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INNOCENCE WANING PART 3 THE OXYGEN DEBT Seventeen-year-old Chezdon Morrison lives seventy-two floors above a Melbourne that is splitting along fault lines years in the making. The city isn't burning. Not officially. But from his tower, he can smell the smoke. Chezdon has survived things that don't come with neat diagnostic labels or triumphant recovery arcs. He has done the appointments and taken the medication. Performed functional daily engagement. And still the static hums beneath everything. The visible scars are the easy part. It's the invisible ones that keep misfiring. Outside his glass walls, Melbourne performs its usual theatre: protests and politics, old money and fresh wounds, tram sparks above South Melbourne rooftops, the NGV glowing like a reliquary, the Yarra moving through it all with ancient indifference. Somewhere in that sprawl is his father, newly entangled in something corrosive. Somewhere else is the boy he loves, cutting furious laps through a dead man's pool. And somewhere luminous and far away, Jayden reads the weather to a nation that has no idea what it's missing. Over four charged days, Chezdon is forced out of the tower and into the city at its most beautiful and most brutal. A brawl on wet bluestone. A gig in a corrugated-iron warehouse. A gallery thick with paint that refuses to lie. A lecture hall of young men desperate for maps. A swimming pool named for someone who walked into the water and did not return. He finds allies who look at his mind instead of his file. Who sees the jagged edges as architecture, not pathology. Who offer him a seat at tables he didn't know existed. He also discovers that some of the safest places are only safe until they aren't. At midnight, he publishes something that cannot be taken back. And in a moment so small it won't trend or photograph well, Chezdon makes the most important decision of his life - a choice that costs him oxygen, certainty, and perhaps the version of himself he's been protecting. The Oxygen Debt is feral, funny, and devastating in equal measure - told in the fevered first-person voice of a boy too perceptive for comfort and too honest for safety. It is about friendship forged under pressure. About the distance between the broadcast version of a life and the one actually being lived. About fathers and fault lines. About the friction that shapes a person when everything else is stripped away. Because friction isn't the enemy. It's the material. And the material, if you're brave enough to use it, is everything.

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