Present Day at Ashvane Corp Tower, a city of Varun.
The elevator moved too fast and Sera Wynn spent the ride telling herself she was prepared for this.
She had ironed the blouse twice and had rehearsed what to say to the receptionist. She arrived twelve minutes early, which she considered evidence of a composed and functional human being.
The doors opened on the thirty-second floor and composure became significantly harder to locate.
Dark marble, low, expensive light. The kind of silence that money manufactured on purpose, the kind that communicated without a single word that the people who moved through this space were not the kind of people who made unnecessary noise.
Behind the front desk sat a receptionist with architecture for cheekbones and eyes that moved to Sera and then away again with the effortless dismissal of someone who had assessed a thousand people and found most of them marginally sufficient.
Her nameplate read Nia. "Name," she prompted, without looking up.
"Sera Wynn, new analytics hire. I was told to check in with HR on this floor before..."
"I know who you are." Nia's gaze came up slowly. Something moved through it, careful and assessing, raising the hair on the back of Sera's neck for reasons she could not articulate. "You're human."
Sera blinked. "Yes? Am I not suppose to be?"
The expression rearranged itself into something professionally impenetrable so fast Sera spent the next thirty seconds questioning her own hearing. "HR is through the left corridor. Third door. Someone will collect you." A breath of a pause. "Welcome to Ashvane Corp."
Sera smiled the smile she had been using since childhood to keep the peace and went left.
Six forms, two of which contained language that required three readings each. A non-disclosure clause about internal company culture and operational protocols that she filed away to ask about later, when she felt less conspicuous.
A badge, an orientation packet. A desk on the twenty-eighth floor assigned by a woman named Tova who smiled with great care and kept her eyes at a slight angle, as though direct contact were a resource she was rationing.
Sera took her things, rode the elevator down, and found her desk. At lunch time, she put her soup in the microwave and half-listened to two women at the window table whose voices were lowered in the way of people who do not genuinely care whether they are overheard.
"She does not even know what she is," one of them murmured.
"Did you notice she smells completely? I hate her already!"
"Watch what you say, she is standing right there."
Sera scoff without saying a word, as she took her soup out of the microwave.
Both women looked up. One found somewhere else to direct her attention immediately. The other, tall and amber-eyed with hair pulled back like a statement, held the look for a deliberate, unhurried moment before returning to her meal.
Sera sat by the window alone and ate.
She was halfway through the bowl when Lena dropped into the chair across from her, slightly windswept, badge crooked, wearing the face she always wore when she had just finished managing one crisis and arrived to find a second one already in progress.
"Hey," Lena opened.
"Anything you want to tell me?" Sera replied pleasantly.
"About what?"
"The receptionist called me human like it was a filing category, and two women just had a conversation about me at a volume that suggested they weren't particularly troubled by my presence. And everyone on this floor treats me like I'm either lost or carrying something they haven't decided how to disarm." She took a spoonful of soup. "Go ahead, tell me. What's going on?"
Lena's jaw tightened. "The culture here is insular, it can take time before you..."
"Lena. They called me human! And one even said she hate me. I just resumed today."
"I know." She looked at the table. That expression again. The one Sera had been reading since they were six years old. The one that meant: I am holding something large and I am deciding how much of it to put down. "Give it a week, just one week. I promise it will starts to make more sense."
Sera studied her for a moment. Seventeen years of this face. Every deflection, careful omission, and version of honesty Lena had ever managed to offer.
"One week," she agreed.
Lena exhaled like she had been holding it for considerably longer than lunch. "Thank you."
They finished eating without much conversation. The city moved indifferently beyond the window. Sera kept to herself what she was actually thinking, which was: you have been protecting something for a very long time, and whatever it is, this building is part of it.
Thirteen minutes before the end of her first day, watching the clock, the elevator at the far end of the floor opened and the room shifted.
Every conversation lost a thread, and every head lifted, then corrected itself. The specific, collective adjustment of people in the presence of someone they did not have a casual relationship with.
Sera looked up.
Nathan Ashvane crossed the open floor with the unhurried certainty of a man to whom the concept of obstacles had simply never applied.
Tall, dark-haired, jaw cut sharp, with the kind of face that looked like it had been engineered for a specific purpose and had produced something else entirely as a side effect. Two people flanked him, one talking quickly with a tablet, another watching everything with flat and thorough eyes.
Nathan looked at his phone, his expression was a controlled blank.
He was almost past the open floor when he stopped, mid-stride, and his head turned. Then his eyes found hers across the room.
Sera had been told, at various points in her life, that she had an unsettling stare. She had never once considered correcting it, she held the look.
Something crossed his face in the two seconds that followed. Fast, but she was paying attention and she caught it. Not attraction, but something that looked, from across a crowded floor, exactly like a man encountering a fact that did not belong in any category he had constructed.
He looked back at his phone, continued through the glass corridor doors without a backward glance, and the room exhaled around his absence the way rooms do when the thing commanding all the gravity in them finally leaves.
Sera turned to her screen, her pulse was running faster than it had any reasonable business doing.
"First day," she murmured, to herself. "And strange feelings kept happening around me."