Chapter 5 — What We Pretend Not to Want

Eli did not answer Rowan’s question.

He did something worse. He smiled, reached up, and adjusted Rowan’s tie in full view of the ballroom.

“Your knot is crooked,” he said.

“It is not.”

“It is now.”

Rowan’s eyes darkened. “You enjoy this.”

“I enjoy winning.”

“At what?”

“Keeping you off balance.”

Mara directed them through the archive elevator before Rowan could reply. The doors closed on the music and polite applause, leaving them alone in the narrow mirrored box. Rowan’s hand was still at Eli’s waist. Neither of them moved it.

“You never answered,” Rowan said.

“Neither did you. You asked a question designed to make me short-circuit.”

“I asked because I didn’t want to guess.”

That stole Eli’s easy response. He looked down at the polished floor. “I don’t know what I want yet.”

“Then I won’t make you perform it.”

The elevator opened.

The archive floor was dark except for emergency lights and the blue pulse of locked cabinets. Mara had disabled the internal cameras for four minutes. Eli followed Rowan past rows of labeled boxes until they reached a wall of obsolete audio equipment.

“Storage H-17,” Rowan said, pointing to a brass plate fixed beneath an old reel-to-reel machine.

Eli crouched beside it. “This is my language.”

The machine was a Sloane-era prototype, ugly and overbuilt. Eli removed the front panel with a key from his cufflink, tracing the wiring with his fingertips. Behind the reel was a cassette smaller than his palm.

“Got you.”

The hallway lights came on.

“Two minutes,” Mara whispered in their ears. “Security has changed patrol early.”

Rowan took the cassette. “There’s a private reception room at the end of the hall. We can listen there.”

The room had a piano, velvet chairs, and one heavy door that shut behind them with a magnetic click.

Eli tried the handle. Locked.

“Mara?”

Static answered.

Rowan tested his phone. No signal.

“Calder,” he said.

“You think?” Eli pulled at the handle again. “Does your family ever solve anything without trapping people in rooms?”

“Not successfully.”

They found an old cassette player beneath the piano bench. Eli connected it to the recorder he had brought, cleaned the tape head with the alcohol wipe in his pocket, and pressed play.

Dr. Sloane’s voice filled the room, thin but clear.

“If this recording is playing, Halcyon has resumed command behavior. It must be stopped. The program was designed around one inviolable principle: no response is valid unless freely chosen.”

Eli and Rowan looked at each other.

“The two original subjects established an exit condition together,” Sloane continued. “Neither may be coerced, sedated, threatened, or manipulated. Only an unpressured shared choice can terminate the loop.”

The tape warped. A second voice came through, much younger.

Eli’s.

“I’m doing it because Rowan can’t breathe.”

Then Rowan, sixteen or seventeen and furious: “You don’t get to trade yourself for me.”

The sound broke into alarms.

Eli stared at the player. “I volunteered.”

“Apparently.” Rowan’s voice was stripped bare. “To stop the feedback surge.”

“And you let me believe I was just a patient.”

“I let you forget what it cost you.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“No.” Rowan took a step toward him. “It isn’t.”

Eli wanted to stay angry. Anger was clean. It had edges. But Rowan looked like he had been holding this pain alone for twelve years, and the sight of it made Eli’s own chest ache.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because every time I thought about it, you looked at me like I was home.” Rowan swallowed. “And I thought if you knew what happened, you would look at me like I was the reason you were hurt.”

Eli’s laugh came out unsteady. “You thought I didn’t notice you avoiding me?”

“I thought distance was safer.”

“It was miserable.”

Rowan’s eyes lifted. “I know.”

The locked room felt suddenly too small. Eli thought of Mara in red at the hotel door, of the ugly jealousy he had tried to rename, of Rowan’s hand at his waist on the dance floor.

“I saw you with Mara,” he said.

Rowan blinked. “You were jealous.”

“Don’t make that face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you’re pleased with yourself.”

“I am trying very hard not to be.”

Eli stepped forward, caught the front of Rowan’s jacket, and kissed him.

It started reckless, almost angry. Rowan made a sound against his mouth but did not move until Eli’s fingers tightened in his lapels.

Then Rowan cupped Eli’s jaw.

“Tell me,” he breathed.

Eli understood. “Yes.”

Rowan kissed him back.

Slowly at first, as if he was proving he could. Then with a hunger that made Eli’s knees feel unreliable. His other hand settled at Eli’s lower back, firm through the thin tuxedo shirt, drawing him close enough that there was no space left for denial.

Eli kissed him again, deeper. Rowan’s breath shook. He pressed his forehead to Eli’s when they broke apart.

“I have wanted that for years,” Rowan said.

“You’re late.”

For half a second, Rowan smiled into the space between them. Then the smile disappeared, replaced by a tenderness so exposed that Eli had to look away first. He had expected triumph after finally kissing Rowan. What he felt instead was terror at how quickly it already mattered.

The cassette player clicked.

CHOICE REGISTERED,

a mechanical voice said.

Eli’s vision tore open.

He was inside the glass room. Rowan lay strapped to a chair, blood at his nose, struggling for air. A younger Eli stood beside a console, his hand hovering over two neural leads.

“Use me,” young Eli said. “The loop needs another anchor.”

“It will imprint the fear,” Sloane warned.

“Then erase it after. Just save him.”

The memory vanished with Eli bent over, gripping Rowan’s shirt.

Rowan held him upright. “Eli.”

“I wasn’t just there,” Eli whispered. “I chose it.”

The door unlocked. Mara burst in, pale and breathless.

“We have a problem.”

Screens throughout the room flickered to life.

Calder Vale appeared at the ballroom podium below, smiling for the donors.

“Tonight,” he said, “I regret to announce that Rowan Vale is experiencing a dangerous dependency episode.”