Ethan Joseph Drake

The Quiet One

Ethan Joseph Drake was born at 14:20 on 3 August 2001 at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, the second child of Boyd Joseph Drake and Grace Elise Drake (née Lawson). His father was a finish carpenter from Denver who had come to Seattle for the work. His mother, from Tacoma, was an events coordinator with a career that kept her phone ringing through dinner. His sister, Jenna Elise Drake, was three when he was born and regarded him, for several years, as an inconvenience that had been brought home without her consent.

The family lived in a narrow two-storey house in Ballard, with a detached garage that Boyd had turned into a workshop. Jenna lived in that garage. Ethan went into it mostly to tell her that dinner was ready. He was a quiet, watchful child who learned to read early, talked late, and was happiest at the kitchen table taking apart something that had stopped working, with every screw laid out in a row in the order it had come out.

His first computer was the family's own, an ageing beige desktop in the corner of the living room that he was forbidden to open and opened anyway at nine. He put it back together correctly. His mother caught him at it and, instead of punishing him, asked him to explain what each part did. It became a habit between them. Grace understood almost nothing of what he told her and listened to all of it.

Two Languages

Boyd loved his son and did not always understand him. He had grown up in a basement workshop under a hard father and had made a quiet vow to be a different kind of parent, and with Jenna, who spoke his language of timber and joinery, it came easily. With Ethan it took effort. The boy had no interest in wood and little in sport, and Boyd spent a good deal of his son's adolescence offering things they might do together and watching Ethan politely decline them.

Ethan attended Ballard High School from 2015 to 2019. He was a solid student in mathematics and physics and an indifferent one in everything else, and he spent most of his free hours at a desk in his bedroom, building and repairing computers for classmates and teaching himself to program from library books and online tutorials. He had a small circle of friends, most of them as quiet as he was, and a part-time job from the age of sixteen at a computer repair shop on Market Street, where the owner paid him in cash and let him keep whatever parts customers did not want back.

He was close to his mother in a way that neither of them talked about. Grace was the parent who came home late, and Ethan was often the one still awake when she did. They would sit in the kitchen while she ate whatever was left and told him about the evening's disasters: the bride who had locked herself in a bathroom, the caterer who had brought the wrong menu. He did not much care about weddings. He cared about the hour with her, and she knew it.

The Autumn of the Invitation

Boyd left for his Killerton contract in February 2019, when Ethan was seventeen and in his final semester of high school. The family heard from him through short, relayed messages that said little. Ethan noticed, as the others did not, that the messages always arrived at the same time of day and never answered a question asked in the previous one, and he kept a list of these oddities in a notebook that he showed no one.

He graduated in June 2019 and in September enrolled in a two-year computing programme at North Seattle College, still living at home. He was a few weeks into it when his father's long message arrived, asking the family to join him in a place that was not on Earth. Grace did not want to go. Jenna wanted to go more than anyone. Ethan, who was eighteen and had just started the first thing in his life that was entirely his own, was frightened, and said very little through an autumn of arguments.

When his mother agreed at the beginning of December, he understood that he would be going too. He did not argue. He had never been the one in the family who argued.

On the morning of Sunday 8 December 2019 he was asleep upstairs when Grace collapsed in the kitchen. He was woken by his sister shouting. By the time he reached the stairs, Jenna was on the floor beside their mother with the phone to her ear, and the paramedics were in the house within ten minutes. Grace was pronounced dead at the Swedish Medical Center later that morning. The cause was a ruptured brain aneurysm. She was forty-nine.

Two Months

His father could not come back. No one but a Guardian could cross from Clivilius to Earth, and Boyd's crossing had been one way. Jenna and Ethan arranged the funeral themselves with help from their aunt, Diane, and their grandmother, Margaret, who came up from Tacoma. Several hundred people attended. Jenna gave the eulogy. Ethan had been asked to say a few words and had written them, and on the morning of the funeral found that he could not stand up to read them. He kept the page folded in his wallet for years afterwards.

The weeks that followed were spent emptying the house. Jenna did most of it, with a grim efficiency that Ethan watched and could not match. He withdrew from his course without telling anyone, sold his computers, and spent long hours in his bedroom doing nothing in particular. He did not consider staying in Seattle. Without his mother there was nothing there he wanted, and Jenna was going, and he did not know how to be in the world without one of them.

He did one thing that no one asked him to. The night before they left, while his sister slept, he took the oak coffee table she had built at fifteen, which had stood in their mother's front room for six years, and wrapped it in blankets and packed it with their luggage. He did not tell her. She found it on the other side.

Ethan and Jenna crossed into Clivilius on 5 February 2020. He was eighteen. Their father was waiting. Jenna hugged Boyd and was angry with him in the same breath. Ethan shook his father's hand, which he had never done before, and then did not know what to do next, and neither did Boyd.

Canvas

Bixbus in early 2020 was a settlement of tents, prefabricated blocks, and dusty half-built streets beside a wide river, under a sky with no stars. Boyd had lived in the Tent Community since his own arrival, and Ethan and Jenna moved into his tent with him. Within a fortnight Jenna had a workshop in a shipping container and somewhere to be from dawn until dark. Ethan had nothing.

There was no course to resume, almost no computing to speak of, and no job that anyone thought suitable for a quiet eighteen-year-old with no trade. He took casual labouring work for a few weeks, carrying materials on building sites, and gave it up when his hands blistered and his back went. For most of 2020 he did very little. He slept late, walked along the river, ate when reminded, and sat on his cot in the evenings with his back to the others while his father came in from work and his sister came in later still.

His father did not know what to say to him and mostly said nothing. Jenna, who was grieving in her own way and blaming herself for their mother's death, did not have much left over. The three of them shared a tent and very little else. Ethan said afterwards that the first year in Bixbus was the loneliest of his life, and that he had spent it within arm's reach of the only two people he had left.

A Frame in the Corner

Early in 2021 Boyd found a bicycle frame in a salvage pile behind The Arlington, brought it home, and left it in the corner of the tent with a box of mismatched parts. He did not say anything about it. Ethan ignored it for a week, then began, one evening, to lay the parts out on the floor in rows.

He rebuilt the bicycle over a month. His father watched without commenting, and when it was finished, found another frame. After that they rebuilt bicycles together most weekends, kneeling on the tent floor with the parts between them, saying very little at first and then, gradually, rather more. It was over a stripped-down frame, late in 2021, that Ethan asked his father what their mother had been like when they first met. Boyd told him about the crooked dance floor that was not crooked, and the level, and Grace laughing. Ethan had never heard the story. He asked for it again several times after that.

The bicycles gave him something to do with his hands, and the doing gave him back some sense of himself. He began repairing other things: radios that had come through the portals, a generator controller at the Tent Community, a water pump at the edge of the river that the settlement's engineers had written off. He was good at it in the way he had always been good at it, patiently, one screw at a time. People began to bring things to him.

The River Stations

In late 2021 an engineer whose pump Ethan had repaired recommended him to the Bixbus Urban Development Authority, which was beginning to build a network of monitoring stations along the Bixbus River to track its level, flow, and water quality as the city grew. The equipment came through the portal in pieces and rarely worked in the dry and the dust. The Authority needed someone to make it work. Ethan was taken on as a junior technician in November 2021.

The work suited him. He spent his days on the riverbank, rebuilding sensors, sealing housings against dust, and writing small programs to log readings on hardware that had never been designed for a world without the internet. He learned the river better than almost anyone in the city. By 2023 he was responsible for the whole network of stations from the Arlington towers to the new water intakes downstream, with two technicians under him and a workshop of his own in a converted storage hut behind the Authority's offices.

He left the Tent Community in 2022, a few months before his father, for a shared flat with two Authority colleagues. It was the first time since Seattle that he had a door of his own to close. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he did not close it very often.

Things Not Said

Ethan and Jenna had grieved for their mother in different rooms of the same life, and it took them years to find each other again. In 2022, on an evening when she had come round to his flat and stayed late, Jenna told him that she believed their mother had died because of the argument Jenna had pushed her into. She had never said it aloud before. Ethan listened, and then told her, without hesitation, that their mother would have been furious to hear it. It was the only thing anyone said to her about it that helped.

He did not tell her, then or afterwards, that he had spent his own nights wondering whether he would have heard something if he had been awake. He told Naomi, years later. He never told his sister.

His relationship with his father became, in its quiet way, the closest of his adult life. They still rebuilt bicycles most weekends, though by 2022 they did it in Boyd's apartment near the river rather than on the floor of a shared tent. They did not talk about Grace often. When they did, it was usually Ethan who started it.

Naomi

Naomi Evers was an environmental scientist from Earth who had come through to Bixbus in 2022 to study the river system for Clivilius National University. Her work depended on the data from Ethan's stations, and her first meeting with him, in March 2023, was a complaint. Three of the stations had been reporting nonsense for a fortnight. Ethan drove her out to them, showed her the dust packed into the housings, and spent the afternoon rebuilding them while she watched and asked questions.

She asked a great many questions, and listened to the answers, and that was enough. They began working together on a joint programme to monitor the river's water quality through the dry season, and were seeing each other by the middle of the year. Naomi was quick, impatient, and sociable, and drew Ethan out of himself in ways he did not entirely enjoy and did not resist.

She came with him to his sister's wedding in October 2023, in the small garden behind Jenna's workshop by the river. Ethan noticed his mother's scarf on the arch and said nothing. Later that evening, after the speeches, he found himself at a table with Elias's younger brother, Matteo Rocha, a quiet Dunwich man two years his junior who had never seen a computer and wanted to know how one worked. They drank a good deal more than either of them was used to, and talked until the lamps went out. It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship, carried on through letters on the Dunwich line and a visit every few months.

Ethan married Naomi on 20 April 2024 in a short ceremony on the riverbank near the first of his monitoring stations, with Boyd, Jenna, Elias, and a handful of friends from the Authority and the university. Jenna built the benches. Boyd gave his son a bicycle he had rebuilt for the occasion, with a seat for a child fitted on the back, and Naomi laughed until she cried.

Leo

Their son, Leo Drake, was born at 03:40 on 26 May 2025 at the Royal Bixbus Hospital. Ethan held him in the corridor while Naomi slept and found that he was shaking. He had not expected fatherhood to frighten him as much as it did, or to bring his mother back to him so sharply. Grace would have been fifty-four. He thought about that a good deal in the first weeks, and about the hour in the kitchen after her late nights, and about how little of her his son would ever know.

Leo was a poor sleeper and a loud baby, and Ethan took the nights more often than not, walking him up and down the flat while Naomi worked on her papers. He found, to his own surprise, that he talked to his son more than he had ever talked to anyone. He told him about the river, the stations, the bicycles, and his grandmother, whom Leo would only know through other people's stories.

Leo and his cousin Alina, a year older, grew up a few streets apart, and Boyd's afternoon walks along the river soon involved two prams rather than one. When Matteo came in on the Dunwich line to meet him that winter, he held Leo at arm's length and pronounced him too small to be any use.

By the River

By 2026 Ethan was twenty-five, the father of a one-year-old, and the senior technician on the Bixbus Urban Development Authority's river network, which by then ran to more than thirty stations and fed the city's planning, its water supply, and a good deal of Naomi's research. He had never finished his course, and in a city where almost everything had to be built from scratch, it had stopped mattering. Engineers twice his age came to his workshop with equipment that would not work.

He remained quiet, wary of large rooms, and slow to speak in meetings. He rebuilt bicycles with his father on Sunday mornings and taught his son the names of the parts before the boy could say them. He wrote to Matteo once a month and saw his sister most weeks, and he still carried in his wallet the folded page he had not been able to read at his mother's funeral. He had thought, once or twice, about reading it to Leo when he was older. He had not yet decided whether he would.