I hear nothing.
I move down the hallway to the bedroom door, which is open.
He's sitting on the bed.
The bedroom is the room in his flat that made me understand something about him the first time I saw it properly. The rest of the flat is tidy, practically furnished, books arranged with an organisational logic that I respect deeply, kitchen as neat as mine. But the bedroom has this massive, heavy wooden bed frame that he clearly built himself or had built to specification, and the ceiling is the highest in the flat, and the whole roomjust breathes differently. Like the one space in his life where he doesn't have to compress anything.
He's sitting on that bed in his suit trousers and his shirt, jacket folded on the chair. His glasses are in his hand. His eyes are very still and very far away.
On the nightstand beside him is a document.
Printed. Neatly paper-clipped. Formal letterhead.
I walk to the nightstand, and I pick it up, and I read the top line.
Internal Transfer Request. Submitted for consideration. Orc Financial Services, Regional Branch, Minneapolis.
Minneapolis.
I put the document down.
Narod watches me do all of this without speaking, which tells me everything about how bad it's gotten inside his head tonight, because Narod in a manageable state apologises before I've even identified what he's apologising for.
"When did you print this?"
"A few days ago." He says it simply. No hedging. "I had not decided. I was considering."
"A few days ago." I sit on the bed beside him, leaving a foot of space between us. "While we were—that was while we were actively, what, Narod. You cooked me dinner four days ago."
"I make good decisions when I have multiple models available." He puts his glasses back on. Looks at his hands. "It seemed irresponsible to close a viable option on the basis of insufficient data."
"Insufficient data." I say this back to him very quietly.
"I did not know what your friends would think." He is very still. "I did not know how it would go. I was running a parallel projection."
"And now you know how it went, so you're activating the transfer."
He doesn't answer, which is an answer.
I breathe. The rain is audible against his window, heavier now than it was when I was outside in it, though it's very warm in here, the way his flat always is, the heating calibrated for a body that runs much warmer than mine.
"You paid for the dinner. You sat there while Priya said that, and you paid for the dinner and thanked everyone for a lovely evening."
"It was simpler."
"It was not simpler. It was you deciding that you were the problem."
"The evidence?—"
"You are not a risk assessment, Narod." I turn on the bed so I'm facing him, and I put my hand over his, which is very large and very warm and goes very still under my fingers. "You are not a model. You do not get to run projections on whether you're worth staying for."
He looks at our hands.
"Your friend used the wordbarbaric." He says it the way he says most difficult things, with great precision, like the exactness of the word is the only shelter available. "I have been called that word, or its synonyms, many times. I have a very complete dataset on the frequency with which humans arrive at that conclusion regardless of the behavioural variables I modify. The sweater vest does not change the outcome. The filed tusks do not change the outcome. The wire-rimmed glasses and the formal vocabulary and the extreme care I take in every—" He stops. His jaw is very tight. "The outcome remains consistent."
I look at his profile. The strong, heavy brow. The tusks that catch the low light, smooth and carefully maintained, because he started filing them at twenty-two because a colleague flinched. The amber eyes that are currently fixed on the middle distance with an expression of someone who has done this calculationso many times that arriving at the same answer no longer even hurts the way it used to. It has just become the number.
"Look at me."
