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You keep telling yourself the body will give you a warning. A tickle in the throat, the soft knock of fatigue at the back of the skull, a whisper of sense — go lie down. But as you cut through the corridor’s white geometry, all you get is the antiseptic tang of the scrubbers and the wail of a distant vent like a kettle that never boils. The facility hums its sleepless hymn. You hum back by moving.
You have your tablet clamped to your chest the way some people hold faith. Wendy’s empathy metrics float in your head in tidy blue bars. She sat with Curly for forty minutes today, stroking the seam of a toy rabbit like a rosary and answering questions without bristling. That should mean something. It does. You keep repeating that until it sounds true.
A guard leans, ornamental, against a wall where plaster has been shaved raw and resealed. Another set of boots passes in counterpoint. The mold scrubber waddles in his bulbous bio-suit, nozzle hissing a milky spray into a seam where the ceiling meets the hall, visor reflecting you like a funhouse oval. He doesn’t glance up. You’re not a Sylvia. You’re not Kirsh. Your badge opens doors, but not mouths.
You sneeze. It bursts out, small, unheroic, a hiccup with ambition. It catches the bio-suited man’s visor for a split second. He keeps spraying his seam.
You tell yourself you’ll rest this weekend. Tomorrow. You’ll seal yourself into your narrow quarters, put your tablet face down, consume something salty and stupid from the vending subroutine and pretend your body isn’t made of unhelpful mammal. Your nose stings. Your eyes water. The second sneeze arrives like a punctuation mark you didn’t authorize. You fish for a tissue and come up with a thin square the texture of apology.
The hybrids are progressing. That is the sentence of the week. “Progressing” is a word with room around it. You plan to occupy that room with ethics, with caveats, with care. You have practiced saying it in your head with the precise ratio of optimism to rigor that makes you sound like a person who belongs.
Outside Kavalier’s door, you pause. The door doesn’t pause for you. It blinks green and widens like a pupil, and you are admitted into his gravity.
Boy’s room is a self-contained solar system and he is all its planets. On the left: the laboratory flank, a cluttered bench with a microscope like a small god, slides in little plastic coffins, a scatter of synthetic parts that might be future children or past mistakes.
Behind the bench: two cabinets, a glass display with neat rows of whisper-white fingers and forearm shells and a jaw shaped like a question.
In the center: the communications desk at the far end, dual monitors surrounded by lamps with gut-amber shades, comms device sleeping with its red pulse, stacks of notebooks that lean like exhausted men, a scattering of books shedding dog-ears. Glass planets cluster in a tray, glossy as hard candy. The one he actually touches lies by his bare heel: a Saturn the size of a fist, matte leather skin scuffed where it’s been bounced.
On the right: the sleeping area — beige bedding, expressionist monkeys and androids scowling down from their frames — and a bathroom corner that pretends at privacy with a single glass wall and then loses its nerve. The reading nook squats beside it, black leather chair, narrow cabinet, low table with the persistent sprawl of a white LEGO set mid-ascension, pieces waiting like teeth. A mic leans on its stand there, a thin-jawed thing, as if it’s been listening to children through the walls.
He is where he often is when no one has told him not to be: at the communications desk, one foot curled to nudge the keyboard with his toes. A pajama shirt too thin to be official, washed to a softness that looks like arrogance. He’s building a white tower out of building pieces with one hand while his eyes flick across one of the monitors — data, maps, the slow river of an encrypted feed. He doesn’t look up when you enter. He never needs to. The room knows to move with him, and you are an object the room has permitted.
His orange bottle sits by the left lamp like a traffic cone among the planets. You wonder what it’s for. On the other desk, the one that twins this one, more notes, a few books whose titles won’t confess, and a pen bleeding black into a napkin as if it’s been tried for witchcraft.
You stand with your tablet, ready for your report:
“Sir, Wendy’s empathy tests—”
You sneeze.
He doesn’t look. His mouth pulls, a small vertical twist that could be thought or disdain. The LEGO tower grows a rung. His toes nudge the keyboard to dismiss something you aren’t allowed to see.
“—are progressing,” you resume, your voice doing its best imitation of professional even as it hollows in the middle. “She tolerated—”
You sneeze again, a couple of fast ones chained like a bad decision. Your eyes blur. You feel suddenly ten years old, small in a classroom, holding a test you didn’t study for.
His gaze cuts over without his head moving. A sideways, flat knife. The disdain in it is clean as new glass.
“If you intend to snot all over my office,” he says, “I recommend aiming up. The ceiling tiles are cheaper than the floor.”
Your cheeks heat, ridiculous. You bite the inside of your cheek until iron blooms. “I’m—sorry.” It sounds like a weak offering to a god you don’t believe in.
You sneeze directly through the apology.
He sighs with the put-upon gravitas of a prince forced to sit through a civic parade. His fingers don’t pause. “Make it quick.”
You flip the tablet to the right page. The blue bars swim. The tilt of the world shifts left. You compensate. It shifts right. You say something about Curly and the toy rabbit, about latency decreasing, about language emerging softer around edges.
“Fine,” the prodigy says. “Children who were dying are no longer dying and they are also polite about it. We’ll throw a parade when they stop glaring at me. Anything else?”
You hate that he can make you smile when your mouth feels like paper. You don’t. You clamp down. The room glides half an inch. Your feet have been good feet, steady and earnest, but now they fail you like actors who drop their lines.
You try to drag up the next metric, but the tablet sheet fuzzes, the numbers congeal into a broad, friendly gray. Your nose is a faucet. The world tilts again and does not tilt back. You have time to think: oh, this is what it feels like when a body outsources you.
You have time to be embarrassed about how you will fall.
Then the floor rushes up and stops your performance.
***
The bed in your quarters is the nicest lie the facility tells. It promises: here is a rectangle where you are someone beyond your ID badge. Now your body is butter poured into that lie and it has hardened there, stuttering with chills. You wake into fever’s underwater light, the edges of your world wearing a slight fuzz the way old television images did.
Your ceiling is the same ceiling it always is. Your room is the same narrow arrangement of you: metal shelf, two drawers that never glide smoothly, a wall screen you often use because the feeds in your head are louder than any film. There is a glass of water on your bedsidetable with a face of condensation. There is your tablet, face down as if ashamed.
And there is a voice. Far too entertained to be a hallucination:
“So many toys.”
You jolt. The jolt costs more than you have. It saps the lines from your muscles and rearranges your head into a bell. He is leaning against your cabinet like the cabinet belongs to him, which — by several definitions — it does. He’s half in shadow because your light has decided to be gentle and his shirt is different from before, soft slate, sleeves pushed to his elbows. His curls have been fingered back. His posture says he found the chair boring.
He is flipping through your drawer with the anthropological detachment of someone classifying butterflies. A clatter of hair ties. The rasp of paper. The creak of a hinge that’s been asked to be quiet and refuses. His hand pauses. He lifts something out with two fingers like a curiosity caught and pinned.
Purple. Silicone. Harmless as an eggplant and twice as rude in this lighting.
You stare, then try to stare less. Your face goes from fever to furnace. Your mouth opens to say a word that will save you and finds nothing but air and regret.
He assesses it with the same critical tilt he gives to a new instrument. His eyebrows hop, a boy’s delight cutting clean through the ruler-straight line of his mouth. He hums. It isn’t exactly a laugh. It’s a breath with opinions.
“Lonely?” he asks, not looking at you. His voice doesn’t climb. He flicks the little switch on the side of the vibrator with a thumb, a brief, insectile buzz, then toggles it off and sets the thing back in its nest with the same care he uses for scalpel blades. “Too bad.” He shuts the drawer with his hip. “All that potential wasted on plastic.”
Your throat tries on a laugh and rejects it. You croak something that intends to be “don’t,” or “please,” or “I wasn’t—” but the syllables collapse and are born again as a cough you didn’t order. The cough drags a shiver through you. Your skin tightens everywhere, goosebumps running to the edges.
“Next time,” Kavalier says, tone bright with false instruction. “Take a sick day. I would hate for the facility to drown beneath your contribution.”
He gestures, lazy, to an invisible puddle as if he expects it to wave back. “You sneezed on my floor. I’m not precious about floors, but I am, broadly, anti-mucus.”
“Did you—” Your voice scrapes. You swallow, which feels like pulling a chain through your neck. “Did you carry me?”
He snorts, offended on behalf of physics. He has already moved on from the drawer, lifting a book from your shelf, flipping, not reading.
“Of course not. I made Atom carry you.” He glances up, and the corner of his mouth finds its private joke. “I did tuck you in. And I gave you—” his hand makes a tiny circle toward your temple, as if demonstrating where his ghost has already been. “—a goodnight kiss. You didn’t wake up. I assumed you were dead with… whatever is wrong with you.”
You do a complicated thing with your expression that aims to contain horror, thanks, and the animal urge to eject your soul. You fail, but the effort distracts you from the fever’s small shakes. You push yourself up on your elbows and the bed lurches under your weight. Your head is a bruise. The sheet clings. Your hair has decided to explore new topologies.
He watches you struggle like a field researcher observing a beetle right itself. There is disdain, amusement, something else. There is also a precise attention that makes your skin buzz as if the purple vibrator never got turned off.
“You should have called in sick,” he repeats, because he enjoys being right almost as much as he enjoys being obeyed. “Or called someone. Kirsh, Dame, perhaps. Or Arthur, if you want to be tutted at.” He drops the book back into place. It lands exactly where it had been.
“Instead, you attempted to die in my office, which was uncreative of you.”
You pull the blanket higher because the room has decided to be cold like winter. “Wendy’s scores,” you say, because the part of you that is a report refuses to be buried with the rest. “Her—”
He holds up a hand and flops it at the wrist, as if dismissing a fly.
“Yeah, yeah. They’re fine. She’s fine. I am aware.” He nudges your tablet with a knuckle. It skids a short, obedient distance. “What I am less aware of is why you would choose to liquefy in my presence rather than in your own bed, which, as we can all see, is a shrine to personal efficiency.”
He has no right to sound fond. He sounds fond anyway. A thin strand of warmth sneaks into your chest and ties itself in a confused knot with the fever.
“I didn’t choose,” you say, and your voice cracks on the choo- of the word. He tilts his head, watching the break like a geologist admiring a new type of rock. There is the smallest softness around his eyes, the ghost of sympathy that refuses to show itself fully.
“Of course you did,” he says, but his tone is absent-minded now. He has turned from your shelf to you and from you to your bed, which he regards with the bored respect one grants a colleague. Then he lets himself drop with a controlled collapse, onto the edge of your mattress.
The bed dips. Your world shifts toward him like an offering. He doesn’t ask if he can sit. He never does. He takes the nearest surface and renames it his chair.
“Sleep,” he says. There is an edge filed off the word. He doesn’t look at you while he says it. He looks at the wall as if the wall might argue. “You’re of limited use when you’re… wet.”
You hate the smirk on his face when he says the last word. You should tell him to get out. You should pull dignity over yourself like another blanket and tuck it tight. But the fever makes choices for you:
“I—” you begin, but your body doesn’t let you finish.
You sink. The pillow finds the back of your head like it had been there waiting for you all day long. Your boss makes a small, irritated sound, like someone who bought front-row tickets and discovered the theater insists on intermission. It dilutes into something like a sigh as he slides one palm to the edge of your blanket and tucks it back over your shoulder with two fingers, precise, as if the blanket is a boundary he knows how to calibrate.
Your eyes close because your eyes decide to. The world narrows to the breath at the edge of your mouth and the prickle of heat at the back of your neck. You are almost gone when you feel — light, hesitant, almost an error — the brush of fingers against your forehead. Not a test. Not the cold press of a sensor. A touch that thinks it has a right to be soft.
He could lie later and say he didn’t. He could lie now and say it was to move hair from your eyes because it was blocking his view. He doesn’t say anything. The touch is there and then it is not and your body, treacherous, keeps it anyway.
“Thank you,” you murmur, and open your eyes again, your gaze searching for him as he gets up from your bed.
He watches the gratitude land. It irritates him. It pleases him. You see both. He lifts the book again and then doesn’t read it, mouth chewing the edge of a thought.
“You said something about Wendy.” he says. “I want specifics when you aren’t leaking. The numbers are adequate, but I’m bored of adequate.” His gaze ticks to your forehead like a magnet feels a nail. “And you will not show up in my office if your body decides to betray you again. I am not a nurse.”
“No,” you say. “You’re just a boy.”
His eyes flash, quick and hot. Some men would take it as an insult. He takes it as a crown, but you still freeze, waiting for him to fire you on the spot. Instead he tilts his head and says:
“And you’re a person who forgot that people are made of meat. Go limp when asked. Sleep when told.”
There is obedience in your bones you didn’t sign for. It moves your head in a small nod that feels less like compliance and more like gravity reasserting itself.
At the door, he hesitates. It is small. You could miss it if you didn’t know how to watch him. He turns back. The disdain is there, a habit. The other thing is there too, unpracticed as a left hand.
“You work with children who once were dying, who are now very complicated.” His tone makes the word elegant. “Do not become complicated yourself.”
“I’ll try,” you say. It is a vow a sick person makes.
He nods like a general who has delegated in a way that satisfies him and touches the panel. The door begins to open. As it does, he stops it with his palm and glances back again, as if a thought has hooked him by the collar.
“Your… toy,” he says, a grin creeping it’s way to his lips. “If you find the need to use it next time.” His grin flashes, quick and mean and bright. “Call me.”
“Get out,” you say, and it comes out softer than you intend, but the defiance surprises even you. What surprises you more is you’re not as offended as you should be.
“Sleep,” he repeats, because he likes to end the scene with his word. “And do not snot all over my office again. Do it somewhere cheaper.”
You lie there with the imprint of a hand on your temple that isn’t there and the heat of a touch that didn’t demand, didn’t measure, didn’t brand. Your body, traitor, remembers the precise weight of the blanket being tugged, the accuracy of a tuck that felt like care because it was care dressed as order. You are not naive enough to mistake this for goodness. You are not cruel enough to pretend it doesn’t matter.