Security spotted us before the doors finished sliding open.
Two guards in dark suits peeled away from the wall like they'd been waiting for Lena specifically. Their eyes skipped over me and locked onto her with the resigned hostility of people who met trouble on a schedule.
"Miss Ward," the taller one said. "We talked about this."
Lena's smile was sharp. "Yeah. You talked. I shouted. That's not the same thing."
"Company policy is clear," he replied. "You can't loiter in the lobby or harass employees. You were banned after your last… protest."
"Protest," she repeated. "That's what we call it when a girl asks why her dad died in your building?"
Conversations in the lobby dipped, then resumed at a carefully polite volume. People accelerated their walking without looking like they were hurrying. No one wanted to be caught staring.
The guard sighed. "We're sorry for your loss, Miss—"
"No," she said. "You're sorry I'm noisy."
His jaw tightened. "Please leave. We don't want to—"
He reached for her elbow.
Elias hit the gas.
The world jerked. I felt my center of gravity shift as he slammed forward inside our shared skin, ripping the controls from my hands. My vision narrowed; sounds sharpened into individual threads: Lena's breath, the squeak of polished soles, and the soft ring of the revolving door.
Our arm moved before my thoughts could catch up.
We caught the guard's wrist mid‑grab, twisted, and stepped in. His weight rolled over our hip with practiced ease. In one smooth motion we redirected his momentum and set him stumbling into his partner.
It was fast, efficient, and absolutely not my doing.
The second guard lunged for his radio.
Our knee came up into his stomach. Our hand stripped the radio from his belt and flicked it across the floor, where it slid under a sofa. The little circle of lobby silence widened.
Somewhere behind my own surprise, other impressions flickered—echoes of different bodies using these same movements. A woman in a prison yard. A teenager in a bar fight. A soldier in a narrow hallway. All of them had known how to turn fear into leverage with this exact set of muscles.
They were not Elias's memories.
They were not mine.
They were just… there.
You see? Elias said, our chest heaving. You're not some blank slate. You're a patchwork monster. May as well act like it.
"You assaulted security," the taller guard wheezed, straightening. "We can have you removed, Mr. Ward. Permanently."
"The company already did that once," Elias answered through my mouth. "Didn't stick."
Lena grabbed my sleeve. "Dad, stop. This isn't—"
Alarms began to chirp somewhere in the ceiling. A red line lit up along the edge of the floor, leading toward the emergency exits like an impatient finger.
People finally gave up pretending they weren't watching.
"Back door," Lena hissed. "Stairs. Now."
For once, Elias and I agreed.
We ran.
Glass and steel blurred. A cleaner dropped her mop and flattened herself against the wall as we sprinted past. The guards shouted, but nobody chased us immediately; the corporate reflex was to call someone else whose job title included the word "problem."
We crashed through a gray metal door into a concrete stairwell that smelled of dust and tired air. The slam of it muffled the alarms, turning them into a distant heartbeat.
Lena bent double, hands on her knees, breathing hard. "You didn't have to do that," she said. "They're just rent‑a‑cops."
"They touched you," Elias said.
The words slipped out with too much heat. I felt the way his anger sparked, how it leapt from old guilt to new justification in a single breath.
Lena's gaze snapped up. She studied my face as if searching for the person behind it.
"That's not how you talk," she said quietly. "Not the last time I saw you."
Maybe it wasn't. But it was how he felt now.
"You're going to get us killed," I told him. The Bureau said no interference. No violence.
The Bureau said a lot of things, he shot back. They lied about most of them. Trust me, I checked the fine print.
Lena straightened. "We don't have time for you to pick fights with mall cops. We have"—she glanced at her phone—"twenty‑one hours left."
Twenty‑one hours.
The number made something flicker at the edge of my vision.
A translucent panel slid briefly into existence in the air, like a reflection in invisible glass.
TIME REMAINING: 21:04:33
STATUS: HOST CONFLICT – UNAUTHORIZED CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED
RECOMMENDED ACTION: RECALL UNIT B‑742 FOR MAINTENANCE
The letters were cold and calm and absolutely certain I was a problem.
Then the panel blinked out.
I froze on the stair, one hand on the rail. The phantom image burned after the fact, a ghost HUD only I could see.
Did you see that? I asked.
Elias's chuckle rolled through my skull. No. But I've seen the real thing. They're watching, loner.
"Dad?" Lena said. "You're spacing again."
"I'm fine," I answered automatically, which was quickly becoming the biggest lie of my short existence. "What exactly is the plan once we're upstairs?"
She gave a humorless smile. "You're going to tell the truth."
"That's… new," Elias muttered.
Lena started climbing. "You signed people up for this program," she said over her shoulder. "Sold them those twenty‑four hours like magic tickets. 'One last day, no consequences.' Then you died in the middle of their building. Convenient, right?"
Her footsteps echoed. I followed, every step jarring my too‑fresh joints.
"You want me to testify?" Elias asked. "I'm already dead."
"I want you to ruin them," she said. "You know where the bodies are buried. Metaphorically. Hopefully."
She pushed through the door for the next floor landing, checked the hallway, and kept going.
"Even if I talk," Elias said, "why would anyone believe a ghost in a rental husk?"
"You're not just a ghost," she replied coolly. "You're a client. A paying one. The Bureau has records. Contracts. Signatures. I saw the ads, Dad. They used your face."
That seemed to stun him into silence for a moment.
I used it.
"Lena," I said, "what are you trying to get out of this? Exactly."
She paused on the step above me, head tilted back. The stairwell light threw shadows under her eyes, turning the teenager into someone older and brittle.
"I want them to admit what they did," she said. "I want them to stop selling miracles that come with hidden footnotes. I want an apology that's not written by their legal team."
She swallowed.
"And I want you," she added, voice rough, "to be on my side for once."
The ache that rolled through us didn't belong to a single heart. It was layered: her childhood disappointment, Elias's regret, and my newborn longing to be anything but a tool.
The stairwell dimmed.
At first I thought the light had flickered. Then I realized a different kind of brightness was pushing the shadows back—a glow that came from nowhere and everywhere at once, soft and silver like moonlight reflected in a bowl of water.
Lena