Maya Reyes had a system, and the system was the only thing standing between her and total collapse.

The system existed because the stakes were real, not because she enjoyed color-coding for its own sake, whatever her roommate freshman year had implied. The early-assurance program at her target med school took eleven students a year, campus-wide, and required a cumulative 4.0 through the end of sophomore year with zero exceptions, zero grace periods, and zero patience for compelling excuses — she'd read the fine print so many times she could recite it verbatim, the way other people memorized song lyrics. Miss the cutoff by even a tenth of a point and she'd be back in the ordinary pre-med grind with everyone else, competing for MCAT prep spots and shadowing hours and the kind of debt that turned four more years of school into a math problem her parents couldn't help her solve. She'd wanted to be a doctor since she was seven years old and had diagnosed her stuffed rabbit with a fictional case of "ear rot" using a plastic stethoscope from a Fisher-Price kit; she'd wanted the early-assurance seat since she was seventeen and had done the actual math on what a difference it would make. Between those two wants sat two years of exams that could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to go sideways.

Sunday nights were for color-coding. She sat cross-legged on her dorm bed with four highlighters fanned out like a hand of cards — yellow for lecture, pink for lab, green for exams, blue for anything involving Leo, which this week meant a single entry: Sun 6pm — call Leo (do not skip, he counts). Her planner was a small, obsessive kingdom, and in it, nothing was ever late, nothing was ever a surprise, and nothing — not one single thing — was left to chance.

It was 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday in October, and Maya was reviewing her organic chemistry flashcards for the third time that day when the fire alarm went off.

She didn't panic. She never panicked; panicking wasn't in the system. She logged the disruption — unscheduled, category: building emergency — grabbed her backpack (already packed with laptop, chargers, and a granola bar because a Reyes prepares for contingencies), and filed out into the hallway with the rest of Bell Hall's third floor, all of them in pajamas, all of them assuming it was a drill or someone's burnt popcorn.

It was not a drill. It was, as it turned out, a burst pipe on the floor above hers that had been quietly flooding the walls for approximately six hours before someone noticed water coming through a light fixture in the second-floor lounge. By 1 a.m., Maya was standing in the parking lot in October wind, watching maintenance staff wave flashlights at a building that Residential Life had just declared, over a bullhorn, uninhabitable for a minimum of two weeks.

Two weeks.

Maya's chest did the thing it did before exams — the tightening, the narrowing, like her ribs were a fist closing around her lungs. She breathed in for four counts, held for four, out for four, the way she'd taught herself sophomore year of high school and never told anyone about, and she opened her planner app with hands that were only slightly unsteady.

Options, she typed. 1. Hotel — cost prohibitive, 14 nights. 2. Emergency housing (Res Life) — waitlist, no guarantee, could be assigned anywhere, disrupts schedule. 3. Call Leo.

She stared at option three for a long time before she let herself act on it.

Leo picked up on the second ring, which was unusual — normally it took him four or five, because he never looked at his phone, a fact that used to drive their mother insane. "Hey, May. Everything okay? It's like one in the morning."

"There was a flood," Maya said, and heard her own voice come out clipped and factual, the tone she used for lab reports. "In my building. A pipe burst. They're saying two weeks minimum before it's habitable again."

"Jesus. Are you okay? Where are you right now?"

"Standing in a parking lot. I'm fine. I need somewhere to stay." She hated saying it. Hated the shape of the sentence, I need, like she was handing him a burden he hadn't signed up for. "Just for a couple weeks. I know it's short notice."

There was a pause on the line that went on a beat too long, and Maya's stomach dropped before he even said it.

"May, I just moved. Like — three weeks ago. Into the Birchwood place, with —" He stopped. Started again. "I have a roommate now. It's a two-bedroom."

"Okay," Maya said, already recalculating, already three moves ahead into option two, the waitlist, the strange dorm somewhere across campus, the disruption to her routine that made her want to put her head between her knees. "That's fine, I can —"

"No — no, come here. Obviously come here. I'm not gonna let my little sister sleep in a Motel 6 for two weeks, are you insane." His voice had gone into the register she recognized from her whole childhood, the automatic big-brother register, the one that used to walk her home from the bus stop and check under her bed for monsters he pretended not to believe in. "We'll figure it out. I just — the lease says two-tenant occupancy, that's all. We'll figure it out," he said again, like repeating it made it truer.

"Leo, if it's going to be a problem —"

"It's not a problem. Text me your address, I'm coming to get you."

He hung up before she could argue further, which was very unlike him, and Maya stood in the cold parking lot rereading her calculations, trying to find a version of the next two weeks that didn't involve becoming someone else's problem.

She thought, standing there in the wind with her phone still warm against her ear, about how strange it was that her first instinct in a genuine crisis was still to minimize the damage to everyone but herself. It was a reflex so old she couldn't remember installing it — the specific, practiced art of making her own needs sound smaller than they were, packaging every request in enough qualifiers and apologies that nobody would have to feel the actual weight of it. She'd gotten good at it. Scholarship applications, recommendation letters, even the way she talked to her own parents about her course load — always the reassuring gloss on top, always the version that let everyone else keep breathing easy. It had never once occurred to her, until this exact moment in a windy parking lot at one in the morning, that the habit might not actually be a virtue so much as a very elaborate, very exhausting form of self-erasure.

Her phone buzzed — a text from Leo, omw, ETA 20 min, sit tight — and Maya pushed the thought aside the way she pushed aside most thoughts that threatened to complicate a plan already in motion, and waited, arms wrapped around herself against the cold, for her brother's headlights to find her.

---

The Birchwood Apartments were a fifteen-minute drive from campus, a boxy three-story complex that had clearly been built for exactly this demographic — upperclassmen and grad students who wanted a kitchen that wasn't communal and a door they could lock against the rest of the world. Leo's car pulled up outside a unit on the second floor at 1:40 a.m., and Maya climbed out with her overstuffed backpack and the one suitcase she'd managed to grab before evacuation, feeling, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, completely outside her own plan.

"It's a good place," Leo said, hauling her suitcase up the exterior stairs two at a time, talking too fast, the way he did when he was nervous about something and hoping volume would cover it. "Two bed, one bath, which is going to be an issue, we'll figure out a schedule — my roommate's a hockey guy, he's barely ever home, practice and games and study hall, you'll basically never see him —"

"Leo. It's two weeks. I'll sleep on the couch, I don't need —"

"You're not sleeping on the couch." He said it like it was obviously insane, the same tone he'd use if she suggested sleeping on the roof. "We'll figure it out," he said for the third time, and Maya realized with a small sinking feeling that her brother did not actually have a plan, which was uncharacteristic enough to worry her.

He knocked once on the apartment door — a formality, apparently, because he had his key out before anyone could answer — and pushed it open onto a dim living room lit only by the blue glow of a paused video game and a single lamp.

"Jace? You up?" Leo called, dragging Maya's suitcase over the threshold. "So, funny story —"

The bathroom door down the short hallway opened, and a cloud of shower steam rolled out ahead of the person who'd apparently just finished with it, and Maya's brain did a full system halt.

He was tall — tall enough that he had to duck slightly under the hallway light fixture, a detail she registered with the strange, useless precision of someone cataloging evidence — and built like every stereotype of a college athlete she'd have sworn, twenty seconds ago, she found completely uninteresting. Low-slung grey sweatpants, no shirt, a towel slung around his neck instead of used for its actual purpose, water still tracked down one side of his jaw and disappearing into the ink that covered most of his right arm — a full sleeve, dense and detailed, the kind of thing that took years and meant something. His hair was dark blond and dripping, pushed back off his forehead, and when his green eyes landed on Maya standing in the doorway with a suitcase and a backpack and an expression she was certain looked exactly as shell-shocked as she felt, one corner of his mouth curved up like he'd just been handed the single most entertaining thing that had happened to him all week.

"Leo," he said, without looking away from her. "You didn't tell me we were getting a third roommate."

"We're not," Leo said. "This is my sister. Maya. Her building flooded, she's staying with us for a couple weeks, that's — Jace, put a shirt on, my God."

"It's my apartment too," Jace said mildly, still not moving, still looking at Maya with an expression she was going to spend a truly humiliating amount of time thinking about later. "Hi. Maya. I've heard exactly nothing about you, which, considering how much this guy talks, is honestly an achievement."

"Hi," Maya managed, and heard how stiff it came out, how formal, and hated it, and could not for the life of her figure out how to fix it, some part of her brain still trying, absurdly, to run a first-impressions assessment on a boy she was meeting in her socks at nearly two in the morning. "Sorry to just — show up like this. I know it's late."

"Don't apologize," Jace said. "This is already the most interesting Tuesday I've had all semester." He finally, finally reached for the towel around his neck and used it properly, scrubbing it once through his hair, and Maya made herself look at the suitcase instead of at him, at the door frame, at literally anything that was not the specific geometry of his shoulders. "So what's the plan? She's on the couch?"

"We'll figure it out," Leo said, for the fourth time, and Maya thought, with a dread she couldn't yet name, that whatever figuring it out turned into, it was not going to fit anywhere in her carefully color-coded planner.