"The wall," he says, and his tone drops, becomes something private despite the audience. "The one you built. Is it still standing?"
I think of the barrier inside my mind, the fortress I constructed around what we shared. Around the only happy memories I’ve ever had. Webb has thrown everything at it. Every memory, every trauma, every horror I've tried to bury. But the wall remains.
"Yes," I whisper. "It's still there."
Something shifts in his face. Not relief exactly. Something fiercer.
"Keep it standing. Whatever happens. Keep it standing until I get there."
"Time," Webb says, and the screen goes black.
I stare at my reflection in the dead tablet. Sunken eyes. Cracked lips. A face I used to know, now belonging to someone I don't recognize.
Webb tucks the device into his coat and studies me with detached curiosity.
"Touching," he remarks. "The way you look at each other. Like you actually believe he loves you."
I don't respond. I've learned that responding only feeds him.
"I've been reviewing the data from our sessions," he continues, circling the table with slow, deliberate steps. "Your neural patterns when you think of him are fascinating. The same regions that light up during trauma responses also activate during recall of positive memories associated with Harrison. Fear and attachment, fused at the neurological level."
His fingers brush the edge of the collar, a casual reminder of what he controls.
"You don't love him," Webb says. "You're trauma-bonded. Your brain has simply confused safety with affection because he happened to be the first person who didn't actively destroy you. It's a survival mechanism, nothing more."
"You're wrong."
The words surprise me. I didn't plan to say them.
Webb raises an eyebrow. "Am I?"
"What I feel for him isn't confusion. It isn't survival. It's—" I struggle for the right word, the one that captures something I barely understand myself. "It's recognition. Like finding a piece of yourself that died long ago."
"Poetry." Webb's smile is thin and cold. "How romantic. How utterly meaningless."
He moves toward the door, then pauses.
"We'll continue the extractions tomorrow. I've identified some promising new avenues—early childhood memories that might shed light on your particular pathology. Get some rest. You'll need it."
The door seals behind him.
And I am alone.
The silence is defeaning.
No hum of machinery. No distant footsteps. Nothing but the sound of my own breathing and the quiet tick of my heart.
I lie in the white glare of the overhead lights and think about Jace's face on the screen. The way he looked at me.
Keep the wall standing.
I close my eyes and try to find it. The barrier I built inside my own mind, the fortress where I've hidden everything Webb can't have. It's still there. Battered. Weakened. But standing.
Inside it: the weight of Jace's body next to mine in the dark. The sound of his breathing when he pretends to sleep. The morning he made me eggs and watched me eat without saying a word.
The night he destroyed me to rebuild me.
The promise he made before they took me.
