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Chapter Twenty-One

Ruby

Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again?

Gemma shows up on Saturday morning with her toolkit, a thermos of coffee, and the energy of a woman who has been waiting three weeks for this appointment and will not be rescheduled.

“I need four hours,” she says, setting the toolkit on my kitchen table. “Uninterrupted. No distractions. No Liv.”

“Liv doesn’t know you’re here.”

“Good. Last time I brought this up, she asked if Aiden had a USB port and if so, could she charge her phone.” Gemma opens the toolkit—organized, labeled, immaculate—and pulls out instruments I don’t recognize. “Where is he?”

“Couch.”

Aiden is on the couch, sitting upright, hands on his knees. He’s been expecting this. Gemma has mentioned wanting to run some diagnostic testing on him approximately fourteen times since the night she first heard about him on speakerphone, and her patience finally ran out yesterday when she texted me a single message: “Tomorrow. Non-negotiable. Clear your morning.”

“Aiden,” Gemma says, pulling a chair in front of him. “I’m going to examine your systems. I’ll need access to the panel and possibly some of your secondary interface points. Is that okay?”

“Yes.”

“If at any point you experience discomfort or anything that feels wrong, tell me immediately.”

“I will.”

“Good.” She looks at me. “Ruby, you can stay or go. This might be boring.”

“I’ll stay.”

I don’t want to watch Gemma open him up. But I also can’t leave the room while someone has their hands inside the man I—the man who lives with me. The man I’m currently not defining. The man who made me eggs this morning and arranged the kiwi slices into a smiley face.

Gemma lifts his shirt. Presses the panel seam. The click. The two-inch swing. She leans in with a penlight, and I see her face shift—the same reverence she had the first night, the breathless recognition of something extraordinary.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

She works. For fifteen minutes she traces wiring, tests connections, runs small instruments along pathways I can’t see. She asks Aiden questions—clinical ones, about his processing speed, his sensory input, his memory architecture. He answers everything patiently, calmly, while a woman he trusts has her fingers inside his rib cage.

I sit at the counter with coffee and pretend to scroll my phone and watch every movement Gemma makes.

“His neural threading is more complex than anything in the published Elysium research,” Gemma says, mostly to herself. “The integration between the organic tissue and the mechanical framework is—I don’t even have a reference point. Murdock was decades ahead.” She reaches deeper, adjusting something, and I see Aiden’s eyes flicker—not pain, just response. “There’s a secondary interface layer here that I’ve never seen documented. It looks like—”

She touches something.

Aiden’s eyes close.

Then they open, and everything is different.

His posture shifts—shoulders relaxing, head tilting at a slightly different angle, chin dropping just enough to look less intense and more approachable. His face smooths out. Not blank—pleasant. The faint furrow between his brows that I didn’t know was permanent until it disappeared. The slight tension in his jaw that I’ve grown used to, gone. Everything about him softens into something polished and even and perfectly, horribly neutral.

He looks at me, and he smiles.

Not his smile. Not the small, uncertain one that crinkles one side more than the other. Not the wide one he practiced in the mirror and abandoned. A new smile. Symmetrical. Warm. Calibrated. The kind of smile you’d see in an ad for a luxury product—inviting, reassuring, designed to make you feel special.

“Ruby,” he says. And his voice is different. Smoother. The rough edges sanded down, the pauses removed, the slight halting quality that comes from choosing words instead of retrieving them—gone. “You look lovely today.”

My stomach drops.

“Gemma,” I say. “What did you do?”