I reached for my phone anyway, my thumb hovering over the screen as I started to build the search—what to do after mutual blowjobs, what to say, how to act like a man who hadn’t been put together out of damage and survival—but I didn’t unlock it. I let my hand drop and shoved the phone back into my pocket. Caleb deserved better than a version of me who learned patterns, mirrored reactions, and passed as something close enough to human to get through a room without setting it on fire.
He was safe, for now, and I could stay up here for a little longer to get my head straight, to work on being human so I fit in Caleb’s world. But his voice carried up the stairs, cutting clean through everything.
“In the comms room! We’ve got footage to review.”
Saved by the mission imperative.
The screens were already open on the table, surveillance feed paused mid-frame, and Caleb stepped aside enough for me to see it clearly.
“No sign of any other juveniles, but I found Noah, the older brother.”
Noah stood just inside the perimeter fence, shoulders tight, eyes tracking something beyond the boundary, a slightly more grown-up version of the kids back at the center—same posture, same watchfulness, coming from being corrected too many times. He held a compact carbine low against his thigh, military issue, short barrel, suppressed, the kind of weapon issued to people expected to control, not protect. Caleb zoomed in on the feed, sharpening the image until the details resolved.
“He’s wearing a collar,” he said as the band at the boy’s throat came into focus. Black. Functional. No ornament. My attention locked on it instantly.
I felt sick.
I knew what it was.
Caleb rewound the footage. “Interesting,” he said, scrubbing back a few seconds and letting it play again at half speed. The kid moved with intent, checking left and right, cutting his profile behind trunks, using the trees as cover, the way you’re taught when you expect to be watched. He edged toward some unknown perimeter in small increments, testing the line without committing, until he took one step too far—and it hit. Anyone would miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for: a fraction of a second where his shoulders locked, breath snagging, a flinch he crushed down.
My pulse kicked hard, a violent spike that had nothing to do with the room, and for a second it wasn’t a plan so much as a surge—heat and pressure climbing my spine, narrowing my vision until all that existed was the collar and the line he couldn’t cross. Every part of me leaned forward, already closing the distance, already calculating how fast I could get there and how many bodies I’d have to put down to reach him. Break the perimeter. Kill the relay. Rip the collar off. If it took bone and blood to do it, then so be it. The sequence stacked in my head faster than I could breathe, brutal, efficient, unstoppable.
Too far.
I locked it down hard, dragging control back in by force, choking the impulse before it could turn into action.
Caleb leaned in. “Range, signal, and power. If we kill the relay—or flood or blind it—we can spoof his position and keep the system reading him in bounds. Then we cut the collar and extract.”
I knew the system. Not this hardware, but the way it taught compliance through pain, escalating in measured increments until the body learned before the mind had time to question it.
I went very still.
I could feel Caleb’s attention shift to me. “You with me, Novak?”
I kept my eyes on the screen. “It’s not just distance,” I said, grabbing back all the control I could find. “There’ll be layers. Distance first. Then, there is an escalation in pain if they test it. They won’t just let him walk out. They’re hard to remove, built to resist anything short of dedicated tools—hardened locking mechanism, probably keyed to the system as well as physical restraint.”
“You’ve seen this before.”
“Something close.”
“Okay, well, we’ll need to factor in bolt cutters, or a cutting torch if it’s reinforced...” he rubbed a hand over his face, and I heard the rasp of two-day stubble. “…even then, you risk triggering a failsafe if it’s wired into the relay. There are bolt cutters in the storage area, but no cutting torch that I know of.”
On the screen, Noah caught my attention as he edged back inside the boundary, shoulders tight, breathing shallow, learning the line without needing to see it. Conditioning in real time. Another guard approached his position, grabbed his shoulder. We didn’t have audio at that point, but I could see the larger man was asking questions, and the way the teenager tried to laugh things off, and then the bigger guy put an arm over his shoulder. Seemed like the teenager had been successful in making his excursion seem innocent.
Good play.
“…thinking we surveil for five days, work out security rotations, and I’ll get into their systems and see what I can find.” Caleb was still talking, and I tuned back in.
“You can hack them without them knowing?”
He smirked and cracked his knuckles. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
I nodded, and when Noah finally left that camera position, I backed out of the room. “I need to… I… I’ll find bolt cutters.”
“Are you okay?” Caleb asked with a frown.
“I’m good,” I responded.Liar.
