Between sessions, I step into the corridor and lean against the cool wall because there are days when the only thing between me and my worst decisions is a plaster surface and the knowledge that if I start thinking in the wrong direction it will take ten people to pull me back.
I look at my phone and think of last night. The room. The paint. The way she saidI’m not afraid of youand made it sound like a decision she could revoke. I think of this morning. R’s ribs. The cup of water on the floor. The blanket next to his knee like a question he got to answer without paying for it. The two realitiesare not enemies. They are inconvenient roommates. I will live with both. I will make the house hold both.
By late afternoon, after the second interview has done the thing careful stories do—change the shape of a day without announcing it—Simone signs off with a look that saysthis workedand a second look that saysdon’t ruin it.Aurora stands, thanks the survivor with a voice that’s steadier than she feels and leaves the room before I can do something like put a hand on a chair and pretend the chair needed me.
In my office, the last sunlight finds the bare edge of the window and lays a thin stripe across the desk. The screens in the control wing show feeds from Sanctuaries I could draw by memory if I allowed myself to be the kind of man who draws maps. Navarro’s alley is quiet. The port shows the back of a warehouse and a forklift that will break down within the week. The clinic in the west has a waiting room with three chairs and a woman pretending to read last month’s magazine. The number that matters doesn’t appear on any screen.
I pick up my phone one more time because I am going to send a final message for the day and I want it to be language that reads as invitation and not as claim. I type:
Thank you for today. If you want debrief notes from Simone, she’ll bring them to your room after dinner. If you’d rather draw than talk, the studio is open. 2100. Your choice.
I look at the words longer than I should. They say exactly what I can offer and nothing I can’t. They also conceal the thing that is true whether I write it or not: I will be in the studio at 2100 whether she comes or not.
I press send and the screen goes black. For a half-second, it gives me my face back. The eyes belong to a man who made decisions all day and will make more tonight. The mouth belongs to a man who knows restraint is a choice he gets to make and is willing to live with what it costs.
Orientation is over.
Time for immersion.
Chapter 25 – Aurora
The text arrives like a knock you hear even when the door is already open.
11:30. Control wing. Confidential.
I’m on the floor with my back against the bed and my sketchbook spread across my knees, copying fragments from last night of my hand inside a larger hand, a threshold bar across the bottom of a canvas, and a hinge that looks like a scar. I’ve already drawn and crossed out three versions of his mouth. Lila’s in the next room, sleeping off a late breakfast and an early facial; she made me promise to wake her if the house changed shape. The house is always changing shape. That’s what it was built to do.
I stare at the message. The NDA penalties flicker through my head—dollar figures, clauses with teeth, the way a signature can turn into a gate behind you. Then the reason I signed at all pushes forward: proof. If the Sanctuaries are real the way he says they are, they’ll be here, in the belly of this place.
I take a picture of my sketchbook out of spite, as if a photo will matter when a man like him decides he wants something erased. I drop the phone into my pocket and stand. The brush I stole from the studio looks at me from the desk where I left it. I don’t need it. I take it anyway and slip it into the inside pocket of my cardigan like a superstition.
The corridor to the control wing doesn’t waste time pretending to be beautiful. It’s bright enough to show dust that isn’t there, quiet enough to make your own footsteps sound like someone following. Halfway down, the floor tiles shift from warm wood to slate, a temperature change under shoes that tells you you’ve crossed a border.
A silent aide in a different suit and the same blank eyes, meets me at a small desk where a brass plate hums under hishand. “Ms. Hale.” He gestures me through a security checkpoint. Everything here operates like it has nothing to prove.
We pass a glass room where a woman in scrubs speaks into a headset, her fingers poised over a keyboard, and her eyes on a map that’s only lines and dots if you don’t know what you’re looking at. We pass another space that’s too neat to be used often: long table, empty folders, a pitcher sweating patiently. The aide leads me to a stretch of glass that overlooks a smaller conference area. Cassian stands inside it, shoulder to shoulder with vacuum. The wall-mounted screen shows Dr. Navarro’s face in a secure call, the one I recognize from the briefing packet: short hair, and eyes that categorize pain faster than most people register daylight.
On a bank of monitors behind him are blurred faces, a hand passing a paper cup to a child, a hallway with a blue door that could belong to a school if you didn’t notice the guardrail bolted at knee height. My breath catches before I can decide whether to let it; the sound stays behind my teeth.
The aide taps the glass twice with his knuckle and gestures me farther down, away from the screens, into a corridor that makes a square around what must be the clinic. My stomach knots and then unknots as if it doesn’t want to take sides.
He stops at a door with a small, frosted window and opens it quietly. “Observe only.” It’s the only thing he’ll say to me today.
The room is small by design: a cot pressed against the wall, two chairs that don’t match because matching would make it feel staged, a rolling cart with a blood pressure cuff and an oximeter, and a sink with its own neat row of paper towels. The light is gentle enough not to scrape but honest enough to show you when someone is lying.
A teenage boy sits on the cot, knees drawn up, sneakers planted, hands inside his sleeves. He’s half-turned toward thedoor like his body is a compass and the direction he wants is alwaysout. His hoodie is gray in the way cheap fabric turns after too many washes. The skin over his knuckles is split. His eyes are hollow in the way that means he’s too full of information he shouldn’t have had to carry.
Simone is in one of the chairs, the therapist voice ready without being weaponized. She doesn’t have a notepad in her hands, and I love her for it. “Hey,” she says to him, not looking at me. “It’s Simone. My job is to make this room boring.” She taps the side of her jaw with one finger. “We can be quiet borers together if you want.”
Cassian stands in the corner by the rolling cart, jacket off, sleeves rolled. He’s not pretending not to be here. He also isn’t pretending the room is about him. He greets me with a look that reads a dozen things I don’t want to name and says one sentence that’s as much for him as it is for me. “Observe,” he says quietly, “don’t interfere.”
I take the other chair and pull my sketchbook up as a shield I’m allowed to look over. My heart is up in my throat; I swallow and it goes down enough to let me breathe. The boy looks at me once and his gaze does a quick calculation: Girl. Stranger. Safe? He decides I’m furniture and turns back to Simone.
“I can sit on the floor,” she says, “or the chair, or nowhere. I can leave and come back. You can tell me which and I will do it.”
“My shoes stay on,” he says. It comes out like a challenge, not a plea.
“Then they stay on,” Simone concedes.
