Chapter 1: Evaleigh

In the distant future.

(Trigger warning: mature themes and oppression)

"Move!" The middle-aged, bespectacled brunette doctor in wrinkled navy scrubs gestured frantically from the trauma bay as the paramedic-flanked stretcher, burdened with its patient, raced toward him from the ambulance bay.

Resuscitations were usually incongruously calm events, given the task at hand. Something, however, had put that particular look of alarm on Dr. Carrington's face.

My nervous system jolted — a live wire touched to still water. This life on the line. Not just anyone — someone who is High-Elite.

I stationed a light blue medical mask over my nose and mouth and trailed the stretcher as it passed the nursing desk into the prepared and awaiting, stage-lit trauma bay, morphing into a cog in the resuscitation machine. Looking down, I saw baby-pink scrub pants and white sneakers moving in time with my colleagues, as if I were one of them.

I often look down. I'm not one of them.

The patient was petite, blonde, and bare-chested. Her rose-sequined evening gown bodice had been cut away for resuscitation, a paramedic straddling her on the stretcher, kneeling, manually compressing her chest as they went. The stretcher thrummed with each compression. Her buxom torso heaved with artificial life — a heart pumped by human hands, keeping the flame from going out. Even with her dress intact, modesty clearly hadn't been her concern — the cut fabric at her sides showed that much. A large diamond pendant danced in time with each compression against her bronzed skin, a metronome counting out the seconds she had left.

Like all Elites, especially High-Elites, it was impossible to guess her age just by looking at her. Ample resources and leisure bought perfection for someone with a Pygmalion obsession — a life spent optimizing, enhancing, refining, sculpting herself into something time was not permitted to touch. Her face was a sealed room — not a line, not a crack in the plaster, nothing allowed in or out. Only the blue-tinged lips parted around a breathing apparatus hinted that decay had found her anyway, the way it always does, through a door you didn't think to lock.

The stretcher stopped in the trauma bay, and the team continued their work. I quickly applied a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter, and ECG leads while compressions continued. My next task: start a second IV site.

I positioned myself on the inside of her right elbow, feeling for the struggling vein. The bay light illuminated every perfect detail of her — a spotlight that had no interest in the rest of us. A wet spot on her skirt smelled of alcohol. She reeked of musky perfume and chocolate, the ghost of a party still clinging to her skin.

Success. I found a vein.

"Trenette Xerxes, age 52," Dr. Carrington announced to the room. "Collapsed at the President's Ball. Cardiac arrest."

Is she 52? She looks 25. My age.

I studied her face — not a line, not a wrinkle, not a single mark of time. Elite individuals had access to treatments that could roll back the clock by decades, winding it back like a watch they owned outright. Lower-class people aged faster. Hunger, violence, stress — it carved itself into our faces by thirty, chiselling its record into our skin whether we consented or not. In another twenty-seven years, if I made it that long, I'd look seventy. She'd still look thirty. We were aging on entirely different planets, under different suns, but side by side.

The divide was absolute. Only High-Elites could hold office, vote, exercise autonomy, and travel. I'd never leave Prescott in my lifetime. Never own anything. Never have a say in the laws that govern my body. Mid-Elites had some rights — education, property, a path to vote if they could pay for it, safer neighbourhoods, and easier access to the rewards of their social position. They lived on higher ground, surrounded by beautiful parks. And then there was the rest of us, down where the water collected.

I sanitized her skin, pressed my thumb from the opposite hand to hold the vein in place, and found my angle — the way a plane finds its runway, committed, precise, no room for hesitation. The needle slid through her skin, and the tired vein allowed the intrusion without contesting.

The vein doesn't care if I'm low-class and it's High Elite. Biology is the only democracy left. All of these thoughts would never dare meet the light of day; it would be the last thing I said.

I exhaled. Getting an IV under the pressure of so many eyes watching can be nerve-racking – I’m low-class, I have to continually show I’m valuable here, or I could be fired on the spot. I like starting IVs. They make me feel like I'm proficient at something, like I have earned my place in the room. I flushed the site for patency, secured it to Trenette's skin with a dressing, and placed her thin, manicured hand back on the stretcher — gently, as if it were porcelain, as if she could tell the difference. I glanced up at Carrington — the site was ready.

He'd already been watching me. "Well done, Oberle." He smirked and winked, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder and staying there, heavy as a stone, his eyes lingering on me as he continued giving orders to the room. Of course, he thought he was entitled. Domination was the game — it always was, in systems that had built their inequalities so deep into the architecture that most people stopped seeing them at all, the way you stop seeing the walls of a room you've lived in too long.

I noted his behaviour, and reoriented my assessment of him.

My eyes were the only part of my face left exposed between scrub cap and mask — a small mercy, until they betrayed me. I felt the eye-roll coming before I could stop it, so I didn't try. Instead, I dropped my gaze, crouched, and let my body do what it knew — bending away, stepping just beyond his reach, occupying myself with the discarded IV package on the floor. A practical move. A practiced one. I let my eyes roll with quiet, private pleasure as I straightened up, the green laminated trauma bay floor the only witness to my small act of rebellion. Even revolution, when you are low-class and female, must be invisible to survive.

I know my place well. Educated, employed, fortunate by some measure, and still barely enough, a boat bailed out just fast enough to stay afloat. So I keep my distance: from people, from feeling, from anything that might crack the surface. Always on guard. Always quiet. Eyes to the ground. There is a particular skill in making yourself invisible, in shrinking so completely that the world simply moves around you like water around a stone. I have mastered it. Emotions are a luxury I can't afford — they break focus, and nothing is going to fracture this momentum I've built toward surviving on my own terms.

I shouldn't have been able to go to nursing school — low-class and female. But my mother claimed an Elite friend co-owned this hospital and had sponsored my education. They needed nurses. Mom said it was probably because people think I'm pretty. Elites value extraordinary natural beauty even more than money — money is ubiquitous to them; beauty is rare, something wealth can't always manufacture, a garden that resists being bought. She always said that, my mother, in the same breath that she emphasized my mind and abilities over my looks. Intelligence is complex, enduring, desirable, she'd say. Beauty is effortless, unearned, and fleeting — a flower, not a root. I think she wanted me to believe I had earned my place. I'm still not sure I do.

I skulked out of the way and started recording on the patient's digital chart. The resuscitation proceeded like a well-oiled machine — manual compressions replaced by a mechanical compressor, medications running through her left IV, fluids pouring into my new site, the body of Trenette Xerxes held together by tubes and electricity and the sheer collective will of people paid to keep the powerful alive.

The chart prominently displayed how High-Elite she was. Trenette was top tier. Her great-grandfather had been one of the original oligarchs when the illusion of democracy finally fell into non-illusion, his stolen and unimaginable wealth a glacier that had carved the landscape for generations, reshaping everything it moved through. No wonder the team was desperate to save her.

"Clear! Don't touch her!" Shanna called out, arms fanning wide over the patient. The team lifted their hands. The compressor stopped. The shock delivered — Trenette's body jolted, pulled briefly back toward the shore. Activity resumed immediately.

Shanna was one of our experienced nurses, whose wisdom, mentorship, and kindness I'd relied on over the past ten months — a steadying current beneath the surface of this place, despite the gulf between my low-class status and her Mid-Elite standing. Some people wore their social position like a wall. Shanna wore hers like a door left open. She didn’t care where we came from; we needed to be a cohesive team, and everyone was important.

I recorded medications and resuscitation details. A strand of my long, wavy, frost-coloured hair escaped my cap. I tucked it back, as if my appearance needed to be kept in line as well.

Before Trenette arrived, the ambulance had brought in the wrong patient. A low-class woman, homeless, bleeding heavily from a miscarriage. The paramedics had found her at a Mid-Elite neighbourhood address and assumed she belonged there. She didn't. No doubt she had gone looking for help but did not find it.

I'd watched Carrington take one cold look at her chart. "Transfer her to Mercy."

"She'll bleed out before we get her there," Shanna had said.

"Then she bleeds out." He'd turned away, as easily as a man turning off a light.

The woman in the doorway — bleeding, barely conscious — had gone to a Mid-Elite address looking for help she was not going to find. Carrington took one look at her chart and said what he always said. "Transfer her to Mercy." "She'll bleed out before we get there," Shanna said. "Then she bleeds out." Low-class. Female. Pregnant. Three strikes in a system that had decided, fifty years ago, that those three words in combination did not constitute a medical emergency worth addressing. I had stopped being surprised by this. Surprise required believing something different was possible, and I had spent twenty-six years learning exactly how possible it was.

Shanna decided. "Take her to Dr. Hammond. I'll take responsibility." A quiet act of defiance, small enough to survive, large enough to matter.

Carrington glared but didn't stop her. After all, the woman would probably die anyway. What was one more corpse for the collection truck?

Dr. Hammond had mercifully accepted responsibility for her care. She was in surgery now. She might live. That small, stubborn word — might — was the best any of us could offer women like her.

But Trenette — top-tier, High-Elite Trenette — had received the full response team immediately. The machinery of this place always knew which lives to fight for.

My eyes shifted past the screen. A bronzed, handsome, dark-haired young man in a tuxedo leaned against the wall outside the bay — the kind of man who leaned against walls as if the walls were lucky to hold him. Bored. Annoyed. He checked his watch, inspected his fingernails, and huffed while looking down the hallway. Then he returned his gaze to the scene, his expression briefly scrambled, like a man who had been handed something he hadn't ordered but couldn’t send back.

Like he had somewhere else to be. Callous. Like her dying was an inconvenience to his evening rather than the ending of a life.

His dark eyes sluiced to me. An eyebrow raised. A dimpled smile formed — slow and deliberate, the way a trap opens. That lecherous, sybaritic look.

I gave him an icy stare, then returned my gaze to the screen. I wished I could dissolve into the floor. I hated being seen. I kept my focus on the screen or the ground when I wasn't watching the room — the way small animals learn to move through open fields, quickly and without drawing attention.

Being low-class and pleasing to the eye is dangerous. Low-class women have no human rights. Our reproductive organs are considered the state’s legal property until marriage, a relic of long-lost religious beliefs that the state kept because it provided control. Once married, any last shred of choice or autonomy a woman had turned into her husband's legal property, along with her body. Mid-Elite women have illusory rights—autonomy that exists like a cage with an open door: technically free, but practically not. High-Elite women have complete freedom of choice. The rest of us are community property, and men openly claim abusive liberties over girls of any age and women, treating it as their civic duty—unremarkable, and unreported. There is no system, no norm, no collective pressure to stop them; in fact, it openly encourages this violence.

I’ve survived by staying unnoticed. I will never marry, never partner, never have a child. Having a child is my greatest fear. It would be the end of whatever small life I have managed to build — a door I refuse to walk through, one that locks from the outside once you cross the threshold.

Trenette's heart eventually regained its own sinus rhythm. Her colour slowly returned, like dawn arriving reluctantly. She was extubated and breathing on her own. The tension in the room eased with a collective exhale — the machine had done its work, the powerful woman had been retrieved from the edge, and order had been restored. The team shifted to stabilization and covered her with a blanket.

Disappointment flickered across the bored man's face. Then his demeanour glazed over into practiced concern — furrowed brows, a flourish in his tone, arms opening wide. The visitor rules clearly didn't apply to him. Rules rarely did, for men like that.

Trenette's eyes fluttered open. Dazed, she took in the room quickly, the way someone does when they've woken in a place they don't entirely trust. She wrapped her arms across her chest — sore, rightfully. Her eyes found me. Something in her expression I couldn't place. Warm rather than ice. Like a mask had slipped, just for a moment, before she remembered she was wearing one.

Carrington explained what had happened. A substance in her blood had stopped her breathing, stopped her heart.

The man halted his approach, something recalibrating behind his eyes. A strong cologne reached me before he moved — he was likely closer to my age than hers, though with Elites it was always difficult to tell. Time didn't operate the same way on that side of the divide.

Trenette's expression went icy as she processed the news, her gaze locked on mine. Her breath stilled. She grimaced as her ribcage shifted — she would be bruised and sore, the body keeping its own record of what had happened here tonight, whatever money and treatments could not erase.

Her eyes shifted reluctantly to the man, then stiffened when they found him. What followed was an award-winning performance — counterfeit warmth flooding her face, her right hand reaching out, pulling him in. She became what he needed her to be, efficiently and without hesitation, the way someone fluent in a second language switches without thinking.

The team cleared the room except for Shanna and me. We remained in the background, monitors to watch, records to keep. Shanna turned to her screen.

Trenette pulled the blanket to her waist, baring herself for him — a calculated offering, a hook baited with precision. He was her entire focus: beautiful for him, sculpted for him, breathing and existing for him, performing aliveness in the specific shape and depth he required. A woman who had mastered a different kind of invisibility than mine — one that worked through spectacle rather than absence, commanding all eyes while revealing nothing of herself.

Effective. I'll give her that.

He leaned into a mindlessly rough embrace, his hands moving across her chest as if she were an object he owned, squeezing, caressing, playing without any concern for damage, only his pleasure. She stifled her wincing, her ribs still singing from the drumbeat of compressions, her discomfort irrelevant to him — he moved through her pain the way the powerful move through most inconveniences, without awareness, without stopping. She reached for the apex of his thighs, outside his pants, with her manicured hand, deliberate and practiced. He responded like clockwork.

She was clearly in pain. He remained selfishly oblivious, a man who had never been taught to look for what he didn't want to see.

Shanna noticed. She looked at me and nodded towards the nursing station — my cue to leave. Relief washed over me like cool water. Shanna pulled the curtain around Trenette's stretcher and went back to the monitors, a quiet and professional guardian over a scene she couldn't change and had no choice but to witness.

High-Elites do whatever they want, apparently. The curtain was a courtesy, not a boundary.

Just before it closed, his dark eyes found me one last time. A smirk cut across his face. Her expression mirrored it — a wincing, icy contortion, a warning dressed as amusement. Then the curtain fell between us like a sentence ending.

Poor Shanna had to stay in the room in case something went immediately wrong with our freshly resuscitated patient. A different kind of survival, hers — learning to stay present in rooms you'd rather leave, keeping watch over people who would never watch over you.

I slid the soundproof glass doors shut with a light clang and headed for the nursing desk, mentally shaking off the residue of both their expressions — the way you shake off something that has touched your skin and left a trace you can feel but not quite see.

I sat at the nursing desk with a full view of what was happening in the room. Red fabric was already pooled on the floor beneath the curtain, a discarded petal from a flower that had nearly died an hour ago. Shanna leaned against a cart outside it, two fingers pinching the bridge of her nose, hand covering her eyes — the posture of someone who has seen too much and has no available exit. On the monitoring screen, vital signs were elevated. One of Trenette's bare feet had escaped through the curtain panels, toes pointed at the ceiling, indifferent to everything.

This hospital provides care mainly for the High and Mid-Elite — what should be standard treatment for everyone, but is instead rationed like a luxury. The staff here genuinely cared or at least performed caring convincingly enough that it no longer mattered. Whether driven by loyalty to the Elite class or fear of repercussions is hard to tell. Most likely the latter. Fear remains a powerful motivator.

Ten blocks down, in the low-class areas — the "Zoo" — no one comes to anyone's rescue. We are dehumanized as animals kept for control, ants on a path that more important feet control without looking down. The animals in the actual Elite zoo are treated better than us.

A City truck collects bodies from our streets all day. They call it disease control — the water system, they say, always the water system — as if the real disease were biological rather than political. The Elites use the same water. That fact alone should tell you everything about who they believe is expendable and who is not.

The divide between the classes is not a gap. It is a canyon with no bridge — on one side, obscene and unimaginable wealth; on the other, severe and incomprehensible poverty. And both sides are expected to pretend this is natural. That it has always been this way. That it could not be otherwise.

And yet here we are. A desperate-to-keep-her-man High-Elite and her younger, affection-wandering narcissist are having sex in a trauma room not sixty minutes after her cardiac arrest. She didn't seem remotely concerned about that last part. Does she understand the risk? Probably not. Or perhaps she has calculated that losing him would be the greater danger. In a world where women are appraised rather than known, that calculus makes a terrible kind of sense.

As I completed documentation at the nursing desk alongside Carrington — who had positioned himself uncomfortably close, as if proximity were a right he'd been granted without application — and the paramedics finishing their reports, Trenette remained behind the curtain. Shanna stood outside it, hands on her hips, rolling her eyes at the rest of us with the weary eloquence of someone who has run out of more precise language for the situation.

"Oberle, right?" The new nurse — Marcus — was staring at me while we worked.

"What."

"Your eyes. That colour. I've never seen anything like it."

I pulled my mask higher and my scrub cap lower, drawing curtains against an unwanted visitor. I did not answer. I do not owe anyone an explanation for my face.

"This is NOT the time for this, Marcus."

I didn't mention watching my father get killed by a government drone when I was three. I didn't mention that the trauma had changed my hair and my eyes. I didn't mention any of it because some things, once spoken aloud, become real in a way that is very difficult to put back.

My eyes were a dead giveaway. Mom said I used to have normal brown eyes and brown hair, like hers. But at three years old, I watched government drones kill my father in the street. They had accused him of political dissent without evidence — he had been walking past a gathering of low-class workers trying to organize, not even among the speakers, just passing by with me in tow. They killed thirty-seven people near that meeting. Haphazardly, efficiently, and without consequence. The government could say whatever it wanted afterward. Everyone knew they lied. They always lied. The lie was also the point.

Mom said I screamed for three days straight. When I finally stopped, my eyes had shifted to this turquoise-to-tropical-green-to-honey-rimmed colour, and my hair had turned platinum blonde — as if the shock had bleached me from the inside out, as if my body had tried to process something it couldn't hold and had simply changed the container. We never found out why it happened. There was no one to ask.

I had been marked by violence since I was three. It showed in every mirror. I had learned to think of it as armour, even when it felt like a target.

I didn't mention any of it.

Marcus opened his mouth to ask more, but a tall woman with long jet-black hair and striking blue eyes charged onto the unit — tight navy evening gown, heels announcing her arrival like a gavel iteratively coming down, six guards trailing in her wake. Heavily made-up, shapely, and brazenly authoritarian, she moved through the space the way a shark moves — everything in her path simply adjusted, was swept aside, or eaten.

Several people stiffened in recognition, the way bodies stiffen before something realized.

A nervous clerk tremulously pointed to Trenette's room. Carrington erupted from his chair and lunged into the path between the woman and the trauma bay. He bowed low, eyes to the floor, hands outstretched in a gesture half-pleading, half-surrender.

"Please give her a moment for decency, Madame Aamon."

Verity Aamon. The President's wife. My nerves detonated quietly beneath my skin. It was well-known that if she were unhappy, we'd be the ones needing resuscitation.

Aamon — our dictator, who uses the title "President" as if he'd earned it through anything other than force, coercion and inheritance, as if the voting process were anything other than a toll road where only the wealthy can afford the fare. Her reputation for cruelty, well-matched to her husband's, was known throughout Panacea the way a hurricane is known — as something to be prepared for, not prevented.

Fuck her. Fuck him. Fuck all of them. I vowed it silently in the deepest, most sealed room of myself, where things are kept that will never see light. I could be killed for what I thought. So I thought it very quietly, and I kept my face still.

Shanna spotted the visitor, stiffened, and moved swiftly to the curtain. She whispered through the fabric. The effect rippled immediately — a flurry of movement from behind the curtain, the sharp visible signs of urgency. Red fabric was kicked aside. Feet were pulled into black trousers. A shoe forced on. No sign of Trenette's feet.

The tension on the unit stretched itself wire-thin. Verity pushed Carrington aside — he stumbled and hit the floor, his glasses skidding away — and yanked the sliding glass doors open with both hands, releasing a gusty, "Dante! GET THE FUCK OUT!"

Whatever Dante's social position, she outranked him. Considerably.

Flushed, he ripped the curtain open, snatched his jacket, bow tie, and remaining shoe, and fled, trying to puzzle together his remaining masculinity through expression and posture. Trenette lay beneath her blanket, wide-eyed and red-faced, the picture of someone assembling composure from whatever pieces were still available. Heart monitor stickers had come loose during her escapade. Lipstick smeared. False eyelashes had migrated to her cheek in small dark strands. Her hair was mussed, though somehow — miraculously, almost insultingly — the blood pressure cuff remained attached, the pulse oximeter still clipped to her finger. I made a mental note to check the IV site's integrity. Lipstick trails led clearly from her mouth southward beneath the blanket — a map with an obvious destination. She was aware. She met no one's eyes.

Her gaze, when it settled on Verity, was the temperature of deep winter.

"You too!" Verity raged at Shanna, throwing a hand in the air. Shanna evacuated the bay with practiced neutrality. Verity slammed the glass doors and drew the curtain. Whatever passed between them behind it, the soundproofing kept it buried.

Dante used the reprieve to reconstruct himself — shoe on, jacket shouldered, fingers raked through his hair, heavy sigh offered to the room like a performance of inconvenience. Then he sauntered deliberately toward me, wearing Trenette's lipstick and an expression like something that had crawled out from under something else.

He appeared close to my age, as best as I could judge. He was about to speak when Verity's voice tore through the reopened doorway: "Asshole — I said GET OUT!"

He scurried from the unit, head down, and the confidence of a moment ago evaporated entirely. If he'd had a tail, it would have been between his legs.

Verity watched him go. Then she slowly dragged her ice-blue eyes to me. She narrowed them. Let the silence stretch. Hardened her features into something deliberate and assessing, the way a person looks at something they are deciding what to do with. Then she roughly re-closed the door and returned to Trenette's bedside behind the curtain, her heeled shoes visible below the hem, planted and unmoving.

Her six guards lined up shoulder to shoulder outside the bay, machine guns resting on their right shoulders and pointed at the ceiling. Not. Moving. A. Muscle. Decorative menace. Structural threat.

I felt myself turn to marble. I had to consciously remember to breathe, to instruct my lungs to continue. Everyone at the desk held their positions in rigid, collective stillness, the way people do when the air itself has become dangerous. No one spoke.

Thirty minutes passed like thirty years. When Verity emerged, her expression had softened only slightly — a blade still sharp, but no longer raised. Her step was fractionally lighter. Still agitated. Still a storm, just one that had spent some of its energy.

She charged toward me, finger pointed, the gesture of someone who has never once had to ask for attention.

"YOU. What is your name?"

"Evaleigh," I stammered, my voice barely above a breath.

She huffed, rolling her eyes, dropping her hand. "SPEAK UP, girl — and your last name is?"

"Oberle."

"Of course it is," she sneered, as if my name confirmed something she had already suspected. She threw her hands in the air, then jabbed her finger directly at my face. "YOU are trouble." The word landed with a spray of saliva — one drop between my eyebrows, one on my right eyelid when she hit the T. "YOU might have legs, tits, and an ass for days — a shape that people kill for — but your enormous tropical lagoon EYES..." Her finger drew circles in the air before my face like she was inscribing something. "...are a dead giveaway for recognizing you."

Is she insulting me or making an observation?

Dead giveaway. To who?

"NO ONE has eyes like that. That makes you different, and different makes you a target. You'd better watch yourself. You could get hurt — or WORSE, MANDATED. You might very well be my new project." She pressed that last sentence into me like a brand, holding eye contact until I felt it reach the bone.

No. My worst fear, spoken aloud by the one person in Panacea with the power to enact it. Mandated by the government to carry a child — often with a man they choose, a transaction dressed in the language of duty. I am my mother's mandated child. I watched what it cost her. I have spent my entire life navigating away from that same edge.

"I have no interest in—"

"I'm not interested in what you think, little girl." Hostile. Reductive. The tone of someone who has never needed to consider what another person thinks.

She contorted her face into a sneer. "Beauty like yours should be in the public domain. Shared. Not kept for YOU to tease and entice men with."

I do not try to draw attention. The irony of the accusation settled over me like something cold.

Does she not realize she legally owns my reproductive organs? That she is threatening me with the exercise of a right she already holds?

"...But, little girl..." She scoffed, as if the contempt alone were a sentence. "...only with the best genetics to mix with yours. YOU stay FUCKING away from Dante."

"I would never—"

"Oh, SHUT UP. You are so weak, it's pathetic."

She talks as if I haven't been beaten and violated regularly on the streets. As if I have choices that haven't already been made. As if I am not barely scraping by, working in a system she and her husband maintain to keep people like me just functional enough to be useful. She has so much privilege that my life is unimaginable to her — a foreign country with no map and no reason to visit. She doesn't deserve to know what it has cost me. She is not entitled to my story. She would only use it as another weapon.

I sat wide-eyed, shifting in my chair, every instinct in my body pulling in opposite directions — fight and disappear, scream and vanish, exist and evaporate.

In the deepest, most sealed room of my heart, the one I never open, something stirred.

Fuck you, Verity.

This threat is entirely about appearance and the control of genetics — the currency of the truly powerful, who have more actual currency than they could spend in ten lifetimes. My beauty, in this world, is not an asset. It is a liability with a lien on it. It limits my choices, draws the wrong eyes, and hands people like her a lever they are not shy about pulling. The threat is not abstract. It carries the specific, embodied risk of violation and harm, delivered with saliva on my eyelid and a pointed finger.

These Elites are so stolid and catastrophically pointless.

I just wanted to stay unnoticeable. I had been so careful. I had been so small.

I cannot handle this. My body vibrated with fear, a frequency too high to be visible, trapped entirely inside me with nowhere to go.

She held her aggressive stare as she turned and began to stride away, heels striking the floor like punctuation — each step a period, the sentence already finished. Her guards fell in line behind her, creating a small artificial breeze as they passed, the kind of wind that comes from power moving through a space and taking all the available air with it.

"See that your patient gets everything she needs!" she ordered down the hallway, throwing her right hand in the air as she marched away, the command cast behind her like something she'd already forgotten.

Everyone stared at me. I felt my face flush, felt the dangerous sting behind my eyes. I stared at the desk because it was in the way of looking at the floor, and the floor was the only place I wanted to be.

I cannot do this life. I want another option.

...But I must. I don't have another option.

Carrington materialized behind me, his hands settling on my shoulders, rubbing them. Probably intended as comfort. It did not feel like comfort. It felt like a second set of claims being filed on the same ground that was already under contest.

I took everything — the fear, the fury, the grief, the humiliation, the dangerous and unspeakable things — and I forced them, one by one, into the large mental lockbox where they have always lived. I turned the key. I slid the whole thing somewhere beneath the floor of myself, where it will remain until the end of time, or until I can no longer hold it down. Whichever comes first.

I cannot feel this. I will not feel this.

I return my eyes to the desk.