Gray's shoulders stiffen. He shoots Zef a baleful look. "What're you on about?"

"I'm not leaving you to fight Rylan alone."

The deadened look to Gray's eyes flashes with something steely. "Not asking you to stay."

"And I'm not asking you to let me. I'm not going. You can't force me to, either. So if you want to face her, you face her with me. Or—" Zef swallows the lump in his throat. "Or you can run away with me."

Gray sneers, but for the first time, Zef thinks he can see through it. Nothing but a guard. A veneer. "Don't gimme that romantic horse shit, darlin'. You 'n me both know it weren't real."

"It was for me," Zef says. He sees those words alight in Gray's heart like a fledgling sparrow taking seeds out of his open palm. Zef pushes on. "I gave my dad emergency money to buy train tickets out of here in case everything with Rylan went to hell. I asked him to buy four of them. One's yours."

Quietly. "Fuck off..."

"I'm serious. All you have to do is abandon this stupid vengeance plot and come with me."

For a long, long time, Gray stares at him. It's a look two parts assessing and two parts cornered animal. Zef's gamble hinged upon Gray's protective nature overriding his hatred for Rylan. He didn't want Zef here when they clashed, that much was clear. He'd been unsubtly pushing Zef away. Hoping if he hurt Zef hard enough, maybe Zef would leave and he wouldn't have to feel guilty about dragging him through this mess. Or, at least, Zef thinks so. Hopes he's not wrong.

For Zef's gamble to work, Gray has to believe he'll stay.

Gray stares at him, and slowly, subtly, the tension in his frame relaxes.

He says, "No."

"No?"

"You ain't about to help me kill Rylan," he says with conviction. "You can just about drink and punch a screw, but murderin' ain't in you."

Zef's voice pitches high. All the testosterone in the world can't stop it from cracking. "You're willing to bet both our lives on that?"

"Mine. Not yours. You're leaving. Get outta here, Zef."

Zef feels cold in all his extremities. Ollie not answering Zef's calls. Ollie giving him short, one-word answers to all his questions. Ollie pushing and pushing and— "I'm not leaving you!"

"Yes you fucking are, now go!" Gray punctuates his words by shoving Zef towards the door.

The knock to his chest winds him, but he seizes the opportunity of their proximity to grab Gray's hands. Gray freezes. It's the first time Zef touches him without asking.

Gray says, "Don't."

"She can't find you if you're halfway across the country."

"Zef, I'm warnin' ya—"

"You asked me what things I wanted to do that'd make me happy, well I'm adding one more to the list. I want you to come with me."

"Shut up!" Gray wrenches free. Chest heaving, he says, "You still don't get it, do you? I can't just run and hide, she'll find me—"

"So we keep running—"

"She's under my skin," Gray screams, the sound rough as a rake dragged over concrete. "I can't escape this as easy as you, and you don't get to ask me to try like I haven't already. For years. I gave you all the rest. All the other things you asked for."

Zef's heart sinks. "And there's nothing you want that I could give you in return?"

With finality, in a wretched voice bursting with horrible feeling, Gray says, "The only thing I want is Rylan dead."

From the doorway, a third voice, cool and absent of emotion, says,

"Is that any way to talk about your mother?"

It's as if a wraith entered the room. The temperature drops. Or maybe that's all the blood draining out of Zef upon hearing that particular voice saying those particular words.

Rylan Archer stands in the doorway. Her face is robotically absent of feeling. Immaculately dressed in a suit like liquid mercury, she doesn't look at all like she just got off a plane.

Mother. Mother. Mother. She's Gray's mother.

All the portraits in the mansion. With a baby, a child, a little girl. Not a girl at all. Shame bleeds through Zef, appalled it took him this long, but there'd been no photos of Gray older than the age of five or six. Connecting the frilly pink dresses and bows to the Gray stood in front of him was as far-flung a reality as life on distant stars.

Gray's lips peel back from his teeth. "Zef, leave." His throaty voice, affected with cold, fails to cover a shiver of fear.

"I think he ought to stay," Rylan counters.

"She's your mother?" Zef says.

"I'd ask why Gray isn't still in that cage," Rylan muses, "but having overheard some of that conversation, I don't think I need to."

Zef's shock and uncertainty crystalize, forming an edge keen as a blade that slides through his ribs with a pain too real to keep from his face. "He's your son."

It adds context. Puts into perspective the depth of Gray's hatred, the commitment to vengeance, but it's also confusingly alien. How could she? Why would she? As Gray's handler, Zef could at least comprehend the total lack of empathy. Rylan treated her employees like tools, but her son?

She takes a step forward. Zef steps back. "I don't want him caged," Rylan says. "I want him home, safe and sound."

Gray snarls, "Zef, just go."

Zef can't go. Couldn't leave Gray before, and certainly can't now. "You gilded him full of tech you control instead of letting him transition and expect me to believe you?" Zef says

"Is that how he twisted it?" Rylan responds. "What other lies has he been telling you? I suppose he failed to mention that Project Jewel Wasp was, in part, his idea?"

"Shut up," Gray says.

"Or that he volunteered to beta test it?"

"That's not—"

"Shall I call up the footage to prove it?" Rylan says. "We worked on it together. Our passion project. She was so excited at the time."

The slipped pronoun makes Zef's heart skip a beat. The audacity of Rylan's accusations fuel an anger inside him he didn't realise he had. At the same time, he recognizes that this conversation is entirely for his benefit. He both serves as arbiter for their long-standing feud, and as a forced stalemate, because Gray won't make a move that might endanger him.

At least, not yet.

Gray doesn't meet his eyes when he says, "I didn't lie."

"You only told him the parts of the truth that were convenient," Rylan supplies.

"Fuck you." The tendons in Gray's neck stand out. "You never told me about the control chip. All those things I did, I did them for you because I—" He cuts himself off with a snarl of frustration.

"You're overreacting," Rylan says. "I only used the control chip to protect you. You knew when we installed the tech that it might make you a target for competitors—"

"And you still shackled me with it," Gray says.

"I let you shackle yourself with it because you insisted you were old enough to know what you wanted," Rylan responds. A bleed of real emotion comes through. As if noticing, Rylan touches the implant at her temple. After a moment's consideration, the light in it swirls then goes dark. Powered down. The stiff torpor of her expression unwinds into a slurry of emotion that makes Zef feel sick.

She looks, for all intents and purposes, genuinely sad.

"We were thick as thieves, once. I miss it. The time when we strived for the same stars." She sounds wistful, but it's missing something. A touch too trite.

In the wan, overcast light coming through the warehouse windows, Gray looks hollow. A ghost. "That was before I realised everything was conditional on me doing what you wanted. Before the gild," he says.

Rylan says, "I let you install the gild to respect your autonomy, but I couldn't let you endanger yourself—"

"That ain't how it happened," Gray says, the thickness of his accent coming through with his distress. It's an accent Rylan doesn't share. Did she erase that with tech, too? Or did Gray pick it up later, when he ran from her?

Rylan throws up her hands, as if giving up. "Then how did it happen? You came to me with this idea. You practically begged me to allow you to test it out and to transition. It was too much all at once. We agreed on that. We had the gild installed first and agreed you would wait for the rest. For when you were sure."

"I only stopped being sure because you kept punishing me."

"Now you're really being dramatic. How did I punish you?"

Gray's voice breaks, snapping like a violin chord. "You quit—"

He cuts himself off. Can't finish. Zef finds it hard to watch. Feels like he should look away. There's a layered history here to which he isn't privy, but he feels it shifting like tectonic plates beneath his feet. He doesn't know what to say. The conversation changed tracks, and he's the decoupled car left behind.

The things Rylan says, the way she says them. It bugs him 'cause it reminds him of Matthias, sitting in a restaurant across from him and trusting him to make decisions for himself because he's grown up, and even if Matthias worried for his son, he supported him.

Rylan says she let Gray install the tech out of respect for his autonomy, but her actions speak otherwise. Let him have the tech, but install a control chip. Zef remembers her taking away the lung filter implant and offering him his dream project in one breath. Slap him with one hand, offer cake with the other.

Had Gray's whole life been like that?

"There's no point talking about this," Gray growls. "Every conversation with just goes in circles. Say what you want. It's not going to save you."

With genuine hurt, Rylan says, "You couldn't really kill me."

"You say it like it should be hard," Gray says. "When you treated me like a tool, a puppet, a weapon, not a son. All 'cause you wanted a daughter."

"I made a daughter." Rylan's voice rises with heat Zef's never heard from her before. "And you were my daughter before you were my son. Can I not feel sad, or do you have the monopoly on misery?"

She takes several steps towards Gray. He doesn't give ground, a look of calculated wrath straining at his wavering restraint.

"Zef, leave," he says under his breath.

Zef shakes his head. "Not leaving you."

Rylan ignores him, lifting a hand as though to touch Gray. He recoils. She lowers it. "How do you think this makes me feel?" she whispers. "How can you hate your mother, when I love you more than anything?"

"Love." In Gray's eyes, there is nothing of its kin. Only a simmering, dry hate ready for a lit match. "Even without that thing in your head, you were never capable of it."

"I do love you, Evelyn," Rylan says.

Zef doesn't know if deadnaming him was a slip of the tongue or a deliberate step on a known trigger. All he knows is it's a hot ember to the dry kindling of Gray's volatile mood.

Gray launches himself at Rylan.

He is fast. A detonation of movement. A wisp of warehouse dust streams behind him as he leaps into the air. Light. Suspended there too long, like gravity is a thing of fiction for him. Coming down, his heel aims for Rylan's skull with enough force to split it.

A mounting dread chokes Zef silent. I'm about to watch Gray murder his own mother.