Something was wrong.

Katters couldn’t put her finger on it, but something had gone terribly wrong. The house was too quiet, too still. There was no pitter-patter of animal feet, no distant crashes or screams as Zebra broke something, or someone.

She slunk through the rooms like she was trespassing, from living room to dining nook to kitchen.

The house smelled weird. A sharp smell: bright, and fresh, and very faintly sticky — and absolutely everywhere. Oranges? Did someone buy oranges? Was Zebra on another one of his anti-scurvy jags?

The smell clung to her tongue and throat, but she couldn’t find any oranges. Not in any of the usual places one would expect to find an orange, anyway. And her hand didn’t stick to the refrigerator handle when she pulled it open. Her shoes didn’t slip through puddles of old grease. She wasn’t sniffing or sneezing every few minutes.

She began to fear the worst.

In the bedroom, she found made beds. Changed lightbulbs. An organised bookcase. She decided against checking the bathroom — she had seen enough to confirm her suspicions.

The house was clean.

And that was cause for concern. For alarm. But it was a symptom. The house didn’t clean itself — someone cleaned it, and solving the who and the why would also solve the what. And if she wanted to do that, she would have to go down into the basement.

That was where all the very wrong things happened.

She felt better as soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs. The basement was clean, too, but it was supposed to be clean. It was supposed to be quiet and orderly. It was supposed to smell like bleach and antibacterial soap.

The door to the lab was not supposed to be ajar, but that did happen sometimes. It was not inherently upsetting like everything else was.

“Zebra?” she called toward it. She made her way through the silence that followed, edging around the autopsy tables between her and the door.

“Are you in there?” She pulled the door open and poked her head inside. The lab — more of a library or a study than anything else — was strewn with scattered notes and books. Zebra’s, but Zebra himself was not in there.

The chemistry set was doing something, in its corner. Bubbling and dripping away. Katters was bad at chemistry — for all she knew, it could have been doing that for hours. Or, it could mean she’d just missed the chemist.

She went inside and something crunched underfoot. Glass. A broken flask. She crept deeper into the room, still unable to shake the feeling she didn’t belong there, that this was not a perfectly ordinary room in her own home. Her shoes scuffed against the papers on the floor, and she picked up a handful to page through.

More chemistry, and it may as well have been Greek for all the good it did her. Hell, some of it could actually have been Greek. It didn’t help that it was in Zebra’s chicken-scratch.

The top page was dated that day, and while the writing that followed was still indecipherable, it was slightly more legible than the other pages. If she stared at it for an hour, she might have been able to glean some sort of meaning from it all.

Somewhere above her, a door shut, and a dog barked. She dropped the notes and stared up at the ceiling.

Zebra.

She hoped.

She found him inside the house, unhooking Spike’s lead from his collar. The dog would normally have come to Zebra’s waist, but his head and tail were held low. Nervous about something.

Zebra looked up when Katters came out of the basement. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said. “Where were you?”

“Just walking Spike.”

“What for?”

He frowned, coiling the leash up and putting it away. “Because he needed walking?”

Free, Spike crept past her to hide under the dining table.

“You never walk him,” she said. “Not of your own volition, anyway. What are you up to?”

“I just felt like taking the dog for a walk.” He shrugged. “It’s a nice day.”

She crossed her arms. Spike was staring up at her, his eyebrows quirked in a way that made him look sadder than any dog had any right to be. She looked back to Zebra, who was taking off his jacket.

He reminded her of the house. Wrong, somehow, different in a way that was hard to put her finger on. It must have been his hair, which he’d pulled into a pony-tail. It was unusual to see him without wisps of witch-hair framing his head like a halo of spider-webs. But there was something — everything else about him was the same as it always was, from his unsettlingly light-blue eyes to the manicured nails on his soft, spider-like hands. From his patent-leather shoes all the way back up to the scar that had appeared across his cheek a few weeks ago.

Maybe she still wasn’t used to seeing that.

He’d noticed she was staring. She sniffed, self-conscious, ran a finger under her nose.

“Did you clean?” she asked him, looking around the room.

“Huh? Yeah, I guess I cleaned a little.”

“That’s weird, Zebra.”

“It’s not that weird.”

“We’ve been living here for, like, seven years,” she said, hunching her shoulders. “And neither of us have ever cleaned anything without having to spill blood, first. It’s weird, Zebra.”

“Well, maybe I was tired of it.” He snarled at her and his voice took on a gravelly edge. “Maybe I was tired of the dust, and the mildew, and the grease.”

“Okay.”

“Is that weird? That after seven years of living in a sty, I might get tired of it? Excuse me, then, for trying to make things a little better, for once.”

“Yeah, see, that is weird.”

“Whatever.” He pulled at his hairtie and his hair fell past his shoulders in a curly mass. He suddenly looked like himself, again.

Katters uncrossed her arms and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “Sorry,” she said. “I just, it threw me off. You know how I get about my environment.”

“It’s our ‘environment’,” he said, hooking finger-quotes around the final word.

“True. That’s fair. Yeah.”

He walked into the dining room, his jacket slung over his arm. “Is that all?” he asked. “Are you done interrogating me?”

“I wasn’t interrogating you.”

“Then you must be done.” He stepped around her to get to the basement door. “I have things to do,” he said, opening it. “I’ll be in the lab if I’m needed.”

She frowned and watched him go. She turned to Spike.

“Very weird,” she said.

Spike sighed.

The house did not stay clean for long. It was mere days before everything — floors, counters, walls — was as sticky and as gritty as it had been before Zebra’s episode.

And his strange behaviour did not make a recurrence during that time.

It took a week for Katters to convince herself she’d been imagining things. That he was right, and it wasn’t that weird for him to catch a wild hair and do a little uncharacteristic cleaning. It was, she decided, a clear case of baseless paranoia, and she put the event out of her mind.

Until it happened again.

It was Sunday morning, and a very early morning at that, when she woke. Sunday was their day off, and Katters was never happy to see any side of it, but especially not the side before noon. Seeing Sunday meant she was not sleeping, and that was a problem.

So she started in a bad mood, with nowhere to go but down.

The smell of citrus wafted into the bedroom, carrying with it a cheerful hum from the kitchen. Still half-asleep, she buried herself in her blanket, until the significance of everything crashed together in her head and brought to her a terrible realisation.

Zebra wasn’t in his bed.

Zebra was in the kitchen.

At six o’clock in the morning. On a Sunday.

Humming.

He sounded happy and that was both deeply unfair given how unhappy she was at that moment, and also the biggest red flag she had learned in her years of living with him. He was only happy when he was making other people miserable, and it was not uncommon that the other people happened to be her.

She was torn, between anger and fear, and equally torn between a desire to investigate and a desire to stay in bed and pretend she hadn’t noticed anything was amiss.

The smell of frying eggs chased the smell of oranges into the room and she decided to get up and see what was going on.

She didn’t recognise him, at first, though if you had asked her what, exactly, was different about him she would have struggled to tell you. He’d tied his hair back, again, but it was still the long, thick poof it always was. He stood a little straighter, had a bit more of a bounce to him than was normal, but he was still the five-and-a-half-foot-tall, scrawny kid of a twenty-something he’d always been.

He was unmistakable — unique, original, inimitable, except for the small detail that only a moment ago, she had, in fact, mistaken him for someone else. A stranger.

It must have been his enthusiasm. He hummed, something peppy that she didn’t recognise, swaying to the tune while he cooked breakfast.

His enthusiasm — and the fact that he was cooking breakfast at all. At, again (and not to belabour the point) six o’clock in the morning, on a Sunday.

She stood there for a while, watching him from behind and waiting for any shoe to drop. It didn’t even have to be a shoe — anything could drop and she’d be happy with that. But something needed to happen, something that would prove she was still in the correct reality and hadn’t been kidnapped by Norman Rockwell in her sleep.

He turned, finally, and somehow seeing his face made him feel even more like a stranger than ever. But he recognised her, and smiled, which was perhaps the worst thing he could have done.

“Hey!” he said, scooping eggs from the pan to a pair of plates. “Good morning!”

“Good morning,” she ventured. She kind of wanted one of the plates, but she didn’t feel safe getting any closer to Zebra than she already was. If it was Zebra. It was Zebra. Who else could it be?

It turned out that her wariness was not a problem, because Zebra — Zebra? — carried the plate over to her and put it into her hands like that was a normal thing to do. Which it was. She was being paranoid again.

“I thought I’d make breakfast,” he said. “Since I was up already.”

“And cleaned,” she said, remembering the citrus smell.

He shrugged, passing her to the dining table with his own plate. “Early bird gets to do all the chores, I suppose.” His voice had an airy, lilting quality to it. Breezy. Carefree.

She hovered by the kitchen before deciding she was being silly and sitting down at the table. It wasn’t that weird. It wasn’t that weird that he got up early for the first time in his life and decided to spend his extra time cleaning the kitchen and making breakfast. It wasn’t that weird that he’d also made breakfast for her, without needing any threatening or cajoling at all.

Well, when she put it that way, it did sound pretty weird.

She ate, because the eggs smelled really good and she was very hungry, and she did always hate to let food go to waste. And, also, because if it turned out to be poisoned, that would actually come as something of a relief.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Hmm?” He looked up from his plate. He was already half done, having none of her misgivings for it. “Eating?”

She didn’t say anything and he sighed.

“You’re going to make a big deal out of this, again,” he said.

“Out of what? Out of what, exactly?”

“Out of nothing.”

“This is not nothing,” she said, stabbing at her food. “What, did you join a cult? Are you on drugs? Are you — do you — if you’re depressed, Zebra, you can tell me.”

“What?”

“Or even, if you — look, if you’ve got some kind of plan—”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” he snapped.

“Okay.”

“I don’t even know where to start with all of that.”

“It’s just.” She took a breath. “These are warning signs. Everything is telling me these are warning signs, and either you’re — you — you know, or you’ve got, I don’t know, cancer or something.”

“Jesus.”

“Brain cancer,” she continued. “Maybe syphilis.”

“I do not have syphilis.”

“But you might have brain cancer?”

“I guess? I haven’t had a reason to check.”

She slammed her fork down. “This!” she said. “This is a reason to check!”

“For crying out loud — it’s drugs. Okay? I’m on drugs.”

“What?”

“I’m on drugs.”

“Oh.” She picked her fork back up. “Okay,” she said. “That makes a lot of sense, actually. So, what, uh — amphetamines?”

He took his empty plate back to the kitchen. “What about them?”

“Is that what you’re on?” She twisted in her seat, following him. “Speed?”

“Kind of. Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

"They're experimental."

She frowned, chewing thoughtfully. "You're experimenting on yourself? You should know better than that."

"Well, I'd experiment on you, but." He paused. "Actually, that could be interesting. Not useful, but interesting."

He left his plate in the sink, not even bothering to run water over it. The pan, he left on the stove, a problem for someone in the distant future to deal with. The distant future — or a few weeks, when he decided to get high, again.

There were upsides to his experiment. But Katters still didn’t like it.

“What are you testing?”

“What?”

“What hypothesis are you testing with your experimental drugs?”

His head was hidden behind the hanging cabinets between the kitchen and the dining room. His hesitation said something, but without seeing his face, Katters had no idea what it was.

But she did know that whatever came out of his mouth next would be a lie.

“Concentration aid. Marketing to college students.”

She snorted. He stepped out from behind the cabinets, out of the kitchen, but he still wouldn’t look at her. “I’ll be in the lab. I need to document this.”

“Or it’s just screwing around,” Katters said, but she was already talking to herself.

Whatever Zebra was doing, he wouldn’t tell her about it, and that meant it was neither innocent nor safe. No matter how sleek and, and clean it all seemed on the surface, there was a layer of grime underneath it that would definitely come back to bite both of them before too long. Grime that smelled like oranges and sounded like bubblegum pop.

Katters needed to find out what he was actually doing. Once again, the answer would be in the basement.