The hour never announced itself in Low Town. The time was only knowable by the hue of the neon hemorrhaging through the blinds—acid pink if morning, viridian if evening, orange if the brothel down the street was running its breakfast special. Martha Javitts registered the sickly magenta pulse on her eyelids, but didn’t bother opening them yet. In the void of waking, she catalogued the house by sound: the radiator’s scalded moan, the staccato tick from the neighboring apartment’s ceiling fan, and—underpinning all—a viscous, unremitting silence.

  It was not always so. Once, Sylvester’s sleep had punctuated the house with little sonatas of snoring, sighing, and whispered formulas muttered into the pillow. Now the bedroom air was as inert as the chemical baths in his lab. Martha lay still, letting her thoughts roil to the surface. At last, when the angle of neon made her feel observed, she threw off the blanket and sat up, wincing at the cold.

  She’d fallen asleep in her day-clothes again. The wool dress—once navy, now the color of a healing bruise—clung in all the wrong places and scraped at her clavicles. She tugged it back into submission, ran a hand through her hair, and crossed to the bathroom without bothering to turn on the light. The mirror caught her in mid-urination, and she took stock: late thirties, two new crow’s feet, skin gone sallow from so many hours under artificial light. She had once looked sharp and severe; now she looked only sharp, as if her features had been honed by anxiety and then left to rust.

  She brushed her teeth mechanically, tongue tracing the chip in her left lateral incisor—a souvenir of a previous life, when she’d been both foolish and optimistic enough to drink vodka out of beakers at a university mixer. It was the kind of story Sylvester used to retell, his voice bright with pride at her recklessness. The same recklessness he now called “unbecoming,” as if the passage of time had been a season and not a blight.

  The apartment was a sequence of dull rectangles: bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen. The last was the bleakest. Martha flicked the switch and the overhead fluorescents buzzed before submitting to a kind of damp illumination, like sunlight filtered through milk. The refrigerator gurgled its last rites as she opened it. Two eggs, a jug of something that might once have been orange juice, and a loaf of bread sporting a five o’clock shadow of blue-green mold. She regarded these relics with the resigned air of a museum curator before selecting the least offensive slice, excising the mold with surgical precision, and dropping it into the toaster.

  She set the table for two. It was not habit—at least not the mindless kind—but rather ritual, as precise and grimly necessary as an autopsy. Two chipped ceramic mugs, two plates, two sets of misaligned cutlery. Even as she performed it, Martha was aware of its futility, yet to forego the ritual would be to acknowledge something irretrievable. She poured the coffee, black and burnt, and placed a mug at the seat Sylvester had once occupied, his chair now pushed so far from the table it seemed to be receding into the wall. She poured her own cup, sat down, and contemplated the toast.

  It was during these first five minutes of the morning that Martha allowed herself to replay the before.

  Before Low Town, before the sick-building syndrome, before Sylvester’s sabbatical had become exile, they had lived on the top floor of a white stone building that had its own security guards and a rooftop garden. Back then, Sylvester had been a meteor of a man: a genius, certainly, but also an eccentric who quoted Dadaist poetry and once dyed his hair green to “see if the lab mice would notice.” She remembered the way he used to debate her in public, never minding if she bested him.

  Now, his voice existed mainly as a memory, or an echo from the sub-basement when he was working late, which was always. She chewed the toast, ignoring its aftertaste of spores, and tried to reconstruct the sequence that had led them here. It was not so simple as a fall from grace; it was a slow-motion detonation. One day, he was writing grant proposals, the next, he was raving about post-biological life cycles and the possibility of resurrection through metabolic transfer. It would have been comical if he hadn’t begun using their home as an annex to his lab, inviting in the worst elements of the city—undocumented suppliers, coked-up assistants, mercenaries with synthetic hands and dead eyes.

  Martha finished her toast and made herself drink half the coffee, because the bitterness kept her awake, and being awake meant she might one day react to her circumstances. The water stains on the ceiling formed Rorschach blots above her, and she let herself imagine what they looked like. One was definitely a fetus; the other resembled a pair of lungs, delicate and veined with mildew. She wondered if Sylvester ever noticed the stains, or if he even noticed the ceiling. Or her.

  It wasn’t loneliness that Martha minded most. It was the knowledge that she was living inside a closed system, and that all her entropy—the wasted energy, the futile actions—would accumulate until it was indistinguishable from the apartment’s decay. She toyed with her mug, tracing the spiral fracture where she had once thrown it against the floor in a fit of rage. Sylvester had repaired it with some sort of resin, and it now bore a cloudy scar that was both uglier and more resilient than the original break. That was marriage, she thought. That was survival.

  A scraping sound from the floor above made her freeze. Not the regular scurrying of rats or the groan of the heating pipes, but a more deliberate noise. She waited, but it subsided. Martha finished her coffee, returned the mug to the sink, and rinsed it out. She set Sylvester’s untouched mug in the microwave, a pointless gesture of preservation, and swept the bread crumbs into her palm.

  The day’s work beckoned, though she had no employer and no schedule. Her profession—bioethics—wasn’t exactly in high demand in a city where the only regulation was how many replacement limbs you could afford. Still, she maintained the pretense of consulting work, running simulations for out-of-town firms that never replied to her reports. It gave her days a flavor of purpose.

  But first, she would check the sub-basement, as she did every morning. Not out of concern for Sylvester, if he died, it would almost certainly be of his own volition—but because she wanted to see what he was up to before the day’s experiments made him unreachable. Sometimes she even caught him between tasks, and they would share a breakfast of sorts: her toast, his amphetamine bars, and a volley of conversation that was more fencing match than communion.

  She moved to the door at the end of the hall, where the old dumbwaiter shaft had been converted to an elevator. She pressed the button. Nothing happened. She pushed it again, harder, and finally the doors slid open with a mechanical sigh. The elevator was a steel coffin, just large enough for two. Martha stepped inside, pressed B, and braced herself against the wall as the elevator stuttered downward.

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  The basement always smelled like battery acid and fried skin. It was illuminated by a grid of LEDs that cast everything in a forensic blue. Martha could hear Sylvester’s voice, rapid-fire and exultant, filtering through the door at the far end. She paused, not wanting to interrupt whatever experiment had him in its grip.

  Instead, she waited. She let the silence accumulate around her, tried to remember the last time she had laughed, and counted the days since Sylvester had last joined her for breakfast. She lost track somewhere after twelve.

  The elevator hummed overhead, returning to its default position, leaving her marooned on a small island of linoleum. Martha stared at the door. Her heart beat with a muted, steady defiance.

  She was alive. That was all that mattered, for now.

  #

  After the failed attempt at catching Sylvester in his element, Martha retreated to the kitchen and reset her morning. The act of cleaning—scraping burnt crumbs from the plate, scrubbing her mug until the ancient coffee stains blurred to sepia—usually restored order, but not today.

  She’d just turned on the tap when the first noise rolled up from the sub-basement. It was unmistakable—a metallic clang, as if someone had hurled a tray of scalpels at a steel plate. Martha stopped, knuckles whitened around the sponge. She let the water run, stared into the sudsy pool, and waited for a follow-up. It came: a throaty electrical hum, the kind that preceded a blackout or a house fire.

  Then something else. A low, irregular thumping that could have been the radiator or a dying animal or—she hated herself for thinking it—the arrhythmic pulse of a heart in the wrong place.

  She squeezed the sponge too hard; water bled from its pores, soaking her palm and running down her wrist. She tried to dismiss it as an experiment gone wrong, or right. Sylvester was always blurring that line.

  But there was another sound, softer yet more alarming: a muffled groan. Not animal, not human, but somewhere in the uncharted territory between. Martha pressed her wet hand to her chest and exhaled, but the groan echoed up the vent, persistent and searching.

  Logic dictated that she ignore it. The city’s crime rate was a full-time cautionary tale, and she’d once written a dissertation on the importance of respecting privacy in scientific research. But she was also a scientist, and curiosity, like mold, found its way into every crevice. She let go of the plate, wiped her hands on the threadbare towel, and moved toward the basement door.

  She paused there, hand on the knob, the rough chill of the metal shocking her out of her reverie. The noises had evolved: now a wet, slapping sound interleaved with the frenetic tittering of glassware. And beneath it, Sylvester’s voice, rapid and animated, leaking through the floorboards like a chemical spill.

  Her pulse quickened, a chemical surge of adrenaline despite her best efforts to rationalize the situation. The house felt suddenly alien, as if the hallway had elongated or the ceiling pressed closer. Her vision sharpened to a narrow tunnel, focusing on the thin seam where the door met the frame.

  She listened, knuckles whitening, every muscle taut with contradiction.

  A shriek—cut short, as if someone had clamped a hand over a mouth—sent a full-body tremor through her. Martha set her jaw, squeezed the doorknob with the other hand, and tried to conjure the image of the Sylvester she used to know: the one who played chess with her at 3am, who once baked a cake shaped like a paramecium for her birthday. But all she could picture now was the obscenity of his current passions, the clinical zealotry in his gaze.

  The groaning resumed, louder and more articulate. A conversation, or an interrogation, with a respondent who lacked a tongue. Martha’s own mouth went dry.

  She could retreat, close the kitchen door, and drown out the noises with a podcast or the static of the city. But that would be cowardice, and besides, she had to know. For science, or for herself.

  She dried her hands more thoroughly, straightened the seams of her dress, and set her shoulders. The hallway felt colder than before, the floorboards flexing under her bare feet. She counted three heartbeats, then turned the knob.

  The hinges protested with a whine, and the door shuddered open an inch. A gust of frigid, metallic air greeted her, tinged with a sweetness that reminded her of raw liver.

  From the darkness below came the slapping again, paired with Sylvester’s ecstatic monologue: “Yes, yes, right there, good, that’s it, now hold—dammit—hold—”

  Martha steeled herself and opened the door further. The stairwell was unlit, a chute of shadow leading straight into the bowels of the building.

  She felt the tremor in her hands before she saw it. She gripped the banister, the wood worn smooth by a thousand anxious descents, and leaned into the dark.

  Below, something banged against metal, and Sylvester shouted, “No, you’re not going anywhere!” A thud, then another, then the sound of liquid hitting the floor. Martha recoiled, bile rising in her throat, but she forced herself to keep watching.

  Her brain divided the scene into clinical observations and primitive alarm bells. The former urged her to catalogue the stimuli—blood, sweat, and more than a hint of ozone. The latter begged her to run, to seal the door and never look back.

  She did neither. Instead, she reached out, found the basement light switch, and flicked it on. The bulbs stuttered awake, revealing nothing but a patchwork of cracked paint and exposed conduit. The noise had stopped. All that remained was Sylvester’s breathing, shallow and ragged.

  Martha hesitated at the threshold, one foot on the first step. She was shaking now, and not from the cold. “Syl?” she called down, her voice steady despite everything.

  A pause, then a clatter of movement. “Martha? Don’t come down. I’ll be up in a second.”

  She almost laughed at the absurdity of it: a man warning his wife away from his secret lair, as if the mysteries of their marriage could be contained by a wooden door.

  But she obeyed, for now. She closed the door, leaning her forehead against its warped surface, and let out a long, low breath. In the silence, she imagined Sylvester mopping up whatever catastrophe he’d conjured, rehearsing a lie he would tell at breakfast tomorrow.

  Martha stepped back, flexed her numb fingers, and wondered which was worse: the sound of the unknown, or the certainty of it.