Chapter 3
LYN
It’s the moment of truth.
There’s a nonzero chance getting drunk last night wasn’t genius-level planning. My skull hums, my stomach does a lazy barrel roll, and the lab’s LEDs feel one setting too bright. I’ve got coffee, ibuprofen, and a brazen lie I’m about to tell myself: this will be fine.
The advisory board filters in—two Merati, one Mlok.
The uppity-ass merfolk look down their noses at me while the Mlok looks like…
well, like a lizardman. Hard to know what they’re thinking, given their lizardness.
Rhyss, on the other hand, is perfectly transparent with his emotions, even if he thinks he’s good at hiding them.
His electric yellow tendrils flick impatiently, golden eyes narrowed as he watches me.
“Dr. Walker,” he says. “Begin when ready.”
“Ready,” I lie, and I flip the simulation on.
This…it’s going to go fine. I’ve been over and over this, had gone over and over it even before I came back from the bar last night.
Sleeping in my own damn bed would have been more useful than coming back here, but choices were made, and…
now all I’ve got is a hope and a prayer that this makes sense.
And, you know, a priceless lab full of equally priceless equipment.
And the chance—if I don’t screw this up—to finally move to live clinical trials.
Real patients. Real results.
The first step toward making this more than just theory.
I’ve got my modified translator on a simulator that will allow the committee to see the way it translates pain into not-pain, a clean re-route from “nociceptive spike” to “attenuated baseline.” The sim reads from a bank of anonymized pain inputs I collected with consent from the physical therapy clinic: needle sticks, post-op stiffness, phantom limb prickle, cluster headache.
“Input set A,” I say, forcing my voice steady. “Needle puncture at the forearm, intensity three of ten.”
The waveform pops on the wall.
I hit RUN.
For a breath, the lab is a held note. The translator parses, hands off to my tables, maps the error to “stand down,” and—
The pain trace dips. Not a cliff dive, but a sure, even slope to baseline. I feel the board lean forward, just slightly. The Mlok’s fringe flicks.
Rhyss doesn’t move.
Of course he doesn’t.
“Latency under 200 milliseconds,” I say. “No rebound spike in the post-interval.”
“Next,” one of the Merati says.
“Input set B,” I say. “Post-surgical stiffness, right hip, intensity five of ten.”
I queue it up. This one’s trickier—longer duration, less predictably localized, and more prone to spike under stress. I hold my breath as the signal runs.
The translator hesitates for a blink—just long enough to make my stomach lurch—then completes the handoff. The slope to baseline is smooth again, slower this time, but clean.
I glance at Rhyss.
Still no reaction.
And I hate how much I’m dying to get a damn reaction from him. Even a nod. God forbid a smile.
“Latency at 242 milliseconds. Still under the 250 cap,” I say.
“Show us the phantom limb pain,” says the Mlok. “Something difficult.”
Of course. I’d saved this for last on purpose, because phantom limb pain is a cruel bastard—erratic, slippery, full of contradictions. No clear cause. No clear path.
But I have to show it. I want to show it. Because if this works…if it works, it’s not just theory anymore.
“Input set C,” I say. “Phantom limb pain. Amputation at mid-forearm. Intensity six.”
I hit RUN.
For a moment, nothing happens. It really looks like it’s going to work.
Then the waveform explodes.
What does that mean? Well…it means that, if this simulated patient was experiencing phantom limb pain before, they’re now in complete agony. It also means something has changed since yesterday…because it didn’t do this yesterday.
The spike is violent. Jagged. The kind of output that would send any real patient into a full-body shutdown. The waveform flails like it’s screaming, and for a second, I swear I feel my own arm throb in sympathy.
Someone sucks in a breath—it might be me.
This didn’t happen yesterday. Yesterday, the slope was slow, but stable. Today?
Today it looks like a seizure. Or a panic attack. Or—
Shit.
I scroll through the data, trying to keep my hands steady. The system’s throwing off error flags like confetti, but it’s not crashing—it’s confused. There’s something off about the signal…something weird that doesn’t feel like an error in my work so much as technical.
It doesn’t make sense.
Unless the input was wrong.
I blink at the label: Input Set C.
That’s what it should be—phantom limb pain, mid-forearm, moderate intensity. But I don’t remember double-checking the staging folder before I left it running overnight. I was exhausted. Buzzed. Pissed off. I thought I was being efficient.
What if I loaded the wrong trace?
What if I pulled from the wrong archive?
“I—uh…” I swallow hard. “That spike isn’t from the translator. It’s the input. Something’s off.”
The Mlok tilts his head at me. The Merati are already making notes, which is never a good sign.
Rhyss is silent. Watching.
I keep going. “I think I queued the wrong file last night. It must’ve been mislabeled in the export folder—I thought it was phantom limb, but this isn’t matching the pattern.”
“And you didn’t verify it before running the test?” one of the Merati says.
“I thought I had. But I…must’ve skipped a step.”
Rhyss still doesn’t speak, which is almost worse than if he ripped me apart.
“This isn’t a failure in the translator,” I add. “The algorithm was responding to a signal it wasn’t built to handle.”
“And in a live test,” says the other Merati, “that would still be catastrophic.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “I’m not asking for clearance. Just time to find out what happened.”
Rhyss finally moves.
He steps forward, too slow not to be angry, and every part of me wants to flinch—but I don’t. I hold my ground.
Mostly.
“Dr. Walker,” he says. “You came to your clearance review hungover. You ran an unverified signal in front of the advisory board. You presented unstable data as trial-ready, and now—after jeopardizing months of research, after wasting the committee’s time—you stand here and say you might have skipped a step? ”
I grit my teeth. “It was an honest mistake—”
“There is no such thing,” he snaps. “Not in this lab. Not when live subjects are involved…subjects who can feel pain, which you could have made far worse.”
Okay–that pisses me off. Because I get pain, I really do. My grandmother struggled with chronic pain every damn day of her life; my mom told awful stories. I want to fix this. “Dr. Rhyss,” I start.
But he doesn’t let me continue.
“You don’t get to be wrong at this stage,” Rhyss goes on. “You don’t get to sleepwalk through prep and hope your code is smarter than your hangover.”
He’s making me seem like some kind of alcoholic in front of the committee, and my face burns in response.
I want to argue. I want to tell him I’m brilliant and he knows it, that one misstep doesn’t erase everything I’ve done to get here.
But I also know if I open my mouth, I might cry.
And there’s no way in any universe I’m giving him that.
“You can’t extrapolate from incomplete data,” he says. “You cannot guess at clinical readiness based on a handful of clean signals and one catastrophic outlier. You have no idea what would have happened if that was a real patient.”
“I do,” I say, voice tight. “That’s why I stopped the sim.”
“You stopped it after the spike,” he says. “After the damage would have been done.”
“In a live test, we wouldn’t be running anything without hard fails in place,” I snap. “You know that. This was a simulation, not an open wound.”
“And you still didn’t verify the data source.”
“I was working off a set I’ve used a dozen times before. The export folder shouldn’t have had mislabeled data in it.” I pause. “That’s on me for not checking. But that folder should have been clean. And if someone corrupted the metadata—”
“You think this is sabotage now?”
“I think something’s wrong,” I say, leveling my gaze at him. “And I want time to fix it—”
“You need to go home, Lyn.”
I blink.
He doesn’t…he doesn’t ever use my first name.
He must be really pissed.
“Excuse me?” I stutter.
“Forty-eight hours. No lab access, no sim runs, no late-night bugfixing with one eye open.”
“You’re suspending me?” I ask, and my voice sounds more hurt and less stubborn than I wish it did.
“I’m telling you to get out of your own way,” he says.
“I just told you I want to fix it. I’m not making excuses, I’m giving you exactly what I’ve got. If you think I’m happy about this, you’re not paying attention—”
“Lyn.”
I stop dead.
“You’re too close to it,” he says. “You’re not thinking clearly.”
I cross my arms, trying to fold the ache in my chest into something sharp and defensive instead of…
whatever this is. I don’t want to look like a petulant kid in front of the committee.
I want to look like a goddamn genius. But the way he keeps saying my name is making it harder to breathe than the hangover ever did.
“I am thinking clearly,” I hiss. “I’m thinking about an error that could make all the data I’ve collected so far entirely pointless.”
“And I’m thinking,” he bites back, “about the fact that you didn’t notice it until it was on the wall in front of the entire board.”
“Because the system didn’t throw a red flag until it hit the end of the test! If I’d caught it at the top of the run—”
“But you didn’t.”
My jaw locks.
The Merati murmur something behind us—probably a note about protocol or performance or the fact that I’m now one minor breakdown away from losing this entire damn clearance.
The Mlok flicks his gaze from me to Rhyss, then back again. I don’t know what he sees. I can’t even pretend to care.
“I’m not asking for a medal,” I say, quieter now. “I’m asking for forty-eight hours so I can figure out what went wrong.”
“No,” Rhyss says flatly. “You’re asking to solve it the same way you caused it. Alone. Sleep-deprived. Reckless.”
“I’ve always worked like that—”
“And I’ve always covered for you,” he snaps.
“Oh, bullshit—”
Behind us, someone coughs.
One of the Merati shifts in his seat.
I step back, swallowing whatever I was about to hurl at Rhyss’s face. It wasn’t going to help. It wasn’t going to change anything. And I’m not about to make things worse with the entire board still in the room watching me like I’m a loose wire sparking next to an open fuel line.
I clear my throat. “Understood,” I say, and the words feel like gravel. “I’ll…I’ll take a few days to rest.”
Rhyss just watches me, face unreadable now, all that heat banked behind the glint of his eyes and the stillness of his posture. For a second, I wonder if he regrets it. Then I decide I don’t care.
I turn to the committee. “Thank you for your time,” I say, aiming for professional and almost sticking the landing. “I’ll submit a revised incident report once I’ve had time to review the archive and confirm where the error originated.”
The Merati incline their heads. The Mlok doesn’t move. The board begins to rise.
So does Rhyss.
We don’t look at each other.
I gather my notes and tablet, turn on my heel, and leave the lab without another word.
I don’t let myself cry until the elevator doors close. Not until I’m halfway out of the university, racing back home to Mythara Village to fling myself into bed and think about what a failure I am.
I just…I needed that win.
I need his approval.
And I’m farther from getting it than ever before.