“Nicole.”

  His voice came out wrong. Scraped. Like audio playing through a blown speaker. He tried to say her name again, but his throat had sealed shut around it.

  Nicole didn’t move away from Kelvin. If anything, she pressed closer, as if his body was a barricade between her and an inconvenient past she’d forgotten to delete.

  In the silence, David could hear everything with terrible clarity: the soft hum of the suite’s climate control, the distant sound of an elevator arriving on another floor, the creak of Kelvin’s watch as he folded his arms. The world had turned up its resolution, and every detail was a shard of glass.

  “Since you’ve seen it,” Nicole said, and her tone was the same one she used when explaining why she’d returned an item she’d bought online—practical, slightly bored, already moving on, “there’s no point hiding it. Let’s break up.”

  Let’s break up. Three words, nine letters, delivered with the emotional weight of canceling a subscription.

  “Why?” David’s voice cracked on the single syllable. He hated the sound of it. He hated that his body was betraying him in front of these two people—that his hands were shaking, that his eyes were burning, that there was a pressure building in his chest like a runtime error trying to crash a system that couldn’t afford to go down.

  “Five years, Nicole. Five years.” He heard himself speaking and it sounded like someone else. “I sleep four hours a day. I skip meals. Everything I earn—”

  “Enough.”

  Nicole cut him off with a precision that suggested she’d rehearsed this, or at least considered the possibility. Her lip curled. Not a sneer exactly, but the cousin of one—the expression of someone who had outgrown something and was vaguely embarrassed to be reminded it ever existed.

  “Stop acting like a martyr, David. What does your money buy? Cheap restaurants with plastic chairs. Clothes from the clearance rack. A motorcycle that sounds like it’s dying. Do you think that’s love? Do you think I’m supposed to be grateful?”

  Each sentence landed like a keystroke deleting a file. And the worst part was that her voice wasn’t cruel. It was tired. It was the voice of someone stating facts they’d accepted a long time ago.

  “Look at yourself,” she said, softer now, almost gentle. That gentleness was the cruelest thing of all. “You’re running yourself into the ground, and for what? You can’t even afford to eat properly. You smell like the kitchen you work in. I can’t do this anymore, David. I can’t pretend that being poor together is romantic.”

  David opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. The subroutines that handled speech had crashed. His mind was running through five years of cached memories, trying to find evidence that would contradict her—a proof that she’d loved him for real, that the late nights and the sacrifice had meant something—and every memory he pulled up now looked different under this new light, contaminated, like data that had been silently corrupted for months without triggering an alert.

  Kelvin watched the entire exchange with the relaxed posture of a man watching reality television. When the silence stretched, he laughed—a single, sharp bark.

  “You heard her, delivery boy.” Kelvin reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, swiping to a photo of a receipt. “Ten thousand ringgit. A bag. I bought it this afternoon because she mentioned she liked the color. That’s what love looks like when you can actually afford it.”

  Something inside David’s chest made a sound. Not a physical sound, but a structural one—the low, subsonic groan of a bridge cable snapping inside a suspension tower. The kind of failure you felt in your teeth.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  What happened next wasn’t a decision. It wasn’t courage or rage or even self-respect. It was a buffer overflow: too much input, too fast, crashing through every safeguard his rational mind had built over twenty-one years of being the guy who kept his head down and did the math.

  David’s fist connected with Kelvin’s jaw before his conscious mind had even finished authorizing the command.

  The impact was satisfying in the way that smashing a keyboard is satisfying—cathartic and completely unproductive. Kelvin’s head snapped sideways. A thin line of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  The satisfaction lasted approximately one and a half seconds.

  Then Kelvin’s eyes went cold, and David understood—with the same clarity he’d feel when reading a fatal error log—that he had just escalated a social conflict into a physical one against an opponent who outweighed him by thirty kilograms and hadn’t been eating 800 calories a day for three months.

  The beating was methodical. Not frenzied—methodical. Kelvin hit him the way a man hits someone when he knows, with absolute certainty, that there will be no consequences. Two shots to the ribs. One to the stomach that folded David in half. A knee to the face that sent him spinning into the hallway wall.

  David crumpled to the carpet. Blood pooled under his cheek, soaking into the expensive fibers. He could feel his ribs shifting in ways ribs weren’t supposed to shift. His vision strobed—white, dark, white, dark—like a screen losing its signal.

  Through the static, he heard Kelvin squat down beside him. Felt the weight of a leather shoe pressing deliberately onto his fingers.

  “Listen carefully, rat.” Kelvin’s voice was low, intimate, almost friendly. “My uncle is the Police Commissioner. If I kicked you off this balcony right now, the report would say you jumped. Do you understand?”

  David understood. He understood the way a terminal process understands that it’s about to be killed: completely, and without any power to prevent it.

  But something in him—some stubborn, stupid, essential piece of code that refused to terminate gracefully—forced bloody air through his broken lips:

  “Then do it.” A cough. Blood on the Persian carpet. “Kill me if you dare... trash.”

  Kelvin paused. Then a smile spread across his face. Not amused—fascinated, the way a child is fascinated by an insect that keeps moving after you’ve pulled its legs off.

  He stood up. Raised his right fist high. Aimed for the temple. David knew enough biology to know what that meant: best case, permanent brain damage. Worst case, the kind of error that has no stack trace.

  He watched the fist descend.

  And then the world ended.

  Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. The physical parameters of reality suffered a catastrophic failure.

  It started as a sound—a rumble so deep it bypassed the ears entirely and vibrated directly in the chest cavity, in the marrow, in the spaces between atoms. The marble floor didn’t just crack; it decompiled. Hairline fractures raced through the stone like spreading segfaults, and through the cracks, David saw something that his CS-trained brain would spend years trying to articulate: the raw substrate beneath reality, flickering with green phosphorescent data streams, as if the physical world was just a rendered surface and something underneath had started leaking through.

  The crystal wall sconces didn’t shatter—they dissolved into cascades of luminous fragments that hung in the air for a fraction of a second before dispersing, like particles in a system that had forgotten the rules of gravity.

  Kelvin’s falling fist slowed. Not because he chose to stop—because the local physics engine was failing. David could see lines of distortion trailing from Kelvin’s knuckles, as if his movement was leaving artifacts in a video stream running at insufficient frame rate.

  Nicole screamed. Or tried to. The sound came out fractured, repeating, as if someone had put her voice through a broken audio loop.

  Then the floor gave way entirely. Not a collapse—an unraveling. The physical geometry of the hotel deconstructed itself layer by layer, and David, Kelvin, and Nicole fell through the architecture of a world that had stopped believing in its own structural integrity.

  The last thing David saw before the darkness swallowed him was the iPhone box, tumbling through the void beside him, its white surface catching the light of the disintegrating world like a tiny, perfect, completely useless beacon.

  Then nothing. A hard shutdown. No error message. No crash log.

  Just the Abyss.