Day 45 – Hour 006"While Marco Is Away"
A week passed, and nothing exploded.
No cryptic letters. No shadowed contacts in pressed slacks. No photographs slid under doors with invisible ink. Just silence.
Three days ago, Marco opened the shop to the "public." Not the kind that stumbled in off the street for spare batteries or secondhand bulbs. These were people who knew what Marco really offered — not goods, but precision. Silence. Surveillance. Photography as an extraction tool.
I stayed quiet, observed from the corner, and took mental notes.
But if I expected anyone remarkable, I was disappointed. They looked normal. Too normal. Their requests were vague, and their pickups even vaguer. One woman dropped off a stack of envelopes. One man whispered something about a "third corridor" and left before Marco even replied.
They glanced at me, sure. But no one asked questions. No one seemed surprised that I was there.
Maybe I wasn't invisible anymore.
But I wasn't memorable either.
This morning felt different the moment I turned the corner.
Marco's shutters were already open.
Inside, the space was brighter than usual. A second bulb had been screwed in — one of the overheads that Marco never bothered with. The air smelled like cheap tea and roasted chickpeas.
And Marco was nowhere in sight.
Instead, behind the worktable stood someone new.
Older, like Marco — maybe the same age. But everything about him was the opposite. A bright scarf hung lazily over one shoulder. His sleeves were rolled, one higher than the other, and he wore a wristwatch with a cracked glass face and rainbow thread for a strap.
He was humming.
Not nervously — joyfully. And loudly.
"Nemi, right?" he said before I could introduce myself. "Yeah, I figured. You've got that 'Marco shape' about you. Come in, come in!"
I stepped in cautiously.
He didn't wait for a reply.
"You can call me Vex," he said. "Or not. Names are weird, aren't they? Marco's out today. Something about a wall. Or a meeting. Or possibly just wanted to sit in silence, as he does."
Vex laughed at his own joke and then gestured broadly at the workspace.
"Today, you're stuck with me. Lucky you!"
I blinked.
He clapped his hands once.
"Alright," he said, shifting behind the table and immediately digging into a drawer. "Let's see what you've been doing. You've got a camera, right? A lens? Don't be shy, show me!"
I handed him my work from the past two days — black-and-white stills mostly. Texture tests. Framing drills. Nothing I thought was impressive.
Vex took the prints like they were made of gold.
He laid them flat, four at a time, rearranged the order, shuffled them like cards, and tapped them with his fingers as if trying to coax them to speak.
"Hmm."
"Interesting."
"Oooh."
Then he looked at me and beamed.
"Marco's been training you like a soldier. Which is fine — that's his way. But art, my friend, is a thing of the spine. It should give you shivers. Not blisters."
He pulled out a stool and sat close — too close by Marco's standards — and began flipping the prints slowly.
"This one," he said, pointing to an overexposed frame of a cracked teapot. "Not bad technically. But boring. Let me guess — Marco made you pick it for the angle of the handle, right?"
I nodded.
"See?" Vex grinned. "Marco sees geometry. I see ghosts. Let's try something else today."
He didn't bother assigning drills.
Instead, he handed me a camera with dust in the corners and said, "Follow your gut."
For the next hour, he hovered. Not annoyingly — just present. Like an overexcited uncle at a birthday party.
"Wait—there! See how the shadow from your elbow is interfering with the background? Shift your stance. Yes! Good."
Then, a minute later: "Now you're too posed. Break the line. Shake the composition."
It was chaos.
But it worked.
By noon, I had more shots on the reel than I usually took in a full day.
They weren't all good — but some of them were interesting.
Alive.
"You're fast," Vex said, sipping tea. "I like that. Fast hands mean fast eyes."
"I'm just following what Marco taught me."
He laughed.
"Sure. But you're also listening to your own tempo. That's rare."
When I started reaching for my cash pouch to pay for the film, he raised a hand.
"No, no, no. Keep your money."
"But Marco—"
"Marco's not here."
He grinned wide, teeth slightly yellowed but all present.
"Take as much as you need while Marco is away," he said with exaggerated reverence. "HAH! Consider it your reward for surviving this long."
I didn't argue.
Didn't feel like I needed to.
There was something refreshing about Vex — as if he understood that the world was cruel but decided to laugh through it anyway.
He didn't ask about the Club.
Didn't probe my reasons.
Didn't try to sound wise.
He just taught.
And that was enough.
As I packed up near evening, Vex reached into his coat and handed me a single lens cap with a star etched into it.
"From me," he said. "It doesn't do anything special. But it helps you remember which way is forward."
I didn't know what that meant.
But I took it anyway.
Walking home, I felt the lightness in my steps. A different rhythm than the ones Marco had carved into me. Not better. Just wider.
Marco taught rules.
Vex taught rhythm.
And somewhere between the two, maybe I'd learn to see things even the Club didn't.