VARIABLE
ariella
Turns out, being a student at Oxford High School doesn’t mean I’d get stolen glances of my Prince Charming whenever fate feels indulgent.
Oxford High is one of those old boarding schools that prides itself on preparing girls for places like Oxford University. By the time you reach sixth form, they loosen the leash. Independent study periods. City library access. Enough freedom to convince everyone we’re responsible adults.
Most of my classmates spend those afternoons buried in cafés or revising for entrance exams.
I spend mine stalking a man who doesn’t know I exist.
If anything, I only ever see him from afar—across streets I’m not meant to cross, slipping in and out of university buildings that still don’t belong to me.
It only worsens my obsession.
Most afternoons, once classes end and the other boarders disappear into the city, I linger longer than I should near Banbury Road, drifting south where the navy blazers of Oxford High gradually vanish into crowds of university students.
Stone replaces hedges. The city grows older.
Somewhere between Parks Road and Broad Street, Oxford University begins to breathe differently.
And that’s where he is.
Every morning, without fail, he arrives just before ten—coat unbuttoned, stride precise, disappearing into the same stretch of university buildings like clockwork.
Every evening, exactly at six, he leaves.
Not a second early. Not a second late.
Thankfully, my classes begin at nine and finish at three-thirty, leaving me just enough time to watch the second half of his day.
Everyone thinks I wander these streets because I dream of studying here.
They’re right. They just don't know my version of Oxford has blue eyes, a pair of glasses, and the surname Hertley.
He never changes the car he loves to drive alone—an Aston Martin DBS Superleggera. A man like him doesn’t share space unless he intends to dominate it.
Watching him has become a ritual—a ritual for which I paid a questionable amount from my trust fund to the bodyguards Dad assigned me to get rid of them from my tail.
I know nobody is going to touch me for my last name. This protection has always felt like both a blessing and a curse wrapped into one.
A few of my classmates have noticed. I shrug it off easily, telling them it’s just my fixation on the university. My ambition. My hunger to get in.
Which isn’t entirely a lie.
I’d take any course. Any department. Any excuse that lets me sit in a lecture hall and belong to him in the most technical way possible—his student. Even if it’s only on a register.
It’s been a year since I came to England.
Life is boring, if you ask me. Not that Sydney ever offered anything better. I don’t miss the city. Compared to there, I love it more in here. I needed the cold stone. The order. A place royally old enough to swallow mistakes without echoing them back.
The only thing I miss is my elder brother, Asher, and our cousin Adrian.
I think they miss me too. It shows in the way they visit me whenever CynoTech loosens its grip long enough to let them breathe. Well, being the CEO, Adrian hardly gets days off to relax.
Asher has changed a lot ever since taking on the COO role, working alongside Adrian. I blame the damn family legacy, the CynoTech Group, for carving him into something perpetually grumpy and impossible to relax.
I miss the old sarcastic Asher.
Sometimes he brings Adrian with him. He’s our only close cousin, and obviously, the best days are when he tags along with Asher.
Adrian is the only one who can get away by poking him relentlessly, needling his composure until something familiar cracks through. It’s only when the three of us are together—crowded in shared space and old rhythms—that Asher slips back into his element.
alistair
An anomaly left unexamined is a security failure in waiting.
For exactly ninety-two days, a localized variance has drifted along the perimeter of my routines. A shadow on a black sports bike. A recurring blip on the private surveillance loops I’ve spliced into the Oxford campus grid.
The body lingers in the blind spots of the stone archways, tracking the exact timing of my departures from the engineering faculty.
At first, my calculations suspected Council surveillance.
The Triarch Dominion’s hidden biometric research lines require constant vigilance against internal oversight.
So I monitored the shadow with cold, algorithmic precision, waiting for a misstep that would necessitate a clean, permanent extraction.
But the data didn’t align with a professional operative.
An intelligence asset doesn’t wear an oversized fleece hoodie that swallows their frame.
A state spy doesn’t hold their breath so sharply when I pass that the acoustic sensors hidden in the courtyard pillars catch the sudden spike in their respiratory frequency.
A trained tracker doesn’t leave a digital footprint under the brazenly arrogant alias @phasevariance on public engineering forums, systematically analyzing my uploaded CoreCircuits schematic files.
I sit at the mahogany desk in my darkened office in the mansion, the amber glow of three monitors reflects off the lenses of my glasses.
On the central screen, a real-time data string from the local cellular node is attempting to unmask the device tracking me.
SIGNAL ENCRYPTION LEVEL: HIGH.
PARENT CARRIER: SECURE GLOBAL GATEWAY (DATA ROUTED THROUGH SYDNEY/ENGLAND CACHE).
USER IDENTITY: DECRYPT IN PROGRESS... STATUS: CLASSIFIED/RESTRICTED.
I lean back, tapping a single fingernail against the polished wood of my desk. Whoever this tracker is, they’re backed by an incredibly advanced, corporate-grade security matrix—the kind of multi-layered sovereign shield that typically belonged to high-tier tech dynasties or defense contractors.
The individual’s agency is an illusion. I haven’t left this stalker uncontained because I’m careless.
I’ve left them uncontained because a threat hiding behind such high-level encryption is an exceptional data point.
I’m allowing the loop to continue to harvest behavioral profiling, tracking their exact steps until their identity finally decodes itself in my system.
A sudden flash of crimson on my auxiliary monitor breaks my thoughts.
ALERT: ZONE 4 COMPROMISE. UNIVERSITY SECURITY DISPATCHED.
On the live surveillance feed of the Radcliff Quadrangle, the lone figure in black leather is pressed tightly against the shadow of a stone pillar. The tracker has miscalculated the patrol sweep.
An Oxford security guard is cutting across the lawn, his flashlight beam slicing through the mist, heading directly toward the alcove where the figure hid.
My jaw tightens. If the university security processed this individual, a public administrative record would be generated. Local police would step in, and the highly encrypted entity I’m busy analyzing would vanish into the system before I could extract their purpose or their origin.
Inefficient. My fingers strike the keyboard, instantly overriding the campus radio frequencies.
I route a synthetic, high-priority emergency alert to the guard’s earpiece—a simulated server-room overheat warning in the adjacent library basement.
On screen, the guard stops dead in his tracks, presses his hand to his ear, and pivotally turns away from the figure’s hiding spot, sprinting toward the fictional hazard.
I watch through the camera as the cloaked silhouette lets out a visibly shuddering breath, completely unaware that the hand of the demon they’re hunting just reached out to protect them from discovery.
Don’t take it as the goodness of my heart.
I assumed it might be a prototype Synthètes the Triarch Dominion was planning to test in the real world.
I wasn’t expecting them to run the trail on me. Interesting.
We’ll see how far they can go before I remind them who leads the project Synthètes.