A man and his wife wait inside with sick grins stretched over their faces. His pants are tented and she’s slowly stroking him through the fabric.
No. No no no no.
I try to run, but my legs won't move. I try to scream, but my throat is locked. He smiles and reaches for me, setting me directly on top of his lap, stroking my hair, my body, traveling between my legs.
"Welcome home," he says.
Thedream shifts.
The apartment.
Jace's apartment. I recognize the sparse furniture, the sealed windows, the carefully ordered space that reflects a mind that doesn't know how to be messy.
I'm sitting on the couch, knees pulled to my chest, watching the door.
Waiting.
The lock clicks. Three deadbolts disengage in sequence. The door opens.
Jace enters.
But he's wrong. His face is blank, emptier than I've ever seen it. His eyes are flat grey coins, reflecting nothing, absorbing nothing. He moves like a machine, all precision and no presence.
"Jace?"
He doesn't respond. He walks past me like I'm not there, goes to the kitchen, starts pulling things from the fridge. The same routine I've watched a dozen times. But now it feels hollow. Automated.
"Jace, please. Look at me."
He turns. His eyes meet mine, and there's nothing in them. No recognition. No warmth. No flicker of the thing I thought I saw growing between us.
"Asset number 437," he says. His voice is flat, mechanical. "You have been designated for disposal. Please remain calm. This will be easier if you don't resist."
"No." I'm on my feet, backing away. "No, that's not you. That's not who you are."
"I am what they made me." He advances, reaching for something at his hip. A knife. The same knife he kept in the second drawer, the one he left for me to find. "I have no capacity for attachment. No capacity for care. I am a weapon. Weapons do not feel."
"You felt something. With me. I know you did."
"Negative. You were a variable. An anomaly. A malfunction to be corrected." He raises the knife. "Correction in progress."
I wake up screaming.
The sedative is wearing off, leaving a metallic taste on my tongue and a fog in my thoughts. My throat is raw from screaming. My cheeks are wet with tears I don't remember crying.
I stare at the ceiling and try to separate dream from reality.
My mother is dead. She died when I was six, a year after that morning in the kitchen. Cancer. Quick and merciless. Shepromised she'd be there, and then she wasn't, and nothing has been safe since.
The auction was real. The couple was real. The basement, Moore, the chair, the instruments, the eighteen months of learning how to survive by not being present—all real.
Jace is real too. But which version? The one who held me through the night, who marked my body with his teeth, who said he wanted to keep me safe? Or the one in my dream, hollow and mechanical, reaching for a knife?
Asset number 437. Designated for disposal.
Is that what I am? Is that what I've always been?
I close my eyes and try to find the wall. The barrier I built. The fortress that holds everything Webb can't touch.
