By the time the last washer finished its spin, the night over Harbor Heights had folded into that in-between hour when the city seems to forget itself. The neon donut sign across the street buzzed and sputtered, stuck between O and N. Out front, a bus sighed at a red light like a sleepy dragon. From our apartment above the laundromat, the air smelled like warm metal and soap. "I think the city's hiccupping again," Arlo said, peeking through the blinds. He said it like a joke, but his eyebrows were doing that jumpy thing they did when he was nervous. "It's a vibe," I said. "An actual vibe." It was. I could feel it, a shiver right under my skin, like when a song you love is about to hit the good part. Ever since March, when Arlo and I learned what happened when we held our breath at exactly the same moment, I had felt that shiver more and more, a hummingbird beating its wings between the seconds. We didn't tell anyone. Not Mom, not Coach Gil from swim team, not the kids who stuck gum under the folding tables in the laundromat. We wrote our own rules in a notebook with a cracked blue cover: Keep it short. Don't try it underwater. Always hold hands if you can. Never do it on the stairs. And absolutely no showing off. The first time it happened was in the pool. Coach blew her whistle and yelled, "Streamline!" and Arlo and I took a breath at exactly the same time. The water went flat. The splash froze to lace. You could see the silver tile lines below like they were drawn with a ruler. We came up laughing and coughing because we forgot we were supposed to move even when the world didn't. We practiced after that, carefully, only for a few heartbeats. It felt like slipping into a still photograph and not being trapped there because we had the key. Tonight, though, something was off. The second hand on the clock over the counter twitched backward, forward, backward again, like a bug trapped in a glass. The neon donut did its buzz-sputter-buzz routine three times in a row. Down on the corner, the pedestrian crossing kept flashing WALK but the little white person wasn't walking anywhere. Arlo looked at me. "Should we-?" "Roof," I said before he even finished. We crept past the rows of sleeping washers and dryers, their round glass doors reflecting our faces like dozens of foggy moons. Mom had left a note under a magnet-Back by 10:30, don't wait up-but I tucked another note under it anyway: Went to roof. Not far. Promise. Because if we were going to step between the seconds, I wanted the regular world to know we hadn't just vanished. On the roof, the city spread out like a quilt stitched from fire escapes, rooftops, and a whole lot of nighttime. The donut shop's pink light washed the street below. The elevated train line stood quiet, a metal riverbed waiting for a current. Arlo and I stood side by side, fingers linked. It makes it easier that way, like jumping off a dock together. The air was damp and warm. Somewhere down the block, a saxophone let out a single smooth note and then thought better of it. "Ready?" I asked. "Count of three," Arlo said. We counted in our heads. One. Two. Three. We breathed in together and held it. The world made a soft, private sound, like a curtain being drawn in a theatre. The buzz of the donut sign unraveled into silence. The tiny breeze tugging at my hair let go and forgot what it was doing. The saxophone note stretched thin and didn't break. I could see the exact shape of it in the air. Hello, Stillness. In the Stillness, the edges of things were sharper. The city had a kind of glitter, not the shiny kind but the little sparkle that happens when you notice something perfectly ordinary and it becomes important. A moth hung in the air by the rooftop light, its wings pitched forward like a hand about to wave. A drop of water, kicked loose from an air conditioner, had become a bead you could pluck. Far below, a dog hovering in mid-leap looked like a statue to joy. Arlo squeezed my hand and pointed. He doesn't talk in the Stillness-no one does-but we've learned each other's hands as well as faces. His finger aimed toward the sidewalk across from the donut shop. There, snaking along the slab of concrete and curling under the frozen bus, was a chalk arrow. It was glowing. Not a flashlight-and-batteries glow. More like the moon slipped into the chalk. Pale blue. New. Not there before. I knew, because I'd watched the bus stop and the bus had been just a bus. The arrow pointed east, toward the subway. Arlo's eyebrows did the jump again. My heart did a thud that I could feel in my mouth. We'd stepped into the Stillness plenty of times, but never once had the Stillness stepped back. We moved. In the pause, every footstep felt like it could wake a sleeping floor, but the only sounds were inside my chest. We took the fire escape down. Two landings-our rule is three is too many when you're holding your breath. The metal rail was cool and slick. At the bottom, we slipped between a couple frozen teenagers with a skateboard and a woman lifting a stroller over the curb. The woman's hair hovered like a question. The chalk arrow kept going, a calm blue line sliding beneath our shoes. It ducked under the stopped bus, and we went around instead. A little dog paused mid-bark on the other side, his paws off the ground and his collar bell suspended in the tiniest ring. The subway stairs yawned below, a mouth with tiles for teeth. The arrow flowed down, step, step, step, like it had been drawn by a hand that didn't believe in gravity. We followed. The station was a forest of pillars and light, all captured in place. A man in a suit leaned into a turnstile, his tie stuck at a jaunty angle. A girl with green headphones had a bubble at her lip that would never pop unless we let go. A coffee during a sprint had lifted itself out of a cup and stretched into a caramel thread that made my throat ache to swallow. That's when I saw it. Tiny prints appeared in the dust ahead of us, one after another, as if an invisible foot were touching the ground and then lifting. Each new print puffed a bit of powder into the air, and the powder hung there in the pause, tiny constellations. I nudged Arlo with my shoulder so he would see, and he did, and his eyes went wide. We weren't alone. The blue arrow curled past the last tile pillar to a narrow door painted the exact tired shade of subway green that no one noticed. MAINTENANCE 3B was stenciled on it in peeling white letters. On the knob, someone had wrapped a strip of black cloth, and that cloth was swaying, slowly, like there was a breeze in the world that no longer moved. I could feel my lungs stretching, asking if we were almost done. I nodded at Arlo, tapping the centre of my own chest the way we do when it's time to be quick. He nodded back. We've planned for this-short moves, sharp moves, no races. And still, the prints kept appearing, quiet as ink. We pressed the handle. The door creaked not at all, because nothing creaks in the Stillness, but the feel of it rattled along my arm. Inside was a hallway lined with lockers and paper notices so old they'd turned the colour of tea. A string of bare bulbs ran along the ceiling, each frozen mid-yellow blink. And clocks. Somebody had hung clocks on the wall at different heights, big ones, small ones, plastic, brass, wood with carved leaves. Their minute hands pointed all over the map. None of them ticked. I felt the inside of me tighten-the good kind of scared, like when you climb just high enough you can see everything at once. The dust prints went ahead. We followed, our socks whispering over the floor. The glowing chalk curled along the baseboards, lighting up the way in a soft sugared line. Arlo squeezed my hand again-a question. I answered by squeezing back twice-we can do this. At the end of the narrow hall, the way split-left into a room stacked with rolled diagrams and a fan blade the size of a car door, right into a darker space that smelled like old rain and electricity. The chalk arrow bent right. My lungs pressed a little harder. Arlo and I traded a look. The green headphone girl's bubble was somewhere behind us, still a perfect circle. Somewhere above, the world was resting its weight on the second we had stolen. We stepped into the dark room. It wasn't fully dark, not with the pale blue chalk and a little wedge of neon bleeding through a crack in the ceiling. The air felt thicker. A faint hum tickled my teeth. Someone was at the far end of the room, just a shape at first. Not tall. Not short. Hood up. Elbows pointed out a bit, like a bird with folded wings. The dust at their feet made a pattern I didn't know, and then I did, because it matched the one we were making with our own steps-a pattern that only happens when the world is not moving and you are. The figure turned. Arlo's grip tightened so hard my fingers tingled. The shape lifted a hand. The blue chalk light brushed their knuckles, and even in that soft glow I could see the edge of a smile. Somewhere over our heads, one of those silent clocks slid one tick forward all at once. A voice, very close and very calm, curved through the Stillness like a thread being pulled: "Took you long enough."