Chapter 29
twenty-nine
BEN
The Student Union is a goddamn war zone.
I’ve claimed a four-top table in the dead center of the Commons—prime real estate during midterm season—and transformed it into something that looks like an engineering fever dream crossed somewhat messily with a coffee addiction’s last stand.
Project Theseus sits to my left, currently navigating a labyrinth I’ve constructed from empty coffee cups, a stapler, pens, and someone’s abandoned highlighter. The robot moves through the maze with precision, its sensors finally calibrated, the code clean and beautiful.
Around me, caffeinated desperation roars. A table of pre-law students shoots me hostile looks, probably because I’ve claimed enough square footage to host a small wedding. A girl in a sorority sweatshirt nearly trips over my backpack and mutters something about “freaks” under her breath.
I don’t care.
For once in my life, I genuinely do not care what any of them think.
It’s like discovering the background noise in your life—the hum you stopped hearing years ago—has gone silent. The relief is almost dizzying. The old Ben would have shrunk, apologized, started packing up his weird little project to make room for normal people doing normal things.
That Ben is dead, and I’m not sorry he’s gone.
“Holy shit.” Anya’s coffee hovers halfway to her mouth as Theseus executes a ninety-degree turn around a napkin dispenser. “It’s beautiful.”
“Told you.”
She sets the cup down with a grudging half-smile. “Fine. You were right, but I’m putting that in writing exactly never.”
I should be doing a victory lap. Weeks of debugging, two near-catastrophic meltdowns, and one embarrassing 3:00 a.m. conversation with my soldering iron where I definitely didn’t cry—all of it vindicated by this ugly little robot navigating a maze I built from literal garbage.
Career highlight, really.
But my attention isn’t on Theseus.
It’s on the circuit board clamped in front of me.
“So who figured it out?” Anya asks, still watching the robot. “You said someone helped you with the diagnosis.”
“A friend.” The word tastes wrong. “She heard the pitch of the servo motor and realized it was bleeding and causing signal interference.”
Anya’s eyebrow rises. “She? Friend?”
The question hangs there, unanswerable. She’s the girl who heard music in my robot’s malfunction. She’s the girl who fell asleep in my bed with her hand on my chest like she was checking to make sure my heart was still beating. She’s the girl I—
I push those thoughts away before they can finish forming. Because that particular spiral has its own well-worn groove in my brain after the last few days. I know exactly where it leads, and I don’t have time to stand at the bottom of that hole today.
“Someone with good ears,” I say instead.
“She must have great ears if she caught that.” Anya studies me now, her analytical gaze doing that thing where she dissects people like they’re particularly interesting problem sets. “You’ve been weird all week. You OK, Kellerman? “
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You look like you haven’t slept since Tuesday.”
She’s not wrong, but sleep isn’t something I can afford right now.
Not until this is done.
I pick up the soldering iron. Smoke curls up from the tip, and the smell hits me—rosin and hot copper, the exact scent of my mother’s basement workshop when I was twelve. I was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor while she guided my shaky hands over a busted transistor radio.
“The trick,” she’d said, “is patience. You can’t force a broken thing to work. You have to understand why it stopped working first.”
I’d fixed my first radio that summer. A little AM/FM from a yard sale, its speaker blown and its tuner dial cracked. It took me three weeks. When it finally crackled to life, playing some oldies station through a haze of static, I’d felt like a god.
That feeling—the resurrection feeling—never got old.
But this build is different.
This isn’t resurrection.
This is something closer to prayer.
I’ve been calling my fixes to the amp ‘Ghost-Killer’ in my head, which sounds melodramatic. But there’s something fitting about the name—a custom isolated power supply, hand-wired from components I had to special-order from three different suppliers.
It’s the kind of build that audiophile forums argue about for hundreds of pages, everyone sure they’re right and that everyone else is an idiot, everyone debating transformer cores and capacitor tolerances like they’re matters of life and death.
For me, it might be.
“OK, now explain the other science experiment that looks like it’s about to achieve sentience and demand healthcare benefits.” Anya wheels her chair closer, then her eyes widen as she catalogues what she’s seeing. “Ben… is that a medical-grade regulator?”
“Military-spec, actually.”
“And those capacitors—” She picks one up, turning it over in her fingers. “This isn’t your usual five-dollar rescue project.”
No. No, it’s not.
I set down the iron and let myself actually look at what I’ve spread across this cafeteria table. Military-spec voltage regulators. Capacitors with tolerances so tight they’re measured in fractions of fractions. A custom-wound transformer I had to search for hours to find.
My usual projects—the ones I find on Facebook Marketplace or rescue from dorm room trash heaps—cost me nothing but time. A broken kitchen appliance here, a busted turntable there. Fix them, flip them, squirrel away the profits into my junker fund like some kind of fiscal doomsday prepper.
“How much did you spend on this?” Anya asks quietly.
I focus on a particularly delicate joint, threading silver wire through a ground plane. One wrong move and I’d have to start over, and I don’t have time to start over. Or—
“Ben.”
“All of it.” The words come out flat. “My whole fund. Freshman year to now. But it’ll be worth it.”
There’s a long pause, and I wonder if I’ve done something wrong, or again driven off someone by being too nerdy about tech stuff. Because that’d be typical, right? Survive the mortification of speaking my mind, only to step on some other social landmine.
But, finally, she replies.
“This is for her, isn’t it? The friend with the good ears?”
I meet her gaze. There’s no judgment there, just that same wondering curiosity she brings to every problem worth solving. So I shrug. “Her amp has a ground loop hum,” I say. “Has had it for years. She plays through it anyway, but I think this will kill it.”
I gesture at the mess of components and wiring in front of me.
“It’ll completely isolate the power supply and filter out all the noise. She’ll be able to hear herself clearly for the first time.” I shrug. “But it won’t do so by altering her sound or toning anything down, just by straightening everything up to be the way it should be.”
Anya’s expression shifts. I can see her connecting the dots—the friend who diagnosed Theseus’s problem by ear, the guitar amp, the fortune in components laid out like a sacrifice. Then a smile crosses her face like she’s figured out the hardest problem she’s ever had to work through.
“You’ve got it bad,” she says.
“Yeah.” I laugh. “I really do.”
I pick up a capacitor, rolling it between my fingers. Such a small thing. Such an expensive, precise, perfectly calibrated small thing. If I did this wrong—if even one joint is cold, one connection loose—the whole build fails. She plugs in, the hum is still there, and the effort is a waste of time.
I cut the thought off and turn back to the board. The thing is ugly. A hand-wired mess of components that would make a professional electrical engineer weep with horror. There’s nothing elegant about it, nothing pretty. But it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever built.
Because it’s not just a power supply.
It’s me saying, I see you. I hear you. I know what matters to you.
I’m hoping Cass understands all that when she realizes. She was the only person who ever looked at my workshop—at the mess of half-dissected electronics and salvaged components—and saw something beautiful instead of something embarrassing.
“It’s like the opposite of a graveyard,” she’d said once, running her fingers over some of the kit. “A place where things come back to life.”
Nobody had ever described it that way before.
Nobody had ever seen it that way before.
“Kellerman!”
The voice cuts through my concentration. Nash is approaching our table, fresh from the gym. A month ago, the sight of him would have triggered an instant spike of anxiety—the looming threat of mockery, the desperate calculation of how to seem cool enough to belong.
But now I just feel tired.
“What are you building?” Nash peers at the chaos of components, his brow furrowed. “Looks like something that would get you on a watchlist.”
I wait for the punchline. The sneer. The casually cruel observation about my weird hobbies that would have sent me spiraling a week ago. But it doesn’t come. Instead, Nash just stands there, looking confused, which is probably fair, since he’s studying an ‘athlete’s degree’ with a C average.
The dynamic between us has shifted since I exploded on him and Stiles in the locker room. He’s been tentative around me ever since—not hostile, exactly, but uncertain—like I’ve stopped following a script we were both using, and he doesn’t know how to replace it.
“It’s an audio filter,” I say evenly. “For an amplifier.”
Nash nods slowly. “Cool. So, like… music stuff?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a beat of awkward silence. Anya watches the exchange with fascination, her eyes flicking between us like she’s cataloguing data for a future research paper. Because whatever I lack in confidence, she has in spades. She’s more than comfortable being one of the campus nerds.
“You coming to Saturday’s game?” Nash asks. “Semi-finals, man. Matinee slot, 1:00 p.m. puck drop. If we win, we go to the Nationals in three weeks.”
The question lands hard. I should be playing in that game.
“I’m still benched,” I say.
“Yeah, but you could still come. Support the team.”
I look back at the board. “Got something more important.”
Nash’s expression shifts—surprise, maybe, or a grudging respect. It’s strange, seeing that look on his face. He opens his mouth, closes it again, then nods once. His knuckles rap against the table, an awkward gesture that might be a peace offering.
“All right,” he says. “Good luck with your… filter thing.”
Then he’s gone.
“Huh,” I say.
“That was weird,” Anya observes.
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t mock you even once.”
“I noticed.”
“Are you two, like… friends now?”
I consider the question. A month ago, I would have given anything for Nash’s casual acceptance, for the easy belonging of being one of the guys. And in the end, I traded something real for something that turned out to be worth less than the empty cups scattered across this table.
And all it took was standing up for myself.
“I don’t know what we are,” I say finally. “But he’s laying off now.”
Anya hums thoughtfully but doesn’t push.
I turn back to the Ghost-Killer. The board is almost done. There’s a few more joints to go, and my hands are steady as I work. The solder flows clean and bright, each joint a small perfection. I’ve done this a thousand times before—a million times, probably—but it’s never felt like this.
Like every connection I’m making on this board is also a connection I’m trying to make to someone else.
Twenty minutes later, I set down the iron for the last time. The Ghost-Killer sits before me, complete, and when I run the final diagnostic, the readings are perfect. Textbook-ideal voltage regulation with noise levels so low they barely register on my meter.
Step one complete.
I slide the finished board into an antistatic bag, handling it with the care of a holy artifact. I tuck the bag carefully into my backpack, next to my laptop and my notes and all the other ordinary detritus of college life. Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to deliver it.
But for now I let myself feel something that might be hope.