You wake up in MC's apartment.

Not the closet — the couch. You're lying on the couch with a blanket over you and a pillow under your head and the particular warmth of a space that has been heated to a temperature someone else chose because you were unconscious when they carried you in.

Your body is wrong.

Not damaged — wrong. The way a machine is wrong when you remove a component that was load-bearing and the rest of the structure holds but differently. Your cells are still there. Your blood still moves. Your heart still beats. But the thing underneath — the pulling, the shifting, the constant low hum of cells that are ready to change — is gone. Not suppressed. Not sleeping. Gone, like a room where the lights have been off so long you've forgotten where the switch is.

You try to move your hand. It moves. Slowly, heavily, the way a hand moves when it's just a hand and not a piece of adaptive machinery.

You lie on the couch and you stare at the ceiling and you catalogue what's left.

Vision: normal. Single spectrum. No infrared, no ultraviolet, no electromagnetic overlay. Just eyes.

Hearing: normal. No frequency differentiation. No subharmonic detection. Just ears.

Strength: baseline. Human baseline. The body you were born with, minus the reserves you burned through on the floor of a substation.

Scanner: dead. On the table beside the couch, cracked casing, dark screen. It died with your cells.

You close your eyes. You open them. The ceiling is still there.

---

MC is in the kitchen. You can hear her — the sounds of someone making food with the quiet efficiency of a person who has been doing it for hours while waiting for someone to wake up. The kettle. The cutting board. The particular rhythm of a woman who cooks when she's worried because cooking is the only thing she can control.

"How long?" you say. Your voice is wrong too — rough, thin, the voice of a body that spent its last reserves screaming at a frequency that shouldn't exist.

MC appears in the doorway. She's wearing yesterday's clothes — the Hunter jacket is missing, because the Hunter jacket is currently wrapped around your shoulders under the blanket. Her face is controlled. Professional. The expression she wears on missions, the one that keeps everything behind her teeth.

"Fourteen hours," she says. "You've been out for fourteen hours."

You process this. Fourteen hours of unconsciousness means fourteen hours of zero cellular activity. Fourteen hours in which your body did nothing except the bare minimum required to keep you alive. Breathing. Circulation. The basic operations of a machine running on emergency power.

"Your nose stopped bleeding around hour three," MC says. "Your ears stopped at hour six. Your temperature came back up at hour nine." She pauses. "I almost called Zayne at hour four. I didn't. But I almost did."

She didn't call Zayne. She sat in this apartment for fourteen hours and monitored you herself — checking your pulse, watching your breathing, tracking the blood and the temperature and the glacial return of whatever passes for normal in a body like yours. She did it alone because you asked her not to involve anyone else. You didn't ask her that. But she heard it anyway, in the particular way you live — the privacy, the control, the refusal to be examined by strangers.

"Thank you," you say. The words are inadequate. They're also true.

MC nods. Goes back to the kitchen. Returns with soup and toast and tea — the particular combination of foods that your body processes most efficiently, calibrated from months of watching you eat.

You sit up. It takes effort that sitting up has never taken before. The blanket falls. The jacket stays. You eat the soup because your body needs it, not because you want it. You drink the tea because MC made it. The toast sits on the plate.

---

Your cells come back slowly.

Not in a rush, not in a wave. In increments. Day one after the substation: nothing. Day two: a flicker. A moment in the kitchen where you reach for a mug and your fingers extend a millimetre further than they should — the ghost of a shift, the smallest possible evidence that something under the surface is still alive.

Day three: the nosebleed returns. Small. Brief. Almost welcome, because a nosebleed means cellular activity, and cellular activity means the engine isn't dead. Just dark. Just cold. Just waiting for something — fuel, time, the biological patience of a body that has rebuilt itself before and can do it again.

You track the recovery in the steno. Not in spider-ink shorthand — you don't have the fine motor control for that yet. In block letters, large, the handwriting of a child. You write the data because the data is the only thing that feels like yours. Everything else — the apartment, the blanket, the jacket, the soup — belongs to MC.

Day five: you can feel the scanner's absence. Not emotionally — physically. A gap in your senses where the electromagnetic overlay used to be. You can't read the city anymore. You can't feel the frequency of the lights, the pulse of the power grid, the particular hum of the Aether Core in MC's chest. You're blind in a way you haven't been since before your cells woke up for the first time, years ago, in a dimension that doesn't have a portal to reach anymore.

The scanner on the table is dead. You could rebuild it. You've done it before — twice. But rebuilding requires components, and components require the accelerated cognition that runs on cellular energy, and your cellular energy is a pilot light where there used to be a furnace.

You sit at the desk. You look at the dead scanner. You don't pick it up.

---

Zayne comes on day seven.

You know he's coming because MC told you — carefully, with the particular diplomacy of a woman who understands that you don't like doctors and you don't like strangers and you especially don't like strangers who are doctors who work for organisations that classify people like you as anomalies.

"He won't examine you," MC says. "He wants to talk about the Aether Core. About what the portal did to it."

"To yours or to me?"

MC looks at you. "Both."

He arrives at seven in the evening. You're at the desk. MC lets him in. He takes off his shoes at the door — a habit MC has apparently taught everyone who enters this apartment — and he walks to the kitchen counter and he sets down a tablet and he looks at you.

The tremor is still there. In his hands — the left one, the one that holds the tablet. The small vibration you catalogued in your steno months ago. Zayne. Doctor. Controls everything except his hands. You were wrong about the control. It's not that he controls everything except his hands. It's that his hands are the only part of him that tells the truth.

"I have data you need to see," he says. No preamble. No pleasantries. He has the particular directness of a man who has decided that efficiency is more respectful than courtesy.

You appreciate that. You don't tell him.

He opens the tablet. Charts. Waveforms. The clinical language of medicine applied to a phenomenon that medicine doesn't have vocabulary for.

"When you opened the portal," he says, "you drew energy from MC's Aether Core. The extraction was minor — three percent of the Core's total output, sustained for approximately four minutes. MC's cardiac system compensated. No lasting damage."

"I know. I designed the extraction protocol. I calibrated the draw rate to stay below the five percent threshold." You pull the steno across the desk and open it to the resonance charts. "Your three percent matches my projection within half a percentage point."

Zayne looks at the steno. At the spider-ink shorthand he can't read. His expression doesn't change, but his hands go still — the tremor stopping the way it does when his brain takes over from his body.

"You can't read it," you say. "But the math is there. I ran the same projections you did. I know what the portal costs."

"Then you know it's not viable."

"I know the CURRENT parameters aren't viable. That's not the same thing."

He pauses. His hands stop trembling. The way they always do when he's about to say something precise.

"The problem is the ratio." He turns the tablet toward you. A graph — two curves, one ascending, one descending. "Your portal required four minutes of extraction to open an unstable breach that lasted under six minutes. A stable portal — one you could actually walk through — would require sustained extraction at significantly higher output. The Aether Core can't sustain that level of energy loss without destabilising."

"I know what the graph says. I drew it six weeks before you did."

"Then why did you attempt it?"

The question lands harder than a graph. You stare at him. He stares back. The clinical mask is still on, but there's something behind it — not anger, not frustration. The particular intensity of a man who has spent his career making sure bodies don't break, watching someone who deliberately broke her own.

"Because theory and practice aren't the same thing," you say. "I needed live data. I needed to know if the resonance bridge could hold under load, if the dimensional barrier would respond the way the models predicted, if my cells could sustain the engine function long enough to—"

"Long enough to what? Die on the floor of an abandoned building?"

"Long enough to gather data I can't get any other way."

"You burned through your entire cellular reserve. Your body temperature dropped below thirty-one degrees. Your cardiac rhythm was irregular for nine hours." He turns the tablet back to himself and pulls up a different chart — your chart. Your data. Your vitals, recorded from a source you didn't authorise.

You feel your jaw tighten. "Where did you get my biometrics?"

"MC's scanner logged your vitals during the event. She shared them with me."

You look at MC. MC looks back from the couch. No apology. No guilt. The steady gaze of a woman who watched you almost die and then called the best doctor she knew.

"You were on the floor bleeding from your ears," MC says. Calm. Matter-of-fact. "I called Zayne."

You look back at Zayne. "Fine. Show me the data."

"I'm showing you the data. You nearly killed yourself."

"I CLOSED the portal. I made a calculated decision to abort when the parameters exceeded—"

"You made a calculated decision at minute five of a six-minute window. You had ninety seconds of cellular reserve remaining. Ninety seconds." He leans forward. The tremor is completely gone now. His hands are surgeon-still. "If you had miscalculated by thirty seconds — if the resonance bridge had resisted closure for half a minute longer — you would be dead. Not injured. Not recovering. Dead."

"She didn't miscalculate," MC says from the couch. Both of you look at her. She's standing now — arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe between the living room and the kitchen. The posture of a team leader entering a briefing, not a bystander watching from the sidelines. "I was there. She monitored the parameters in real time. She closed the portal the moment the readings went critical."

"That doesn't change the margin," Zayne says.

"It changes the context. She wasn't reckless. She was precise. The margin was thin because thin is all the physics allowed." MC looks at you, then back at Zayne. "I agreed to this. I was present. I knew the risk."

Zayne's jaw tightens. Something flickers across his face — not at you. At MC. The particular frustration of a man who has spent years trying to protect a woman who keeps giving herself away.

"The risk was to both of you," he says.

"I know what the risk was." MC's voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. "I felt my heart stutter. I chose to stay. That was my decision, Zayne. Not hers and not yours."

The kitchen is quiet. Three people. Three different kinds of stubborn. You can hear the refrigerator. You can hear the city outside. You can hear the particular silence of a room where everyone is right about different things and none of it helps.

"I didn't miscalculate," you say, quieter now.

"This time," Zayne says.

The two words hang between you. This time. The implication is clear: you'll try again. He knows it. You know it. MC knows it. The only question is what stops you.

"There's a second problem," Zayne says. His voice changes — quieter, more controlled. The voice he uses when he's about to say the thing he came to say. "And it's not the portal."

You wait.

"The Aether Core stabilisation you performed on day one — when you fixed MC's heart." He pulls up another chart. "It wasn't permanent. It was a resonance lock. Your cells established a frequency match with the Core that stabilised its output. That lock is maintained by proximity — your continued presence near MC reinforces the stabilisation."

You feel the shape of what he's about to say before he says it. You feel it in the way your stomach drops, the way the room narrows, the way the data you've been ignoring for weeks suddenly assembles itself into a conclusion you should have drawn months ago.

"If you leave — by portal or any other means — the resonance lock degrades." He meets your eyes. "The half-life of the stabilisation without your proximity is approximately six to twelve months. After that, the Aether Core returns to its pre-intervention state."

Pre-intervention state. The clinical term for what MC was before you fixed her — the failing heart, the fragmenting memories, the woman who was dying in pieces so slowly that no one noticed except the people who loved her.

"No." You say it before you've finished processing it. "That's wrong. The stabilisation was cellular — my cells rewrote the Core's frequency at a structural level. That's not a lock, it's a repair."

"A repair requires the original material to hold. Your cells aren't the original material. They're a graft — a biological patch on a dimensional organ. Without reinforcement, the graft degrades."

"Show me the data."

He shows you the data. You hate it. You hate it because it's clean, because the methodology is sound, because the decay curve is elegant in the way that only true data is elegant, and because you can't find a flaw in it.

You spend four minutes looking for a flaw. You read every axis, every variable, every assumption baked into the model. Zayne watches you do it. He doesn't rush you. He has the patience of a man who has seen other brilliant people try to find mistakes in his work and fail.

"Your sample size is one," you say finally. "One Aether Core. One stabilisation event. You're extrapolating a decay curve from a single data point."

"I'm extrapolating from seventeen years of Aether Core research, six months of MC's cardiac data, and every biometric reading your cells have produced since day one." His voice is still quiet. Still controlled. "The sample size is small. The data is not."

You close the tablet. You push it across the counter toward him.

"You're telling me I can't leave."

"I'm telling you the medical data. What you do with it is not my decision." He takes the tablet. "But if you attempt another portal — if you draw from MC's Core again, at higher output, for longer duration — the extraction alone could destabilise the lock. You wouldn't need to leave. The attempt itself could undo the repair."

The sentence sits in the room like a third person. The attempt itself. Not the departure — the attempt.

You can't try again without risking MC. You can't leave without killing MC slowly. You can't stay because staying was never the plan.

"How long have you been monitoring my cellular data?" you ask.

Zayne's hands start trembling again. The truth returning to his fingers.

"Since MC brought you home," he says.

"Without my knowledge."

"Without your knowledge."

The kitchen is very quiet. MC is still in the doorframe. Her arms are still crossed. She's looking at you — not at Zayne, not at the window. At you. She already knows everything Zayne just told you. She knew before he came. Her face says: I knew. I said yes anyway. Don't you dare feel guilty about this.

"You and I," you say to Zayne, "are going to have a conversation about boundaries. Later. When I can feel my hands properly."

Zayne nods. He stands. He puts his shoes on at the door. He pauses.

"For what it's worth," he says without turning around, "your portal architecture was elegant. The resonance bridge design, the cellular engine conversion — I've never seen anything like it. No one has." He opens the door. "That's not a compliment. It's a clinical observation."

He leaves. The door clicks shut.

---

Zayne takes the stairs instead of the elevator. Seven flights. He needs the movement — his hands are shaking and his chest is tight and the stairs give his body something to do besides remember the way she looked at him when she said boundaries.

Not angry. Not afraid. Direct. The particular directness of a woman who has been poked and prodded by strangers and has learned to push back without raising her voice. She had been sitting at a desk in borrowed clothes with her hands barely functional and she had stared down a cardiologist with seventeen years of clinical experience and he had been the one who blinked.

His hands are shaking. He tells himself it's the adrenaline of confrontation. He tells himself that until he reaches the ground floor. By the time he reaches his car, he has stopped telling himself things and is sitting in the driver's seat with the engine off, replaying the way her jaw set when she said "I didn't miscalculate." The certainty in it. The stillness of her, amid everything that was shaking.

Clinical observation. That's what he called it. The portal architecture was elegant — that part was true. What he didn't say, what he filed in the part of his mind that doesn't have a label, was that the woman who built it was something too.

He starts the car. His hands are steady on the wheel. They won't be steady tomorrow.

---

The apartment is quiet.

MC is in the kitchen, putting the kettle on. You're at the desk. The dead scanner sits between you. The steno is open to a blank page. The pen is in your hand.

You can't go home. The portal would kill MC. And even if you found another way — a way that didn't use her heart, a way that didn't cost her anything — leaving would start the clock. Six to twelve months. The resonance lock degrading. Her heart returning to the thing it was before you touched it. The memories fragmenting. The woman who said go home, find your fiancé, I'll be fine slowly becoming a woman who can't remember why she said it.

You fixed her. And the fix requires you. And you are the opposite of fixed.

"I'm not going anywhere, am I?" you say.

MC looks at you. Her face does the thing — the controlled expression cracking, just slightly, at the edges. Not breaking. Not crumbling. Just opening, the way a window opens when someone unlocks it from the inside.

"I know," she says.

You don't write the day in the steno. You haven't written the day since the night she said yes. The count stopped and you don't miss it and you don't know what to do with the space it left behind.

You put the pen down. You look at the blank page. You look at the dead scanner. You look at the jacket — her jacket, still on the back of the desk chair where you put it this morning, folded with a precision that would have been impossible a week ago because a week ago your hands could barely hold a spoon.

Your cells are coming back. Slowly. Quietly. The pilot light warming toward something that might become a flame.

You pick up the pen. You don't write the day. You write something else:

I can't leave. I can't stay. I'm going to have to figure out which one is the lie.

You close the notebook. MC makes tea. The kettle boils. The city breathes outside the window.

The apartment is quiet. It sounds different from in here than it used to.