The message arrived without sound. Your "secret" phone lit with a number that wasn't a number. The text read: Evaluation. Noon. Discretion ensures safety. — E.V.
You put the phone face down as if it had looked at you wrong.
You weren't going. You had made the decision as soon as you read the message.
The next morning bent around that decision and then—rudely—around something else. A vision opened inside your skull like a window you hadn't known you'd left unlatched. A hand braced on glass. Blue eyes in a face that didn't apologize. A cut along a knuckle that wasn't yours and the warmth of blood you didn't own slicking your palm.
Noon came and found you at the base of the tower anyway, breath tight in your chest, anger and something less polite braided in your fists.
The lobby air was conditioned into obedience. The elevator opened without being told.and A woman with perfect posture met you with a badge and the kind of smile that promises survival if you don't ask the wrong questions.
"This way," she said.
The testing wing smelled like antiseptic and a choir keeping secrets. Machines observed with the hum of expensive things pretending not to watch as you pass.
You sat where you were told and offered your arm because saying no would have been performance.
The needle slid. Your blood moved obligingly into a plastic future.
The door opened. The air changed.
He didn't fill the room. He quieted it.
Atlas Kael Cain stood just inside the threshold, rain still remembering his hair. Up close he was not more beautiful, just more true—control arranged on a face built to lose it. The scars beneath the collar of his shirt made their old, faint map. His eyes were not merely blue; they were cold fire, the color of a rule that had outlived its author.
"You," you said, because anything smarter would have killed you to speak.
He looked at your arm where the blood moved through the line, then at your face, then at the floor, as if any of those were safer than the other two. "You shouldn't be here," he said.
"You invited me," you said. You didn't look at the phone because it would have made you swallow pride, and you were fresh out of salt.
His mouth moved in what might have been humor being strangled. "I invited your blood."
"Same address," you say..
"What do you want from me."
His gaze flicked, knife-fast, to the long window separating this room from another—another chair, another set of instruments, another life. "I want to know how to stop this."
"This," you said, and the word lifted its head. "The tether."
He held your eyes like a cliff holds someone who wanted to jump and changed their mind at the last second. "Yes."
"And if you can't," you ask, with a hint of a fearful undertone
"If it doesn't stop."
His breath went in and stayed.
"Then we manage it."
"We," you repeated, as the syllable put its hand at the base of your throat.
He took a step closer. Not enough to be a threat, but just Enough to be a confession. The IV line trembled once as if it were a filament remembering its purpose.
"Look at me," he said.
Your eyes dart upward swiftly.
The world simplified to a single instruction and the body's inability to disobey it when the voice was right. For a heartbeat, your pulse and his found each other like two notes that had been written to be a chord.
The glass wall behind him hummed. Silver ghosted across it, delicate as frost.
The door hissed.
Thorne's reflection appeared, red-eyed and unamused. "Time," he said, to the room, to the tether, to the thing that had started without any of you agreeing to it.
Atlas stepped back and The world restarted. You remembered you were sitting down. You remembered how to be insulted and saved it for later.
"Am I a patient or a problem," you asked, to see which mask he would wear.
"You're a person," he said, and the honesty of it almost knocked you sideways. "And a problem."
He left before your mouth could choose which answer to give.