The drones move on a Thursday.

Not visibly — Caleb doesn't make visible moves. He makes adjustments. Reconfigurations. The kind of operational shifts that look like routine maintenance on a logistics report and look like a tightening net on a tactical overlay.

Twelve drones. Reassigned from district patrol to fixed-position surveillance. Four on MC's apartment building — two on the roof, two on adjacent structures, covering every entrance, every window, every fire escape. Four on the butcher's shop where the girl works three days a week. Four mobile, rotating between the routes she takes: apartment to Kwon's, Kwon's to the warehouse, the warehouse to the apartment. A triangle. His triangle.

He files the reassignment under "Wanderer Incursion Pattern Analysis — District 7." Standard classification. No flags. No oversight. The Hunter Association tracks Wanderer patterns across every district; drone reassignments for pattern analysis happen weekly. No one asks why District 7 suddenly needs twelve additional surveillance units. No one asks because no one is supposed to ask. That's how the system works. That's how every system Caleb has ever operated inside has worked.

The system works because people like him make it work. That's what they trained him for. That's what the facility produced: soldiers who build systems that run themselves, who construct operational frameworks so clean that the people inside them never see the walls.

He sits in his apartment — sparse, functional, the apartment of a man who has never learned to live in a space, only to occupy it — and he reviews the surveillance grid on his tablet. Twelve drones. Four fixed positions. Full coverage. The girl cannot leave MC's vicinity without his knowledge.

His left hand holds the tablet. The tremor is worse tonight — a vibration that runs from his wrist to his fingertips, constant, the shaking of a hand that remembers things the man attached to it has been trying to forget.

His right hand rests on the desk. Still. Steady. The prosthesis doesn't shake. The prosthesis does what it's told.

He envies the right hand tonight.

---

The false alarm happens six days later.

Not an accident — Caleb doesn't have accidents. An insertion. A manufactured Wanderer alert in District 7, subsector 4, three blocks from MC's apartment. The alert triggers standard Association protocol: lockdown, evacuation advisory, Hunter deployment. The lockdown covers a twelve-block radius. MC's apartment is inside the radius.

The girl can't leave during a lockdown. Can't go to Kwon's. Can't go to the warehouse. Can't go anywhere that takes her outside the perimeter. She sits in the apartment with MC and she waits for the all-clear and she doesn't know that the all-clear depends on a man sitting in a car four blocks away, watching thermal signatures on a screen, deciding when the threat that doesn't exist has been sufficiently neutralised.

He holds the lockdown for ninety-three minutes. Not long enough to trigger an investigation — lockdowns in District 7 run between sixty and one hundred and twenty minutes on average. Long enough to test the protocol. Long enough to prove that he can keep her in place.

The all-clear goes out. The girl leaves for work. Caleb watches her thermal signature move through the streets — the particular gait he knows, the particular heat pattern of a body that runs warmer than human baseline because of the cells that are slowly rebuilding inside it.

He logs the event. Wanderer alert — false positive, signal artefact, closed. Standard. Clean. No one questions it.

He should feel wrong. He waits for the wrongness — the guilt, the shame, the particular self-disgust of a man who just used his authority to cage a woman without her knowledge. He waits for it the way he waits for the tremor in his left hand: knowing it's coming, bracing for it.

It doesn't come.

What comes instead is relief. The particular relief of a system working as designed. She stayed. MC stayed. The proximity was maintained. The resonance lock held. MC's memories are intact. MC remembers him.

For her own good.

The sentence arrives in his head fully formed. Not his voice — the Colonel's. The commander from the facility, the man who took his arm and his memories and gave him a prosthesis and a mission. The man who said for her own good every time he ordered something that wasn't good for anyone except the mission. The man who built systems that looked like protection and functioned like prisons.

Caleb knows that sentence. He knows it the way his body knows the prosthesis — intimately, permanently, the particular familiarity of something that was attached to him without his consent. For her own good was in his file. For her own good was the justification for the memory wipes, the augmentations, the years of his life that exist as blank spaces in his mind because someone decided that forgetting was for his own good.

He's using the same sentence now. For a different woman. For a different reason. But the sentence is the same and the structure is the same and the logic is the same and somewhere inside him — in the space between the left hand and the right, between the hand that feels and the hand that doesn't — he knows that the reason doesn't matter. The structure is the thing. The structure is always the thing.

He knows this.

He builds the next false alarm anyway.

---

Zayne's hands are steady when he opens the "Containment Options" file.

He's had it minimised for eleven days. Eleven days of opening MC's cardiac data, reviewing the girl's cellular recovery projections, running the half-life calculations. Eleven days of telling himself that the file is a precaution. A theoretical exercise. The responsible preparation of a physician who has identified a risk and is cataloguing possible responses.

He opens it now because MC had a cardiac event this morning.

Minor. A flutter — three seconds of irregular rhythm, self-correcting, no intervention required. MC didn't even feel it. Zayne felt it — through the monitoring array, through the data feed that connects his wrist-screen to MC's cardiac signature twenty-four hours a day. Three seconds of irregularity. Three seconds of MC's heart remembering what it was like before the girl fixed it.

The girl is at sixty percent cellular recovery. The stabilisation is holding. The flutter wasn't a failure — it was a fluctuation. Normal variance within the parameters of a resonance lock that is, by every metric Zayne can measure, functioning correctly.

But the flutter happened. And the flutter means the lock isn't absolute. And if the lock isn't absolute, it can fail. And if it can fail, it will fail — eventually, statistically, inevitably. The half-life is six to twelve months without the girl. With the girl, the timeline extends. But extends is not eliminates. Extends is not cures. Extends is the language of management, not resolution.

He needs resolution.

The file contains three options. He wrote them clinically — the language of medicine, the format of a treatment protocol. Each option has a rationale, a methodology, a risk assessment. Each option is, by the standards of his medical training, a legitimate response to a legitimate cardiac risk.

Option 1: Voluntary cooperation. The girl agrees to remain within proximity of MC indefinitely. No coercion. No containment. Relies on the girl's continued willingness to prioritise MC's health over her own desire to return home.

He's already tried this. The girl said she wasn't going anywhere. But MC mentioned it during their last cardiac check-in — casually, the way MC mentions things she doesn't realise are grenades: the girl is working on making the stabilisation independent. Making it so she doesn't need to stay. Option 1 has an expiration date and the date is whenever the girl's research succeeds.

Option 2: Medical intervention. A pharmaceutical protocol designed to suppress the girl's cellular recovery, preventing her from reaching the energy levels required for another portal attempt. Administered as a daily supplement, presented as nutritional support. The girl doesn't need to know.

He stares at Option 2. He wrote it at two in the morning, four days ago, in the particular clarity that comes from sleep deprivation and fear. He reads it now with the distance of a man who slept six hours and drank two coffees and can see the words for what they are.

A pharmaceutical protocol designed to suppress. Administered as a daily supplement. The girl doesn't need to know.

Drugging her. He's describing drugging her.

His hands start to tremble. Not the fatigue tremor — the other one. The one that lives deeper, in the tendons, in the muscle memory of a man whose hands have done nothing but heal for his entire career and are now writing protocols for harm.

Option 3: Physical containment. A controlled environment — medical, supervised, comfortable — designed to maintain the girl's proximity to MC while preventing independent movement. Presented as a recovery protocol. Duration: indefinite.

A cage. He's describing a cage. A cage with medical equipment and comfortable bedding and the correct books and the right temperature, but a cage. A room the girl enters and doesn't leave.

He wrote three options. The first one expires. The second one is drugging. The third one is imprisonment.

He looks at his hands. They're shaking. Both of them — not just the left, not just the fingertips. Both hands, wrist to knuckles, the full-body tremor of a man whose ethics are at war with his fear.

He doesn't delete the file.

He minimises it. He opens MC's cardiac data. He watches the heartbeat — steady, stable, the rhythm the girl gave it on day one. He watches it pulse on the screen in the blue light of the monitor and he thinks about a flutter that lasted three seconds and a file that contains three options and a woman whose heart depends on the continued presence of someone who wants to leave.

He doesn't delete the file because deleting it would mean the options don't exist. And the options exist. They existed the moment he thought of them. Deleting the file doesn't unthink the thoughts. It just removes the evidence.

His hands shake. The monitor pulses. The night shift continues.

Adequate, doctor. The words come from nowhere — not anyone's voice. His own. The particular self-assessment of a man who has been adequate his entire life. Adequate grades. Adequate bedside manner. Adequate control of the thing that lives in his hands and tells the truth when the rest of him lies.

Adequate, doctor. You've built a cage in a spreadsheet and called it medicine.

The sun comes up. He doesn't close the file.