"Who is that?"
"Keep moving, Alex."
Through the window, he hasn't moved. Still frozen. The cup still halfway up. His knuckles white around it. Behind him, the card player glances up, notices something's wrong, follows his gaze to the window, to me. The card player's face changes — recognition, then alarm. He says something. The frozen guy doesn't respond.
I can see the effort it costs him to move. It's physical. Visible. His jaw clenches. His shoulders tighten. And then he turns away from the window with the kind of deliberate, mechanical precision of someone overriding every instinct in his body.
He walks to the far side of the room. Sets the cup down on a counter. Places both hands flat on the surface. Stands there with his back to the window, his back to me, his head down, breathing.
Controlled. Every second of it controlled. Not a single crack in the surface.
But I saw his face before he turned. And the face said everything the body refused to.
"Sven." My voice sounds strange to me. Thin. "Who is he?"
Sven pulls me forward. His pace has increased. He's not walking me to Lumi's session anymore. He's removing me from proximity.
"No contact pending evaluation," he says. The words are procedural but his voice isn't. His voice has that edge again — the one from the night he found me and RJ in the common room. The sound of a man watching a situation exceed his protocols in real time. "Gold House residents are outside your interaction clearance."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you're getting."
We round the corner of Gold House. He's gone. But the tremor in my wrist isn't. Faint and persistent, humming alongside the two signals I already carry.
Sven deposits me at the annexe door. Lumi is inside — I can see the candle through the window.
"One hour," Sven says. His jaw is tight.
"You're not going to tell me his name."
He looks at me. For a long moment, the enforcer and the person fight behind his eyes. The enforcer loses.
"His name is Gray," he says. "He is Gold House's highest-functioning resident. He has been stable. He is scheduled for reintegration review next quarter." Each sentence lands like a nail being driven. "If your proximity destabilizes him, his review is void. All of that progress. Gone."
He says it like an accusation. Like I walked past a window on purpose to ruin a man's life.
"I didn't do anything," I say. "I walked past a building."
"I know." The same two words Stone said after the fence. I know. That's the problem.
He opens the door. I walk in. The door closes.
The deep pulse. The warm ache. The fine vibration.
Three.
How many people am I going to break by existing near them?
I sit on the couch. Press my wrists together.
Lumi walks in. Sees my face.
"Something happened," she says.
"Yeah." I look at her. "How many mates can one person have?"
She sits down. Slowly. Her face carefully, precisely neutral.
