Danny’s POV
Nora comes home from the brunch and walks straight past me to the bathroom.
"Hey," I say to her back. "How was—"
The door clicks shut. The lock turns. The shower starts thirty seconds later, and I stand in the kitchen holding two plates of pasta I made because I thought she'd be hungry, because feeding people is the only useful thing I can do when everything else is falling apart.
The shower runs for forty-three minutes. I know because I count. Not intentionally — my brain does it the way it does when a machine is running too long, when the cycle should've ended and hasn't, when something in the system is stuck in a loop it can't break.
She's crying in there. I'm almost certain. The water covers the sound, which is the point — she figured that out the same way she figures out everything, with the strategic precision of a woman who's been hiding her pain from surveillance systems since before she knew the word.
When she comes out, her eyes are clear. Her face is composed. Her hair is wrapped in a towel and she's wearing my shirt and she looks exactly like someone who just took a long shower and nothing else.
"Pasta's cold," I say. "I can reheat it."
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since—"
"Danny. I'm not hungry."
She sits on the mattress with her back against the wall and opens a textbook. British Romantic Poetry — the class she registered for because it was hers, because nobody assigned it, because the act of choosing Keats over Corporate Finance was the smallest, most defiant thing she'd ever done.
She stares at the same page for twenty minutes. I watch from the kitchen, pretending to wash dishes that are already clean. She doesn't turn the page once.
The next morning is worse. And the morning after that. The erosion isn't dramatic — it's geological. Slow, constant, invisible unless you know what the landscape used to look like.
She speaks exactly enough. Correct responses at correct intervals, the conversational equivalent of a pulse — present, regular, devoid of life.
The real smile has vanished entirely. What's left is the performance version, deployed at me, in our apartment, across our kitchen counter, and the distance between that smile and her actual face is a canyon I can see but can't cross.
Tuesday night. She's asleep — or performing sleep, which has become difficult to distinguish — on the far edge of the mattress.
Arms crossed over her chest. Knees drawn up. Body folded into the smallest possible configuration, angled away from me, every line communicating the same message: do not touch.
I recognize the posture. The Nora from the early days — the woman who froze at Tristan's touch and moved through the world like a passenger in her own body.
Quest by quest, his blackmail is dismantling every breakthrough we fought for. Every late night where she learned to laugh without performing it. Every morning where she reached for me first. Gone.
I slide out of bed at 2 AM and head to the kitchen, my phone already dialed to Raf’s number.
He picks up on the second ring, because Raf doesn't sleep anymore either.
"Tell me you have something," I say.
"Hello to you too. Yes, I'm fine, thanks for asking. My back is destroyed from sleeping on concrete and I'm developing a concerning relationship with caffeine, but please, let's skip the pleasantries."
"Raf."
"I have something." The sound of keys clicking. "Miguel and Santos did physical reconnaissance on NeuraLink's headquarters — the parent company behind Meridian. Office building downtown, twelve floors, glass and steel, the kind of place that screams 'we harvest your data and call it innovation.'"
"And?"
"And the servers aren't in the building. Not the main ones. NeuraLink's public-facing infrastructure is hosted through standard cloud services — Amazon, Google, the usual corporate stack. But Meridian's data — the surveillance feeds, the player profiles, the Love Room archives — that's segregated. Separate physical servers. Separate network. Air-gapped from the main system."
"Where?"
"Basement level of the same building. Miguel got close enough to ID a biometric access panel on the stairwell door — keycard plus fingerprint. Rotating security on twelve-hour shifts, two guards, camera coverage on the corridor."
More clicking. "It's not a fortress, but it's not a walk-in closet either."
"Can you get into the servers remotely?"
"If I could get into the servers remotely, I would've done it three weeks ago and we'd be drinking beer instead of having this conversation at 2 AM."
He pauses. "The air gap is the problem. Those servers aren't connected to any network I can reach from the outside. To deploy the virus — the one that wipes the rootkit and targets the Love Room data — I need physical access. Someone has to plug a device into the primary rack."
"Someone meaning me."
"Someone meaning someone who can get past a biometric lock, two security guards, and a camera system without triggering every alarm in the building." Another pause. "So yeah. Probably you."
I lean against the kitchen counter and stare at the ceiling. The water stain looks different at 2 AM — darker, more defined, less like Florida and more like a countdown.
"How do I get in?"
"That's the part I'm still working on. The keycard is cloneable if we get close enough to a valid one. The fingerprint is harder — biometric spoofing requires a clean print, a mold, and about six hours of fabrication time. The cameras run on a closed circuit with a three-minute rotation gap during shift changes."
"Three minutes."
"Three minutes to get from the stairwell door to the server room, plug in the device, wait for deployment, and get out." He exhales.
"It's tight. It's really tight. And if you get caught, the best-case scenario is federal trespassing charges. Worst case, Arthur Wilson's lawyers bury you so deep your grandchildren will be paying legal fees."
"And if I don't go?"
Silence. We both know the answer. If I don't go, the recordings stay on Meridian's servers. Tristan keeps his leverage.
The System Quests keep coming. And Nora keeps retreating behind a mask that fits better every day.
"I'll have the device ready in a week," Raf says. "The virus targets two things — the Echo Link rootkit across all devices, and the data partition storing the Love Room archives. Format-specific. It'll hunt encrypted audio files using Echo's proprietary signature and wipe them. Every copy. Every backup."
"And Tristan's personal copies?"
"If he downloaded files to a local device, we can't reach those remotely. But if the server copies are destroyed, his leverage shrinks. He'd have to prove the recordings are authentic without the original server data to corroborate them."
"Shrinks isn't gone."
"No. But shrinks is better than where we are now."
I look toward the bedroom. Nora is a shape in the dark — curled, closed, arms locked across her chest like she's holding herself together because nobody else can be trusted with the pieces.
"Do it," I say. "Build the device. Map the security rotation. Find me a way in."
"Danny—"
"She's disappearing, Raf." My voice catches on something I flatten before it can surface.
"Every day, a little more. He's putting her back in the box she spent twenty-one years trying to climb out of, and I can't — I won't — watch it happen."
Raf is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, the sarcasm is gone.
"One week," he says. "I'll find you a way in."
I hang up. Set the phone down. Walk back to the mattress and lie down beside a woman who is sleeping on the far edge with her arms crossed and her back to me, performing unconsciousness with the same flawless precision she performs everything else.
The water stain watches from the ceiling. I watch it back.
One week. Seven days to find a door into a building I have no right to enter, reach a server I have no right to touch, and destroy data that someone spent four point two million dollars to collect.