Chapter Five Jace
I don't sleep.
The chair outside Elliot's door is the same one from the night before, legs scratched from dragging it across the tile.
I sit with my back straight, hands on my knees, feet flat.
The pose is designed to minimize muscle fatigue during extended surveillance.
I learned it at age nine, in the third month of Foundry conditioning, when they made us watch each other for seventy-two hours straight to identify who would break first.
The scream.
I replay it in my memory. Not the sound itself, but my response to it.
I was in the kitchen, running a security diagnostic on my laptop, when his voice cracked the silence.
My body moved before my brain registered the threat.
Three seconds from chair to doorway. Knife in hand. Ready to kill whatever was hurting him.
There was nothing to kill. Just Elliot, thrashing in sweat-soaked sheets, hands clawing at his own throat.
I put the knife away.
I filed the reaction under anomaly and added it to the growing list of things I don't understand about myself when it comes to this man.
At 0415, my phone vibrates. Silent mode, but the buzz irritates my skin.
Jagger. Encrypted channel.
I pull it out, angle the screen away from the door. The message is short.
Forty-one hours. Director meeting scheduled for 0900. Prepare your case.
I don't have a case. I have an asset I cannot justify acquiring and a deviation I cannot explain. The Tribunal will want documentation. Purpose. A clear operational benefit that outweighs the breach in protocol.
I have none of those things.
What I have is Elliot Rowe, who flinches before contact instead of after. Who curls into corners like he's trying to disappear into the wall. Who looked at me last night with eyes that expected pain and found something else instead.
I don't know what he found. I don't know what I'm offering.
I type a response to Jagger: Acknowledged.
Nothing else. There's nothing else to say.
I pocket the phone and run a security sweep from memory. Building access logs, elevator usage, visitor manifests. I hacked the building's system three years ago; the data feeds directly to my laptop. I pull up the interface and scroll through the night's activity.
Two anomalies.
First: a surveillance node on floor six that wasn't there yesterday. Ministry signature, but not one I recognize. Someone planted it between 2200 and 0100, while I was focused on Elliot.
Second: an inspection manifest flagging my apartment for "welfare compliance check" within 48 hours. Standard form, standard language, but the timestamp is wrong. It was logged before Jagger's intervention at the Tribunal, which means someone anticipated my brother coming to my aid.
I stare at the screen. The data is clean, verifiable, damning.
The Ministry of Acquisition is watching. They knew I would take him before I knew it myself.
I disable the surveillance node remotely. Burn the access log. Calculate that this buys me approximately nineteen hours before they notice the gap and install a replacement.
Nineteen hours. Forty-one until the Director meeting. About 24 until the welfare check.
The math doesn't work in my favor.
At 0503, Elliot screams again.
I'm through the door before the sound finishes, moving on muscle memory. The room is dark, the only light a thin strip from the hallway behind me.
He’s sitting up in bed, hands wrapped around his own throat, fingers digging into the skin where the bruises are still fading. His eyes are open but not seeing. He's somewhere else. Somewhen else.
I've seen this before. In assets who survived extended interrogation. In operatives who came back from jobs that went wrong. The body is here, but the mind is trapped in a loop, replaying whatever broke it.
The protocol for handling compromised assets is sedation, restraint, and transport to Medical for evaluation. If the damage is too severe, they're marked for disposal.
Right now, I’m being considered for reconditioning. It all depends on value.
I don't reach for the sedative kit.
Instead, I crouch at the foot of the bed. Close enough to be seen, far enough that I'm not a threat. I keep my hands visible, palms up, fingers spread.
"Elliot."
His name. Spoken flat, no inflection. The same tone I use when giving operational commands.
He doesn't respond. His nails are leaving marks on his throat, red crescents that will bruise by morning.
"Elliot. Count the corners."
His fingers pause. A micro-hesitation. Data point: verbal cues can penetrate the dissociative state.
"Four corners," I continue. "Count them."
His eyes move. Left wall, right wall, the two points where ceiling meets floor behind me. He's not tracking consciously, but his brain is processing.
"Four," he whispers. His voice is raw, scraped out.
"Count the windows."
His gaze shifts to the glass. Sealed, covered with blackout curtains, but still visible as a rectangle of faint gray.
"One."
"Count my hands."
He looks at me. For the first time since the scream, he actually sees me. His pupils contract, then dilate. Fear response, recognition, confusion. All of it cycling through in the span of two seconds.
"Two," he says.
"Good."
I stay where I am. I don't move closer. I don't touch him. I wait.
His hands drop from his throat. The marks are vivid against his pale skin, red lines that will purple by afternoon. He stares at his fingernails like they belong to someone else.
"I was back there." His voice is small. "In the basement."
I know which basement. Senator Moore's. The file Jagger pulled for me was thorough: eighteen months of documented abuse, medical logs that read like a horror novel, psychological assessments that concluded asset functionality compromised beyond standard recovery parameters.
They were going to dispose of him. The auction was a formality, a way to recoup some value before the inevitable.
I took him instead.
I still don't know why.
"You're not there," I say. "You're in my apartment. Third floor, east wing, building 7-Kappa. The door is locked. The windows are sealed. There is no one here except you and me."
He processes this. I watch his breathing slow, his shoulders drop, his jaw unclench. The panic is receding, replaced by exhaustion and something else. Something I can't identify.
"Why?" he asks.
The question is too broad. Why is he here. Why did I take him. Why am I crouched at the foot of his bed at five in the morning, talking him through a flashback instead of sedating him and calling Medical.
I don't have answers. Not ones that make sense.
So I give him the only truth I can access: "It just is. I don’t want you to be afraid of me."
The words come out wrong. Too soft. Too personal. I learned them from a training video on asset management, a section on building rapport with reluctant informants. They were never meant to be sincere.
But Elliot's expression shifts. The fear doesn't disappear, but something cracks beneath it. A fissure in the wall he's built around himself.
He doesn't trust me. He shouldn't. But he looks at me like he's considering the possibility that I might not hurt him.
I file that under progress.
Finally he calms and I leave the room but not the hallway. I grab the chair, position it outside his door, and sit.
The building settles around me. Pipes groan. The heating unit cycles on and off. Somewhere on floor two, a door slams and footsteps echo in the stairwell. I track each sound, assign it a threat level, dismiss it.
At 0600, I make coffee. Two cups. I set one outside his door, knock once, and go back to the kitchen.
He opens the door at 0622. He crouches, grabs the cup, retreat. The door closes. The lock clicks.
Small data point: he's accepting things I offer. Food. Water. Now coffee. Each acceptance is a thread of connection, a micro-transaction of trust. I don't know what I'm building, but I know it's something.
At 0715, my phone buzzes again. Not Jagger this time. An automated alert from the building's security system.
The surveillance node on floor six has been replaced. New signature, different Ministry. Not Acquisition this time.
Erasure.
I pull up the specs. The node is military-grade, the kind they use for high-value target tracking. It's not just watching the building. It's watching me.
I run a trace on the authorization. The signature is buried under three layers of encryption, but I crack it in under four minutes.
Alfred Webb. Director of Erasure. The man who signed off on my training when I was twelve years old.
Webb doesn't waste resources on routine surveillance. If he's watching me, it's because someone flagged me as a potential problem. Failed training. A threat to operational security.
I think about the collar in my dream last night. The one they put on assets who malfunction. The one that delivers a shock strong enough to stop a heart if the handler decides you're not worth the trouble anymore.
I think about Elliot, asleep in the next room, throat still bruised from the last collar he wore.
I delete the trace log and start planning.
At 0803, Elliot emerges.
He stands in the doorway of the bedroom, wearing the same oversized shirt from yesterday, hair damp from the shower he took while I was working. He's holding the empty coffee cup in both hands, like he doesn't know what to do with it now that it's served its purpose.
I'm at the table, laptop open, running scenarios. I don't look up immediately. I let him stand there, let him adjust to the space, let him decide whether to approach or retreat.
He approaches.
Three steps. Four. He stops at the edge of the kitchen, still holding the cup.
"I can wash it," he says.
"Sink is right there."
He turns, runs water, scrubs the cup with more attention than it requires. I watch him in my peripheral vision: the way he keeps his shoulders hunched, the way he flinches when the water pressure changes, the way he dries the cup three times before setting it on the counter.