̷T̷E̷N

"... And how do you feel?"

On top of a stack of wooden pallets, Elodie was still struggling to catch her breath. His voice pierced the whine that clouded her hearing. Through the slats of her fingers, she saw Connor's shadow shift. Elodie's hair was mussed, her jeans ripped and grass stained, and she had the metal taste of blood on her tongue, having bitten her lip on impact when her tackled her to the ground.

How did she feel? Elodie didn't know how to answer that. Not truthfully, at least. She could hardly admit the truth, that she was scared, confused. Worst of all, that she was embarrassed beyond belief. She'd almost died. The androids had gotten away. Connor had failed.

All of which had been Elodie's fault.

His fingers were still braced against her pulse, and both their eyes fell to his arm. Connor dropped it to his side.

"Fine. I'm ... Yeah, I'm fine."

"Is that what they call fine up at Cyberlife HQ?"

Hank had swiped a pack of cigarettes off a beat cop and was making his way to an empty box in earnest. Half-smoked, he let the one in his mouth fall to the damp concrete, snuffing it under the heel of his shoe.

"Lieutenant, I'd advise you not to chain smoke, as it exacerbates—"

"Yeah, because I'm the posterchild of health."

"In some cases, secondhand smoke was found to be deadlier than active smoking." Connor said. "At least, that's what my brief search indicated."

A scowl bunched the skin of Hank's face. He looked from his new cigarette, to the pair of them, huffed, pushed a hand through his hair and squelched off down the alleyway.

Connor glanced over his shoulder to watch, waiting until Hank's lumbering figure had disappeared before attending to her. Elodie struggled to meet his gaze. Behind the forced neutrality that his programming begged, she thought she saw a hint of frustration.

No, she was imagining things. Seeing her own thoughts of herself reflecting back at her. They warned them about this at Cyberlife, the danger of letting your imagination run away from you. Androids were a reflection of humans, nothing more, nothing less.

"Follow the light with your eyes."

"I know. I've done this before." Elodie said, her posture hunched.

She blushed at how abrupt she'd spoken, though for some reason, she could've sworn it made him relax.

Connor held up his fingers and the tip glowed a cold shade of blue.

Up, down, up, down.

He prompted her again with the question of how she felt as she dutifully followed his fingers, swaying hypnotically. Internally, she groaned. Her eyes hurt. Her head hurt. She wanted out of whatever nightmare she'd unwittingly wandered into. Back to the safety of her bubble. Her cozy, claustrophobic life.

"I'm ok. Really."

Side to side to side to side ...

White cleared her vision in the space of a blink. A steady beeping filled her ears, like the sound of a heart rate monitor. A crescendo, then silence.

White to black, then back again: no longer in the alley, but somewhere else entirely. She knew without thinking that she was in her office. But the blinds were drawn, and she was forward, tapping frantically with the end of a ballpoint, then chewing the metal cap, cold against her tongue, and all of the sudden her heart leaped high in her throat, because the knob turned, and the door swung open and ...

The light flashed.

Elodie gasped, rocking forward and reaching to steady herself. She found his chest. The material of his blazer bunched, cool grey against the white of her knuckles. A wool blend, silk lined, she felt a slip between her fingers.

They had been this close when he had saved her, but the finer details had been lost in the flood of adrenaline. She was not immune to marveling at the replication of presence. The facilitation of human warmth, a beating mechanical heart, not heard or felt but understood. Or was that her? The skin of his neck rippled with the fine grain of her own, rising and falling with the rhythm of a simulated breath.

Their eyes met, and to her surprise, she found him anything but neutral. Connor may have been advanced, but Elodie had a practiced eye for the passive vacancy, the 'standby mode' which washed androids clean of any true semblance to humanity. For a hair width of time, though, the mask slipped, and something assumed its place. Something like internal strife.

Why did she get the feeling that he'd seen exactly what she had?

"I'm sorry ..."

She pulled her hand away, as though it stung, and fumbled herself back to the edge of the pallet. Connor ignored her. As though in an attempt to autocorrect himself, his posture snapped in place, almost like a reversion to factory settings. Rising, he took a good step back, and trained his gaze miles away from her, straight into the brick wall at her back. Hank, reappearing in the aftermath, having missed the interaction but never one to overlook an air of awkwardness, strode towards them with a bemused smirk on his lips.

"Tell me I'm interrupting something. It'd really make my day."

A switch flipped in Connor, and he turned his attention to Hank. Elodie wondered if she imagined the wash of relief.

"Nope, we're all done here. Miss Kamski's all set to go home." He said with a nod.

"I'm ... What?"

Connor ignored her. "By my estimation, you have a great deal of paperwork to fill out, and I must make my reports to Cyberlife on the escape of the AX400." She certainly didn't imagine the pinch of his lip corners. Two failures in a row.

Elijah had told her to observe. He hadn't said what would happen in the event of ineffectuality.

Feeling as though she had regained some strength, Elodie pulled herself to her feet. Hank's eyes trained on her, clearly expecting some kind of a reaction. Any other day, Elodie would have neglected to give him one, but her skin was prickling. She finally knew how she felt. Angry.

"You don't make calls like that. There's no reason for me to go home."

"You have experienced a significant amount of stress today. By my estimations, it's recommended that you take the rest of the day to process these events, as they may have a traumatic effect on your psyche."

Elodie flinched. Was he really weaponizing her accident against her? She felt a flare of annoyance that she'd entrusted him with this fact. What had she been thinking. What use did an android have for sympathy?

Hank seemed equally perturbed. He narrowed his eyes at Connor, shaking his head slowly. "What, are you a shrink now?"

"I'm simply following the best advice."

Elodie felt her ears prick. "Who's best advice?"

"Doctor Cyrus Sorenson," Connor replied.

She couldn't speak. She tried to generate a reply, but all that her mind would allow was blank space. Her face grew mute as her mouth. Finally, she came back to earth. Her psychiatrist. He knew her psychiatrist.

Elijah, she realised with a start. This had to be Elijah. Some kind of test, though whether it was for Elodie or Connor to fail, only Elijah held the cards.

To her surprise, Hank stepped between them, cutting her off from Connor's intent gaze. "Now, why do I feel like you've gone and said some shit that you shouldn't have?"

Connor blinked rapidly, as though he were remembering himself. "Lieutenant, I—"

"Because it's true." Elodie said, watching him carefully. "You're monitoring me too, aren't you? You're logging observations."

"My purpose is the capture and decommission of deviants."

Elodie raised her head, her bright eyes searing into his. She could almost see him squirm. Hank, too, was taken aback. But Elodie's anger did not look like other people's. It centered her, made her forget herself, her nerves, her body. It fenced her with horse blinders. She zeroed in.

"He's sending everything back to my brother." 

"Paranoia is a natural reaction to the events you've experienced ..."

"You want me to go home so you can report to him."

Connor's mouth tightened. "This is an incorrect assumption."

"Then why are you so insistent?" She narrowed her eyes.

"Because you're a liability," he snapped.

A liability? She clutched her hand to her sternum, taking a step back. Connor's LED spiraled orange as he registered the hurt she failed to hide. The drizzle from earlier started up at that moment. Sparse, sharp droplets.

Elodie was good at one thing. Her job. This might not have been a typical Tuesday for her, but it was still her area of expertise. They could insult her on most things: her demeanor, her awkward way of speech and dressing, the searing incongruence that everyone, including Elodie, felt in her presence. But her job?

Liability meant dead weight. Dead weight meant useless. Useless meant failure. She couldn't fail. Not at this.

"Why would you say that, RK800?"

Orange light. Even Hank held his tongue. Elodie flushed, dropping her arms and taking a step towards the android.

"A question requires a direct response, RK800. Answer me. And that's an order."

Connor flinched. Connor flinched? Had he really—

"Because it's the truth." Connor said, his voice precise as a paring knife. He went for the throat. "Twice now, your involvement with this investigation had jeopardized my mission through your incompetence in the field."

"Jesus Christ, Connor. I dunno what's up with your programming," Hank said. "But you don't talk to a lady like that."

"I'm not a lady." Elodie muttered. "I'm a woman."

"I don't know why bother," Hank said.

"Twice now, your life has come at risk, overriding my objective and forcing my system to work counterintuitive to—"

"Why?" Elodie pressed.

She had pushed past Hank and now faced Connor head on. Though she was tall, he was taller, her gaze held at a cant, catching droplets on her glasses, the bottom of the rim fogged by the heat of her cheeks.

Again, the LED flashed orange. This time, however, it was nothing more than a flicker.

"The purpose of all androids is to protect and serve humanity." He said finally, with something of a note of resignation.

"And that's enough to overwrite your mission."

It was an acceptable response. A good cover. What sense did it make for an android, programmed for war, to contain such a sensitive switch for humanity? Like the worm she had found in his code, these were questions she wouldn't be able to answer, out here in the wind and the wet, no matter how much she wanted to.

A tickle at the base of her skull, like a sixth sense. With that, she knew what she had to do.

"Ok, pack it up you two." Hank rose his hands, but there was a reproach in his grey eyes, his voice hitching on a forced note of levity. "Leave the shit flinging to the expert."

"Lieutenant—"

"Nope! No!" Hank waved a hand, making for the far end of the alley. "I'm working on a migraine and I ain't talking the head kind." He stabbed a thick finger against his temple. "Lucky for the both of you, I'm calling it in. I've seen enough of this shit today." Hank grunted, casting a dark eye in the direction of the highway. "So yeah, head home Kamski. I'll deal with the paperwork."

But Elodie did not go home.

The arched shadows of the highway cut across the winter sun like the bones of a giant whale. Elodie tapped her finger against the sill of the car in practiced time. She pressed the side of her temple to the glass. Cyberlife tower rose from the sea, but from her position, the dark window frame, it could have easily appeared that the tower was drilling down.

When had her world upturned itself? How had she neglected to notice? She searched her mind back, back before Connor, before the accident, to the span of time her memory picked up from, the rim around the dark. This period was just as blurry, but in a different way. The days repeated themselves, like blank sheets on a desk calendar. She had lived for Cyberlife. There had been no Lex, only herself and the work. On occasion, Carl, and rarer, her brother.

She realised, with a sickening jolt, that the reason her mind couldn't readily recall her life was not because the accident. It was because it was not worth the recollection. She had been about as sentient as the androids she worked on. She had been nothing.

Elodie shook the thought from her mind, disturbed. If there was one positive that could be taken from the day, it was that Connor had been right. She'd experienced stress. Her mind was looping on negativity. If there were ever a time not to trust her own thoughts, it was now.

A salty gust of wind caught her on the cheek as she walked into Cyberlife HQ. She scanned her ID and headed toward the elevator. Faces passed her by, unacknowledged, blending with the low mechanical hum, the cycling announcements from the unseen speakers, and the clinical ambient glare of the lights above.

At the front desk, she inquired whether Lex was clocked-in. Yes, but he's in a meeting, said the admin android, sweeping her with polite impersonality. For how long? Long enough to send her upstairs to wait.

Her office door sighed open.

The blinds were up. The cleaner had been through at some point, fluffed the couch pillows, turned the framed photo of her and Elijah at her sixth grade science fair on an angle. She adjusted it to face her straight on. It'd taken her a while to grow into her eyes, they seemed to bug out of her head, accentuated by the tight bun of her dark hair. She held second place. Some other kid had made a model of Vesuvius, several degrees flashier than her sound-tracking robot.

In the black melanite pen cup, she found the chewed ballpoint. Picking it up, she sat at her desk, leaning back in her chair. She could feel the contours of what she had seen, but not the exact sequence itself. It had been less like experiencing a memory than watching a clip from a movie, but the pen was evidence that, at the very least, what she had seen had some basis in reality.

Elodie leaned forward, because that was what she had done. From her body language, she had been nervous, anticipating something. Someone. The blinds had been closed. Elodie adjusted them and sat back down. The main light of her office was still on, and her desk light off. This, she changed as well.

Now she was getting somewhere. She'd superimposed a grid of that night onto her surroundings, but the depth of it remained elusive. Who had she been waiting for? The question depended on when the memory had occurred. If it had happened after the accident, Lex was the obvious answer, but filling in the blanks, he felt tacked on rather than slotting into place.

"Think, Elodie, really think." She muttered, clutching kneading her forehead.

She thought. She thought about how the air had felt in that tiny snippet of a windowless past. Nothing had existed outside that room. This initially had felt like a feature of how she'd encountered it. A disembodied image with no head nor tail. But Elodie was beginning to suspect that perhaps that was literally how she had felt.

Elodie allowed this idea to manifest, and felt a sudden heat in her chest. Her stomach fluttered like the wings of a butterfly.

Nothing else had mattered but whoever was about to walk through that door.

It was like stepping into the frame of a film. At once, she was back in time. Elodie grasped the collar of her shirt and felt her lab coat bunch in her fist, nicking her badge against the point of her knuckles. The calendar on her desk read April 25, 2038.

Despite the capsule of the Cyberlife tower, in her bones, she knew it was spring. It was late at night, too. Working late was not unusual for Elodie, but there was no work on her desk.

A sheet of paper sat on her desk, folded four-ways into a neat square. Implicitly, Elodie knew that whatever was contained within had not been made by her hand. This was why she was waiting. But for whom?

The handle turned. Was she ready for it to open? She had been waiting all night. Whoever it was, she had kept herself away. Elodie was at the edge of her seat.

It was inevitable that the door opened.

And she was glad.

Elodie gasped and pushed back from her desk, knocking over her chair. The door opened. She heaved in air, the pen clattering against her desk. The light above flicked on. Elodie shielded herself. A hand met her shoulder.

"Off! Get off!" She shrieked.

"Chill, chill, Elodie, calm down." Lex said, clutching her either side. Lex. She dropped her hands but not her guard.

"Wh-What are you doing here?" The flashback, the fright, it had shocked her sense of time, however briefly, into stasis. Elodie knocked her temple with the heel of her palm. "I asked where you were at reception."

"Yeah, I was in a thing with Fredericks, but I got pulled out ..." She'd seen him two nights ago, but standing before him, he appeared a stranger, or worse, a co-worker. "What's going on? I've been calling you all day."

He had? She could've sworn her phone had been silent. Elodie pat her pocket to double check it was even on her. Lex's eyes narrowed.

Opening his mouth, he seemed to consider otherwise before backing up to close the door. Arms to chest, he lowered his voice.

"You know it's been a shitshow here, right? Bunch of androids have gone haywire. They paused all production. Davies is losing his fucking mind. And no one knows where you've been. I'm surprised you didn't get stopped on the way up."

Panic rose in her throat. "Why would anyone be asking for me?"

A familiar hardness set in Lex's brow. He sighed in resignation.

"There were still ice bergs in around Antarctica the last time he set food in here. A job. Coming from him. Did it really not set off alarm bells?"

She didn't need Lex to tell her not to trust Elijah, but it stung all the same. It was impossible to miss the little tug at the corner of his mouth. He was enjoying this. The temptation to point this out was trumped by the dread that had set in her bones.

"Lucky for you, I covered. But now, understandably, there'll probably be a couple questions about how you magically healed your appendicitis."

"Appendicitis isn't forever," she muttered.

"Are you hearing yourself right now?"

Elodie pulled from the ring of animosity that encircled Lex. He followed her with his eyes as she trailed around to the other side of her desk. There was an LED panel installed in the dark wood, near invisible to the eye. Skimming the screen, it lit bright blue. She pressed the power button on. There was a soft whir as a screen began to rise from the head of the desk.

She'd turn this on him. She'd ask him about the code. Better yet, she'd show him.

Lex scowled: "You're not even hearing me."

She ignored him and typed her Cyberlife login with the keyboard that had appeared in tandem with the screen. Turning away as she pressed enter, she grabbed her satchel from the foot of her desk and pulled out the tablet.

Her eyes lit on the screen. Access Denied.

"He's got you mixed up in something. Something deeper than you can know."

What little color she had in her face had drained. She typed her password again, slowly. The textbox shook. Access Denied.

Elodie caught her bottom lip between her fingers, pinching, warm with pain. He leered over her desk. He needed only to look down to see the error screen.

"I found a worm in the code of an android," she said, hitting the power off before he could.

"What android?"

"RK800."

His Adam's apple bobbed.

"So that's ..." Lex muttered.

"That's what?"

Her gut clenched. Somehow, she knew this wasn't about the worm.

"You know something. Did you ... Work on him?"

Lex inhaled sharply. If he worked on Connor, he'd know more about the code than she did, which would've made him a better candidate for the task of supervising. But she was beyond the point of believing this had anything to do with utility. Whatever Elodie had stumbled into, it was all part of Elijah's machinations, and Lex was a piece of that puzzle.

"If you worked on him, then you worked with me." During all the blank space. Maybe she'd been waiting in her office for him. She tried to slot him in place, like he was chess piece, aiming for mate.

Had it been you? She searched his gaze as he straightened up.

"We can't talk about this."

"Why not?"

"That would be talking about it," Lex said. "I'm being kept back because of this deviant shit. Go home. You're exhausted. Don't wait up. When I get back, I'll wake you. I'll explain everything. I mean, everything."

She didn't believe him. Elodie opened her mouth to object, but he waved his hand.

"Seriously, Elodie." He gestured to the ceiling, to his ear. "You don't know what you're playing with."

But you do, she thought.

You know, and what's more, you've kept it from me. With a shiver, she realised how naive she had been. Elodie had invited this man into her life. Into her home. Her bed. She had slept beside him, all the while without the knowledge that they may have been closer than the passing rebuff she'd given him, long before they'd started dating.

How long had she blamed herself for the echo that permeated their interactions? The artificial taste on her tongue, that she'd misplaced as an internal fault. An inability to be normal. Deep in her gut, she knew that she had not been waiting on the other end of the door for him.

Then who?

An inkling as they passed her couch made her pause. Elodie feigned a glance back at her desk. "I'll catch up in a second." She waited until he was out in the corridor before she kneeled at the foot of her couch. Barely visible, the slip of white was barely thicker than a paper cut, sandwiched between the seat pillow and the couch's base frame.

Crumpled, she turned over the paper in her hand. She could see the ink's shadow bleeding through. Under any circumstances, Elodie would have waited. Maybe she would've even called Elijah. Somehow, she had taken a turn into wonderland. Part of her doubted, however small, tensed with the thought that not opening it might render the paper as ephemeral as the flashback.

Quickly, she peeled it open, enough to spy a sliver of what lay inside.

For a second, she couldn't make sense of it. All she saw were the rivulets of blue, the perfect structure and symmetry. It took her a minute to realise she was looking at an iris. It took her another to register it was not a photo, but in fact, a sketch.

Whoever had put it there hadn't wanted it found. Except, perhaps, by she.