The seconds before his session with Dr. Aris Thorne were the longest of Leo's life. He sat in the waiting room—a space even more aggressively neutral than her office—and ran through the mission parameters one last time. General Madsen's orders were a cold, hard litany in his mind. Report everything. Downplay the video. Lie.
He was a weapon, and his handler had just put the safety on. Not to protect others from him, or even to protect him from himself. It was to make sure that when he inevitably broke, no one else would be able to hear him scream.
When her door opened, he walked in feeling like a traitor. The guilt was a physical weight, heavier than any of his other burdens. He was here to poison the only clean well he had found in a decade.
"Leo," she greeted him, her voice as even and calm as always. She gestured to the couch. "Please."
He sat. The room, which had once felt like a cage, now felt like a sterile interrogation cell. His senses, usually a curse, became instruments of torture. He could see the faint swirl of dust motes dancing in a beam of sunlight slanting through the blinds. He could hear the soft, rhythmic rustle of her sleeve against the fabric of the armchair. He could smell the faint, lingering scent of citrus and paper from her morning tea. The silence was not empty; it was dense with unspoken questions.
She settled into her chair, her notepad and pen on the table, untouched. She let the quiet stretch, a space she clearly expected him to fill. When he offered nothing but his own tense stillness, she began.
"How was your week, Leo?"
The question, so simple and guileless, was a masterfully laid trap. He had his pre-approved answer ready, a line scrubbed clean of all truth.
"It was fine." His voice was a flat monotone, an unnatural calm he had spent two days perfecting.
"Fine?" she echoed, a slight tilt of her head the only indication of her skepticism. "That's a word people use when they're describing the weather, not the week after a session like our last one. Let me be more specific." Her eyes, calm and analytical, met his. "Did you do the assignment?"
He forced himself to hold her gaze. "Yes."
"You went to a cafe?"
"Yes."
"And you stayed for five minutes?"
"Yes."
He offered nothing more, each word a stone dropped into a deep well. He was a prisoner of war, giving only name, rank, and serial number. He braced himself for the next volley.
Aris leaned forward slightly, her expression unreadable. "And how did that feel?"
He thought of the roaring panic, the terror of being seen, the horrifying sensation of his power boiling his own coffee. "It felt," he said, the lie tasting like rust in his mouth, "like sitting in a chair for five minutes."
"I see," she said slowly. The two words were heavy with a disbelief she was too professional to voice outright. "So, no major incidents? Nothing out of the ordinary occurred that you'd like to discuss?"
The girl. Zoe. The video. The boiling coffee. The call from Madsen. A Rolodex of disaster spun in his mind. "Nothing worth mentioning," he lied.
"And yet," Aris continued, her voice soft but persistent as a rising tide, "you seem more tense now than you did last week. Before you'd even attempted the task you were so terrified of. You've succeeded, by your own account. You faced a fear. But you don't carry yourself like someone who has overcome an obstacle. You carry yourself like someone who has just been handed a heavier burden. Why do you think that is?"
Her perception was a physical force. She was seeing the architecture of his new prison without ever having been inside it. She was diagnosing the wound without ever seeing the weapon.
"I'm just tired," he deflected, the excuse flimsy even to his own ears.
"Are you?" she challenged gently. "Leo, last week you were adamant that this task was not just difficult, but dangerous. Now you're telling me it was mundane. Both of those things can't be entirely true. The goal of the assignment wasn't for you to simply follow an order. It was for you to experience something, to gather data on your own reactions. So, tell me what you experienced."
The crack appeared. The quiet, desperate urge to tell her the truth rose up like a fever. He thought of the suffocating lockdown, of Madsen's cold fury, of the corruption of this one safe space. The pressure was immense. He deflected with the only tool he had left.
"What do you want me to say, Doctor?" he snapped, the anger a welcome shield, a blast of hot air to hide the shivering guilt behind it. "That it was some magical, healing experience that cured ten years of trauma? That I sat down, had a coffee, and now everything's fine? It wasn't a breakthrough. It was an order. I followed it. Mission accomplished."
He used Madsen's military language intentionally, a bitter, passive-aggressive jab he knew she would notice.
Aris didn't react to his anger. She simply absorbed it, her gaze softening with something that looked dangerously like understanding. She leaned back in her chair, a silent admission that she had hit a wall she could not, for the moment, break through. She was quiet for a long time, her eyes studying his face, not as a specimen, but as a puzzle with missing pieces.
When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, and her words bypassed all his prepared defenses, every lie he had so carefully constructed.
"Okay," she said softly, as if conceding a point. "Let's table the cafe for now."
He felt a flicker of relief, thinking he had won. He was wrong.
"Instead," she continued, her eyes holding his, "tell me about the container you live in. The crater. Has it gotten smaller this week?"
The question struck him with the force of a physical blow. The air left his lungs. He looked at her—really looked at her—and the carefully constructed walls of his deceit crumbled into dust.
He thought of her again, not as a memory in the silence of space, but right here, right now. Aris. The calm in her eyes, the sharp, patient intelligence that had offered him the first glimmer of hope he'd felt in three thousand, six hundred and fifty-four days. She was the only person he wanted to trust. The one he was now forced to betray. And she was asking about the size of his cage, not knowing he had just allowed his handler to lock the door and throw away the key. Not knowing that she had just stepped inside it with him.
The lie he was supposed to tell—No, it feels the same—died in his throat. He couldn't say it. He couldn't look this woman in the eye, the only doctor who had ever seen the shape of his wound, and lie about its depth. The weight of his betrayal, of Madsen's orders, of his own cowardice, crashed down on him all at once.
He was silent. The seconds ticked by, each one a hammer blow. He stared at the space between them, a chasm he had just filled with deceit. His hands, resting on his knees, clenched into fists so tight his knuckles ached.
The session wasn't over. It had just hit its first, real, catastrophic wall. And Leo Vance, the man who could move worlds, was left utterly, hopelessly paralyzed, unable to speak a single word of truth or tell another lie.