She caught my wrist. Warm fingers wrapping around the pulse point. Holding on.
“But right now?” She held my stare. Didn’t let go. “You’re not the person who scares me. That chip does. What it might do. What it might make you forget. And those awful monsters behind it, whoever they are.”
“So no. I’m not afraid of you, Xavier.” My name sounded fierce in her mouth.
I turned my hand in her grip. Not pulling away. Palm to palm, fingers threading through hers. Tentative. Testing.
She let me. Squeezed back.
Heat flooded through me. Not just warmth. Something deeper. More dangerous.
Her thumb brushed across my knuckles, the same knuckles that had crushed a man’s throat hours ago. She knew what these hands could do. Chose to hold them anyway.
Wrote with my free hand, awkward, not wanting to let go of her: Thank you.
She read it. Something shifted in her expression. Softening.
“Don’t thank me for basic human decency.” But her voice was gentle. “You’re a person, Xavier. Not just... whatever they tried to make you.”
Person. The word settled into my chest. Took root.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I could be both. Weapon and person. Killer and protector.
Maybe that was enough.
I released her hand reluctantly. Gestured to the desk. To the laptop.
She understood. Nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I need to... we need to understand what they did to you.”
Pulled the other chair closer. Sat beside her instead of at a distance.
Our shoulders touched. She didn’t shift away this time.
Clare opened the laptop. Blue light illuminated her face, made her look pale, but the tension had eased from her shoulders. The barriers were gone.
She pulled up medical journals. I watched over her shoulder, close enough to feel her warmth, see the screen reflected in her tired vision.
“Looking up neural implants,” she murmured, fingers flying over the keys. “Spinal chips. Trying to understand what they put in you.”
The research she’d been doing for hours. On the bus when she thought I was sleeping. Quick searches on the new phone. Now with a proper laptop, diving deeper.
Medical journals. Technical specifications. Images of surgical procedures.
And there: the X-ray from the clinic. My spine, vertebrae lined up in gray and white. The chip a bright spot near C7, foreign and wrong.
I reached toward the back of my neck without thinking. She caught my hand gently, pulled it down to rest on the desk. Left her hand over mine for a moment before returning to the keyboard.
The screen showed a medical journal article about experimental neural control interfaces for paralysis patients. Dense technical language explaining how electrical signals could restore movement to damaged limbs.
Clare scanned rapidly, processing, discarding. She clicked to the next tab, a study about deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s tremors. Then another article about cochlear implants.
“Standard medical applications,” she muttered, scrolling faster. “Paraplegia treatment. Motor function restoration. Seizure suppression.”
She opened a new tab. Compared the diagrams to my X-ray.
“None of these match.” Her finger traced the chip’s position on the screen. “Placement is wrong. Size is wrong. The surgery they did on you...” She shook her head. “This isn’t medical. This isn’t therapeutic.”
I leaned closer. Studied the difference between the images she’d pulled up and what sat inside my spine.
