Heat left his skin like a hand letting go. The lemon cleaner was back. The radiator's tick reassembled itself. Detective Stone's grip on his wrist existed again, exactly where it had been, as if someone had lifted a needle and dropped it back on the same groove.
The black rectangle lay in Caleb's palm as if it had never taken him anywhere at all.
[EXIT COMPLETE][OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE—CLEARED][ITEM CONTROL: VERIFIED][NEXT ENTRY: PENDING]
Stone flinched a fraction, not because of the text—he didn't look at it—but because his hand registered sweat that hadn't been there before. His gaze checked Caleb's face, then the shoulder seam where fabric sat wrong, then the scuff on a shoe that hadn't existed a heartbeat earlier.
"What just happened," Stone said. Not a question. A request for a diagnosis.
Officer Brooks had half-risen; now she committed. "His pulse is up," she said, eyes scanning without begging permission. "Did you faint?"
"I stayed standing," Caleb said.
Ms. Parker had one hand on the door like it was moral support. "You… blinked," she said. "Longer than a blink. You—" She gestured, came up empty. "You weren't… with us."
"Define 'with,'" he said.
Stone squeezed Caleb's wrist once, a mild warning. "You lost time."
"Or you did," Caleb said, because semantics was a rope you could pull without moving.
The desk lay tidy where he had left it. The mug wore a new ring of cooling tea. The cheap clock agreed with itself. The plant kept practicing photosynthesis. Somewhere outside, a car door thunked at a slightly different angle, perhaps because it was a different car.
[PROVISIONAL ID: P-01][RISK CREDIT: MINOR]
He didn't know what a risk credit bought besides trouble.
Stone extended his free hand, palm open. "Card."
"No," Caleb said.
Brooks's eyebrows lifted just enough to be honest. "Caleb."
"It stays with me," he said, because the interface had made that into a law and he was beginning to understand that laws were how you stayed vertical.
Ms. Parker tried calm. "We can keep it safe for you."
"Can you?" He set the rectangle carefully on the blotter, not because he was surrendering it but because he wanted to see what the world would do.
Stone reached, slow, like coaxing a badly socialized dog. His fingers closed around matte black. The card played along, then decided obedience was not its vocation. He lifted; the rectangle rose with his hand; for a breath, physics kept its end of the bargain.
The ring on the face pulsed once, a polite blink.
Stone's knuckles whitened a shade. The card refused to travel farther from the desk. He tried again—one millimeter conceded, then the card settled back, not defiant, just certain.
"Huh," Stone said, as if the world had told him a joke he disliked. He let go. The card mapped itself to the blotter with the correct sound for paper that wasn't paper.
Brooks wet her lips. "Augmented lock? Magnetized?" She shook her head immediately. "No—no hardware."
Caleb picked it up. It came to him without argument.
"Only him," Stone said, and didn't bother hiding that he hated the data point.
Ms. Parker's tone cracked on empathy. "This is exactly why you should let us—"
[FIRST CONDITION: MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL CONTROL OVER SPECIAL ITEM]
He didn't look at the text; he watched faces. Ms. Parker wanted to fix the category this belonged in. Brooks wanted to preserve options. Stone wanted leverage.
He slid the card into his pocket the way you put away a dangerous tool when guests won't understand it. The pocket didn't feel heavier. He did.
"You need to come with us," Stone said, gentle the way rivers are gentle until they aren't. "Voluntarily."
"To talk," Brooks said. "To get you somewhere we can—"
"—feel like adults," Stone finished, dry.
"Am I under arrest?" Caleb asked.
"Not yet," Stone said, honesty like a blade laid on linen.
"That suggests future tense."
"It suggests choices."
Ms. Parker tried to iron the air flat. "Caleb, you can cooperate without admitting anything. Detective, he's a student, he's—"
"—in possession of an object that doesn't obey hands," Stone said. "And he just did something the rest of us didn't perceive."
Brooks came a half-step closer, voice lower. "What did you see?"
The hallway lived under his skin like an x-ray—Don's leg under the shutter, the blurred agent's knife kissing matte black, a ring in a wall saying hello, a timer carving seconds into air. He could stack those images and still not make them into something the room would believe without breaking it first.
"A test," he said.
Ms. Parker's eyes flicked to Stone's. "A test?"
"Don't play the teacher," Stone murmured.
"I didn't make it up," Caleb told him.
"Then who did?"
He thought about the verb give and discovered the card had not been given; it had been a sentence with a missing subject. He didn't answer.
[NEXT ENTRY: SCHEDULING]
The letters pricked the edge of his vision like a rude guest. He tracked them the way you track a wasp.
Stone saw the muscle in Caleb's jaw jump. Brooks saw pupils go coin-small. Ms. Parker saw nothing that would help.
"Talk," Stone said.
"Right now," Caleb said, "my day is about to repeat a function."
"Meaning?"
He wanted to say, Meaning we're on a timer again and timers turn people into the clever versions of themselves or into witnesses of their own decisions. He said, "Please don't stand too close to me."
Ms. Parker obeyed without knowing why. Brooks didn't move, but she shifted her weight as if to promise he wouldn't hit the floor alone.
Stone's hand stayed on his wrist. His posture altered one degree—not retreat, not advance, a braced neutrality he probably used on drunks and flooded basements alike. "Say the thing," Stone told him. "Then follow my instructions."
"Don't touch me when it starts," Caleb said.
"When what starts."
"The countdown."
Stone didn't let go.
The air sharpened like focus when you decide to stay awake. The ring in his pocket pulsed through fabric, a heartbeat that belonged to design rather than blood.
[ENTRY SCHEDULED][T—00:30]
"Thirty," Caleb said.
Brooks lifted a hand—hovering, not on him, within reach. "If you can cancel it, cancel it."
"I don't see that option."
"Then plan for after," she said. "You come back, we sit down, we're boring."
He let the corners of his mouth admit appreciation for the word boring.
Stone spoke to the air and to the part of himself that had watched too many kids make bad decisions. "If he drops, you call it," he told Brooks. "If he goes, we're right here when he returns, and he returns with his hands where I can see them."
"I'm not trying to lose you," Caleb said.
"Flattery," Stone said, "will get you nowhere."
[T—00:20]
The radiator ticked like it enjoyed being unimportant. Far down the hall, laughter rose and died through two doors and a life that had chosen different problems.
Ms. Parker's eyes filled with the kind of almost-tears people produce when their bodies want to cry and their brains are on the phone with themselves. "Please," she said, and left the verb unemployed.
"Don't stand in front of the door," he told her.
She moved. She still didn't know why she obeyed.
[T—00:10]
Stone leaned closer. "Look at me."
Caleb did. The detective's eyes were brown in a useful way, the color of floors you trust not to buckle. Under the calm there was calculation and under that a tired, honest anger at the way the world made jokes with knives.
"If you can bring that card to my station when this theater is over," Stone said, "do it."
"I can bring myself," Caleb said.
"That'll do."
Brooks's lips barely moved. "Breathe."
He did. The ring in his pocket brightened without light.
[T—00:04]
He looked at Stone's hand on his wrist. "Don't," he said.
Stone's jaw set. He didn't let go.
"Detective," Brooks warned, quiet and precise.
"Don't," Stone repeated—to her, to the room, to something he couldn't see.
[T—00:01]
The geometry around Caleb tightened, the way a fitted sheet finds its corners. The ring—unseen, felt—became a hole. The world tipped in a direction human bodies don't admit in polite company.
Stone's fingers clamped instinctively. His eyes told him nothing he could use. His hand told him belief had a job to do.
Something precise clicked; the room kept still and his grip found only space.