The apartment building smelled of must and lavender, as if somebody had walked through the hallways waving fresh lavender in the air just yesterday but now even that scent was growing old and musty. I and my mosquitoed compatriot, Scape, stopped at the door to the apartment. The buzzing hallway light just above us flickered right on cue, and I pushed the door open to apartment 10. The door creaked (like they seem to do in this kind of situation) and the room beyond the door was dim, the air thick. I walked in and the room was in shambles – the desk, dresser and table were covered in heaps of torn and crumpled paper. Blanketing the walls and the dirty window were maybe a hundred moths, all twitching their wings and waving their antennae about. The old man who lived in the apartment was standing on the cluttered desk, writing a seemingly endless stream of ones and zeros on the wall with his finger, which was dripping with black ink. Across the room was the boy, maybe 14 years old, shoving notebooks and a compass into a shoulder bag. The boy barely looked up at us when we entered.
