Day 2 - Night 2/2

Katherine had left almost as soon as she had entered, she changed unceremoniously from her soft hotel issued tank and sweats into her sleeker mission suit.

“Umm…” Naomi was faced away from the scene. “Did you want some privacy?”

“I don’t really do embarrassed” came Katherine’s muffled reply from within the hollow of her black and silver top. “This is a training facility, you may as well get used to female nudity. Any day now, they’ll take away our en suite bathroom and give us a barracks shower.”

Naomi made a startled sound halfway between a cough and a yelp, it sounded like it hurt. “Would they,” she cleared her throat. “Would they really do that?”

“No reason to think they wouldn’t.” Katherine quipped as she secured her hair with a tie. “I’m leaving, there are three places I wish to search before the Van-droids are active.”

Naomi flinched at her words, “Do you *have* to call them that? It feels gross.”

“I suppose not.” She allowed. “But I still need to hustle.

Naomi was standing by the bed, holding her gloves in both hands. “Should I…” she searched for the right question, “I don’t know, leave a light on, wait up to make sure you’re safe, radio for backup?”

Something very close to a laugh slipped from Katherine’s nose. “No, thank you.” She paused with one hand on the door. “I learned a lot last night and I mapped four routes that should minimize exposure to the patrols this time.” She smiled despite herself. “I should be back long before the security bots track me down. They really don’t understand who they have trapped here.”

Before Naomi could respond, Katherine slipped from the room without the latch even clicking shut.

The sudden intense void of activity pressed in on Naomi and she felt a distinct pressure. She was now alone with her racing thoughts.

Evelyn had convinced her at dinner that she didn’t need to untangle her emotions all at once, so she decided to focus on what she could.

First she retreated to the bathroom. Despite its lack of a door, she still wasn’t quite ready to join in on Katherine’s freedom from nudity taboos just yet. Her broken power meant she had been spared the rigors of formalized training environments and had never gotten comfortable with public nudity. Even the semi-private version Katherine described.

Once she was safely in the bathroom, she undressed quickly while focusing on her power. She considered the things she learned throughout the day and envisioned she was taking off the stress of the day as she stripped. It didn’t take long but as she went, she felt less and less like “Codename: Velvet” and more and more like Naomi Hale. As she stepped under the hot spray, she realized her power had been relaxing its pull like a dog trained to heel.

The power was there, the leash was a present weight in her mind, but the strength of its pull was vastly diminished. She felt exultant, maybe this mindset was the key. She was allowing her fears to recede and was focusing on the things she could affect.

Maybe her lack of control was a result of feeling a lack of control over her life. Has she ever seriously tried to overcome it before now? Or had she merely accepted that it was impossible from the start and given in to what the doctors said? She wasn’t sure.

She contemplated her changing mindset while her body proceeded on auto pilot through the mechanical motions of showering. The shampoo foamed while she considered the power instructor, Muriel Dane. Did she know specifics or was she being coy? The soap slid in glimmering lines down the curves of her body while she considered the date night taking place.

She scrubbed absently while wondering what she would want from a date with Van. Was she interested in him as a person? Maybe. Her emotions were like a crowded room and everyone was stuck at the exit. Even if she decided she likes him, would she be willing to let everyone see what she does with him in real time?

She thought about what Katherine said about female nudity and wondered if she felt the same way about emotional visibility. Naomi didn’t know but something kept repeating in her mind and she rinsed the soap away.

Now, she has a choice. She wasn’t sure what she would do with it, but she had one. Her thoughts circled the drain back into chaos as she dressed. A sleeping tank and shorts because the facility wouldn’t grant her the correct pajamas unless she was willing to be ****. She was becoming more unbalanced as she dressed but had not yet become as volatile as she had been before.

The power felt half asleep as she arranged the sheet and quilt to provide two separate sleeping “pockets” to segregate her from unintentional touches with Katherine. She resolved to wait up for Katherine, but sleep was pulling hard at her consciousness.

Two doors down, Fiona Kavanagh chose the shower because water was easier to endure than Cassie Lin’s opinions.

Unfortunately, the bathroom archway did not even provide a door to save her from either.

Cassie had spent the first five minutes in their room fighting with the wardrobe. The hotel had provided sleep clothes. Technically. The drawer held several folded sets of soft cotton shorts, tank tops, and loose shirts, all in the correct sizes if one defined correct as what the hotel wanted to be true. Cassie had found a pair of shorts that seemed survivable and a tank top that immediately began clinging to her like it had a grudge.

She stood near the dresser, pulling at the hem. The hem moved half an inch. She glared down at it. “I’m going to kill this fabric.”

From the shower, Fiona said, “That would be your most reasonable target today.”

Cassie looked toward the bathroom opening. Steam curled through it. “You’ve been waiting to say something since the hallway,” Cassie called. “Go ahead. I can hear you judging me through the tile.”

Water struck tile in a steady rush. Fiona’s answer came after enough delay to prove she had considered pretending otherwise. “You do that often?” Her voice was strong despite the distance and the rushing sound of the shower. “Give men the benefit of the doubt due to some tragedy?”

Cassie stopped tugging at her shirt. The room seemed to narrow. She looked at the bathroom door. “That is a very dramatic way to accuse me of being reasonable.”

“You keep making him smaller,” Fiona said. Her voice carried through the water, harder than the steam-softened room should have allowed. “Poor Van. Awkward Van. Trapped Van. A boy with a title he didn’t ask for. Maybe all of that is true. Maybe he hates it. Maybe he would rather sleep in a ditch than stand at the center of this place. But he is still at the center. The suite is his. The schedule bends around him. The language bends around him. We are the ones expected to become his little sex slaves.”

Cassie sat on the edge of the bed, too angry to rise. “I am not nominating him for sainthood,” she said. “I’m saying there’s a difference between a man holding a knife and a man waking up with one duct-taped to his hand while everyone screams at him for being armed. That difference matters to me. It should matter to you too, since you keep acting like precision is the only thing separating you from the rest of us fragile idiots.”

The water kept running. Fiona did not answer right away.

Cassie took that as permission to keep going. “And before you say it, yes, the knife can still hurt someone. Yes, we still have to watch him. Yes, the title gives him a kind of power whether he wants it or not. I’m not stupid, Fiona. I know a cage can have a soft-spoken boy inside it and still be a cage. I just refuse to call the boy a monster because hating him would be easy.”

The shower turned off. That made the room feel louder. Fiona’s voice came through the door, closer now. “Convenient hatred keeps people alive.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it just gives frightened people a target close enough to hit.”

The door opened. Cassie looked up, ready to fight the next sentence.

Fiona stood in the doorway with wet hair slicked back from her face, towel wrapped in a hurried knot around her body and her sleeping clothes clenched in an angry fist. Steam moved behind her. She had clearly meant to dress before coming out. She had also clearly forgotten that intention somewhere between anger and the need to make Cassie look her in the eye.

“The answer I want,” Fiona said, stepping into the room, “is for one person in this place to stop softening the cage because the boy inside it looks sad. I do not need him to be evil. I do not need him to enjoy this. I need the rest of you to stop treating **** as if it cancels impact.” Her towel dropped free of its sloppily tied knot and fell to the floor. Fiona’s angry glare never flickered. She was staring directly at Cassie like the younger girl owed her an explanation.

Cassie did not answer. She had words. Many words. Excellent words, probably. They vanished the second her eyes betrayed her.

Fiona was not posed. She was damp, furious, unguarded by accident, all compact muscle and pale scars and hard lines made sharper by anger. Cassie’s altered awareness caught too much at once: the strength in her shoulders, the water sliding from her hair to the towel, the steady balance of someone ready to fight even un-dressed.

Cassie turned away so fast her neck almost hurt.

“Put your clothes on.”

Fiona stopped. “What?”

Cassie stared at the wall. The wall was safe. The wall had no curves, no hardened nipples, no slender pink openings, no short frizzy hair shaved into a sound wave. “I am trying to disagree with your personality, Kavanagh. Stop weaponizing the rest of you.”

Silence. Then Fiona realized what had happened and inhaled sharply. She yelped and turned in place. She began to dress in hurried jerking movements.

Fiona said, lower now, “I didn’t do that on purpose.”

“That makes two of us,” Cassie muttered.

The silence afterward was not empty. It was crowded with the thing they were both pretending had not happened.

Cassie stood, paced once, then sat again because pacing toward the bathroom felt like a tactical mistake. Her sleep shirt had crept higher. She yanked it down, failed, and gave up. The hotel had given her a body that wanted to be noticed and clothes with no loyalty. Fiona, meanwhile, had walked out of the steam like a challenge Cassie had not agreed to answer.

Fiona had dressed in the hotel’s dark sleep pants and a loose shirt. Her hair was still wet. Her face was composed again, but still flushed with heat.

“I still don’t trust him,” she said, arms folded.

Cassie let out a breath through her nose. “I didn’t ask you to. I don’t trust him either. I trust that he looked miserable when the system tried to make him look powerful. Those are different things.”

Fiona’s jaw worked once. She looked away toward the window, where the hotel grounds glowed with infuriating peace. Fiona’s voice came quieter. “You watched him at breakfast.”

“Everyone watched him at breakfast.”

“You know that is not what I mean.”

Cassie’s temper flared partly because she did know, and partly because she did not understand why Fiona cared. “No, I don’t know what you mean. That is the problem. If I call him dangerous, you argue like I’m giving him too much importance. If I call him trapped, you act like I betrayed the revolution. If I notice he’s scared, you look at me like I’ve volunteered to hand him the keys to my bedroom. What answer are you trying to drag out of me?”

Fiona’s expression tightened. She had no answer. Not one she understood very well.

The anger in Cassie softened by one dangerous degree. “Look, I get it. I hate this. I hate all of it. I hate the title, the suite, the fact that they made Claire go first and then broadcast pieces of it like entertainment. I hate that he gets to be the axis even if he hates it too. But I am not going to pretend he built the machine just because he’s strapped into the biggest gear.”

Fiona looked back at her. “You make sympathy sound like strategy.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe not letting the hotel choose my enemies is the only strategy I have.”

“That is a convenient excuse for the only attractive boy trapped here with us.”

Cassie opened her mouth. Attractive. Fiona heard it too. Her face changed by almost nothing, which meant plenty.

Cassie decided, with the speed of a woman avoiding a cliff, to ignore it. “Safety is not currently on the menu. We are choosing between flavors of terrible.”

Fiona’s mouth pressed into a line. “And Van is what? The least terrible flavor?”

“He is a person,” Cassie said, more tired than angry now. “That is all I’m saying. A person in a horrible position. If he turns cruel, I will burn his eyebrows off myself. Does that satisfy your need for vigilance?”

“Only his eyebrows?”

“I’m starting modestly. Escalation is available.”

The corner of Fiona’s mouth almost moved.

Cassie caught it and felt an absurd little spark of triumph before remembering she was annoyed with her.

Fiona crossed to the bed and pulled back the covers. Cassie looked at her across the room.

The joke she wanted did not come quickly enough. “Fine,” she said at last. “I make noise. You glare until the room surrenders. Congratulations, we both have hobbies.”

Fiona should have let it end there. Instead she said, “I don’t know why it bothered me.”

Cassie went still.

Fiona stared down at the blanket in her hands. The words had escaped with no plan behind them. She seemed to resent them immediately, but she kept going, maybe because retreat was no longer available. “At dinner. Hearing you talk about him that way. I told myself it was because you were being careless, but you were not careless. You were irritatingly careful..”

Cassie’s throat felt dry. “You’re mad because I had a point?”

Fiona looked up. “Do not enjoy it.”

“I’m trying not to.”

The room eased by a fraction. Not enough to become safe. Enough for both of them to notice.

Cassie picked at her edge of her blanket. “For the record, I don’t know what I think about him. Not really. I know what I said at dinner, and I meant it. I feel sorry for him. I also resent him. I also think he might be decent. I also think decent men can still hurt people when the world hands them a script and tells them it’s destiny. So no, I am not making him harmless. I’m just refusing to make him simple.”

Fiona listened without interrupting. That was new. When she answered, her voice had lost some of its blade. “I can respect refusing to make him simple.”

Cassie looked over, surprised.

Fiona immediately added, “I still think you are too generous.”

“There it is.”

“I was worried you would miss it.”

Cassie smiled before she could stop herself.

The awareness returned, unwelcome and charged, filling the room from a direction neither of them wanted to acknowledge. Cassie looked away first. Fiona reached for the lamp on her nightstand.

“I am turning this off,” Fiona said. “Before either of us says something worse. Good night, Cassie.”

The lamp clicked off.

Cassie sat in the dimness for a few seconds before turning off her own. Darkness gathered around the beds, softened only by a thread of bathroom light beneath the door and the silver wash from the window.

She lay down with her back facing Fiona. Across the bed, Fiona did the same. Neither apologized. Neither resumed the argument. Neither slept.

Cassie tried to keep her mind on safe subjects: Van, the title, the hotel, the machine, the cage. Those were problems with names. They belonged to the crisis they were all allowed to discuss.

Much harder to name was the damp, furious woman breathing evenly lying next to her, who had stepped out of steam in the middle of an argument and made Cassie forget every clever thing she had planned to say.

Claire had opened the book across her lap with every intention of reading at least one paragraph. She had turned three pages and retained nothing beyond the fact that the story involved a widow, a locked tower, and someone named Ammaranth who seemed entirely too confident.

Van had been more honest. He had not pretended to read. He sat on the far cushion with one elbow on his knee, watching the fireplace behave itself.

The remote remained face down on the table between them. Neither trusted it.

At last Van drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “We should probably figure out the sleeping part before we’re both too tired.”

Claire lowered the book. She had known the sentence was coming. The bedroom doors had been waiting on the far side of the suite since they entered, tall and polished and patient in a way she resented. Still, hearing the matter named sent a little nervous pressure through her stomach.

Claire closed the book and set it on the table, carefully avoiding the remote. “All right. Sleeping part.”

They stood almost together. Van did not move toward the bedroom first. Claire noticed. He had been doing that all night, leaving tiny spaces for her to decide before he crossed any line the hotel had drawn for them. It was considerate. It was also tiring to be treated as a person whose comfort might shatter if mishandled.

Claire crossed the room and put her hand on one of the bedroom doors. “I’m going to open this before it becomes symbolic.”

The bed dominated the room without quite looking vulgar. It was enormous, framed in dark wood, dressed in white sheets and a deep blue coverlet turned down with professional care. Lamps glowed on either side. A second fireplace waited cold along the opposite wall, mercifully unlit. Tall windows looked out over the lake, where the boardwalk lights trembled on the water as if the evening were still happening somewhere outside them.

A number of pillows designed less for sleep than for being arranged by someone with strong feelings about presentation. Some large. Some narrow. Two small decorative ones embroidered with a subtle pattern of silver thread. She disliked those on sight.

Van stopped beside her, just inside the doorway.

“Well,” he said after a careful pause. “That is a lot of bed.”

Claire let out a laugh through her nose. She stepped farther inside. The carpet was soft under her shoes. On one side of the room, a wardrobe stood beside a dresser. On the other, a door presumably led to the bathroom. Two robes hung from hooks near it, thick and white and embroidered with the hotel crest.

Van cleared his throat. “I can sleep on the far side. Shirt and soft pants. No wandering. No heroic pillow fortress unless requested.”

Claire looked at him and gave him a real, if brief, smile.

Claire walked to the foot of it and touched the folded coverlet. The fabric was smooth, cool, and expensive enough to be irritating. “The bed is enormous. If we sleep on opposite sides, we may need to send letters to communicate.”

Claire tugged at the hem of her jacket, suddenly aware of her clothes in a practical way. Date clothes. Boardwalk clothes. Clothes she had worn through dinner, through the malt shop, through the hotel’s latest attempts to turn her life into an audience sport. Then another problem arrived.

“Oh.” she gasped.

Van straightened at once. “What?”

“I don’t have anything to sleep in.”

He stared at her for one second, then looked away so fast she almost laughed. “Right,” he said. “Right. Because you went on a date, not a camping trip.”

“I failed to pack for being kidnapped into a second location after dessert.”

“That was shortsighted of you.”

“It was. I’ll try to do better next time I’m **** by hospitality.”

His smile flickered and stayed. “There might be something in the dresser. Normal hotel things. Shirts. Pajamas. Something that does not have an agenda.”

Claire gave him a look.

“I heard it too,” he said. “I regret the optimism.”

They approached the dresser with the solemn unease of people investigating a suspicious noise. The first drawer held folded men’s sleep clothes: soft T-shirts, loose pants, socks, all arranged by color. Van opened it, glanced down, then shut it halfway.

“That appears to be mine,” he said.

The second drawer held more of the same. The third held spare blankets. The fourth had a small brass label fixed to the front.

GUESTS

Claire and Van both stopped. The label sat there with polished innocence.

Claire wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t like that.”

“No,” Van said. “Neither do I.”

“You don’t have to open it.”

“I know.”

Neither of them moved. Then Claire exhaled. “Open it. Carefully. If it contains fog or music, close it.”

Van pulled the drawer open two inches.

He looked down and his expression changed. Then he shut it, fast.

Claire stared at him. “That bad?”

“I saw enough to decide we are not accepting hospitality from that drawer.”

Despite herself, she stepped closer and pulled the drawer open a cautious inch. Withing was an expanse of luxurious small clothes, lace, silk, sheer fabric folded with obscene professionalism. Pale blue. Black. White. Red, because apparently the hotel had no survival instinct. Something with ribbons. Something with feathers. A small stack of garments that might have been nightwear in the same way a sword might be a letter opener if one were committed to the argument.

Claire closed the drawer with great care. Her face had gone hot.

Van had turned away toward the wardrobe and was studying its handles as though they contained spiritual wisdom.

“That drawer,” Claire said, “is a declaration of war. I am not wearing anything from the war drawer.”

“I was not going to suggest it.”

“I know. I just needed the sentence outside my body.”

She pressed both hands over her face for a second. The scene was ridiculous. Horrifying, yes, but ridiculous too. The hotel had stocked a drawer as if seduction could be organized by fabric weight. When she lowered her hands, Van was opening the first drawer again.

“These are mine,” he said, pulling out a soft gray T-shirt and a pair of dark flannel pants. “Or they’re intended for me, which may be legally different in this building. But they look comfortable, and unless the hotel has found a way to make flannel predatory, they are probably the least cursed option.”

Claire looked at the clothes in his hands.

They were plain. Soft. Warm-looking. A little worn in appearance, though she suspected the hotel had manufactured even that. No lace. No ribbons. No implication beyond sleep.

The relief was embarrassingly strong. “Thank you,” she said.

Van held them out without stepping closer than necessary. “They’ll be too big.”

“That is currently a virtue.”

“Good.”

She took them. The fabric carried no scent of him, which should not have disappointed her and therefore absolutely did not. It smelled clean, neutral, hotel-laundered. Still, the gesture felt personal in a way the guest drawer had not. The hotel had offered performance. Van had offered cover.

Claire folded the clothes against her chest. “I’ll change in the bathroom.”

“I will remain here and continue my diplomatic negotiations with the bed.”

“Be firm. It does not respect weakness.”

“I suspected as much.”

She went into the bathroom and shut the door. The bathroom was, of course, perfect. Marble counter. warm towels. soft lights around the mirror. A shower large enough for a person to have conferences in. Claire set Van’s clothes on the counter and took a moment to look at herself.

Her hair had fully escaped the knot by now, falling around her shoulders in red waves that looked more deliberate than they were. Her cheeks were still flushed. Her eyes looked bright from exhaustion, embarrassment, laughter, and several feelings she had not yet sorted into safe categories.

She removed her jacket first. Then her shoes, her jeans, her shirt. She did it quickly, because lingering made the whole thing stranger. The flannel pants nearly slipped off her hips until she found the drawstring. The T-shirt hung loose over her frame, the sleeves falling past her upper arms, the hem low enough to make the pants almost redundant.

She looked younger. That was the thought she did not expect.

Not childish. Not helpless. Just less arranged. The girl in the mirror did not look like someone walking into a public date with her shoulders squared. She looked like someone who had laughed too much, panicked too often, and been handed something comfortable because a boy did not want her cornered by lace.

Claire gripped the edge of the sink. “Stop making this profound,” she whispered to her reflection. Her reflection did not obey.

She gathered her own clothes, folded them badly, then deliberately left them badly folded because correcting them felt like conceding something to the hotel. When she opened the bathroom door, Van was on the far side of the room, removing decorative pillows from the bed with the grave focus of a man clearing debris after a storm.

There were already six pillows on a chair. He froze when he saw her.

His eyes moved over her once, quickly and with obvious effort not to linger. He looked away afterward, not because she was unpleasant to see, but because he was trying to give her control over being seen.

“Too big?” he asked.

Claire glanced down at herself. “Comically.”

“That was the predicted outcome.”

“They’re comfortable at least.” She twirled in place then almost tripped and released a small laugh that an uncharitable person would have called a giggle.

Claire became aware of the sleeves again, the looseness, the strange safety of being hidden inside fabric meant for someone else. “Thank you.”

“You already said that.”

“I’m saying it again. I had time to appreciate the alternative.”

Van looked toward the closed guest drawer with open dislike. “The alternative has been contained.”

“For now. But I’m willing to place furniture in front of it.”

“That may be excessive.”

She laughed and carried her folded clothes to a chair near the bathroom. “Your turn.”

“Right.” He gathered his own sleep clothes from the drawer. Before he went into the bathroom, he paused. “Do you want the lamp left on while I change? Or off? Or does that not matter?”

Claire blinked, then understood he was asking whether she wanted the room changed while he was gone. It was absurdly considerate. Also, yes, it mattered.

“Leave it on,” she said. “Please.”

He nodded. “On.” He vanished into the bathroom.

Claire stood alone in the bedroom. The bed waited.

It looked larger without him in the room, which was unfair. She crossed to the far side and pulled back the coverlet. The sheets were cool and smooth. She sat on the edge, then slid under them before she could overthink the action. The bed accepted her with expensive softness.

She looked across the empty mattress to Van’s side. It was far enough away to be proper. Close enough to be real.

When Van came out, he wore a dark T-shirt and soft pants, as promised. His hair was damp around the edges where he had splashed water on his face. He stopped when he saw her already in bed, then caught himself before the pause became awkward.

He crossed to the other side of the bed and pulled back the covers then stopped. “Pillow barrier?”

Claire thought about it.

Part of her wanted to say yes. A wall would make the rules visible. It would turn the empty space between them into architecture, and architecture had already proven itself an untrustworthy participant in the evening.

Another part of her disliked what a wall would imply.

“No,” she said.

Van’s hand stilled on the blanket.

Claire felt her face warm and immediately continued. “No wall. We are not enemies. Also, that is not an invitation. I am clarifying categories.”

Van nodded with immense seriousness. “Categories are welcome. I strongly support categories. Categories are the reason I am not currently hyperventilating.”

He got into bed. The mattress dipped slightly under his weight. Not much, because the bed was massive and possibly engineered by people with a vested interest in furniture as a real estate market. Still, Claire felt it. She kept her eyes on the ceiling.

Van lay on his back on the far side, hands folded over his stomach like someone in a very polite coffin.

Claire turned her head just enough to see him. “That cannot be comfortable.” She shifted onto her side, facing the center of the bed but not him directly. “You’re allowed to sleep like a person.”

He let out a quiet laugh and relaxed by visible degrees. His hands moved from his stomach to the blanket. His shoulders lowered. He still stayed on his side of the bed, but he no longer looked preserved for a museum.

The bedside lamps remained on. Neither reached for them. After a while, Claire said, “We should probably turn off the lights.”

“Probably.”

Neither moved. Claire smiled faintly at the ceiling. “This is ridiculous.”

“Yes.”

“That was too short. We are trying to avoid clipped responses.”

Van turned his head toward her, surprised into amusement. “All right. Expanded version: this is ridiculous because we are both exhausted, the lamps are within reach, and yet turning them off feels like signing a contract neither of us has read.”

“That was better.”

“I can grow as a person.”

“I’ve seen evidence.”

He looked back at the ceiling. “Do you want them off?”

Claire considered lying and saying yes because yes was the normal answer. Then she remembered the guest drawer, the fireplace, the remote, the golden panels, and every other normal thing the hotel had taught her to distrust.

“Not yet,” she said. “I think I want to be able to see the room for a little while.”

“Then we leave them on.”

“You can sleep with the lights on?”

“I grew up in places where people fixed engines outside bedroom windows and dogs argued with the moon. A lamp is not going to defeat me.”

“That sentence is aggressively rustic.”

“I contain multitudes. Some of them own socket wrenches.”

She laughed softly, and the sound loosened the room.

Claire watched the lake through the windows. From this angle, she could see a sliver of boardwalk. The lights there looked smaller now. Harmless, if one did not know better.

Van spoke while looking at the ceiling. “The room has already been smug tonight. We defeated it once.”

“That is true. You were very brave against the saxophone.”

“I don’t want to brag, but I did press several incorrect buttons.”

“History will remember your sacrifice.”

Van smiled to himself then let it fade into something quieter. “I’m glad it wasn’t awful for you.”

Claire looked at him then. He did not seem to realize how much that gave away. Not glad for himself first. Not relieved that she liked him. Glad it had not been awful for her. Claire’s throat tightened, and she looked away before the feeling became visible.

“It wasn’t,” she said. “Some of it was embarrassing enough that I may need to leave my body and return under an assumed name, but it wasn’t awful.”

Claire shifted against the pillow. The oversized shirt pulled at one shoulder. She tugged it back into place and found herself strangely aware that it was his. Not in a dramatic way. Not in the way the guest drawer would have wanted. In a human way. Borrowed fabric. Chosen modesty. A boundary made soft enough to sleep in.

“Van?”

“Yeah?”

“If tomorrow is strange—”

“It will be.”

She glanced over.

He winced. “Sorry. Expanded version: tomorrow will almost certainly be strange because this place considers discomfort a design principle. But I know what you mean. If people act strange about tonight, I won’t make it worse on purpose.”

“That is not exactly what I was going to ask, but it helps.” She drew a breath. “I was going to say, if tomorrow is strange, I don’t want us to pretend tonight was nothing just because that would be easier.”

He went very still.

She pressed on before courage drained away. “I’m not asking for a promise. I’m not asking for a definition. I am especially not asking for the hotel to develop opinions. I only mean… I don’t want to hand it the good pieces by pretending they don’t exist.”

Van’s eyes remained on the ceiling. His voice, when it came, was quiet and steadier than she expected. “I don’t want that either.”

It was not a dramatic answer. It did not need to be. Claire nodded once, mostly to herself.

The lamp on her side of the bed glowed warmly over the sheets. On Van’s side, its twin did the same. Between them stretched a wide plain of untouched mattress, pillows, and careful restraint.

"Good night, Van."

The phrase felt absurdly intimate once it left her mouth. People said good night all the time. Families. Friends. Teammates. Strangers in adjacent hotel rooms. But here, in this bed, wearing his shirt, after everything the evening had tried to become, the words arrived carrying more than politeness.

Van turned his head toward her. “Good night, Claire.”

For a while they both lay awake.

Claire faced the ceiling because turning toward him felt too close to a decision. Van lay carefully on his side, facing away at first, then shifting onto his back when the pose became too stiff to maintain. Neither of them crossed the space between them.

The distance was wide enough to be safe. It did not feel empty. Claire closed her eyes and tried to decide whether the date had gone well. The question refused to hold still. It changed shape every time she touched it.

The date had been ****. She had laughed. The hotel had intruded. Van had been kind. Her hair had betrayed her. He had given her clothes that made the room less frightening. None of those canceled the others.

On the far side of the bed, Van breathed slowly, too slowly to be asleep. Claire wondered if he was performing rest for her benefit. The thought should not have made her smile. It did.

Eventually, exhaustion began to gather at the edges of her thoughts. The boardwalk lights blurred behind her closed eyes. The sound of the lake, or whatever the hotel used to imitate one, moved softly beyond the glass.

Just before sleep reached her, Claire felt one loose strand of hair slip across her cheek.

It lifted slightly, as if considering the distance across the bed. Claire caught it in her fingers and tucked it firmly beneath her shoulder. “Not tonight,” she whispered.

Across the bed, Van made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a dream. Claire smiled into the dark. Then, at last, she slept.

Naomi woke to running.

The sound came fast along the dormitory hall, half-swallowed by carpet and rain and the thickness of sleep. For one disoriented second she thought she had dreamed it. Then something struck the wall beyond the door hard enough to make the lamp on the nightstand tremble.

Naomi sat upright as the door flew open.

Katherine Wren came through it backward, drenched from head to toe, one hand braced on the frame and the other clutching the folded ruin of her napkin map. Her hair was plastered against her face. Rainwater streamed from the hem of her mission suit, from her sleeves, from the point of her chin. She had mud on one knee, a tear across one shoulder, and a smile so bright and sharp Naomi did not recognize it at first.

A pale hand reached towards the gap behind her, but Katherine slammed the door. The impact cracked through the room.

Naomi flinched hard enough to pull the blanket to her chest. On the other side of the door, something stopped with mechanical precision. No shove followed. No attempt to break the lock. Only a stillness too exact to be human.

Then a voice spoke through the wood.

“Contestant Katherine Wren has returned to authorized residential quarters. Curfew pursuit suspended. Further restricted-access violations may result in penalty assessment.”

Katherine leaned her back against the door, breathing hard. “Noted,” she said.

The Van-droid remained outside for another few seconds. Naomi could hear it somehow: no breathing, no shifting weight, only presence. Then its steps retreated down the hall, even and unhurried, as if it had not just chased a woman across half the facility in a storm.

Katherine listened until the sound vanished, then she started laughing.

Not loudly. Not freely enough to be careless. But she laughed, breathless and disbelieving, one hand pressed against the door as rain dripped steadily onto the carpet beneath her.

Naomi stared at her. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Katherine said at once, then looked down at herself with a more professional eye. “Possibly. Not significantly. Bruised. Scraped. My left shoulder will be uncooperative tomorrow. I may have damaged the gutter on the west annex, but I refuse to accept responsibility for that.”

Katherine was dripping water across the floor. Her teeth were almost chattering. Her hands shook from cold and adrenaline. And still she looked more alive than Naomi had seen her all day.

“What happened?”

Katherine peeled herself away from the door and crossed the room in three quick steps before seeming to remember she was soaking wet. She stopped on the rug, looked down at the expanding dark patches around her feet, and gave the carpet a grave little nod, as though acknowledging collateral damage.

“The clock tower does not contain the dossier,” she said.

Naomi blinked. “That’s what happened?”

“No. That is the headline. The body of the report includes several errors in judgment, one correct inference about service stair timing, three Van-droids, a locked clock chamber, a false drawer, rain coming through the louvers, and a roofline that was much steeper than it looked from the west garden.”

Naomi stared at her.

Katherine’s smile sharpened again before she caught it and tried to file it away. She failed badly.

“I found a maintenance passage behind the second-floor portrait gallery,” she said, words moving faster now, less polished and more alive. “It led upward, not outward, which suggested either mechanical access or symbolic nonsense. In this building, naturally, it was both. The passage opened into the clock tower below the mechanism. Good visibility through the face, terrible footing, remarkable acoustics. If the dossier had been there, it would have been hidden somewhere near the counterweight channel or behind the service panel beneath the bell frame. It was not. The service panel contained an empty folder, which I assume was either a taunt or an index marker.”

Naomi climbed out of bed. “Katherine.”

“I triggered something when I opened it. A chime, I think. Not the bell. Smaller. Deliberate. Within twenty seconds, the first Van-droid entered the base chamber and politely informed me that the tower was closed after curfew. I disagreed by leaving through the clock face.”

Naomi stopped halfway across the room. “You what?”

Katherine gestured upward, as if the clock face were still above them and she could indicate the relevant handhold. “The interior ladder had been cut off. Not literally cut. Retracted. The tower wanted me to go down through the patrol. I preferred the exterior. The clock hands have structural depth, incidentally, though the minute hand is less stable than the hour hand. I do not recommend trusting it in rain.”

Naomi’s mouth had fallen open. She closed it. “You climbed out through the face of the clock tower during a storm.”

“Yes. The alternative was being escorted.”

“You say that like those two things are comparable.”

Katherine’s eyes were bright, almost feverish. “No, they are not. That is why choosing mattered.” She seemed to hear it only after it had left her mouth. Some of the wild energy in her posture tightened back into shape.

Naomi softened her voice. “You’re freezing.”

“That is a separate problem.”

Naomi pointed toward the bathroom. “Towel. Dry clothes. Sit down before your body realizes what you just made it do.”

Katherine looked prepared to object on procedural grounds, then shivered hard enough to ruin the attempt. She gave a short, irritated breath and went to the bathroom.

Naomi grabbed a towel from the rack near the door and tossed it to her. Katherine caught it one-handed, winced at her shoulder, and pretended she had not.

“You came through the door laughing after outrunning robots on a roof.”

Katherine paused with the towel around her shoulders.

Naomi folded her arms, suddenly much more awake. “You were laughing, happy I guess. You’re a maniac.”

“I was unsuccessful, soaked, pursued, nearly removed from a clock face by weather, and briefly dependent on ornamental drainage for survival.”

Katherine looked down at the water dripping from her sleeve. For once, she did not seem to have a prepared answer.

When she spoke, the energy had quieted but not disappeared. “Most secrets are disappointing after acquisition. They belong to small people with expensive locks, or to corporations that mistake volume for importance. You open the safe, copy the file, leave through the service elevator, and learn that everyone involved was exactly as petty as expected.”

Naomi listened.

“This is different,” Katherine continued. “The dossier is not merely hidden. It was offered, then hidden. That means the concealment is part of the communication. It is a challenge designed with an audience in mind. Possibly only me. Certainly including me.” Her fingers tightened in the towel. “I know that should make me more cautious.”

“Does it?”

“Yes.” A beat. “Also no.”

Naomi understood more than she wanted to. Not the climbing. Not the chase. But the hunger underneath it. The sudden joy of a door opening inward after years of standing in front of walls.

Katherine gave a small, humorless smile. “It has been a long time since the work asked anything interesting of me.”

“So what did you find?” Naomi asked.

Katherine’s expression shifted, gratitude disguised as focus. “Not the dossier, that’s for sure. I found that the clock tower’s external architecture is climbable under adverse conditions if one is sufficiently motivated and willing to lose dignity during descent.”

“How much dignity?”

“I slid down a roof on my stomach and collided with a decorative urn.”

Naomi pressed her lips together.

Katherine narrowed her eyes. “Do not laugh.”

“I am being incredibly respectful.”

Katherine’s mouth twitched. The almost-smile did not become a full one, but it remained in the room anyway.

Naomi retrieved the dry sleep clothes from Katherine’s bed and held them out, careful not to touch her skin. Katherine accepted them with equal care.

“Change,” Naomi said. “Then you can write down whatever terrible lesson the gutter taught you.”

Katherine disappeared into the bathroom. The wet clothes hit the tile with a heavy slap. A minute later she emerged in dry clothes, towel around her hair, color beginning to return to her face. She still looked exhausted. She also looked unwilling to surrender the night entirely.

She crossed to her bed and sat slowly. The adrenaline was leaving her now. Naomi could see it go: the shoulders lowering, the brightness dimming, the cost arriving. Katherine winced again when she pulled back the blanket.

Naomi almost asked if she needed help.

“Do you want me to leave the lamp on?” Naomi asked instead.

Katherine looked at her, then at the lamp. “Low, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.”

Naomi turned the lamp down until the room softened into amber and shadow.

Katherine lay back with more care than grace. For several seconds she stared at the ceiling, rain still ticking against the window. The storm outside made the room feel smaller. Safer, somehow, now that the chase had failed to cross the door.

Naomi settled under her own blanket, bare hands resting on top where she could see them. “And you had fun.”

Katherine closed her eyes. “Good night, Naomi.”

Naomi smiled into the dim room. “That was not a denial.”

“It was a boundary.”

The rain tapped steadily against the glass. Down the hall, the hotel remained quiet, its rules intact and newly mapped at one fragile edge.

Katherine’s breathing evened out faster than Naomi expected. Exhaustion took her with professional efficiency once she allowed it.

Naomi stayed awake a little longer.

She looked at the wet footprints drying near the door, the towel thrown over the chair, and the woman asleep across the room who had returned empty-handed from a clock tower and looked, for one flashing second, like she had found something anyway.