Chapter Text
“Mr Scout.”
Mark heard the booming voice as he slowly blinked awake, eyes gritty, brain sloshing somewhere between pain and nausea. The world around him swam into focus in pieces: the harsh overhead lights, the cold air-conditioning biting at his skin, the sharp smell of sterile surfaces. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten here.
For the past two years, Mark’s life had followed a rigid, miserable routine. He woke up still drunk or hungover, took a morning shot of whatever bottle he had opened the night before, then drove to Ganz College to teach eight hours of history to bleary-eyed students destined to become future Lumon foot soldiers, or whoever else had the misfortune of attending the college Lumon kept on a short financial leash.
After class, he drove home, taking sips from the flask he kept in the glove compartment. He fed the fish Devon insisted he adopt, ‘so you’ll have something living that needs you,’ and drank while the TV’s background noise blurred into static. He stared at the framed photo of Gemma on the table until the room began to tilt.
Once, maybe twice a week, he ventured out to a bar in Kier. And every time he staggered home, he made the same detour: stopping outside Lumon’s gleaming tower, standing where he believed Jame Eagan’s office was, and shouting. Shouting about Gemma. About Lumon. About the town. About the rotted empire they all lived under. He screamed until security dragged him away or he ran out of breath, whichever came first.
Tonight, however, was different.
As Mark’s vision steadied, he noticed floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, stretching up into darkness. Beyond them, the faint grid of city lights glittered like a distant warning. He recognised the skyline immediately. His stomach dropped.
He was inside Lumon.
Mark moved his hand toward the back of his head, pain flared there, but the motion stopped short. His wrists were strapped to the chair. Thick restraints. Not improvised.
He muttered a curse under his breath.
“Mr Scout,” the voice repeated.
He looked up.
Standing before him was a man who looked less like a person and more like a verdict, precise, immaculate, carved out of corporate steel. His suit was severe and perfectly pressed. His expression was controlled. When he tilted his head, light caught in his silver hair like a blade.
There was no warmth in his eyes. No anger, either. Just assessment. Cold, clinical, and wholly uninterested in Mark as anything more than a variable.
Typically Lumon in every possible way.
“Who are you?” Mark asked, trying, failing, to sound level. In all the fantasies he’d had about finally stepping inside Lumon, none of them had involved being tied to a chair with someone who looked like he knew eighteen ways to kill a man and had studied all of them for fun.
The man didn’t respond. He nodded to someone behind Mark.
Before Mark could twist around far enough to see, a door opened behind him. A soft, precise sound. Mark turned as much as the restraints allowed and saw the one face he’d recognise anywhere.
Jame Eagan.
Sharp suit. Sharper stare. Wearing the exact shade of Lumon white that made everyone else seem dirty by comparison. His greying hair was combed back with military exactness. He didn’t walk, he glided. Every movement is deliberate. Every breath is economical. The air changed when he entered, the way it might if a storm decided to walk into a room.
He had the quiet presence of someone born knowing the world would always bend to him, and having spent a lifetime perfecting how to make it do so.
“That will be all, Drummond,” Jame said softly. Not loud. Not harsh. But his tone carried command the way mercury carried poison. The other man left without a word.
Jame didn’t acknowledge Mark’s glare as he rounded the table. His shoes made no sound on the polished floor, yet every step felt like pressure tightening behind Mark’s ribs. He moved like the room was his, as though everything within it belonged to him.
Mark supposed it did. Everything within fifty miles probably belonged to him.
Mark kept his eyes locked on him. Refusing to blink. Refusing to give him an inch. His jaw clenched so hard it ached. Jame didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he simply didn’t care.
When Jame finally reached the chair opposite Mark, he pulled it out with a soft scrape and sat with an unnervingly controlled grace. Back straight, hands folded lightly on the table. As if this were a scheduled meeting, not an abduction.
Only then did he fully meet Mark’s eyes
“Mr Scout,” Jame said, voice soft, almost gentle, like he was greeting an old acquaintance and not a man tied to a chair. “You seem… unsettled.”
Mark didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his voice not to betray something, anger, fear, the sheer surrealness of being this close to a man who’d ruined entire lives with a signature.
Jame tilted his head a fraction to the side, watching him the way someone might watch a restless animal at a zoo exhibit. “You’ve been trying very hard to get our attention.”
Mark’s glare sharpened. “I wasn’t exactly subtle.”
“That’s true.” Jame’s smile didn’t touch his eyes. “But effective? That remains to be seen.”
Jame leaned in slightly, lowering his voice. “So let’s begin, shall we?”
Jame’s hands stayed folded, but there was a tiny shift in his shoulders, a barely-there rearranging of his posture that made Mark’s skin crawl. It was the sort of adjustment a person made before delivering a prepared speech, not a conversation.
“You’ve been very loud, Mr Scout,” Jame went on, tone still mild. “The guards outside my office tell me you’re becoming something of a local attraction.”
“Glad to be boosting tourism,” Mark said. His mouth was dry, but the words came anyway. “Do you drag all your fans in here, or am I just special?”
A flicker at the corner of Jame’s mouth. Not quite a smile. Not quite not.
“You’re special,” he said. “In that you are… persistent. Most people scream at a building once and then get on with their lives. You, however, are devoted. Night after night, week after week. That kind of consistency is hard to come by.”
“I’m flattered,” Mark muttered. “Is this the part where you threaten to have me arrested? Because I gotta say, there were easier ways.”
Jame studied him quietly for a moment, eyes moving over his face like he was assessing a crack in the foundation of a house he owned. Mark resisted the urge to look away.
“If I wanted you arrested,” Jame said eventually, “you would be.”
The words dropped between them with a dull weight. Matter-of-fact. No bravado. No need.
Mark swallowed. “Then, what do you want?”
Jame leaned back slightly in his chair, as if Mark had finally asked a question worth answering.
“First,” he said, “I want to understand what it is you think you’re doing.”
Mark huffed out a humourless laugh. “You serious?”
“I make a habit of it.”
“What I’m doing,” Mark said, heat rising in his chest, “is reminding you that your trucks kill people. That my wife…”
He choked a little on the word. It still catches sometimes, even two years on.
“My wife died because one of your drivers wasn’t paying attention after a sixteen-hour shift. What I’m doing is making sure you have to hear her name when you go to work. Gemma. Does that ring a bell? Or do you go through too many bodies to keep track?”
If he’d hoped for a flinch, he didn’t get one. Jame’s expression didn’t change; if anything, it smoothed out further, as though emotions were something he’d elected to have surgically removed.
“I’m sorry for the loss of Gemma,” Jame said, like a man reciting a line he’d used too many times to feel anything about it. “Losing a spouse is… destabilising.”
“You don’t get to say her name,” Mark snapped, louder than he meant to. The sound bounced off the glass and polished walls, came back at him thinner, more desperate. “You don’t get to sit there and talk about destabilising like it’s a weather pattern. You did this. Your company did this.”
“And in response,” Jame said calmly, “you’ve been shouting at my front door. You understand that, from a distance, it looks less like activism and more like… a man having a breakdown in public.”
“Good,” Mark shot back. “I hope it ruins the view.”
For the first time, something like amusement flickered through Jame’s eyes. It was gone almost immediately.
“You seem to be under the impression that I’ve brought you here to scare you into silence,” he said. “Or to punish you. Or perhaps to make you disappear. That is what you’ve been hoping for, isn’t it? A clean, cinematic villain.”
“If the shoe fits,” Mark said.
Jame regarded him for a moment, then shook his head faintly, as if disappointed in a student who hadn’t done the reading.
“No,” he said. “That would be a waste of resources. And I do so hate waste.”
He straightened a folder that had been sitting to his right, the movement so precise it looked practised. Mark hadn’t even noticed it was there. Jame flipped it open, eyes moving briefly down the page.
“Mark Scout,” he read. “Thirty-four. Associate professor at Ganz College. Tenured, which is impressive in this funding climate. Specialising in twentieth-century American history and the socio-political evolution of industrial towns, if I’m remembering correctly.”
Mark let out a dry, humourless sound. “You should know,” he snapped. “Lumon owns the college. And the town. And everything else.”
Jame didn’t even blink, just continued, as if Mark’s interruption was a footnote rather than a challenge. He didn’t need the file for that, Mark realised with a cold twist. That was for show.
Jame went on, voice light. “Widower. No children. One sister, Devon Hale, married, one daughter. Your parents both deceased. Gemma’s parents still alive, yes?”
Mark’s stomach dropped. “I told you not to say her name, leave them out of this.”
“I haven’t put them into anything,” Jame said. “Yet.”
The yet hung in the air like a blade.
Mark flexed his fingers uselessly against the restraints. His pulse was a drumbeat in his ears.
“You control the trucks,” he said, forcing the words through gritted teeth. “You control the college funding. You control the cops, the city council, the garbage pickup schedule and the price of milk in the fucking grocery store. I get it. Is this the part where you list every way you can ruin my life, or is that just the warm-up?”
Jame closed the folder with a soft, deliberate sound.
“No,” he said. “This is the part where I offer you an opportunity.”
Mark stared at him. For a second, he wondered if he’d misheard, if maybe he’d finally drunk enough to start hallucinating outright.
“An… opportunity,” he repeated flatly.
“Yes.”
“To what? Be less loud while you run people over?”
Another almost-smile. “To be useful.”
The word made Mark’s skin prickle. “I’m not interested in being useful to you.”
“Not to me,” Jame said, with a slight tilt of his head. “To her.”
Mark frowned. “To whom?”
“My daughter.”
The room went very quiet. Somewhere beyond the glass, something mechanical hummed to life, the sound thin and distant.
“Your… daughter,” Mark said slowly. “You dragged me in here because of your daughter.”
“Yes.”
“Is this some kind of… intimidation thing? ‘Look what happens to men who talk bad about Lumon around my little girl.’”
Jame didn’t bother dignifying that with a response. Instead, he folded his hands again, the picture of composed patience.
“Helena is twenty-five,” he said. “She will be announced as my official successor at the next board summit. The board is… reluctantly in agreement.”
“Congratulations,” Mark said. “I’ll send a card. Or a truck.”
Jame ignored him. “There are conditions,” he went on. “Expectations. The board prefers predictability. Stability. Optics that reassure shareholders we are not handing the company over to a volatile young woman with no attachments and no one to… temper her.”
Mark stared, trying to follow the curve of the conversation. “What does that have to do with me?”
“They don’t like that she’s unmarried,” Jame said, as if talking about the weather. “They like even less that she appears uninterested in correcting that.”
“So find her some Eagan-approved husband,” Mark said. “Shouldn’t be hard. Just throw a rock at a yacht club and pick whichever heir screams the least.”
“Oh, they’ve tried,” Jame said mildly. “She’s refused every name presented to her. Rather emphatically.”
A faint glimmer of something flickered in his eyes then, pride, annoyance, something darker; Mark couldn’t quite parse it.
“So, you want me to talk some sense into her?” Mark asked. “Is that it? Give a guest lecture on the benefits of marrying for corporate optics?”
Jame’s gaze slid back to him, sharpened. “No, Mr Scout,” he said. “I want you to date her.”
For a moment, Mark thought the world had tilted. He let out a short, incredulous laugh that sounded wrong even to his own ears.
“You… what?”
“You heard me.”
“You kidnapped me,” Mark said slowly, “brought me into your glass villain lair, restrained me to a chair, recited my entire life back at me, so you could ask me to… be your daughter’s boyfriend?”
“Fake,” Jame corrected, as if the distinction mattered. “Initially.”
Mark stared at him, waiting for the punchline, for the cameras to swing down from the ceiling, for someone to shout that this was a prank show. Jame’s face remained utterly still.
“You’re insane,” Mark said.
“No,” Jame replied. “I’m practical. The board will not bully her into a political marriage, and she will not tolerate me orchestrating one. However, she does understand that appearing… grounded… is part of her role. A partner addresses several concerns at once.”
“And you just decided that partner should be me.”
“I decided,” Jame said, “that it should be someone outside our existing circles. Someone who appears, to all the world, to have chosen her for herself. Someone without a family name that threatens the balance of the board. Someone with a respectable profession, a tragic past the press can sympathise with, and no real power of his own.”
He paused.
“And,” he added lightly, “someone who has made himself very visible to me.”
Mark’s mouth had gone dry. “There are thousands of men in this town who fit that description.”
Jame tilted his head. “No,” he said. “There are not.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Mark could feel his heartbeat, a hard, unpleasant staccato against his ribs.
“You think I’d ever agree to that?” he managed eventually. “After what your company did to Gemma? After everything you’ve taken? You think I’d… smile politely for the cameras and hold your daughter’s hand at some gala so the board thinks you raised a nice, stable little heir?”
Jame regarded him with a mildness that made Mark want to punch something.
“I think,” he said, “you’ll do whatever is necessary to protect the people you have left.”
Mark’s breath stalled. “Don’t.”
“You have tenure,” Jame continued, as if Mark hadn’t spoken. “Which is impressive, as I said. But Ganz College exists on a tether. Grants. Donors. Endowments. Most of which, in one form or another, trace back to Lumon Holdings and its affiliates. If I tug on that tether, the college contracts. Departments are cut. Positions made redundant. It would be… unfortunate if the history department found itself first in line.”
Mark swallowed hard. “You can’t.”
“I can,” Jame said, not unkindly. “Your apartment is part of a housing initiative subsidised by a Lumon-adjacent fund. Devon’s health care during her pregnancy was covered by a clinic we own through three shell companies and a charitable foundation. Your niece’s preschool is on land we leased to the city for one dollar a year. Gemma’s parents’ pension sits in a fund I could freeze with a single phone call under the guise of an internal audit.”
Each example landed like a stone in Mark’s stomach.
“I’m not threatening you, Mr Scout,” Jame said quietly. “I’m explaining the weather. You have spent two years shouting at a storm for raining on you. I am telling you that the storm knows your name.”
Mark’s hands were trembling against the armrests. He clenched them until his fingers hurt.
“And if I say no?” he asked, his voice rough.
Jame’s expression didn’t change. “Then we will all go back to our lives,” he said. “You will wake up, drink whatever’s left in the bottle, drive to work, and try to pretend you don’t notice the way your students’ numbers shrink. You will watch your sister and her family adjust to less and less. You will watch Gemma’s parents choose between medication and heating. All of this will feel, to the outside world, like a coincidence. Bad luck. Economic downturn.”
His eyes sharpened, pinning Mark in place.
“And you,” he added softly, “will know it isn’t.”
Mark felt suddenly, violently sick. He forced air into his lungs.
“You’re a monster,” he said.
Jame considered that for a moment, then gave a tiny shrug. “I’m a custodian,” he said. “Of a company, of a town, of a legacy. Monsters are for stories. I am simply… thorough.”
He let the word sit there a moment, then went on.
“I’m not asking you to love her,” Jame said. “I’m not even asking you to like her. I’m asking you to be seen with her. To attend functions. Dinners. Galas. To look at her the way a man looks at a woman he has chosen, and to allow the world to believe that story.”
Mark shook his head, more out of reflex than conviction. “She’d never go for it. I don’t know her, she doesn’t know me, why would she…”
“That,” Jame said, a faint, cold satisfaction curling his mouth, “is precisely why you will work.”
Mark stared.
“She doesn’t know who you are,” Jame went on. “You are not a board member’s son she’s been rejecting since childhood. You’re not a rival heir. You’re not a name she’s been warned about. You’re… no one. A professor from the college. An introduction at a gala. A conversation she believes is happening by chance.”
He leaned in slightly.
“People are much easier to guide when they think they’re moving under their own power.”
Mark’s throat felt tight. “And what do you think is going to happen?” he demanded. “You think she’s just going to… fall for the guy you picked out like a piece of furniture?”
“I think Helena is smart enough to recognise a good narrative when she sees one,” Jame said. “Tragic widower. Earnest teacher. A man who dislikes everything I stand for. She’ll find that… appealing.”
He said it with the casual cruelty of someone who knew his daughter like a product line.
Mark exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “How long does this go on for? How long am I supposed to pretend?”
Jame considered him with a faint tilt of his head, as though the question were almost quaint. “It won’t be forever,” he said. “Eventually, Helena will realise she needs to be serious. The board will have… someone waiting for her. A more appropriate match. You are simply an interim solution. A soft landing.”
The words hit Mark like a blast of cold air. Temporary. Disposable. A placeholder in a suit.
“And if she finds out?” Mark asked. “If she figures out you’re pulling the strings? That you’re using her, using me…”
Jame’s eyes cooled further, if that was possible. “She won’t,” he said simply. “Because you’re not going to tell her.”
Silence settled between them, heavy and suffocating. Mark could hear his own breathing, too loud in his ears.
“You’re asking me to lie to her,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
“To help you control her.”
“Yes.”
“So you can keep running the machine that killed my wife.”
Jame considered him for a long moment, then inclined his head, the barest acknowledgement.
“I am offering you a choice,” he said. “Scream at my door until you have no voice left, or step inside and… influence the conditions under which my successor takes power.”
Mark let his head fall back against the chair, staring up at the ceiling for a moment. The lights were too bright, humming faintly. He closed his eyes, just for a second, and saw Gemma’s face. Devon’s. His niece’s sticky hands reaching for him. Gemma’s mother’s smile when she talked about her garden.
He opened his eyes again.
“If I do this,” he said, his voice low and unsteady, “if I agree… my family is off-limits. You don’t touch them. You don’t touch my students. You don’t take away their pensions, their schools, their homes. You don’t… you don’t punish them because of me.”
For the first time, Jame seemed to hesitate. Not out of conscience, Mark thought bitterly, but calculation.
“Within reason,” Jame said at last. “If you do as I ask, there will be no… retaliatory measures.”
Mark let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Within reason,” he repeated. “Right. Because nothing says trustworthy like corporate fine print.”
Jame didn’t rise to the bait. “Do we have an understanding, Mr Scout?”
Mark looked at him. Really looked at him. A man in an immaculate suit, sitting in a building he owned in a town he owned in a life Mark hadn’t consented to.
Everything in him screamed to spit in his face. To tell him to do his worst. To go back to shouting at the gates until his voice gave out and his liver followed.
But he thought of Devon again. Of her small, tired house. Of his niece’s lunchbox. Of Gemma’s parents and their pill organisers. Of his own students, the ones who still believed ethics meant something.
He could ruin me, Mark thought. Or he could ruin them.
The choice wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even really a choice. It was a trap dressed up as a favour.
He swallowed, tasting bile.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked.
Jame’s smile, when it finally arrived, was thin and satisfied and entirely devoid of warmth.
“There’s a gala,” he said. “Next Friday. You’ll be there.”
He rose smoothly to his feet, the interview apparently over.
“We’ll take care of the details. And remember, Mr Scout, there is always more to every story than you realise.”
Jame’s silhouette dissolved into the hallway light, the door whispering shut behind him with a finality that made Mark’s chest tighten. For a moment, the room felt impossibly large, as if the man's absence had carved out a hollowness that nothing could fill.
Silence pressed in, sharp and sterile.
Then: footsteps. Soft, controlled.
Drummond re-entered the room with the same eerie stillness he’d carried before, impeccable posture, unreadable expression, hands clasped behind his back until he was fully inside. He didn’t look at Mark as a person but as an assignment to complete.
Without a word, he approached and unfastened the restraints. The metal clicked open with the precision of a lock being picked, not freed. Mark rubbed at his wrists, skin already red and chafed. His pulse still thudded there, sore and angry.
“Mr Eagan has requested you be prepared promptly,” Drummond said, tone smooth and neutral, like reciting a hotel check-in procedure. “The Lumon Winter Gala is scheduled for next Friday evening. You will be collected at 6:15 p.m. sharp.”
Mark blinked. “Collected?” His voice came out rough.
“A car will arrive at your residence,” Drummond continued, unaffected. “You are not to arrange transportation yourself.”
“What, to keep me from running?” Mark muttered.
Drummond’s eyes finally met his, flat, metallic, giving nothing.
“To maintain protocol,” he corrected. Not a denial.
He reached into a sleek black folder and handed Mark a crisp envelope. It felt heavier than it should, embossed with the Lumon crest he’d memorised from years of hating it.
“Inside, you’ll find a schedule for the evening, your assigned arrival time, recommended talking points, and the event program.”
Mark frowned. “Program?”
“For the gala,” Drummond clarified. “Miss Eagan’s schedule is included. It outlines every speech, introduction, and obligation she has.” He paused. “And, more importantly, the gaps.”
Mark’s stomach twisted. “Gaps?”
“There are brief windows where she will be unaccompanied,” Drummond said. “Moments when she moves between duties. To the bar. To the balcony. Between introductions. She prefers not to be shadowed constantly.”
Mark stared. “You’re telling me to… stalk her itinerary?”
“To appear naturally,” Drummond corrected. “Mr Eagan requires your introduction to be organic. Miss Eagan must not suspect orchestration.”
Mark let out a weak, breathy laugh. “Sure. Nothing says organic like triangulating a woman’s gaps in the evening. Absolutely normal.”
Drummond didn’t so much as blink. “The bar is a common opportunity. She occasionally stops for a drink between public interactions. The dance floor is another option; she participates briefly, typically near the midpoint of the evening. Review the program; you will recognise the best openings.”
Mark stared at him, horrified. “So I’m supposed to… what? Wander into her path like it’s fate?”
“If you prefer that phrasing,” Drummond said. “Yes.”
Mark pressed a trembling hand against his forehead. “You really thought of everything, didn’t you?”
Drummond’s tone remained even. “Additionally, a suit will be delivered to your residence on Thursday morning. It will be tailored to your current measurements.”
“Current?” Mark repeated.
“You have lost weight,” Drummond said matter-of-factly. “We adjusted accordingly.”
Mark swallowed, not sure which part of that statement he hated more, the observation or the surveillance it implied.
“And,” Drummond added, “Mr Eagan requests you refrain from alcohol the night before. You are expected to be… composed.”
Mark glared at him. “And how exactly do you plan to enforce that?”
Drummond didn’t look smug. Didn’t look anything. He simply said, “We will.”
A chill crept across Mark’s spine.
A final detail slipped into Drummond’s voice, cool as marble. “Failure to comply with any of these instructions will be interpreted as refusal, and Mr Eagan made his position on that quite clear.”
Mark’s jaw clenched. “Crystal.”
Drummond inclined his head, precisely once, then stepped aside, gesturing toward the door.
“You are free to go.”
Free. A laughable word in this building.
Mark stood slowly, every muscle stiff from tension, adrenaline, and fear. His legs felt unsteady, like they weren’t entirely sure the ground was still trustworthy. He walked past Drummond, refusing to shrink or wince, but he felt the man’s gaze like a scalpel tracing his spine.
Outside the interrogation room, the hallway stretched long and gleaming, lights too bright, too white. Lumon's corridors were intentionally confusing. He followed glowing exit signs until he reached a stairwell, then eventually a service door that led to the back of the building.
Cold night air slapped him across the face.
He staggered a step, sucking in a breath like a drowning man breaking the surface. The world outside Lumon felt wrong, too open, too loud, too alive.
He started to walk. He didn’t remember deciding to. His feet just moved.
The streets of Kier were quiet, lit with dim orange lamps that flickered in the wind. Storefront windows reflected him: a man hollowed out by grief and now filled with dread instead. He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the envelope dig into his palm like a bruise.
Each step home felt heavier.
Helena Eagan.
He didn’t know her. Had never seen her beyond a handful of board photographs and glossy magazine spreads, always pristine, always poised, always smiling the kind of smile that had been media-trained since infancy. A twenty-five-year-old heir raised in boardrooms and country estates, living a life that didn’t so much run parallel to his as orbit a different universe entirely.
And he was supposed to “run into her.”
Organically.
At a gala attended by 800 of Lumon’s wealthiest stakeholders.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to make sense of it. Jame Eagan wanted him positioned beside her, close enough to build a story, yet far enough that Helena believed it was real.
Her life was curated. Controlled. Structured to the second.
And Mark… he was going to slip into the gaps. The seams. The seconds where she would be between obligations.
A chance meeting scripted by a corporation.
Mark stopped halfway down the street, breath shaky, staring at a darkened shop window as if the glass might offer answers. His reflection stared back, tired eyes, unshaven jaw, clothes wrinkled, shoulders slumped from years of carrying too much.
“What the hell am I doing?” he whispered.
The night gave him no answer.
He kept walking, each step feeling both inevitable and unbearably wrong. His mind tried to claw its way through the mess, Gemma, Devon, his niece, the students he still cared about despite everything, the people Jame could crush with a disinterested sigh.
He didn’t have a choice. That was the truth he’d felt in the pit of his stomach since the moment Jame listed everything Lumon touched. Everything they could take.
By the time Mark reached his neighbourhood, exhaustion weighed on him like a physical burden. He climbed the steps to his apartment with hands that still wouldn’t stop shaking.
Inside, the place looked exactly the same: dim lights, a cluttered table, and the fish tank glowing softly in the corner.
Gemma’s picture sat where he’d left it, Gemma’s smile frozen in the moment before everything shattered.
Mark dropped the envelope on the table next to it.
He stared at both.
One was the past.
The other was the trap.
He sank into the chair opposite the fish tank, burying his face in his hands.
He had five days.
Five days before, he stepped into Lumon’s world on Jame Eagan’s terms.
Five days before, he met Helena Eagan and lied to her face.
Five days before, he learned how to ‘chance’ an introduction that had been engineered to the millisecond.
When he finally lifted his head again, the fish swam in slow, aimless circles, oblivious to everything.
“Lucky you,” Mark muttered.
The hum of the tank filled the silence. He sat there until the room blurred, then eventually pushed himself up and forced his body toward bed.
Tomorrow would come too quickly.
And Friday even faster.
The knock came at 8:03 a.m.
Mark was still half-asleep on the couch, neck stiff, back aching, the fish tank humming steadily in the corner. For a moment, he wondered if he’d imagined it, until it came again, firmer this time.
He pushed himself upright, blinking hard. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep out here. He’d spent half the night staring at Helena’s schedule, each neatly blocked section of time making his stomach twist. Pages of curated movements, scripted introductions, rehearsed speeches.
The gaps were small. Tiny moments where she’d be alone, between speeches, between donors, between curated smiles.
Those were the places Mark had to… slip in.
His head throbbed.
Another knock.
He got to his feet, throat dry, and opened the door.
Two men in black suits stood on the landing. Their expressions were identical: neutral, efficient, faintly bored. The shorter one lifted a long garment bag with both hands.
“Delivery for Mr Scout,” he said.
Mark stared at the Lumon logo stitched into the bag like a warning label.
“Right,” he muttered. “Of course.”
He took the bag, its weight unfamiliar and unnerving. It felt like taking ownership of someone else’s life.
“Please sign,” the man said, holding out a digital pad.
Mark scrawled something that barely counted as a signature. The men nodded in eerie unison and left without another word.
Mark shut the door and leaned the suit bag against the couch. He stared at it for a long time. It stared back. Silent, expensive, inevitable.
Finally, with a shaky breath, he unzipped it.
The suit inside was dark charcoal, impeccably cut, the fabric smooth under his fingers. He lifted the jacket from its hanger. It was lighter than he expected, soft, almost unreal. A faint card slipped loose from the pocket and fluttered to the floor.
He picked it up.
“Please ensure all items are worn as provided. Alterations have been made to accommodate your current measurements.”
Mark exhaled through his nose. “Fantastic.”
He hung the suit on the back of the closet door and got ready for work, trying not to let the image of it haunt him.
Teaching that day felt surreal.
He stood in front of a room full of nineteen-year-olds discussing the economic ripple effects of industrial monopolies, and now and then, his voice faltered, just slightly, because there it was again: Jame Eagan’s voice.
‘I am offering you a choice.’
His students noticed something off, but didn’t press. A few exchanged glances. One lingered after class to ask if he was okay, which he brushed off with a practised half-smile.
He packed up slowly, moving papers and books with hands that still felt too tight around the bones.
Because tonight, he had dinner at Devon’s. And tomorrow, he had a gala, a gala where he would ‘accidentally’ run into Helena Eagan and start dismantling whatever remained of the life he’d once imagined for himself.
He closed his office door with a soft click and walked to his car.
Devon opened the door before he could knock.
“Finally,” she said, sweeping him into a hug that smelled like baby shampoo and simmering onions. “You’re late.”
“I’m two minutes late.”
“That’s late.”
She ushered him inside. In the living room, his niece was building a precarious block tower, humming loudly to herself. Ricken was in the kitchen, dramatically waving a wooden spoon while narrating something to no one in particular.
“Mark!” he called. “Dinner is nearly, devastatingly, ready.”
“Great,” Mark said.
Devon raised an eyebrow. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah,” Mark lied. “Long day.”
She didn’t buy it, but she let it go, for now.
They sat for dinner, pasta, salad, garlic bread, and Mark forced down bites that sat heavy in his stomach. He hadn’t realised how tense he’d been until he caught himself gripping the edge of the table.
Devon noticed immediately.
“You’re weird tonight,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “Weirder than usual.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not drinking,” she added, eyes narrowing.
Mark blinked. “You want me to?”
“No, but… you’re not drinking.” She sat back, studying him like he was a puzzle with missing pieces. “That’s never a good sign.”
“I just don’t feel like it,” he said.
“Mark.” Her tone softened. “What’s going on?”
He pushed his food around, trying to keep his voice steady. “I’m… going to something tomorrow night.”
Devon paused. “A date?”
He almost choked. “No. God, no.”
“A faculty thing?” she guessed.
He hesitated, then said, “The Lumon Winter Gala.”
Ricken gasped dramatically from the kitchen table. “The Gala? The Gala?”
Devon stared at Mark as though he’d just grown a second head. “Since when do you go to that hellscape? You hate those people.”
“I still do,” Mark said.
“Then why are you going?”
He swallowed. “I got an invitation.”
“From who?”
He didn’t answer.
Devon’s eyes widened. “Mark… did you get invited by someone important?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, what are you supposed to do there?”
“Show up.”
And ruin my life.
“Eat shrimp. Pretend I’m impressed by the ice sculptures.”
Devon folded her arms. “And?”
“And nothing.”
She studied him, her expression shifting into the one she used when she tried to read him like a book he kept slamming shut.
“You’re being cagey.”
“I’m being tired.”
“You’re being weird.”
“Dev-”
“Mark,” she interrupted softly, “I know you better than anyone. And you’re sitting in my house on a Thursday night without a beer, telling me you’re going to the biggest Lumon event of the year like it’s a school fundraiser.” Her voice gentled further. “You’re scaring me a little.”
He couldn’t look at her.
So, he looked at his niece instead, her tiny hands, her bright eyes, the way she knocked over the block tower and giggled like the world wasn’t full of sharp things.
He swallowed hard.
“I’m just… trying something new,” he finally said.
“You hate new,” Devon whispered.
“I know.”
The house was quiet for a moment, save for Ricken’s exaggerated stirring and the baby’s delighted squeals.
Devon reached across the table, resting her hand on his forearm. “Just promise me you’re not getting in over your head.”
He managed a thin smile. “I promise.”
He wasn’t sure he meant it.
He wasn’t sure he could.
When he left later that night, Devon hugged him at the door, lingering like she could anchor him with sheer force of will.
“You’ll call me after, right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He stepped out into the cold night, the crisp air hitting his lungs, and for the first time that day, it hit him. Tomorrow wasn’t just the gala. Tomorrow was Helena Eagan.