The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, which was the same as every other morning in the sense that Alex woke up cold and the sky was the color of old concrete and there was nothing immediately ahead of him that resembled a reason to move faster than necessary. He was seventeen years old and had learned, over the past several weeks, to regulate his energy with the precision of someone who understood that the gap between enough and not enough was narrower than most people ever had reason to discover.
He and his younger sister Marta had been sleeping behind the Merkur supermarket on the eastern edge of Brno for twenty-six days. He knew the exact number because he had been counting from the first night, not from pessimism but from the habit of a person who tracks what he can measure when everything else is outside his control. The spot they had found was a narrow channel between the rear wall of the building and the row of industrial waste containers, which provided shelter from the wind on three sides and, on the coldest nights, a faint residual warmth from the compressor unit mounted to the building’s exterior. It was not a good place to sleep. It was, however, a better place than several others they had tried.
