"Good."
I stay where I am. I don't move closer. I don't touch him. I wait.
His hands drop from his throat. The marks are vivid against his pale skin, red lines that will purple by afternoon. He stares at his fingernails like they belong to someone else.
"I was back there." His voice is small. "In the basement."
I know which basement. Senator Moore's. The file Jagger pulled for me was thorough: eighteen months of documented abuse, medical logs that read like a horror novel, psychological assessments that concludedasset functionality compromised beyond standard recovery parameters.
They were going to dispose of him. The auction was a formality, a way to recoup some value before the inevitable.
I took him instead.
I still don't know why.
"You're not there," I say. "You're in my apartment. Third floor, east wing, building 7-Kappa. The door is locked. The windows are sealed. There is no one here except you and me."
He processes this. I watch his breathing slow, his shoulders drop, his jaw unclench. The panic is receding, replaced by exhaustion and something else. Something I can't identify.
"Why?" he asks.
The question is too broad.Why is he here. Why did I take him. Why am I crouched at the foot of his bed at five in the morning,talking him through a flashback instead of sedating him and calling Medical.
I don't have answers. Not ones that make sense.
So I give him the only truth I can access: "It just is. I don’t want you to be afraid of me."
The words come out wrong. Too soft. Too personal. I learned them from a training video on asset management, a section on building rapport with reluctant informants. They were never meant to be sincere.
But Elliot's expression shifts. The fear doesn't disappear, but something cracks beneath it. A fissure in the wall he's built around himself.
He doesn't trust me. He shouldn't. But he looks at me like he's considering the possibility that I might not hurt him.
I file that underprogress.
Finally he calms and I leave the room but not the hallway. I grab the chair, position it outside his door, and sit.
The building settles around me. Pipes groan. The heating unit cycles on and off. Somewhere on floor two, a door slams and footsteps echo in the stairwell. I track each sound, assign it a threat level, dismiss it.
At 0600, I make coffee. Two cups. I set one outside his door, knock once, and go back to the kitchen.
He opens the door at 0622. He crouches, grabs the cup, retreat. The door closes. The lock clicks.
Small data point: he's accepting things I offer. Food. Water. Now coffee. Each acceptance is a thread of connection, a micro-transaction of trust. I don't know what I'm building, but I know it's something.
At 0715, my phone buzzes again. Not Jagger this time. An automated alert from the building's security system.
The surveillance node on floor six has been replaced. New signature, different Ministry. Not Acquisition this time.
Erasure.
I pull up the specs. The node is military-grade, the kind they use for high-value target tracking. It's not just watching the building. It's watching me.
I run a trace on the authorization. The signature is buried under three layers of encryption, but I crack it in under four minutes.
Alfred Webb. Director of Erasure. The man who signed off on my training when I was twelve years old.
Webb doesn't waste resources on routine surveillance. If he's watching me, it's because someone flagged me as a potential problem. Failed training. A threat to operational security.
