Page 15

Not yet.

The mag-locks release down the corridor with their familiar throated thunk, and I take my place at the painted line where they make us wait—a row of drawn marks on the floor like a runner’s starting block, each Omega assigned a number, the numbers funneling us through the gate in an order the system can track and tally.

I follow my number toward the far end of the hall, that other side of my playground, and I let my mind drift loose the way it likes to while my body runs the choreography on its own.

I think about the Doc’s endgame, because I cannot stop thinking about the Doc’s endgame, which is itself a data point I dislike intensely.

He’s hired.

That much is plain. Slotted into the same haunted chair the institute keeps refilling, the latest clever man sent to take my measure. But the previous tailors who came to fit me for a diagnosis were useless—dull instruments, every one,and I amused myself by playing badly enough to keep them entertained and well enough to keep them losing. Sport. Cardio for the mind.

This one is different. This one has potential.

I don’t like potential…

Potential is unfinished. Potential is a craft project left half-built on the shelf, and half-built things itch at me until I either complete them or take them apart to see what they’re made of.

I reach the end of my number, the far corner of the rec hall, and the thought drops out of my head all at once.

Because there’s no one here.

I pause at the boundary of the empty quarter and let the wrongness settle over my skin like a draft. The rest of the hall churns behind me—the murmurs, the wet sounds from the corners, the scent-soup thickening toward its weekly crescendo—but this whole side, my side, has been vacated.

No clustered patients. No prowling Alphas.

And, most telling of all, not a single security guard, when there is always a guard, when I personally rate two at a minimum, when the staffing chart treats my proximity like weather.

I pout.

Not from loneliness—loneliness is a feeling that requires wanting company, and I gave that up around the same time I gave up regret. I pout because the absence is a puzzle missing its frame. It’s as though the quarter has been quietly evacuated for the safety of the evacuated, cordoned by instinct rather than instruction, and I cannot for the life of me grasp?—

My eyes lock onto the reason.

He’s parallel to me, all the way across the dead zone, set against the far wall like a stain that won’t scrub out. Sitting. Just sitting, one knee drawn up, a brown glass bottle loose in his grip, and looking at me.

Not the way the others look.

Not the wary, sidelong, plinth-respecting glance the room has trained itself to give me.

He looks at me the way a man looks at the single piece of art that justifies the whole museum—slow and total and unhurried, drinking the sight of me in like he has all the time in the world and intends to spend every second of it on the curve of my face.

Obsession isn’t a strong enough word.

Obsession times a thousand, maybe, with interest compounding by the heartbeat.

I blink.

Make myself look away from him, sweep the hall, and the second piece of the puzzle clicks into its frame.

Everyone has migrated.

Bodily, completely, to the opposite end. The couples rutting in the far corners have gone uncharacteristically discreet, swallowing their moans, keeping their grunts low and apologetic, as though noise itself might disturb the man’s peace and noise has consequences. The orderlies are clustered at the exits.

And the guards—my guards, the institute’s proudest hardware—are wearing the specific, sweat-sheened expression of men who have decided that whatever happens in this quarter is happening without their participation.

They’re frightened.

All of them.