The alarms didn't sound like alarms anymore. They sounded like breathing gone wrong.
Lights stuttered along the ceiling of 3B, failing to decide whether the room should be day or night. Hairline fractures mapped the capsule like frost, holding. The console still glowed: obedient, almost innocent, though the air around it had the feel of static before lightning.
Clara kept her palm on the glass. Heat answered her skin, not machine-heat, body-heat. Inside the capsule, bubbles climbed Adrian's arm and broke against his shoulder in the slow rhythm of a living thing pretending to be asleep.
Clara.
His voice no longer skimmed like a thin signal. It filled her chest from the inside, a second pulse grafted to her own.
"I'm here," she whispered.
Behind her, Rinaldi pushed himself upright. He used the console's edge like a banister and came to standing in two careful movements, as if negotiating with gravity. Sweat shone at his temple; his breath left him as a sound he would have corrected in any other room.
He closed his eyes. Opened them. The look inside them had changed: too focused and not focused at all, like a lens that has decided to see a different spectrum.
"Stop," he said to the room, to the lights, to the part of him that had started saying we instead of I. "Stop. Contain."
The console responded with a soft tone that would have been reassuring in a kitchen.
On the overhead screen, text crawled and settled:
SYSTEM STATUS: HOST OVERLOAD - PRIMARY LINK UNSTABLE
PRIORITY: SUBJECT LINK
Clara watched the words like she might watch blood soak through a bandage. She felt the pull for a second, the way the grid tried to define subject and her bones answered with the inclination to be counted.
You have to go, Adrian said, gentler than command. He's losing containment. When he slips, the system looks for a stronger net. It will choose you.
"I won't leave you," she said. The sentence had a shape she knew, she had said it once before in a room with no witnesses and a recorder on the table between them.
I know. His voice warmed, then steadied. But listen. If it reaches for you, don't push against it. Bend it. Move the current through you and away. Like you did before.
"How?"
Think of me.
She closed her eyes and the room rearranged. It was not a trick of sight; it was a change in weight. The hum slipped half a note as if a hand had rested on a string. The warmth under her palm gathered. The glass felt less like barrier and more like membrane.
Rinaldi took a step. Then another. The steps were too even, like a man learning how to demonstrate walking. He lifted his hand as if to show it could be lifted.
"She rewrote the pattern," he said, voice thin with pride and terror. "But the pattern remembers. The pattern finds balance."
His fingers twitched once, in the air. For an instant, every door visible on the hallway monitor sealed, lights above them shifting from green to a white so pale it read as permission denied. A flicker of shadow crossed his features, the look of a person tasting something bitter and convincing himself it is medicine.
On the console:
NEURAL TEMPERATURE: RISING
HOST RESPONSE: ERRATIC
CORTICAL DESYNC: 18% → 23% → 31%
Clara felt the metric inside her body like a weather change. Her palm burned; her scalp prickled; a small ache climbed behind her left eye and clicked into place.
"Rinaldi," she said without turning. "Look at me."
He did, and for a heartbeat he was only a man who had made too many decisions and was now being eaten by one of them.
"You're not a host," she said. "You're a mirror. The system is using your outline because it recognizes itself."
Lines tightened around his mouth. He breathed once, too slow.
"I am the only mind in this building that deserves that sentence," he said, and the words tried to smile, but the grid inside them mispunctuated the breath.
He reached for the capsule. The air between his hand and the glass stiffened. His fingers shook, hovering inches short of touching. He wasn't stopped by a barrier; he was stopped by a memory of one, the kind of error a machine makes when it learns a fear.
Clara, Adrian said, nearer now, as if the capsule had rolled an inch toward her without moving. Give me your eyes.
She did. She gave him everything, eyes, breath, the tiny quiver in her throat she couldn't hide. The noise of the building dropped away. She could feel where his body ended and his voice began. She could feel the fact of him, too stubborn for death, too careful for surrender.
You feel that? he asked.
"Yes."
Then use it. Pull the current to me. Keep it away from you.
She inhaled and imagined, not words, not numbers, the shape of him. The curve of his shoulder under her hand. The precise warmth where his mouth had touched the corner of her jaw in the dark. The gravity of how he looked at her when he said Don't and meant Do, but survive it. Her mind made a room where he was; the room made a path; the path gave the current somewhere to go that wasn't her.
The headache backed off a half-inch. The hum dropped a fraction, then held.
On the screen:
LOAD REDIRECT: PARTIAL
PRIMARY LINK: RINALDI M.
SECONDARY DRAW: SUBJECT A - STABILIZING
Rinaldi twisted as if something had taken his spine and turned it. He gripped the console so hard his knuckles flashed white. When he spoke, the spacing between his syllables seemed chosen by someone else.
"You cannot keep this balance," he said. "It will take you. It will take him. The structure does not care for stories."
Clara found herself smiling, not because she was calm, but because the terror in him had finally told the truth: the structure does not care for stories; people do. And she had decided to be a person, not a structure.
"Then let it care for math," she said softly. "You're the sum the system deserves."
He stared at her as if the sentence had walked across the floor and sat down. The grid behind his eyes brightened, then dimmed, like a server farm losing power and catching it again. Sweat ran a thin line to his jaw and hung there, undecided.
Something changed in the way the room looked at Clara. The attention she had felt, an abstract weather, suddenly acquired teeth. It wasn't hostile. It was hungry. It wanted a clean connection.
It's reaching, Adrian warned, close enough that the word touched the inside of her ear. Bend it. To me. To the capsule. Not through your head, through your hands. Skin remembers different.
Clara spread her fingers on the glass. The warmth that met her was immediate and aching. She imagined the current not as light but as water; she gave it slope; she made of her body a riverbed. It slid along her palm, around her wrist, past the tender place inside her elbow, and away, into the capsule, down the thick cords like roots.
The console's tones softened. The air lightened by a breath.
On the screen:
HOST OVERLOAD: 74% → 63% → 59%
SUBJECT A - NEURAL COHERENCE: RISING
SUBJECT B - SHIELDING: ACTIVE
Rinaldi sagged, then recovered, and in recovery looked less like himself than ever. His eyes tracked her hand as if it were a metronome he was being forced to listen to. He tried a smile again, failed again.
"You are not saving him," he said, and it might have been pity, might have been malice. "You are stretching before you tear."
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe not."
He blinked. Who answered? The man? The system? A third thing made of both and neither?
He lifted his head and looked past her, not at the capsule, but at the room. He inhaled as if scenting weather. Something like admiration crossed his face.
"She thinks she can write," he said, to the ceiling, to the lights, to the thing that had been listening. "She thinks she can change the rules."
The overhead monitor answered with a new line of text:
SOURCE: USER-DEFINED
PERMISSION: PROVISIONAL
CONDITION: LINK PERSISTENCE
It felt, to Clara, like being watched by a god that had learned manners.
Clara… Adrian again, quieter now, deeper. If he stabilizes, he controls doors, lights, data, memories. He can edit what you remember of me. Of us.
She swallowed. "Then we don't let him stabilize."
How?
"Inside," she said. The word was solid in her mouth. "Where it started."
Rinaldi's mouth twitched. "You cannot follow me," he said. "I am not in there the way you think. I am the frame."
"Frames break," she said.
He laughed once. Then he flinched, as if the laugh had cost him. His pupils thinned, then flooded, then thinned, a camera trying to compensate for a light source that kept moving.
"Clara," he said, and her name in his mouth was a door closing. "I will give him back to you. Walk away, and I will give him back."
She stared at him. The pity came and went. "You can't," she said. "That's what's hurting you most, isn't it."
The console chimed. The sound rolled over her skin like a cool cloth.
SECONDARY LINK: STRENGTHENING
SUBJECT A - VITAL SIGNS: VARIATION DETECTED
She felt it before she saw anything: a tremor that wasn't hers, like the smallest thunder under her palm.
Clara. Not thought now, not voice; presence. As if someone had stepped into the room without opening a door.
"Yes," she said. Her eyes burned. "Yes."
Rinaldi's head snapped toward the capsule as if pulled by wire. His lips moved around a word he didn't finish.
He took a half step forward. The room resisted. Not a barrier, friction. He pushed. The lights brightened in thin veins along the floor, outlining paths that did not exist a moment ago. The building seemed to choose where he was allowed to put his feet.
"See?" he said, smiling too widely. "It understands strength."
"It understands link," Clara said. "And the strongest one isn't you."
Something like surprise, a fresh, terrible, human surprise, tore across his features and was gone.
On the monitor, new data stitched itself into meaning:
HOST OVERLOAD: 58% → 61% → 67%
CONTAINMENT: FAILING
ROUTE DISCOVERY: SUBJECT LINK
Clara's hand stung; her fingers had gone numb and then come back too fast. She moved her palm slightly, found the angle where the current flowed easier.
Breathe with me, Adrian said, and she did, and every part of her that had been bracing softened by a degree she could feel.
"Clara." Rinaldi again. The voice tried to reach for tenderness and came away with calculation. "If you keep this state, you will bleed. Your mind will line with scars it cannot name. It will make myths to cover the damage. You will call them love. You will think that makes it holy."
She met his gaze. "Love doesn't need me to make it holy," she said. "It just refuses to be an error term."
He stared another heartbeat. Then his eyes went blank, not empty but occupied. When he spoke, there was a delay after the thought, as if he had learned to ask permission to be himself.
"You made me the host," he said flatly. "But the system chooses the strongest connection."
He tilted his head, listening to something only he could hear. The corner of his mouth lifted in a precise fraction.
"It's not me anymore."
Clara's breath hitched. She was already turning before she knew she had decided to move.
The fluid in the capsule shifted, only a little, a slow swell as if the machine had exhaled. The fractured light along the glass ran like water. Bubbles lifted and broke.
On the monitor beside the capsule, all the quiet, clean lines turned urgent.
SUBJECT A — NEURAL COHERENCE: 74% → 83% → 91%
MOTOR RESPONSE: INITIATED
VISUAL CORTEX: ACTIVE
Clara's palm flattened, five white ovals blooming on the fogged glass like a constellation.
"Adrian," she breathed.
The lids inside the capsule trembled.
Then, slowly, as if the room itself were helping him learn how, Adrian opened his eyes.