't smell like ozone and old stone and the particular kind of sweat you produce when you spend twelve hours in an underground chamber contemplating interdimensional displacement.
The apartment was exactly as he'd left it. The web-shooter parts on their paper towel. The bananas, now beyond any reasonable definition of edible — he threw them out, finally, and the fruit flies followed the bag to the trash can like mourners at a funeral. The light flickered on its schedule.
He showered in water that started lukewarm and turned cold after four minutes because the building's hot water heater had the capacity and enthusiasm of a dying animal. Stood under the cold spray for an extra thirty seconds anyway, letting it shock his muscles, reset his nervous system.
Nine days.
The number sat in his head like a stone in a shoe. Impossible to ignore. Impossible to remove. Every thought he had, every plan he made, every minor domestic action — shower, dress, eat, breathe — existed in the shadow of that number.
Nine days until the device activated. Nine days until the countdown reached zero and the ancient machine beneath the Sanctum did whatever it had been built to do.
Nine days until Peter Parker went somewhere he couldn't come back from.
Maybe, he corrected himself. Maybe can't come back from. Strange is working on it. There might be a way to stop it. Delay it. Redirect it.
The correction felt thin. The kind of optimism you maintained not because you believed it but because the alternative was a hole you couldn't afford to fall into.
He dried off. Dressed. Jeans, a flannel shirt May had bought him two Christmases ago that he'd never worn because the pattern was aggressive — red and black buffalo check, the kind of thing a lumberjack would wear to a job interview. But it was clean, and it was from her, and tonight that mattered more than aesthetics.
He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. The glass was fogged from the shower, his reflection soft-edged and indistinct. A shape that could have been anyone.
Twenty years old. Average height. Average build — deceptively so, given what was underneath. Brown hair that needed cutting. Eyes that looked tired in a way that twenty-year-olds' eyes shouldn't.
He stared at his own face and tried to imagine it weathered by wind and cold. Tried to imagine what he'd look like in a world without mirrors, without showers, without the small grooming rituals that kept a person recognizably themselves.
He stopped imagining. Wiped the mirror. Left.
---
The F train to May's place took twenty-two minutes from his stop.
He could have swung. Faster, more direct, no waiting on a platform that smelled like piss and burnt pretzels. But tonight he wanted the train. The normalcy of it. The specific, irreplaceable experience of standing in a subway car at 5:47 PM on a Thursday with forty strangers who were all going somewhere that wasn't the end of the world.
A woman across the car was reading a paperback with the cover folded back so he couldn't see the title. The man beside her was asleep, head bobbing with the motion of the train, briefcase wedged between his shoes. Two teenagers near the doors were sharing earbuds, each with one in, watching something on a phone that made them laugh — sudden, sharp bursts of laughter that broke through the white noise of the train and disappeared.
Peter watched them.
He wanted to remember this. The specific weight of a New York City subway car at rush hour. The yellow light. The way the floor vibrated at a frequency you felt in your heels. The automated announcement — this is a Manhattan-bound F local train; the next stop is — delivered in a voice so flat it had achieved a kind of zen detachment from the concept of meaning.
He wanted to remember all of it.
The train rocked through a curve. Peter's hand gripped the overhead bar — lightly, always lightly, because full grip at his strength would deform the metal. One of a thousand small calibrations he performed every day without thinking. Modulating handshakes. Controlling the force of every step. Picking up a coffee cup like it was made of glass, because at his baseline strength, it basically was.
Would he miss this? The constant vigilance of being strong in a fragile world?
You'llstill be strong. Wherever you end up, you'll still be you.
The thought should have been comforting. It wasn't. Strength without context was just force. Spider-Man without New York was just a man who could stick to walls.
His stop came. He got off. Climbed the stairs into the evening air.
Queens in November. The specific quality of light — amber streetlights coming on against a sky that was dark blue fading to black, the last band of daylight visible to the west like a line drawn in orange ink along the horizon. The sound of traffic and distant music and someone arguing in a language he couldn't identify from a window three stories up.
The smell. He'd never been able to describe the smell of Queens to anyone who hadn't lived there. It wasn't one thing — it was a composite. Exhaust and takeout food and cold concrete and the particular mineral scent of old brick when the temperature dropped. Underneath all of it, faintly, the salt edge of the East River.
Home.
He walked four blocks to May's building. Passed the bodega where he'd bought candy as a kid — still there, same awning, different owner. Passed the basketball court where he'd broken his glasses in seventh grade, back when he still wore glasses, back when a basketball to the face was the worst thing that could happen to him. Passed the alley where he'd caught his first mugger, three weeks after the bite, shaking so badly afterward that he'd sat behind a dumpster for ten minutes trying to remember how breathing worked.
Every block was layered. Every corner held a version of him — younger, smaller, less burdened. He walked through his own history like a ghost visiting the living.
May's building was a five-story walkup with a buzzer system that hadn't worked properly since the Clinton administration. Peter pressed the button for 4B anyway, heard the familiar broken crackle, and pushed the door open when the lock released with its arthritic click.
The stairwell smelled like floor cleaner and Mrs. Gutierrez's cooking from 2A — something with garlic and chili that made his enhanced senses sit up and pay attention. The handrail was loose on the third-floor landing. Had been loose for two years. Peter had offered to fix it four times. The super had said he'd get to it.
He reached the fourth floor. Stood in front of May's door.
The lentil smell hit him through the wood. Warm and earthy, with the caramelized sweetness of onions that had been cooking low and slow for the better part of an hour.
He knocked.
---
May opened the door wearing an apron that said KISS THE COOK in letters that were peeling off, leaving behind the ghost text ISS THE OOK, which Peter had once pointed out sounded like a rejected Star Wars character.
"You're early," she said, and hugged him.
He hugged her back.
It lasted longer than usual. He felt her notice — a slight shift in her posture, the beginning of a question forming in the way her hands pressed against his shoulder blades. She didn't ask.
"Come in, come in. Shoes off. I just mopped."
"You mopped?"
"Don't sound so shocked. I mop."
"When?"
"Today. I mopped today. It counts."
The apartment was small and warm and cluttered in the specific way that May's spaces were always cluttered — not messy, but full. Books on every horizontal surface, half of them open, none of them bookmarked because May used receipts and grocery lists and once, memorably, a slice of American cheese still in its plastic wrapper. A sweater draped over the back of the couch. A stack of mail on the kitchen counter that had achieved structural integrity through sheer accumulation.
The kitchen was the size of a generous closet, but May had always made it feel bigger through force of will and creative use of vertical space. Pots hung from a ceiling rack she'd installed herself — badly, Peter had reinforced the anchors with hidden webs three years ago and never told her. The stove was on. Two burners going. The lentil thing in a Dutch oven, the crispy onions finishing in a small skillet, browning in oil that popped and sizzled.
"Smells incredible," Peter said.
"It's the cumin. I added more this time. Ramirez at work said I was being too conservative with the cumin." She stirred the lentils with a wooden spoon that had a scorch mark on the handle from an incident neither of them discussed. "Sit. Five minutes."
Peter sat at the kitchen table.
The table was round, small enough that two people sitting across from each other could reach everything without stretching. Three chairs — there had always been three chairs, even though it had been just the two of them for years. Uncle Ben's chair was the one by the window. Nobody sat in it. Nobody had discussed not sitting in it. It was simply understood, the way some things in a family are understood without ever being spoken.
Peter's chair was the one facing the stove, so he could watch May cook. He'd been sitting in this chair since he was small enough that his feet didn't reach the floor. The view hadn't changed. May, from behind, stirring something. The kitchen window over the sink showing the building across the street. The refrigerator covered in magnets from places May had never been — a friend brought her one from every trip, a tradition that had started as a joke and become a small, sprawling geography of other people's adventures.
Paris. Costa Rica. Tokyo. A gas station in Nebraska, which was Peter's contribution. He'd been fourteen and thought it was hilarious.
He watched May cook and felt something inside him crack.
Not break. Crack. The way ice cracks when the weight on it shifts — a sound you feel more than hear, a structural warning that the surface you're standing on has limits.
Nine days.
"So," May said, not turning around. "Tell me things."
"What things?"
"Any things. Your things. How's the apartment? Are you eating?"
"The apartment's fine. Yes, I'm eating."
"Eating what?"
"Food."
"Peter."
"Ramen. Some burritos. There's a cart on Broadway that does a pretty decent—"
"You're eating street cart burritos and instant ramen." May turned around. Spoon in hand. The expression — he knew it like he knew his own heartbeat. The concern she wore like armor, sharp-edged and warm at the same time. "You have a metabolism that could power a small city. You need actual nutrition."
"I eat actual nutrition. Sometimes."
"Name a vegetable you've eaten this week."
"There was lettuce on the burrito."
"Lettuce is not a vegetable. Lettuce is a napkin that grew in dirt."
Peter laughed. It came out easy, natural — the laugh of a person who wasn't counting days, wasn't carrying a number in his chest like a second heartbeat.
May turned back to the stove. Satisfied. She'd gotten a laugh out of him, and that was enough for now.
The onions sizzled. She adjusted the heat. Hummed something — off-key, unidentifiable. May's humming existed in a tonal space that defied musical categorization. Peter had once tried to Shazam it. The app had returned no results and, he suspected, a faint sense of betrayal.
He sat in his chair and breathed.
The apartment was warm. The light was the warm yellow of old incandescent bulbs — May refused to switch to LEDs because she said they made everything look like a hospital. The radiator under the kitchen window hissed and clanked with the steady rhythm of a building that had been heating itself the same way for sixty years.
If he closed his eyes, he could be any age. Eight. Twelve. Sixteen. The smells were the same. The sounds were the same. May's humming, the radiator, the pop of oil in the skillet. The constants of his life. The fixed points around which everything else orbited.
He opened his eyes and watched her plate the food.
---
They ate.
The lentils were perfect. Earthy, warm, the cumin threading through like a bass note. The crispy onions on top were golden and salty and shattered when you bit into them. May had made rice too — plain, slightly sticky, the way she always made it, in the same pot she'd had since before Peter was born. The pot had a dent in the side from the time Peter had knocked it off the stove at age seven. May called it character. Peter called it evidence.
"This is really good," Peter said.
"Ramirez was right about the cumin."
"Thank Ramirez for me."
"Thank her yourself. Come to the shelter sometime. She asks about you."
May worked at a homeless shelter in Forest Hills. Had for three years. Before that, a food bank. Before that, volunteer coordination for a dozen different organizations that Peter couldn't keep track of. She'd never had a job that paid well. She'd never had a job she didn't care about with every molecule in her body.
He wondered, sometimes, where his sense of responsibility came from. Everyone assumed it was Uncle Ben. And Ben had been part of it — a big part. But May had been there longer. May was still there. Showing up every day to a job that paid nothing close to enough, for people who had nothing close to enough, because someone had to and she'd decided it would be her.
"Maybe next week," Peter said.
"You always say next week."
"And next week I always mean it."
She pointed her fork at him. "I'm holding you to that."
They ate in comfortable silence for a while. The kind of silence that only exists between people who've shared enough meals that conversation is optional — a feature, not a requirement.
Peter looked at the third chair.
Empty. The cushion slightly faded compared to the other two. A sweater draped over the back — not Ben's, one of May's, but the effect was the same. The chair was occupied by absence.
He thought about what it would be like for May if he disappeared.
Not died — disappeared. No body. No explanation. Just... gone. The way the device would take him. One day he'd be here, sitting in this chair, eating lentils. The next day he wouldn't. And May would call his phone and get nothing. She'd go to his apartment and find the web-shooter parts on the paper towel and the flickering light and the dead bananas in the trash and she'd know something was wrong, but she'd never know what.
Another empty chair.
His throat tightened.
"You okay?" May said.
He looked up. She was watching him with the specific attentiveness of a woman who had raised a teenager with superpowers and learned to read the difference between regular quiet and something is wrong quiet.
"Yeah. Just thinking."
"About?"
He could tell her. Right now. Sit at this table and explain everything — the device, the countdown, the vision, the wall of ice. She'd listen. She'd be terrified, but she'd listen, because that's what May did. She held the things you couldn't carry alone.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
If he told her, she would spend the next nine days in agony. Every hour. Every minute. Watching the clock, knowing her nephew was being pulled toward something she couldn't stop, couldn't follow, couldn't fight. It would eat her alive.
If he didn't tell her, she'd have nine normal days. Nine days of not knowing. Nine days of thinking he was fine, that the worst thing in his life was instant ramen and a broken web-shooter.
He could give her that.
It was a terrible gift. A selfish one, maybe — protecting himself from her pain as much as protecting her from the truth. But it was all he had.
"Just thinking about how good this is," Peter said, and took another bite.
May watched him for a moment longer. The assessment — quick, thorough, ultimately inconclusive. She knew he was holding something back. She always knew. But she'd learned, over years of living with a secret she'd eventually discovered, that pushing Peter Parker when he wasn't ready produced nothing but walls.
"There's more on the stove," she said.
"I'll have thirds."
"You always have thirds."
"Because you always make enough for thirds."
She smiled. Small, warm, private — a smile that existed only in this kitchen, at this table, between these two people.
Peter memorized it.
---
After dinner, they washed dishes.
May washed. Peter dried. The same division of labor they'd had since he was tall enough to reach the dish rack. She scrubbed with more enthusiasm than technique — plates emerged from her hands clean but aggressively handled, like they'd been interrogated. Peter dried them with the careful precision of a man who could accidentally crush a ceramic plate into powder if he lost focus for half a second.
"MJ called me," May said.
Peter's hands paused on the plate.
"When?"
"Tuesday. She wanted to know how you were doing."
"She could ask me directly."
"She said you weren't answering her texts."
"She said she wanted space."
"Space doesn't mean silence, Peter. Space means 'I need room to think, but I still care about you.' Silence is what you do when you don't know the difference."
He set the plate in the rack. Picked up the next one.
"I don't know what to say to her."
"Start with 'hi.' Work from there."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. It's just not easy. Simple and easy are different things."
He dried the plate. Set it down. Stared at the dish rack — mismatched ceramic in four different colors, accumulated over years of impulse purchases at thrift stores. A blue one with a chip in the rim. A yellow one with a flower pattern that May said was "cheerful" and Peter said looked like it had been designed during a fever dream.
"What did you tell her?" he asked.
"That you were fine. That you were busy. That you were eating." May rinsed the Dutch oven and handed it to him. "I lied about the eating part."
"I eat."
"Street cart burritos."
"Burritos are a food group."
May turned off the faucet. Dried her hands on the ISS THE OOK apron. Leaned against the counter and looked at him.
"Peter."
"Yeah."
"Whatever's going on with you — and something is going on, don't insult me by pretending otherwise — you don't have to handle it alone."
He set the Dutch oven on the counter. Too carefully. The control itself was a tell — May wouldn't know that, but the deliberateness of it, the precision, was the behavior of a man holding himself together with the same care he used to hold fragile objects.
"I know," he said.
"Do you?"
"May—"
"Because your uncle used to do the same thing. Carry everything himself. Thought he was protecting me by keeping it inside. And I let him, because I loved him and I thought that was what love looked like — letting someone be strong for you." She paused. Her voice was steady, but her hands had found the counter's edge and were gripping it. "It's not. That's not what love looks like. Love looks like saying I'm scared to the person who will be scared with you so neither of you has to be scared alone."
The kitchen was very quiet.
The radiator hissed. Somewhere outside, a car alarm started and stopped.
Peter looked at May. At the lines around her eyes that hadn't been there when he was fourteen. At the grey threading through her hair that she'd stopped dyeing six months ago because, she said, she'd earned every single one of them. At the hands gripping the counter — strong hands, capable hands, hands that had held him through fevers and nightmares and the worst night of his life, the night Ben didn't come home.
He wanted to tell her everything.
The wanting was so strong it was physical — a pressure behind his sternum, right where the device's resonance lived. For a disorienting moment, he couldn't tell the difference between the two. The pull of the machine and the pull of this woman who had loved him his entire life, both tugging at the same place inside him.
"I know," he said. "I know, May. And if — when I'm ready to talk about it, you'll be the first person I call."
She held his gaze. Three seconds. Five.
Then she nodded. Reached out and squeezed his hand — briefly, firmly. The grip of a woman who knew when to hold on and when to let go, and had spent twenty years learning the difference.
"Okay," she said. "Ice cream?"
"Please."
---
They ate ice cream on the couch.
Ben & Jerry's. Half Baked. The only flavor they both agreed on, arrived at through years of diplomatic negotiation and one memorable argument in a grocery store checkout line that a stranger had tried to mediate.
May put on a movie — something she'd recorded, a romantic comedy Peter had never heard of, starring actors he vaguely recognized. He didn't follow the plot. Didn't try. He sat on the couch with his aunt and ate ice cream and let the sound of fictional people falling in love wash over him like warm water.
May laughed at the jokes. Some of them weren't funny, but she laughed anyway — full, unguarded laughs that shook the couch cushions. She had opinions about the characters that she delivered to the screen as though they could hear her. "Don't trust him, he's clearly lying." "Oh, now she figures it out." "If he shows up with flowers after that, I swear—"
He showed up with flowers. May threw a pillow at the TV.
Peter watched her more than he watched the movie.
The way she tucked her feet under the afghan on the couch — the knitted one, brown and orange, made by someone's grandmother at some point, acquired at a yard sale for three dollars. The way she held her spoon upside down in her mouth when she was thinking. The way the TV light moved across her face, blue and warm, softening the angles.
This was what he was leaving.
Not the city. Not the technology. Not the suit, the web-shooters, the life of a superhero swinging between skyscrapers.
This.
A couch. An afghan. Ice cream. A woman laughing at a bad movie.
The ordinary things. The things that didn't feel important until you realized you might never have them again.
Peter ate his ice cream and laughed when she laughed and pretended the tightness in his chest was just the cold of the dessert hitting his system.
It wasn't.
---
He left at ten.
Standing in the doorway, zipping his jacket, the hallway behind him smelling like floor cleaner and Mrs. Gutierrez's leftovers reheating.
May leaned against the doorframe. Arms crossed. The posture of a woman who was finished for the evening but not quite ready to close the door.
"Thursday next week?" she said.
"Thursday next week."
Seven days. The countdown would be at two days by then. If Strange couldn't stop it—
"Bring MJ," May said.
"May—"
"I'm not meddling. I'm inviting. There's a difference."
"The difference being?"
"Meddling is when I call her myself. Inviting is when I tell you to call her." May tilted her head. "I'll meddle if I have to."
"I'll call her."
"When?"
"Soon."
"Peter."
"Soon."
She reached out and straightened the collar of his jacket. A gesture so automatic, so deeply embedded in the choreography of their goodbyes, that Peter doubted she was even aware she was doing it. Hands finding fabric. Adjusting. Making sure he went out into the world looking right.
"Be safe," she said.
The words hit differently tonight.
Every other Thursday, be safe was a pleasantry. Background noise. The thing you said to someone who was walking to the subway.
Tonight it sounded like a prayer.
"Always," Peter said.
He kissed her cheek. She squeezed his arm. He walked toward the stairs.
"Peter."
He turned.
May stood in the doorway, backlit by the warm yellow of her apartment. The ISS THE OOK apron was gone — she'd changed into an old sweater, the oversized one she wore when she was settling in for the night. Her face was half in shadow.
"Whatever it is," she said, "you're going to be okay."
She didn't know what it was. She didn't know about the device, the countdown, the wall of ice in a world that didn't have a name. She was speaking blind — sending reassurance into a darkness she couldn't see, hoping it landed.
It landed.
"Yeah," Peter said. "I know."
She closed the door.
He stood in the hallway for a long time.
The fluorescent light above him buzzed — a different frequency than the Sanctum's magical lights, a different frequency than his apartment's stuttering bulb, but a buzz all the same. The universal hum of electricity keeping the darkness at bay.
In nine days, he wouldn't hear it anymore.
He went downstairs. Out the front door. Into Queens.
---
He didn't go home.
He climbed.
Not swinging — climbing. Up the side of May's building, fingers finding the familiar grips in the old brick. The mortar gaps he'd memorized at fifteen. The window ledge on the third floor that was slightly wider than the others. The drainage pipe on the northwest corner that could hold his weight but groaned about it.
He reached the roof in thirty seconds.
Queens spread out beneath him.
The skyline was low here — four and five-story buildings, water towers, satellite dishes, the occasional taller structure breaking the pattern like a word in the wrong font. To the west, Manhattan's towers made a wall of light. To the east, the darker sprawl toward Jamaica and the airport, marked by the rhythmic pulse of runway lights and the distant roar of planes.
Above it all, the sky.
Clear tonight. Cold enough that the air had a bite and the stars — what few you could see through the light pollution — were steady. Hard. Real.
Peter sat on the roof's edge. Feet hanging over. The concrete lip rough against his palms.
He looked up.
The stars he could see were his stars. Orion. The faint smear of the Pleiades. The Big Dipper, reliable, pointing north like it always did.
In the chamber, the device had shown him a different sky. Wrong constellations. Wrong patterns. A crown of seven. A sweeping chain. A lonely star burning in the dark.
He'd be under those stars soon. If Strange couldn't stop it.
Peter reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook — the kind you could buy at any drugstore, spiral-bound, college-ruled. He'd bought it that afternoon. On impulse. Standing in line at the CVS on his block, holding a notebook and a pen and feeling ridiculous.
He opened it.
Stared at the blank first page.
The pen was a basic ballpoint. Blue ink. The kind that skipped if you wrote too fast.
He wrote:
Dear May,
He stopped.
What do you write to someone who doesn't know you're leaving? Who doesn't know the letter exists? Who won't find it unless you don't come back — and if you don't come back, won't understand a word of it?
He tried again.
Dear May,
I want you to know that tonight was perfect. The lentils. The ice cream. You yelling at the TV. All of it. You should know that I sat there on your couch and I memorized everything. The Afghan. The way you hold your spoon. The sound of your laugh. I memorized it because
He stopped writing.
Because what? Because I might never hear it again? Because an ancient machine is going to pull me into another universe and I don't know if I'm coming back? Because I'm twenty years old and I'm scared and I can't tell you?
The pen hovered over the paper.
He closed the notebook.
Not tonight. He couldn't do this tonight. The words were too big and the page was too small and the distance between what he felt and what he could write was a gap he didn't know how to cross.
He'd try again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.
He had nine days to figure out how to say goodbye to someone he couldn't say goodbye to.
Peter put the notebook back in his pocket. Sat on the roof. Looked at his stars — the right stars, the real stars, the ones he'd grown up under.
Somewhere beneath Manhattan, a countdown continued.
The night was cold. November cold. Queens cold.
He stayed on the roof until his fingers were numb and the lights in May's windows went dark, one by one, and the only sound was the city breathing around him — endless, indifferent, alive.
Then he climbed down, and walked home, and didn't sleep.
[END — CHAPTER FOUR]