Chapter Text
Baelor first saw Duncan in March. The heating had just been turned off in the conference room, and the air still carried the lingering cold-damp of winter's end, like a shirt left to dry half the day still clinging cool against the skin. Duncan sat at the interview table, filling out the application form. The tip of his pen pressed the paper into grooves deep enough that if you turned the page over, you could probably trace the strokes with your fingers. Baelor watched the way he wrote from across the table, his shoulders slightly bowed, his left hand holding the edge of the paper steady. Every word he wrote looked as though it meant to take root.
"Why do you want this job?" Baelor asked.
Duncan set down the pen. It was about to roll across the desk, but he stopped it with a finger. "I want to protect people worth protecting. "
Baelor had heard many people say similar things. Most of them faltered somewhere on a word, their voices lifting at the end, as though asking for permission. Duncan did not. The way he spoke those words was like taking an oath of office, taking an oath of office before the owner of a biotech company. Baelor did not reply at once. He turned Duncan's application form over. Sure enough, the back was marked with the impressions of his writing.
That night, Baelor did not return to his office. He reached the security floor by elevator. The corridor was lit only by the emergency lights, whose green glow cast a small halo upon the grey door at the far end. He swiped his card and entered. Inside this special monitoring room, three rows of screens sat on standby, their dark panels reflecting the outline of his own silhouette. This room was connected to more than just cameras. Access logs, literature borrowing records, reagent requisition lists: every piece of data with a timestamp flowed to these screens. On the console beneath the screens sat a row of switches that controlled the electromagnetic locks on the fire doors and the operation of the elevators. Once the system was locked down, only his biometric data could activate it. When Baelor had built this room, he had done so under the name of "Laboratory Safety Management." The location was discreet, and access was granted to him alone.
Baelor sat down and pulled up Duncan's file. Orphanage, foster homes. When he first started working, he had spent a stretch as a janitor, then a warehouse manager, then moved to a security firm. All hard labor. The file was thin, three minutes was enough to read it through. He read it for a long while, then held the application form a little closer. There was a very faint smell on the paper, something like the alkaline scent of laundry detergent, the cheap kind with a saponin formula, lingering in the cotton fibers so long it was almost gone. Almost.
Assigning a bodyguard to Egg was Baelor's own decision. His nephew had just graduated from university and was about to enter the company as an intern. One of the direct heirs of House Targaryen, young, clever, sharp-tongued, but still hadn't learned how to keep his pheromones in check. When he walked down a corridor, he left a trail in the air behind him, damp and hot, like a gash torn through the wind before a summer thunderstorm. The lab areas required access cards. The coffee machine in the break room required an employee number. The truly dangerous things were not in the ventilation shafts. To Baelor, assigning a bodyguard to Egg was both supervision and observation. He needed a reliable person at Egg's side. This person did not need to spy on Egg for him, the monitoring already took care of that. But he needed someone to stand in front of Egg, to watch him, and to see how Egg would treat this person. At the same time, he needed to observe the person himself. Duncan was suitable. Very suitable.
Baelor had always relied on his own judgment above all else when it came to hiring. He had long since abandoned relying solely on interview score sheets. Data could be fabricated, letters of recommendation could be forged, but the way a person wrote on paper—the handwriting, the pressure, the impressions—those were habits built over years, hard to fake. He studied the impressions on the back of Duncan's application form. This detail put his mind at ease far more than all the information filled into the form itself. As for whether Egg might develop some unnecessary interest in this bodyguard, or that they might develop such an interest in each other, it was not that he had never considered it. But in his judgment, it was not a variable that needed to be ruled out in advance. What he wanted first was to observe: to see what would happen once they drew close. If the variable eventually required intervention, he could of course correct it,this was his own company, and he had the confidence.
On the morning of Egg's first day as an intern, Duncan arrived at the lab door half an hour early. The corridor was long, both walls painted a cold grey. The corridor lights buzzed overhead with a faint electric hum, like a swarm of invisible insects vibrating their wings inside the tubes. He stood to the right of the lab door, hands clasped in front of him, the calluses on his palms chafing quietly against one another. The new leather shoes were a little stiff on his feet; a patch of hot, raw skin had already rubbed up on his left heel.
He heard footsteps at the far end of the corridor, the sound of someone running, soles slamming against the vinyl floor in a quick, scattered rhythm.
Egg burst out from around the corner, his silver hair flashing a cold gleam under the fluorescent lights. He had a piece of toast clamped between his teeth, the bread bobbing up and down with the jolt of his stride. His lab coat was unbuttoned, the hem trailing behind him. The T-shirt underneath was crooked at the collar, baring a sliver of his collarbone. He ran up to the lab door, pulled the bread out of his mouth with one hand, and slapped the access sensor with the other. It took him three tries before he remembered the access card in his pocket.
That was when Egg noticed Duncan.
Egg stepped back half a pace. His violet eyes swept over Duncan from bottom to top: from the new leather shoes, to the shirt ironed too flat, to that too-earnest face. He chewed twice, his throat bobbed, and a few crumbs landed on his chest.
"Who are you?" Egg's tone was unfriendly because someone was in his way.
"Duncan. I'm your bodyguard, Mr. Aegon," Duncan said.
Egg's violet eyes narrowed. He was nearly a full head shorter than Duncan. Though he had to tilt his head back to look at him, he hadn't lost an ounce of Targaryen presence. In a tone dripping with suspicion and sharpness, he said, "I bet my uncle sent you to spy on whether I'm actually getting any work done."
Duncan frowned. A straight vertical line appeared between his brows, like a cut drawn with a knife across leather. "The boss never mentioned anything like that. The contract says I'm to ensure your personal safety."
"Like hell I believe that." Egg bit back into his toast and reached out to swipe his access card.
Duncan listened. The vertical line between his brows deepened. "What I said is true." His voice was heavier than before, just heavy enough to push the echo in the corridor a little further forward.
Egg's hand stopped above the access sensor. He turned his head back. His violet eyes settled on Duncan's face for several seconds. Duncan could feel that gaze resting on his brow, the bridge of his nose, above his lip, like fingertips grazing lightly across those places.
Egg pulled the toast from his mouth. The edge of the bread had a perfectly neat bite mark.
"Really?" Egg asked.
Duncan nodded. He raised his right hand, his middle and index fingers pressed together, the rest curled into his palm. He did the motion without any hesitation, like something he had not done in a long time but had never forgotten how to do. His fingertips were rough; the moment the two fingers came together, they stirred a small current of air that brushed past his own cheek. "Seven above, I am not lying." His blue eyes looked straight into Egg's violet ones. "I am here to protect Mr. Aegon from harm."
The hum of the corridor lights suddenly grew louder. The crumbs at the corner of Egg's mouth caught the light for a moment, and then Egg burst out laughing. The laugh surged up from the taste of bread in his mouth and from somewhere deep in his throat all at once. His violet eyes curved, the sharp violet of a moment before dissolving in the laughter, revealing a glimmer of something vivid, something belonging to his age. His silver brows were pushed gently upward by the laugh, briefly losing their shape above his forehead.
"You…" Egg said, the laughter still trembling in his voice, and his unkempt, messy silver hair trembling with it. "Did you fall out of some old book or what?"
Duncan didn't know how to answer. Egg had already slapped his access card against the sensor, and the door opened. A faint smell of disinfectant alcohol drifted out of the lab. Egg stepped inside. Before the door closed, he glanced back at Duncan. "All right. I'll believe what you said."
The door shut with a soft, muffled thud. The rubber seal fitted into place, sealing the alcohol smell back inside the lab, along with the hem of Egg's lab coat and that sliver of exposed skin at his collarbone.
Duncan stood outside the door. His fingers were still holding the oath gesture, middle and index fingers pressed together, the knuckles slightly bent. He lowered his hand, let it drop to his side. The two fingers brushed lightly against the seam of his trousers, wiping away a thin layer of sweat from the tips.
In the first few days of the internship, Egg didn't talk much to Duncan. He wasn't late for work, except for that first day when he nearly was. But every time he passed by Duncan, he would slow his pace, seemingly without meaning to. Duncan stood outside the lab door, keeping an angle where he could see Egg's position clearly through the observation window. His access card hung at his waist. Occasionally his fingers would brush against the plastic shell of the card, making the faint sound of a nail scraping across plastic. He could swipe in within three seconds if needed, but ordinarily he did not. This was protocol. When his legs grew tired from standing, he shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. A mild ache crept behind his knees. He paid it no mind. He had done hard labor before; he knew how to stand still and stay alert.
Egg, for his part, showed no particular enthusiasm for work. Much of the time, he would sit in the lab staring at data for long stretches, chin propped on his hand, violet eyes fixed on the screen, swiveling idly in his chair. When he ran experiments, he would hum. The tune was low and broken, and Duncan couldn't make out the melody through the observation window, only the movement of Egg's lips, and occasionally the tip of his tongue wetting his lower lip. The air conditioning in the lab ran strong, and Egg's lips dried easily. Sometimes, Egg would line up reagent vials in rows—red, blue, clear—arranging a spectrum across the bench. Baelor's assistant came by twice to press him on the experiment's progress. Without lifting his head, Egg said, Almost, almost. The words passed through the glass, and nothing remained but those two syllables.
At the end of the first week, Egg pushed open the lab door, one foot on the rubber mat inside, one foot on the corridor floor. He said to Duncan, "You can go wait for me downstairs."
Duncan said, "No, my post is here."
Egg looked at him, puffed out his cheeks a little, and said nothing. He turned and walked back into the lab. The sleeve of his lab coat brushed against the doorframe, making a soft rustle of fiber against metal.
And then the coffee invitations began.
Egg came out of the break room carrying two cups of coffee. He held one out to Duncan. The paper cups were fitted with heat sleeves printed with the company logo: a minimalist dragon, like a single stroke of red crayon scratched across cardboard, its tail curling around to the bottom of the cup. Duncan said thanks and took it. He set the coffee on the shelf by the door. Steam rose from the cup, condensing into tiny beads of water around the rim.
At six in the afternoon, Egg came out of the lab and changed out of his lab coat. As he passed the shelf, he glanced at the coffee. The steam was long gone from the rim. The vent hole on the lid no longer exhaled white mist. The coffee, cold through, sat motionless in the paper cup, the condensation on the cup wall long since dried, leaving only a faint ring of water marks. He said nothing.
The next day, Egg brought two cups of coffee again. This time, he had already taken a sip from his own cup. His lips had left a faint mark on the rim, a tiny trace of skin oil clinging to the paper's edge. Duncan took the second cup. He hesitated, then drank. The coffee was on the sweet side, not the taste he was used to, but the hot liquid slid down his throat and settled in his stomach, leaving a warm trail right down the center of his chest. He could feel the slight deformation of the paper cup, Egg had gripped it a little too tight when he handed it over. He set the empty cup on the shelf.
The next morning, Egg found a few coins and a slip of paper on his desk. The handwriting on the note was Duncan's. Even without ruled lines, every character stood perfectly straight, each word aligned on the same horizontal plane as though measured with a ruler. The amount was exact, down to the last cent, not one more, not one less. He had no idea when Duncan had left them there,perhaps after he himself had gone the night before, perhaps early that morning. The lab access logs would never record something so trivial.
Egg stared at that note for a full half minute, his thumb rubbing absently along its edge. He tucked the note into his lab notebook, under the day's date. As the pages moved, he caught Duncan's scent on the paper. Very faint.
The third time, Egg stuck a sticky note on the cup that read No need to pay me back. It was stuck to the lid, one corner lifting slightly. He placed the coffee in Duncan's hands, his fingers bracing the bottom of the cup. Duncan's fingers brushed against Egg's knuckles. Egg's hands were very warm; the paper cup was very warm. There was almost no difference in temperature between them.
That afternoon, Egg found another note tucked into his lab notebook. Duncan had slipped the money he'd paid that morning under the sticky note. All four corners were pressed perfectly flat.
Egg shut the lab notebook with a heavy thud. Another researcher in the lab glanced up at him. Egg did not explain. He shoved the notebook into his drawer, and the drawer slid shut with considerably more force than usual.
Third week. Egg pushed open the lab door and stood at the threshold. The vent at the end of the corridor was cycling air, a low hum resonating from behind the grille.
"The soup of the day in the cafeteria is pumpkin bisque," Egg said.
Duncan said no thanks, he had brought his own lunch. His eyes did not look at Egg; they looked at the wall at the end of the corridor.
Egg leaned against the doorframe, the collar of his lab coat skewed to one side. "Then you can at least tell me what you brought."
"Ham sandwich," Duncan said.
And they stood there like that, Duncan looking at the end of the corridor, Egg looking at Duncan.
On the weekend, Egg messaged Duncan to ask if he wanted to watch a game. Duncan typed back, I'm on the weekend shift. Egg stared at the line of text, his thumb hovering over the screen for a few seconds. He knew exactly what kind of weekend shift Duncan had—on-call, at home. Duncan's duty protocol was written clearly: when the protectee was not present, the bodyguard was not required to be on active duty. Egg turned the phone over and set it face-down on his nightstand, the screen making a short, muffled knock against the wood. The ceiling light was still on. His violet eyes stayed open, his lashes stirring only now and then.
Egg tried doing nothing at all, just sharing the same space. One afternoon, when work in the lab was slow, Egg swiveled his chair around to face the lab door. Duncan stood outside. The April sun streamed through the corridor window and fell on Duncan's shoulders, casting a series of parallel bright lines across his shirt. Egg watched those lines of light drift slowly across Duncan's body, from shoulder to chest, from chest to upper arm. Through the observation window, the edges of the light blurred a little, as though Duncan's outline had been traced in a fine layer of mist. Egg thought of the sunsets he used to watch as a child in the old house on Dragonstone, how the light would slip through the gaps in the stone window lattice and drift across the great hall just as quietly, moving from one corner to another, taking an entire evening. The great hall had the cool scent of old stone, whereas now the corridor smelled of disinfectant and copier toner.
Duncan sensed Egg's stare and turned his head.
Egg immediately spun back around, facing his screen, sinking the hydraulic lever of his chair with a jolt.
"Mr. Aegon," Duncan's voice came through the observation window, the high frequencies filtered out by the seal, leaving only the mid and low tones.
"What?" Egg did not look up.
"Your data has finished running."
Egg looked at the screen. The progress bar was at one hundred percent. He muttered a sullen Got it and began saving his data. He typed hard, the space bar clacking loudly under his fingers.
The only way was to drag the experiments out late. By the time Egg discovered this, more than half of the internship had already passed. Duncan only spoke his name when urging him to leave work. Every day, after six in the afternoon, Duncan would walk up to the observation window and stand there, waiting for Egg to look up. If Egg didn't look up, he would stay behind the glass, his shadow falling across the rubber mat inside the door, spreading into a dark grey rectangle. When Egg did look up, Duncan would point to his watch, and then say through the glass, "Mr. Aegon, it's getting late." The low frequencies of his voice couldn't penetrate the glass, but the shape of his words was clear enough, Egg could see every opening and closing of his lips.
And so Egg began stretching his experiments later and later. He worked past six-thirty, past seven, past eight. He rinsed test tubes that didn't need rinsing under the faucet, over and over. He re-sorted already processed data, changed the formatting, and ran them again. More than a few times, he was the only one left in the lab. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The centrifuge hummed at regular intervals, every ten-odd seconds, like a great metal heart beating somewhere in the basement. In the gaps between these two sounds, Egg lifted his head and looked through the observation window at Duncan.
Duncan stood outside the lab. The observation window framed him like a painting: the cold grey wall of the corridor the background, the white fluorescent light the only source. The man in the frame, his shoulders did not shift. Occasionally his knees gave the slightest flex, so slow it was almost imperceptible. There was no impatience in his face.
Egg moved a reagent vial from the blue row to the clear row. His hand paused. The vial gave a soft clink against the bench. At peace. The word jumped into his mind unbidden. He was not prepared for it. He put the clear reagent vial back where it belonged.
On the final day of the internship, Egg stretched the experiment until nine-thirty.
There was nothing left for him to do. All the data had been archived. All the reports had been submitted. He arranged the reagent vials into three rows, scrambled them, then arranged them into two. He pulled out the project summary that wasn't due until the next day and changed a single punctuation mark, a semicolon into a period. He tapped his phone screen awake and watched it go dark again, repeating this several times. Each time the screen lit up, it illuminated his face, the violet of his eyes growing paler and more faded in the fluorescence.
When Duncan knocked on the observation window, Egg was standing at the sink rinsing a test tube that did not need rinsing. The water streamed against the glass wall, and he heard the sound of knuckles rapping on glass, three knocks, not heavy, evenly spaced. Duncan's knuckles.
"Mr. Aegon, it's getting late."
Egg kept rinsing for a full five minutes. The cold water turned his fingers pale, the skin at the tips wrinkling and numbing. He turned off the faucet. The water spiraled down the drain, the last few drops glinting against the stainless steel before they vanished. He dried his hands and turned off the lab lights. The corridor light spilled past Duncan through the observation window and into the room. Duncan stood outside the door, waiting for him.
Egg pushed open the lab door. The rubber seal pulled away from the doorframe with a soft peeling sound. The corridor air rushed in, drier than the lab, carrying a neutral scent that belonged to no reagent at all.
And suddenly his heart was pounding. The internship was over. Starting tomorrow, he would no longer come to this lab, no longer walk down this corridor, no longer have someone waiting for him in the corridor outside the lab every day, or rather, waiting for him to be done. He had not thought about this when he was writing his internship summary. Only now, standing at the threshold, did it hit him. Something was rising in his throat. He swallowed, but it did not go down.
Duncan looked at him and smiled, a smile Egg had never seen before. It began at the lips, pulled at the corners of his mouth, then reached his blue eyes. The curve of that smile was very slight, but it struck a deep crater in Egg's chest.
"Let's go, Egg."
Egg pressed a hand to his chest. The deep crater was flooding with a name. He caught a glimpse of Duncan's figure, blurred at the edges by the corridor light, and felt his own heartbeat knock against his eardrums, once, twice. Aegon was what Duncan had called him for two whole months. Egg was what he had just heard. Between the two lay the entire distance of the internship, and in that one sentence, Duncan had erased it.
Egg did not sleep that night.
He lay on the bed in his apartment. The ceiling light went off, on, off, on. He laced both hands behind his head, his violet eyes fixed on the corner of the ceiling. He thought of the first morning of his internship, running down the corridor with a piece of toast in his mouth, and Duncan raising two fingers and saying, Seven above, I am here to protect Mr. Aegon from harm. He thought of the first time Duncan accepted the coffee. He thought of the money pressed under the sticky note, not a single corner bent. He thought of the way Duncan looked standing outside the observation window, his shoulders steady, shifting his weight now and then, so slow it was almost imperceptible. He thought of every "It's getting late" Duncan had spoken through the glass, urging him to leave—each of those had been "Mr. Aegon." Only the last one had not been.
Three in the morning. Egg sat up in bed. A tuft of his silver hair had been pressed askew by the pillow and was sticking up in a soft curve above his head. He couldn't be bothered to smooth it down. He opened his laptop, typed "Beta physiology" into the search bar, and hit Enter. He scanned the abstract and added the word "fertility."
The moment the search results popped up, a bird began to sing outside the window. The sky was still dark, but the bird was singing earnestly—short calls, in sets of three, repeating every few seconds.
Egg's eyes stopped on a line in one of the abstracts. Fertility rates in male betas are significantly lower than in female betas. That was not new knowledge, he had come across it back in university. It was the next line that made his finger pause on the trackpad: Nulliparous male betas demonstrate higher fertility potential than those with prior gestational history, with a graded decline correlated to the number of prior pregnancies. He read that line several times. So the first time was the highest.
Duncan.
Egg held the name in his mind, along with a cluster of half-formed thoughts. He set those thoughts beside the name Duncan like placing two test tubes that would never balance side by side on the bench.
So, which category did Duncan fall into? Nulliparous? Or with prior history?
Egg closed the search engine and opened a blank document. He began to type. In the title bar, he wrote: Project Draft.
The next morning, Baelor sat in that special monitoring room and pulled up the video playback of the lab area from the night before. The leftmost of the three rows of screens lit up. The figures of Egg and Duncan were caught in the corridor's overhead lights, moving across the frame like two silhouettes. Egg had left the lab at nine thirty-two. Duncan walked behind him. While they were waiting at the elevator, Egg shifted half a step closer to Duncan. Duncan did not move away. The elevator arrived, and they stepped in together. The elevator camera was angled from above, showing only the tops of their heads: Egg's silver hair and Duncan's flaxen hair, with less than a fist's width of distance between them.
Baelor let the image freeze there. The only sound in the room was the hum of the cooling fans, steady, neither rising nor falling, holding the same rpm. The index finger of his right hand tapped lightly on the armrest of his chair, his knuckle making a dull sound against the worn leather.
He pulled up Egg's recent literature borrowing records.
Empty. No new entries.
Egg's formal onboarding procedures took a week. The holdup was in HR. Supposedly a field had been filled out wrong in the system. Egg went to HR to ask about it twice. The first time, he was told it was being processed. The second time, he was told to wait a little longer. The next day, he received a message from Baelor. It was not a group message from HR. It was from Baelor himself, and it was very short: Come up and sit for a while.
When Egg pushed open the door to Baelor's office, Baelor was standing at the window, looking down. Below was a panoramic view of the company grounds. The hedges were trimmed very neatly. The vehicles in the parking lot, arranged in orderly rows, gleamed softly under the afternoon light.
"Did the procedures go smoothly?"
"HR says they're still working on it."
"I gave them a push."
"Thank you, Uncle."
Baelor gestured for Egg to sit, then moved around to the back of the desk. A metal-edged folder sat on the desk. Baelor opened it, glanced at its contents, then closed it and pushed it aside. "How has your father been lately?"
Egg pressed his lips together. "Same as ever."
"Maekar hasn't asked when you're coming back?" Baelor's voice carried a note of surprise.
"He's busy dealing with Aerion's business." Egg spoke very quickly, as though the subject burned his mouth. "And things aren't exactly quiet with Daeron either."
"It sounds like your eldest brother has stirred up quite a bit of trouble. Probably still going through the process." Baelor paused, and his tone took on a note of consolation. "Don't worry too much. Maekar will handle it."
"It'd be best if he stayed in there a while longer." Egg scratched impatiently at the armrest of his chair. "Uncle, I'd rather not talk too much about what's going on with my family."
"All right." Baelor nodded, but then asked anyway, "I am curious why you're in such a hurry to formally join the company. You know Maekar has his hands rather full at the moment. Going back to keep him company would be just as well."
Egg's violet eyes met Baelor's mismatched ones in a quiet moment. Then his gaze shifted to the metal-edged folder on the desk. He did not know if it contained his onboarding papers, or something else entirely, just as sometimes he had no idea what his father really thought of him. But given that his father's face was always set in a faultfinding and stern expression, he did not hold out much hope.
"Maybe I'm just another one of his messes. Aerion and Daeron are already more than he can handle. He has even less of a clue what to do with me. Me working here is a way of lightening the load for him, one less disobedient son cluttering up his sight."
"A mess." Baelor's brow furrowed slightly. "Is that a word Maekar would use?"
"Doesn't matter whether he uses it or not." Egg truly did not want to keep talking about this, but in front of Baelor, he still had to maintain courtesy and respect. "Anyway, when he hears my name, it's usually—What has that little brat done now?!"
Baelor laughed and shook his head, as though he could truly see Maekar standing there scolding a child, a scene he himself had experienced in a similar way a very, very long time ago. "Then I'll do my part to help Maekar out. I'll have HR take care of things as soon as possible."
Egg nodded, but he stayed seated in the chair, not yet leaving. When Baelor asked if there was something else, Egg pressed his lips together. A thought spun at high speed in his head, then turned into a tentative probe on his tongue. "Uncle, once I've formally joined, my treatment, it should be the same as during the internship, right?"
"Which treatment?"
"Personal safety."
"You never got beaten up during your internship, Egg."
"I mean, the bodyguard." Egg couldn't hold it in. He didn't want to be too obvious, so he swallowed the article before "bodyguard." Not that bodyguard. Just bodyguard.
Baelor's index finger tapped once on the metal-edged folder. He considered for a moment, then said, "In that case… that beta bodyguard, the one called Duncan, will continue on as your bodyguard. As it happens, I haven't yet figured out what new assignment to give him."
Egg offered his thanks and left the office. After the door closed, Baelor opened the metal-edged folder. Inside was an application form, a request for a security personnel position reassignment. On it was written: Retained on lab floor, on the grounds of familiarity with the post environment. The strokes of the handwriting pressed through to the back of the page.
Four days later, Baelor entered the monitoring room again and pulled up Egg's borrowing records once more.
Seven entries appeared on the screen. Every title carried the root word "Beta." Baelor read through them, one by one. He leaned back in his chair. The hydraulic lever sank a notch. The light from the three rows of screens fell across half his face, catching the violet eye so that it gleamed, while the dark one nearly merged with the shadows of the room.
In the weeks after Egg formally joined the company, Baelor would spend a little time in the monitoring room before leaving work each day. He would pull up the feed of the lab corridor. Duncan standing outside the door. Then Egg walking around the corner of the corridor, slowing his pace, saying a word, swiping his card to enter the lab. Duncan giving a small nod at Egg's back. Every day, the same sequence. Baelor's attention was on the sequence itself, on Duncan, watching for when he would break it. After Egg passed, Duncan's gaze would follow him for a stretch, from the door to the bend in the corridor. About three seconds. Once Egg had rounded the corner, Duncan would shift his weight and keep standing. Baelor noted down every one of these small deviations. He was watching a rhythm, the rhythm of when Duncan's tempo would begin to sync with Egg's.
Baelor turned off the feed. The room sank back into the windowless dark, nothing but the air-conditioning vent to the upper left pushing out a thin stream of air, hissing, like whispers heard through a wall.
For a while after that, the feed did not change. Until one day, when Egg passed by in the corridor without slowing his steps. He walked straight past the door, the hem of his lab coat brushing the doorframe. Duncan's gaze still followed, from the door to the bend in the corridor, still three seconds. That evening, Baelor stayed in the monitoring room very late. He replayed that stretch of footage, less than ten seconds long, over and over. Egg's pace had changed. Duncan's three seconds had not. The frame froze on the last image of Duncan turning his face: his lips slightly parted, then closed again, as though cut off at the start of a name.
Three months later, the first project proposal from Egg landed on Baelor's desk. The printed sheets still held the warmth of the printer rollers. The cover page bore the project title in bold, heavy type.
Baelor opened the proposal to the first page. The writing was Egg's, but the terminology and the logic, he could tell which papers they had come from. Seven in all. Months ago, back when Egg had first started, Baelor had read them one by one in this very monitoring room. He flipped to the second page, the third, then flipped back to the first. On the project approval line, he signed his name. The strokes were clean and sharp, without hesitation.
As he handed the proposal to his assistant for filing, he said, "The funding will come out of my special account."
The assistant took the document. Baelor's right hand rested on the desk, his index finger giving the metal edge of the folder a single light tap. Outside the window, rain had finally begun to fall. Raindrops struck the glass in a dense, rustling murmur.