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His breathing was rhythmic, filling the small space, and it grated against my nerves precisely because there was nothing wrong with it. He sprawled shirtless, one arm hanging off the side of the bed with his knuckles grazing the floor, the blanket kicked down to his waist, resting carelessly, in bulk.

Even in the dark, the rise and fall of his chest demanded attention. Shadows clung to the heavy definition of his muscles, following the jagged map of scars that traced his ribs, built with a density that spoke of street fights rather than gym sessions. My eyes dragged over him against my will. There was a raw, unpolished violence to his frame even unconscious. He looked rough, like he had been carved with a dull knife instead of a chisel, and the brute vitality of him pulled at something dark in my gut, something no drill had installed and no manual covered. He took up so much space he seemed to be consuming the oxygen in the room, and I lay there going quietly lightheaded on the deficit.

I closed my eyes and tried to regulate my heart rate. Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for four.

The box breathing was standard issue. It had held through penalty shootouts, board inspections, and every manufactured crisis this building had ever run me through. It did not hold now, because every time I inhaled, I smelled him. He hadn’t showered before bed. The air tasted of his musk, abrasive and intoxicating.

I threw the covers off. Sleep was impossible.

I sat up, and the motion sensors picked up the movement and brightened the floor lights by ten percent, because even at four in the morning the building liked to see what its property was doing.

Leander shifted. He grunted something unintelligible into his pillow but didn’t wake.

I grabbed my toiletry kit and stepped into the bathroom.

The design was cruel, a glass box in the corner of the room with walls made of transparent smart-glass. When the door locked, the glass was supposed to frost over for privacy, but the frost was thin, turning the occupant into a silhouette. A shadow show. Somebody had sat in a design meeting and selected that exact opacity, enough to imply privacy, not enough to grant any.

I slid the door shut and locked it. The glass hummed and turned a milky, translucent white.

The mirror over the sink was harsh, showing every pore and every flaw. Dark circles bruised the skin under my eyes, my hair stood up in chaotic, messy angles, and the total effect was of equipment left out overnight, which was accurate.

But my gaze went straight to the neck.

I reached up and pulled the collar of the sleep shirt down. A strangled noise trapped itself in my throat.

Leander was right. It was a violent, blooming purple. The shape of his teeth was clearly visible against the skin of my throat, angry and possessive.

I touched it, wincing as the tender skin throbbed under my fingertips.

A memory flashed. The rough concrete against my back in the heat of the tunnel. His grip on my jaw, forcing my chin up. Look at me.

I splashed cold water on my face. Hard. “Get it together,” I whispered to the reflection.

The reflection declined, it did not look like the face on the recruitment posters. Officially the asset did not have a 04:00. Officially the asset achieved sleep onset in under seven minutes and held it for eight uninterrupted hours. The brochure version of me did everything cleanly, on schedule. The thing looking back at me from the mirror had residue.

There had been a boy in a Sector schoolyard once. I knew it like I knew my off-foot conversion rate, a fact in a file, not from my memory. Gravel, possibly. A bell. Children being loud for free, burning calories on noise nobody was grading. Then men with stopwatches, because the boy’s sprint times had broken a curve he didn’t know he was being plotted on, and small children are cheaper to rebuild than grown ones. By daylight the frame held, and the daylight math stayed clean. You can’t miss data that was never backed up.

At 04:00 the math carried a remainder. The boy would have slept. Boys sleep sideways, wastefully, limbs flung out and blankets kicked to the floor, like the man four feet from my bed slept, and somewhere between that schoolyard and this mirror the setting had been located and removed. I watched my own posture correct itself in the glass while I thought it, shoulders squaring, chin finding its angle, the machine assembling its photograph for an audience of one insomniac and a bathroom mirror, and I could not switch it off. There was no version of me that stopped performing, not alone, not at this hour, not naked in a locked glass box at the bottom of the night. The performance was the product, and the product was the only part of that boy anyone had elected to keep.

Which left the bruise.

Everything else on this body had been issued, every inch logged, photographed, and filed as property of the State. The mark on my neck was the first entry on that inventory nobody had authorized. No requisition form, no signature, just teeth. In a day or two a physio with a tablet would find it and log a defect in the finish, and I would stand still for the photograph, as I stood still for everything, but alone at 04:00 I could not make the word defect settle, because defects didn’t throb like that, and equipment didn’t stand in front of mirrors in the dark pressing its own damage just to feel it answer.

I stripped off my shirt. I needed a shower. This feeling had to be scalded off before training began at 06:00.

I reached for the shower controls.

Knock. Knock.

I jumped, spinning around.

Leander stood on the other side of the glass wall.

The frost blurred his features, but I knew that silhouette, the broad shoulders blocking out the dim light of the dorm, the messy hair. He leaned against the glass watching the shadow of my naked body like it was already his to inspect.

“You’re loud,” his voice came through the glass, muffled but clear.

Loud. I ran the word back through the last five minutes and found nothing to attach it to except a running tap and one strangled noise I had believed was private. He had been awake. For how much of it, there was no way to establish.