Pulse Zero

Chapter 1

There are moments when everything stops.

A breath. A heartbeat.

Even when it feels like an ending, it isn’t. It’s not a beginning either. It’s something narrower, a precise point in time. It’s a transition, a reconfiguration. The space between one pulse and the next. The point where one part of your life collapses inward and converges with the one to come.

The next part of my life is coming faster than I’m prepared for.

I walk down the hall toward the kitchen, the air filled with the smell of cardboard and lemon cleaner, which means my mom has made her decision.

Boxes are stacked everywhere, some piled shoulder-high, turning the kitchen into a maze. It feels less like moving and more like fortifying. Like she’s building a barricade against the life she’s abandoning, giving her a greater chance of escape when she finally runs from it.

Leaning against the wall of the entryway, I watch her tape up a box on the counter, the tape shrieking in the otherwise quiet room.

She presses her palm flat against the seam, then labels the side in neat black marker.

Kitchen/Keep. As if there’s anything left she hasn’t already decided to take with her and packed away. Everything is so bare.

My entire childhood is either in boxes or out on the curb waiting to be picked up with the trash.

“I hope you didn’t pack my favorite mug.”

“You have six favorite mugs,” my mom says with a little grin.

“Yeah, but only one is my absolute favorite.”

She finally looks up from the box she just stacked on top of another, her grin growing with a spark in her eyes. “In the cabinet.”

I step into the kitchen, the tile cold against my bare feet. The room feels smaller, compressed by cardboard and memory. My dad used to stand right where I am now, leaning against the counter, drinking coffee that was always too hot and pretending not to listen when my mom and I argued.

He’s been dead three years. He died a few days after I turned nineteen.

I’m honestly surprised it took my mom this long to make a run for it.

“North Carolina,” she says, like she’s trying to convince herself it’s real.

Not only is she running from this place, but she’s moving clear across the country.

I open the cabinet above the empty spot where the coffee maker used to be and find my favorite mug exactly where it’s always been.

It’s one my dad gave me several years ago—plain white with GENIUS in big black letters.

It’s not something I ever would’ve bought for myself, but it’s always been a reminder that my dad was proud of me.

Picking it up, I wrap my fingers around it and bring it to my face as though I can feel the comforting warmth of nonexistent coffee.

“You know you’ll need to start packing too.”

There’s sympathy in her voice, and I can feel her eyes on me. Placing the mug back in its spot, I turn to see her watching me expectantly, waiting for an answer to the question she asked me weeks ago, the one she hasn’t asked again since.

“You don’t have to come to North Carolina, but…” Her voice trails off as she gazes around the kitchen. Even with all the boxes, it feels too empty. “Well, a twenty-two-year-old IT tech wasn’t exactly in the real estate listing.”

“You mean ‘comes with one emotionally attached adult son and questionable wiring’ didn’t boost the property value?”

She gives me the look. “Case.”

“‘Lightly haunted by a grown man with a laptop’ wasn’t a selling point?”

Her lips purse in that way it does when she’s trying not to laugh. “Case.”

“I could just live inside the walls. They’d barely notice me.”

Her composure breaks, and she laughs with a shake of her head. “On second thought, live in the walls. The new owners will just have to invest in some good pest control.”

I scoff. “Ouch.”

Her laughter fades, her smile falling into that familiar sad one she wears more often than she used to. “I’m going to miss you if you don’t come with me.”

Leaning back against the counter, I cross my arms over my chest and stare at the floor.

When she asked me to come with her weeks ago, I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t. I feel torn in two directions.

My love for my mom is trying to pull me to North Carolina, but my roots in Washington would be so fucking hard to rip out of the dirt.

I’ve always been close to my mom. I had planned on finding my own place before now, but after my dad died, I decided to stay at home.

I stayed for her, and now she’s just up and leaving.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting.

“Does it have to be North Carolina?” I finally convince myself to ask. I had been trying to word that question just right for days so it wouldn’t sound like I was begging her to stay.

She sighs and looks away, her gaze drifting to the window above the sink. “I want to get as far away from the Institute as I possibly can.”

“I think you’d have to move somewhere off the coast of Africa. That is, if we’re talking about staying on this planet.”

She almost laughs, just a soft sound that comes through her nose. Her gaze is somewhere far away as she looks out into the front yard, her next words coming out as a whisper. “I can’t stay, Case. I’ve stayed as long as I can.”

And then it hits me. She did stay for me.

Now I think I have to do something else for her and let her go.

Pushing off the counter, I move to stand beside her, throwing one arm over her shoulder as I stare outside with her. I passed her up in height my sophomore year of high school, and I’m several inches taller than her now. She leans her head against me, accepting the comfort I’m attempting to offer.

“He had a heart attack, Mom,” I tell her, keeping my eyes directed out the window. “It’s not the Institute’s fault.”

I don’t say it in another attempt to get her to stay but because I believe it’s the truth.

Because I can’t believe that the place my father breathed life into, sacrificed so much of his blood, sweat, and tears for, is the reason he’s dead.

It caused him stress, sure, but even if the building itself crumbled and crushed him to death, it’s probably how he would’ve chosen to go out.

He always would’ve been the one to go down with the ship.

He and his brother, my uncle Malcolm, founded Bellrose Institute before I was born. It’s the largest private research institute on the west coast. Copeland Labs may be best in neuroscience, but Bellrose leads in every other branch of bioscience.

It’s also kind of the reason I can’t bring myself to leave Washington.

I don’t think my dad would’ve wanted me to leave it behind.

He always wanted me to come work with him, and I did too, even though I never wanted to be that kind of scientist. Malcolm hired me last year part-time as IT support, but he promised me something more impressive after I graduate with my master’s degree.

“Your father gave so much of his life to the Institute,” my mom says, still speaking softly and sadly. “And then it took it away from him. It took him away from us.”

I’m not sure what I can say to that because it doesn’t seem like I can change her mind, and I know she kind of hates that I work there. So I stay quiet.

She takes a deep breath and steps away to pin her gaze on me again with what I imagine is the best smile she can manage right now. “We have to be out in three days. What’s your plan?”

I can see a glimmer of hope that I’ll choose to come with her still in her eyes, and I hate that I have to crush it.

“Malcolm said I could stay with him until I find my own place.”

Sure enough, the sparkle in her eyes fades even while she holds tight onto her smile. “Okay then.” She nods and glances around the kitchen, like she’s checking to see if she missed anything. There’s nothing left to put in boxes but my mug. “I’m going to finish packing up my room.”

She gives me a swift kiss on the cheek before she leaves the kitchen. I hear her footsteps on the stairs as I peer around at the towers of cardboard, the boxed up remnants of the part of my life I’m being forced to leave behind. The one that’s collapsing into the next.

After I scan my ID badge just inside the front doors of Bellrose Institute, I nod at the guard as I make my way past him into the atrium.

I’m not scheduled to work today, but I couldn’t stay home any longer.

The house already feels like a place I’ve been evicted from emotionally, and watching my mom cope by turning memories into cardboard cubes is…

a lot. I tried to reminisce with her at one point, but she got too fucking sad.

I don’t want these last few days I have with my mom before she moves across the country to be filled with grief and that fragile quiet that comes after the tears.

I’ll try taking her out tonight. Dinner, maybe bowling, something neither of us ever did with my dad so our time together won’t turn into another crying fest.

I hope she’ll be happier in North Carolina. I really do.

But I’m still going to fucking miss her.

The atrium stretches ahead of me, open and vast. No one could ever accuse my dad and uncle of thinking small when they built this place.

Glass walls stretch upward three stories, angled just enough to distort reflections, turning people into moving fragments as they cross the first floor.

Sunlight spills down from the skylights in clean, colorless beams, washing everything in a kind of sterile beauty.

White stone tiles gleam underfoot, polished so thoroughly they almost mirror the ceiling.

Water trickles somewhere to my left—an artificial stream threading through sculpted stone, more aesthetic than soothing.

It smells faintly like antiseptic and ozone, the kind of clean that doesn’t exist in nature.