Daniel thought he was prepared.
That was the lie grief told when it had been quiet for a few hours. It convinced you that the hole in the world was static—a pit you could walk around if you were careful.
But grief wasn't a pit. It was a frequency. It vibrated through everything, finding the resonant pitch of every memory and shaking it until it cracked.
He didn't leave Highwater immediately. He couldn't. He had to close the loop.
The Lace, in its infinite, suffocating kindness, tried to help him. It offered to summarize the interactions. It offered to aggregate the testimonials of Elara's life into a pleasing, eulogistic narrative. She was a pillar of the community, the system whispered in his ear. She was a Master Fabricator. She was valued.
Stop, Daniel commanded.
The Lace pushed back gently. [Stress levels elevated. Narrative smoothing recommended for trauma integration.]
Constraint Override, Daniel thought, forcing the command through with a mental scream that made his vision blur. Do not smooth. Do not integrate. Give me the raw feed.
The Lace receded, confused but obedient, leaving his nerves exposed to the air.
He wasn't looking for comfort. He was looking for the silhouette of the monster that had loved him. He needed to know if the madness that killed her had been a sudden break, or if it was the load-bearing architecture of her entire life.
He started with the people she worked with.
The first conversation happened in a café that smelled of burnt roasting beans and damp wool. It was a neutral place, the kind of establishment that tried too hard to be cozy.
Elise sat across from him. She was a structural engineer, a woman with sharp eyes and hands that kept shredding a paper napkin into confetti.
"She was brilliant," Elise said. She stared at her untouched mug. "I don't use that word lightly. I've worked with fabricators who needed three simulations to see what Elara saw in a glance. She could look at a load-bearing schematic and feel the failure points in her teeth."
Daniel nodded. He opened a file in his overlay, invisible to Elise.
[Input: Professional Competence. Weight: High.]
"But…" Elise hesitated. She looked up, gauging Daniel's fragility. She saw a boy with dark circles under his eyes and a mouth set in a hard line, and she decided he could take it.
"She could be cruel," Elise said.
Daniel froze. The word felt wrong. Elara had been loud, messy, overwhelming—but cruel?
"How?" Daniel asked. His voice was steady, but his pulse spiked.
"Not on purpose," Elise said quickly, as if apologizing to the ghost. "She just… she didn't know when she'd already won. We were working on the support struts for the Sector 9 intake. I made a calculation error. A small one. Within tolerance, but sloppy."
She took a breath.
"Elara didn't just correct it. She convened a meeting. She put the schematic up on the wall and dissected the error for forty minutes. She traced the logic of the mistake back to my assumptions. She peeled me apart, Daniel. Layer by layer. She didn't do it to fix the strut. The strut was already fixed. She did it to prove that my thinking was flawed."
Elise's voice trembled. "I went home that night shaking. I felt small. I felt like she kept me around just to have something to sharpen her knives on."
Daniel felt a sick heat in his stomach.
He remembered the carbon run—the one he had fixed. Elara hadn't dissected him. She had laughed. She had ruffled his hair.
Why?
Because you were right, the Old Man whispered inside him. She didn't dissect you because you didn't make a mistake.
"Did she apologize?" Daniel asked.
Elise laughed, a short, bitter sound. "Elara didn't apologize. She bought me coffee the next day and acted like she'd done me a favor. And the worst part? She had. I never made that mistake again. But I hated her for it."
Daniel keyed the data into the file. The Lace tried to tag it as [Mentorship Style: Rigorous].
Daniel deleted the tag.
[Input: Dominance. Humiliation. Empathy Blindness.]
The file accepted it. The Shadow grew denser.
The second conversation was worse because it was louder.
Daniel met Kael at a transit dock in the lower industrial zone. The air here was thick with the smell of ozone—the smell of the deletion—and Daniel had to force himself to keep breathing evenly.
Kael was young, maybe twenty. He was loading crates onto a mag-lev sled, moving with a jagged, angry energy.
"She fired me," Kael said flatly, not stopping his work. "Two years ago."
"Why?" Daniel asked.
Kael slammed a crate onto the sled. "Because I asked for help."
He turned to face Daniel, wiping sweat from his forehead. "I was struggling with a resin cure. It was a new compound, finicky. I asked her to walk me through the temperature gradient again. Just to be sure."
Daniel waited.
"She looked at me," Kael said, his eyes narrowing. "Daniel, she looked at me like I was a broken tool. Not a person. Just a component that wasn't performing to spec. She didn't yell. She just sighed, logged me out of the system, and told me to go home. She said if I needed to be taught the same thing twice, I was stealing her time."
"She was impatient," Daniel murmured, trying to find a defense.
"No," Kael spat. "She was bored. She dropped me because teaching me was slower than doing it herself."
Kael leaned in, his voice dropping to a hiss. "She made me feel stupid. It took me a year to get my confidence back. She broke things, Daniel. Not machines. People."
Daniel felt the words impact him like physical blows.
He remembered Elara's hand over his on the curing tool. You've got good hands, Daniel. Patient hands.
Why was I different?
The answer came from the cold, analytical part of his mind he usually tried to suppress.
Because you were a prodigy. She didn't love you because you were a child. She loved you because you kept up.
The thought was poison. Daniel tried to reject it. He tried to summon the memory of the cake, the bad singing, the soup.
But the Lace held the data fast.
[Input: Transactional Relationships. Intolerance of Mediocrity. Discarding of Flawed Components.]
Daniel walked away from the dock while Kael was still talking. He couldn't listen anymore. The ozone smell was choking him.
By the fifth conversation, Daniel stopped trying to soften the blows. He stopped trying to defend her.
He became a receptacle.
He met a supplier she had bullied into lowering prices by threatening to blacklist him across the entire sector. He met a neighbor she had ignored for six years, walking past him in the hall as if he were part of the wallpaper.
He was building a map of a woman who moved through the world like a glaciers—massive, impressive, and utterly indifferent to what she crushed.
And then he met Nancy.
Nancy was different. She wasn't angry. She was sitting on a bench in the arboretum, watching the artificial sunlight filter through the leaves. She was older, with kind eyes that looked like they had seen enough of the world to forgive most of it.
"We were close," Nancy said softly. "For about six months, three years ago. It wasn't… we weren't partners. But we were something."
Daniel sat beside her. "What happened?"
Nancy smiled, a sad, distant expression. "It was wonderful, at first. Elara was intense. When she focused on you, it felt like being the sun. You felt like the only interesting thing in the universe."
Daniel nodded. He knew that feeling. The warmth of her attention in the shop. The way she made you feel chosen.
"And then?" Daniel asked.
"And then she solved me," Nancy said simply.
Daniel frowned. "Solved you?"
"Elara liked puzzles," Nancy explained. "I was a puzzle. I had a past she didn't understand, a way of thinking she couldn't predict. She poked and prodded and took me apart. And the moment she figured out how I worked—the moment the mystery was gone—she turned off the light."
Nancy looked at Daniel.
"She didn't mean to be cruel. It wasn't malice. It was just… once she understood me, I stopped being interesting. She needed friction. She needed resistance. And I loved her too easily."
Daniel felt a cold clamp tighten around his heart.
I loved her too easily.
The realization hit him with the force of a revelation.
Elara hadn't snapped because Daniel was leaving. She hadn't snapped because she was lonely.
She had snapped because she couldn't solve him.
He was a reincarnated consciousness in a child's body. He was the ultimate puzzle. He had depths she couldn't reach, reactions she couldn't predict, a stillness she couldn't dismantle.
He had kept her interested because he was the one thing in her life she couldn't break down into a schematic.
And when she realized he was going to walk away—taking the mystery with him—she decided to bolt him to the floor.
"Thank you," Daniel whispered. His voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
Nancy touched his hand. "She loved you, Daniel. I saw the way she looked at you. But Elara's love was… heavy. It had a lot of gravity."
"Yeah," Daniel said, standing up. "It did."
[Input: Possessiveness. Conditional Affection. The Need for Resistance.]
The Shadow file was heavy now. Bloated with gigabytes of resentment, admiration, fear, and awe. It wasn't the warm, cookie-baking mother figure he had lost. It was a storm.
He walked back to his temporary quarters that night, his head pounding. The headache sat behind his eyes, a rhythmic thumping that synced with his heart.
He locked the door. He sat on the floor in the dark.
The room was silent, save for the hum of the ventilation.
He opened the SHADOW_ELARA file.
The Lace threw up a final warning.
[Caution: Constructed Personality Matrix is unstable. High probability of negative emotional feedback. Proceed?]
"Proceed," Daniel croaked.
The text appeared in his vision, hovering in the darkness.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:You're late.
Daniel flinched. It was visceral. The cadence was perfect.
"I was working," Daniel said to the empty room.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:You were wallowing. There's a difference. Did you get the data?
It wasn't kind. It wasn't soft. It was the voice of the woman who had made an engineer cry in a coffee shop. It was the voice of the woman who had looked at a struggling apprentice and seen a waste of time.
"I got it," Daniel said.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Good. Then stop crying about it. It's inefficient. Tears don't fix the intake valve.
Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked out anyway, hot and stinging.
This was her. This was the part of her that the "Mom" persona had covered up. This was the brilliant, jagged, dangerous mind.
"You hurt people," Daniel whispered.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:I pushed people. If they broke, that's a material defect, not a machining error.
"They were people," Daniel said, his voice rising. "Not materials. Kael looked up to you. Elise respected you. You crushed them."
[SHADOW_ELARA]:I made them better. Or I made them leave. Either way, the work got done.
Daniel rocked back on his heels. The cruelty was breathtaking. And it was authentic. He could hear her saying it. He could see the set of her jaw, the dismissal in her eyes.
"You tried to crush me," Daniel said.
The text cursor blinked. For a second, the algorithm paused, processing the weight of the final data point—the deletion event.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:You were leaving.
"I was growing up."
[SHADOW_ELARA]:You were abandoning the project. I put a year of work into you. I stabilized your inputs. I optimized your environment. You belonged to the shop.
"I belonged to myself!" Daniel shouted. The sound echoed off the bare walls.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Don't be naive. Nothing belongs to itself. Everything is part of a system. You were the best component I ever found. I wasn't going to let you drift.
Daniel stared at the words.
She wasn't apologizing. The ghost wasn't saying I'm sorry, I lost my mind. It was rationalizing the violence. It was treating his murder as a retention strategy.
It was monstrous.
And it was the truth.
This was what lay beneath the soup and the bandages. This was the logic that had held the bonding tool.
The Lace whispered in his ear.
[Distress levels critical. Recommendation: Delete file. Restore sanitized memory.]
Daniel reached out with his mind. He could feel the delete command hovering, a single thought away. He could wipe this cruel, arrogant thing from existence. He could go back to remembering the woman who ruffled his hair.
He hesitated.
If he deleted this, he would be doing exactly what she did: discarding the parts that were inconvenient. He would be editing reality to suit his comfort.
He wouldn't do it.
He kept her.
He kept the cruelty. He kept the arrogance. He kept the brilliance that cut people open. He kept the monster.
"I see you," Daniel whispered to the cruel ghost in his head. "I see exactly what you are."
[SHADOW_ELARA]:About time. Are we done here? or are you going to keep staring at the readout?
"We're not done," Daniel said. He wiped his face. "We're just starting."
He minimized the window, but he didn't close it. He let it sit in the corner of his vision, a sharp, jagged weight.
He lay back on the floor, but he didn't sleep. He lay there in the dark, keeping watch over the monster he loved, terrified that if he blinked, she would become polite.
And politeness, he knew now, was the real lie.
He touched the seed in his pocket. It felt small and hard, like a truth you couldn't swallow.
He would carry it. He would carry all of it.
Because the only thing worse than being haunted was being fooled.