The hook moved first.

  A sharp, cold tug under her ribs, like someone had flicked the metal with a fingernail. The tower’s hum didn’t change for anyone else, but it changed for her. A tiny shift in pitch, a sour thread through the steady vibration.

  She broke eye contact with the Auditor mid-exhale.

  “…actually agree on.” he had just said.

  Whatever would have come after dissolved. His gaze dipped to her chest, to the place where nothing visible lived and everything important did.

  “New movement,” he said.

  She tightened her hand on the rail. The cold was bright this time. Not the deep, old weight of the hoarder. Not the dark, choking drag of the boy. This felt… superficial. Glittering. Like a cut on polished stone.

  “Feels busy.” she said through her teeth. “Like noise.”

  “That would track.” He lowered his slate, angled it, fingers flicking in quick, precise motions. “Intake notice. Recent mortal. Primary death cause: overdose. Substances plural. High public profile. Signal density is…” He made a small face. “Unpleasant.”

  The hook yanked sideways. Her muscles wanted to follow.

  “You remember what we just discussed.” he said. “About rushing. About being sure instead of being right.”

  “Yes.” she said, sharper than she meant. The hook burned in response, not in agreement.

  He went on as if she hadn’t snapped. “This one will be noisy. Public grief. Competing narratives. Strong emotions pointing in aesthetically pleasing directions. That makes the metrics lazy. They like simple gradients. That’s why it’s in your chest, not mine.”

  She swallowed, once.

  “Fine.” she said. “Open it.”

  A seam in the air a few steps along the ring shivered and split, as if someone had drawn a thin blade down reality and found it obligingly hollow. A rectangle of blackness opened, humming faintly, edges lined in a soft red glow.

  She stepped away from the rail. The shaft’s breath warmed the side of her face; the new opening breathed cold.

  Light and sound hit her first.

  The tower’s hum dropped away like someone had turned a dial. In its place came bass.

  It thumped through the floor, through the walls, through bodies that weren’t quite bodies. Music that was mostly rhythm, vowels stretched across electronic noise. The air tasted of cheap perfume and expensive alcohol, sweat and sugar and the faint, bitter edge of something powdered.

  Her eyes adjusted.

  A club. Or rather, the memory of one, pinned in place and looped.

  The room was long, low-ceilinged, shot through with beams of blue and purple. A bar ran along one wall, glass bottles catching the strobe. Tables clustered near it, edges crowded with elbows and cocktails. Beyond, the floor heaved with movement—people pressed together, silhouette against light.

  The space existed twice at once.

  There was the sensory version, what a human would have seen. And there was the version she felt: a map of tensions and choices.

  Lines of pressure ran through the room like invisible wires. Little pulses of want and fear, greed and loneliness, riding the music’s beat. She could feel where arguments were going to start, where kisses were going to be regretted, where someone’s night would end in an ambulance instead of a taxi.

  Under it all, one thread shone brighter than the rest.

  The hook in her chest locked onto it. The pull came not from the dance floor, not from the bar, but from off to the side—through a gap in the crowd where a neon sign glowed over a short corridor.

  RESTROOMS.

  She began to walk.

  The seam gave her footing where there was none: a narrow catwalk of not-quite-stone traced along the ceiling, just above the club’s lights. She moved across it while the crowd rolled underneath, brushing past the bodies and drinks and laughter without touching any of them.

  The pull sharpened as she neared the sign.

  She didn’t see him first.

  She heard the door.

  A man in a black shirt shouldered his way out of the corridor, moving too fast for someone who’d just pissed. His eyes were wide in a way that didn’t match the lazy sway of the drinkers around him; his hand left a streak of wet on the wall as he caught himself, glanced back, and then almost ran toward the bar.

  The seam tightened around that glance.

  She followed it.

  The corridor was narrow and lit by ugly light, music dulled to a percussive thud through the walls. At its far end, two doors: WOMEN / MEN. The pull dragged her past the first, into the second.

  The club bathroom had been cleaned, once. It showed in the tiles: white under the years of smeared colour and shoe-scuff, in the stainless-steel of taps constantly fighting fingerprints and watermarks. Now it smelled of disinfectant, piss, and the sour chemical note of something powdered and cheap.

  Three urinals along one wall. Two sinks opposite. At the back, a row of cubicles, doors not quite reaching floor or ceiling.

  The last cubicle door hung half open.

  He was on the floor.

  The actor lay on his side by the toilet, one hand still curled around the porcelain like it might steady him. His hair was damp with sweat. His shirt had blotches of something—water, maybe, maybe not. There was vomit on the tiles in front of him, smeared where his body had shifted. His eyes were open to a narrow slit, unfocused, staring at the stainless-steel latch as if it were the only thing left in the world.

  The seam froze the moment.

  One breath, half-taken; one heartbeat, half-finished. The body between.

  The hook under her ribs surged.

  This was the axis. The instant the story had cracked open enough for Hell to slip a hook in.

  The system had already filed the basics. Overdose. Cocktail of substances. Human frailty. A familiar script.

  She was here because that script wasn’t the whole thing.

  The club didn’t know yet.

  Outside the bathroom, the music roared on. People laughed. A bartender cursed at a broken glass. Someone shouted over the beat about shots. The world above hadn’t noticed what had gone quiet down here.

  The man who’d fled the corridor was an exception. He was still visible if she reached sideways in the seam: hovering at the edge of the bar, breathing too fast, hands shaking. His mind spun in circles.

  Something’s wrong. He didn’t look right. Should go back. Should get help. Don’t be dramatic. He just had too much. People will think you’re overreacting. He’s fine. He must be fine. He’s him.

  He stared at the bar top until the lines doubled. The note of panic in him flared, then guttered under a wave of shame.

  The seam tasted that shame, logged it, let him walk away.

  In the bathroom stall, the man on the floor took no more breaths.

  The thin, invisible membrane that separated a body full of chemical noise from cooling meat broke.

  The lights flickered.

  The seam flexed.

  The world upstairs would discover the body soon: another man needing to piss; a cleaner; someone checking on a famous guest. Panic would blossom. Phones would come out. Sirens would eventually wail.

  Down here, the moment was already over. Categorised. In motion.

  But the seam around it… shivered.

  She let go of the stall door and stepped backward—back not in space, but in time.

  The tiles blurred. The stall stood up. The body didn’t vanish so much as rewind, sliding fluidly along the line of his own history until he wasn’t here yet; until this bathroom was just one of many places he’d occupied.

  The scene rippled.

  The club rewound.

  Music ran backward into silence, the crowd drawing away from the walls, drinks filling themselves out of thin air, lights closing down into darkness.

  Then, with the sickening lurch of a skipped track, the seam dropped her into earlier nights.

  It always amazed her, a little, how similar people’s pleasures looked from the outside and how different they felt underneath.

  On the surface, the club changed only in details. Some nights the theme lighting leaned more purple, some more red. Sometimes the tables were closer together, sometimes the DJ booth was in a different corner. Hairstyles shifted with trends. Cuts of jeans changed. The basic shape remained: noise, dark, bodies, hunger.

  Inside the seam, each night had its own flavour of tension.

  Tonight the hook wanted the one where he was already comfortable.

  She found him at the bar.

  He sat like he belonged there. Not the way a regular did, staking a claim on a particular stool out of habit, but the way a person accustomed to lenses took up the space they were given. He made the bar look like decor for him, not the other way around.

  Dark hair, swept back with a carelessness that had taken effort. Shirt unbuttoned at the throat, sleeves rolled precisely two turns. A ring on his right hand, understated but not cheap. No watch; people like him didn’t need to check the time. Time came to them.

  He had one knee hooked loosely over the rung of the stool, body turned half-outward to the room. His face was lit in flashes by passing strobe: laugh, shadow, the suggestion of dimples, the familiar line of jaw that had been photographed from every angle.

  She didn’t recognise him. She knew, in the abstract way the tower classified such things, that he was one of the ones whose faces travelled. Movies. Press junkets. Interviews where he sat on couches and charmed daytime hosts.

  That was all surface. Down here, all that mattered was that other people recognised him.

  They did.

  Even in this reconstruction, she could feel the tiny jumps in attention when people noticed him. A group of friends at a nearby table nudged one another, eyes flicking toward him, heads bending to murmur. A man at the far end of the bar pretended not to stare, taking too-long sips off his drink. A bartender smiled harder when she slid his order across, hoping for a story to tell.

  He managed the attention with practised ease. Smiling when it was desired, not when it was demanded. Letting people have a brush of the magic without ever offering anything as vulgar as equal footing.

  Predators had to be good at that.

  The hook in her chest tightened as a new arrival pushed up to the bar.

  Mid-thirties. Neat shirt trying to look casual, sleeves rolled a little too high. Tie loose in his pocket, not around his neck. A face that wouldn’t stand out in a photograph, but would be pleasant to sit across from at lunch. He ordered something with too many syllables and leaned on the bar while he waited, eyes flicking up and down the shelves.

  Then, inevitably, to the man on the stool.

  Recognition hit like a voltage.

  “You’re—” he blurted, then cut himself off, embarrassed.

  The actor glanced over, smile dialled instantly to friendly. “Depends,” he said. “If you’re about to tell me I was great in that one thing, then yes. If you’re about to say you hated the last season, I’m someone else entirely.”

  The man laughed, too loud. “No, I— I just, my sister loves your show.”

  There it was. That familiar deflection—assigning the fandom to someone else so he wouldn’t look foolish. She’d seen it in a dozen permutations in the past five minutes. My wife, my cousin, my roommate. It always meant: I watch you more than is comfortable to admit.

  “That’s very kind of your sister.” the actor said. “What’s your name?”

  He said it.

  The actor repeated it, letting it sit in his mouth just long enough to feel like a gift. “Nice to meet you.” He clinked his own glass lightly against the other man’s. “You out celebrating something, or just avoiding going home?”

  He said it like it was casual banter, but it was also a test. She could feel it in the seam—the little lean of attention, the way he tasted the man’s answer before it arrived.

  The man smiled, awkward. “Bit of both, I guess. I was at that fundraiser tonight. The veterans’ thing? Your—”

  He caught himself, almost choked on the word.

  “—the foundation.” he amended.

  The actor’s smile sharpened by half a degree. Not enough for anyone else to notice. “Ah,” he said. “One of the brave few who survived the speeches.”

  “Hey, they were good speeches.” the man protested, then flushed. “The, uh… the stories. From the guys who served. My grandad was in the army back home. It felt… important to be there.”

  “It is important.” the actor said, and for a moment there was no act at all. “We owe them more than plaques and parades.”

  The seam flickered.

  That part was true. The foundation, the money, the appearances. He believed in that work, in a way that tangled messily with everything else. If this were the only story attached to him, the tower would have been content.

  The man’s shoulders loosened. “You were good up there,” he blurted. “When you talked about… about the guy who couldn’t sleep in quiet rooms anymore. You made everyone shut up and listen.”

  The actor ducked his head, just enough to look modest. “He told the story.” he said. “I just held the microphone.”

  The hook in her chest tugged.

  There, it seemed to say. That’s the problem. Someone who can hold a room’s attention like that leaves marks when he chooses.

  Drinks arrived. The man paid for his, hands a little clumsy on the card. The actor signed his tab with a practiced flick of the wrist. The bartender hovered an extra beat, waiting for some little blessing; he gave her a smile with her name in it and a “Thanks for keeping us hydrated,” and she glowed brighter than the bottles.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Conversation slid on, effortless. He asked about the man’s work. Not just what he did, but whether he liked it. He remembered the name of the grandad, the town he’d grown up in, the detail about the brother-in-law who’d gone overseas and come back different.

  He didn’t ask about a girlfriend. He let the silence hang just long enough that the man filled it with the word partner, careful and small.

  “Lucky man.” the actor said. His eyes didn’t flick to the ringless left hand. He didn’t have to. “To have someone who drags him to charity galas on a weeknight.”

  The man laughed. “God, no, he hates those things. All the small talk. I came with a coworker. He’s home with the dog, feeling smug he dodged the speeches.”

  The actor’s smile did something complicated for a moment, then smoothed. “Next time, tell him I said they’re not that bad,” he said. “Maybe he’ll believe you. People tend to believe you when you say someone famous said a thing.”

  The man flushed, pleased.

  The hook under her ribs hardened.

  Predators had to be good at that, too: naming the power imbalance in a joke so you could pretend you weren’t about to use it.

  She kept her eyes on his left hand.

  It lounged on the bar, fingers tapping occasionally in time with the beat. It didn’t look coiled. It didn’t look tense.

  The seam knew better.

  The bartender turned away to deal with someone shouting about shots. The man took a swallow of his drink and winced. “Stronger than the stuff at the hotel.” he said. “Feels like I’m drinking the centrepieces.”

  “They were terrible.” the actor agreed. “I told them if they want people to donate more, they should stop poisoning them with lukewarm prosecco.”

  The man laughed again. It came easier now. His shoulders had migrated down from his ears. He leaned in a little without realising he’d done it.

  The left hand dipped.

  It was infinitesimal. Two fingers slid into the narrow strip of shadow between the bar’s edge and the bottles behind it, to a tiny lip worn smooth. They came up with nothing visible, but the seam tasted what clung there—chemistry and intention, compressed into something that would dissolve cleanly.

  The actor’s right hand turned his own glass idly, condensation leaving a wet circle. He asked another question about the man’s grandad.

  The man lifted his drink to answer.

  The left hand moved.

  Just a flick over the rim. A drop of something into amber. Timed to the laugh, to the glance away, to the way joy made people stop noticing their own mouths.

  The man drank.

  The hook gave a low, furious vibration at the base of her lungs.

  The actor didn’t look triumphant. There was no glee, no hungry sharpening. He just relaxed.

  As if a knot inside him had been untied. As if the part of the night that required persuading was over.

  They talked for another ten minutes. After three, the man’s sentences started looping. After six, he had to grip the bar to stay upright. After nine, the corners of his vision fuzzed; she watched him blink at the bottles like they’d moved further away.

  “I’m—wow.” he said, slurring. “I don’t usually—”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” the actor said, amused. “You’re doing the ‘I can totally read the cocktail menu’ squint.”

  The man laughed, a startled little huff. “Sorry. I must look pathetic.”

  “You look like someone who’s had a long night and a lot of feelings.” the actor said. “Come on. There’s a quieter spot in the back. I promise there’s more oxygen and fewer people pouring vodka on each other.”

  The man hesitated.

  His brain, fogging, tried to send up a flare: you don’t know him; you shouldn’t go alone; you have a partner at home; you—

  The actor’s hand slid to his elbow, warm and steady.

  “You can say no.” he said, soft. “I’m not offended. I just don’t love leaving people to dissolve on a bar stool.”

  The flare went out.

  “Okay.” the man said. “Yeah. Just… for a bit.”

  They moved off the main crush of bodies, toward the side door that led to the street. Not the corridor at the back, not the sticky hallway to staff rooms and storage; he didn’t take this one into the dark.

  He took it outside.

  Cold air hit them like a slap. The man sucked in a breath and swayed, half from the temperature change, half from the way his blood seemed to forget what “upright” meant.

  “Whoa.” he muttered. “Okay. That’s… okay.”

  The actor kept his hand on his elbow. “You’re fine.” he said. “You just went from aquarium to actual oxygen. Give it a second.”

  The street glowed—neon, wet pavement, the smear of headlights. People smoked in clumps by the door, collars up, hands cupped around cheap lighters. A bouncer nodded at the actor with the wary politeness reserved for valuable trouble.

  “Hey, man.” someone said. “Big fan. Loved you in—”

  “Thanks.” the actor said, already steering his companion away. “Sorry, my friend’s about to redecorate the pavement with his stomach contents. Rain check?”

  The group laughed. One of them called something after him; it slid off his back.

  He raised a hand at the curb. Taxis slowed for him faster than for other people, like the city itself had been trained.

  A cab pulled up. The actor opened the door with one hand while the other guided the man inside.

  “I can—” the man started, trying to straighten himself, to reclaim some semblance of adult dignity.

  “You can barely see straight.” the actor said. “Where do you live?”

  The question hit the part of the man’s brain that still took instructions. He gave an address automatically, the name of a neighbourhood, a street.

  The actor repeated it for the driver, crisp and clear.

  “I’m coming with him.” he added. “He’s had a night.”

  The driver shrugged the universal shrug of people who had seen worse. “Meter’s running,” he said.

  “Of course.” the actor replied.

  He slid in beside the man, shut the door with a solid clunk, and the city began to move.

  The seam rode with them.

  Inside the cab, the music from the club became a muffled thump in the distance. Streetlights strobed through the windows, painting the man’s face alternating orange and grey. He slumped against the seatback, pupils blown too wide, head tilting toward the glass.

  “Hey.” the actor said quietly. “Stay with me a little longer.”

  “M’fine.” the man murmured. “Just… tired.”

  “You will be.” the actor said. “Long day. Long night. Too much free booze. It sneaks up on you.”

  His tone flattened the night into something ordinary. Manageable. A string of small, forgivable mistakes.

  The man swallowed. Somewhere inside, a little thread of unease tugged—he couldn’t remember exactly how many drinks he’d had, when the night had gone from a pleasant blur to this thick, sticky fog—but the words gave that feeling a place to lie down.

  He closed his eyes for what felt like a blink.

  The seam watched the gap stretch.

  He drifted through scraps of sensation: a shoulder under his cheek, the smell of some expensive cologne he’d registered at the bar. Hands under his arms. Stairs—too many stairs. A door opening. Carpet instead of pavement under his feet. A voice saying, careful, I’ve got you.

  He sagged into it all without meaning to.

  Something in him tried, once, to surf back up, to get enough purchase on wakefulness to say no, to say I should go home; my partner’s waiting.

  But there was a hard, chemical drag on his thoughts now. His limbs felt like they belonged to a puppet someone else was operating badly.

  “It’s okay,” that same voice said in the darkness. “You’re safe. You’re just drunk.”

  He believed it, because he couldn’t find enough words to argue.

  Then nothing, for a very long time.

  Morning hurt.

  It arrived as light first—thin and vicious, needling under his eyelids. His head throbbed in slow, heavy waves, each one pushing against the back of his eyes like it wanted to escape.

  He groaned and tried to turn away from the brightness. Sheets rasped under his skin. Not his sheets.

  He froze.

  His body hurt.

  Not in the familiar ways. Not the scattered ache of joints abused by dancing, not the dull complaint of a neck slept on wrong. This was lower, deeper, a raw, insistent soreness that sent alarm bells clanging through his nerves as soon as his brain registered it.

  Memory did not follow.

  He lay very still, heart hammering so hard he half-expected to hear it echo off the walls.

  Walls he didn’t recognise.

  The ceiling above him was high, white, elegantly plain. No cracks, no old water stains. A single strip of molding ran along the edge in a tasteful line. The room smelled faintly of some neutral, expensive cleaning product, and underneath that, the ghost of last night’s cologne.

  He turned his head.

  He was alone.

  No one in the bed beside him. No weight, no warmth, no breathing that wasn’t his.

  The sheets were twisted around his legs. His shirt—last night’s, he realised, the one he’d worn to the fundraiser and then to the club—was hanging open, one sleeve mostly off his shoulder. His trousers were on, but the belt was unbuckled, button undone, zip halfway. There were bruises on his hip, on the edge of his thigh, dark bloom just visible above the waistband.

  He told himself not to panic.

  Then panicked anyway.

  He sat up too fast. The room lurched. The pain in his head spiked, matched by a sharper, tearing sensation lower down. He caught himself with one hand on the mattress, the other flying instinctively to his abdomen, his ribs, his throat—checking for damage as if he hadn’t already felt it.

  Nothing obvious. No bleeding he could see. Just the deep, awkward hurt and the too-bright light and the taste of chemical chalk at the back of his mouth.

  On the bedside table, someone had left a glass of water.

  Beside it, folded once, was a note.

  His breath snagged.

  He stared at it for a full three seconds, as if it might evaporate if he didn’t look directly at it.

  Then, very carefully, he picked it up.

  The paper was thick, nicer than anything he kept at home. The handwriting was neat, quick, the kind that came from signing too many autographs. No greeting. Just lines.

  You drank too much.

  You got pretty wild.

  Don’t be ashamed. You’re safe.

  I got you out of the club before anyone could film you.

  Cab money on the table. Get home, sleep, drink water.

  You don’t owe me anything.

  — M

  There was a little x after the initial. It might have been a joke. It might not.

  His stomach turned.

  He looked down at the rest of the table.

  A folded stack of notes lay under the glass. Cash. More than he’d spend on three nights’ worth of taxis, pressed flat and waiting.

  He put the note back down, very gently, as if it might bruise.

  His mind scrabbled at the edges of the gap where last night should have been.

  Club. Bar. Veterans’ fundraiser before that. The speech about the man who couldn’t sleep in quiet rooms. The actor on the stool, the warmth of being seen, the way his own name had sounded in that famous mouth.

  Then—outside.

  Cab.

  Stairs?

  He remembered a hand on his arm in the back of a car. He remembered trying to text, his fingers too heavy, the screen too bright. He had a flash of his partner’s name in his message history, the unread notification count, the sick guilt of not answering.

  He did not remember saying yes.

  He did not remember saying no.

  He did not remember getting into this bed.

  He did not remember taking his clothes off, or anyone else’s hands on his skin.

  His body did.

  He shifted, flinched. The ache flared, ugly and precise, like a fingerprint pressed into bruised flesh.

  The note sat between him and that fact like a translator with an agenda.

  You drank too much.

  You got pretty wild.

  Don’t be ashamed.

  He could hear the voice that went with those words, that exact cadence. Could imagine the half-smile, the fond exasperation, the tilt of the head that said, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed you can’t hold your liquor.

  The shame rose obediently. Heavy, hot, choking.

  “I… did this,” he whispered, to the empty room. “I did this.”

  He looked at the money again.

  The amount felt like an accusation and a kindness. It said: I had to deal with something messy, but I’m too generous to hold it against you.

  It said: you inconvenienced me.

  It said: this is a favour.

  He swallowed hard.

  His phone was on the table too. The charging cable had been pulled over from the wall, plugged in for him. The screen was dark.

  He picked it up with fingers that didn’t feel like his.

  12 missed calls.

  19 messages.

  All from home.

  His partner’s name glared up at him in white letters.

  He stared at it until his vision blurred, then set the phone down without unlocking it.

  The room was quiet.

  Somewhere in the flat beyond—because this had to be a flat, not a hotel; the furniture was too personal, the art too specific—he heard nothing. No water running. No footsteps. Whoever had left him here had gone.

  Of course he has.

  He tried to stand. His legs shook. The ache spiked again, making him catch his breath, one hand grabbing the bedpost.

  He considered—very briefly—opening the door and shouting. Demanding. Asking: what did you do? Did I… want this?

  The image of his own face, saying those words, flipped in his mind to another one: that face reflected back at him, a brow furrowed in hurt surprise.

  I got you out of the club before someone filmed you, the note had said. It framed last night as a rescue.

  He imagined the actor’s mouth tightening in disappointment.

  “I thought you were stronger than that. I thought you could handle a few drinks. I’m the one who carried you home, put you to bed, made sure no one saw you half-dead on a toilet floor. And now you’re accusing me?”

  The shame hit harder this time.

  He couldn’t remember enough to prove he was wrong.

  He couldn’t remember enough to prove he was right.

  His body whispered its own version, but bodies were liars, weren’t they? That was what people said when they were trying not to listen to fear. It’s just your nerves. It’s in your head.

  His head was a mess. His nerves were shot. His body hurt.

  He clung to the only narrative in the room that sounded like it came with a path out.

  You drank too much.

  Don’t be ashamed.

  Someone had already done the work of turning last night into a story he could tell himself. A stupid, wild, embarrassing night. A famous actor who’d been kind enough not to let it blow up his life.

  All he had to do to keep it that simple was agree.

  He took the money.

  He told himself it was practical, not payment. He folded it into his wallet with hands that were determined not to shake.

  He put the note in his pocket without meaning to. When he realised he’d done it, he almost took it out again.

  He left it where it was.

  He found his shoes by the door. Someone had lined them up neatly, toe to toe.

  There was no sign of anyone else in the flat. The place was clean, curated. Award certificates on the wall. A framed photograph of the actor in a suit with his arm around a man in a wheelchair, both of them laughing at something off-camera. Another of him at a shelter, kids clinging to his legs, a Christmas tree behind them.

  The foundations had given him these. Tokens. Thank-you gifts.

  Real good had come out of his hands.

  The man clung to that as he opened the front door and stepped out into the hallway.

  Real good. Real people.

  Maybe that was why his stomach twisted when he caught sight of himself in the mirror by the lift—shirt askew, bruises starting to bloom, eyes hollow. He looked like every cautionary tale he’d ever ignored.

  This is my fault, he thought, so hard it almost felt like someone else had said it aloud. I’m the one who drank. I’m the one who went with him. I’m the one who—

  He cut the thought off.

  The lift took forever. He stared at the numbers, watched them crawl, heard his heart the whole way down.

  Outside, the city was too bright. A taxi pulled up when he raised his hand. He gave his own address this time, voice flat. The driver didn’t look twice at him.

  He sat very straight in the back seat the whole way home, as if good posture could keep him from shaking apart.

  The seam pulled hard, dropping her into a different kind of room.

  A trailer.

  The outside world came through as a muffled thump of grips moving equipment, shouted instructions, the high whine of some piece of machinery. Inside, the sound was deadened. The trailer’s walls were lined with racks of costumes, a couch, a small table with a lamp.

  He sat in one corner of the couch, still in half-costume. Makeup dotted under his eyes. A script lay open face-down on the cushion beside him, a highlighter capping a half-underlined line.

  In his hand, his phone.

  He shouldn’t have had a seam-window inside that; tech didn’t usually matter down here. But what mattered wasn’t the device. It was what he’d done with it.

  Hidden folder.

  Names that weren’t really names. Initials. Dates.

  He opened one at random.

  The girl felt the seam flinch.

  The photo filled the tiny screen. A man, mouth slack in sleep—or in something very like it—sprawled on familiar high white sheets. Shirt rucked up. Belt undone. A bruise dark on one hip in the shape of fingers. The flash had caught the gloss of sweat on his throat.

  His eyes were closed.

  His body did not, in any meaningful way, look like it belonged to him.

  The actor’s thumb stroked the side of the phone absently as if he were smoothing the man’s hair.

  He breathed a little faster.

  He swiped.

  Another picture. Different night, different body. Same bed. This one on his stomach, face turned away, arms flung above his head. The sheet covered just enough to make it look artful rather than clinical.

  He’d taken his time framing these. No blur of accident. No fumbling. Deliberate.

  He watched them now the way other people scrolled through holiday photos. Memory, reassurance, fuel.

  The seam tasted the justification he layered over it.

  It wasn’t just the sex. It was proof.

  Of what?

  That he was wanted. That he was daring. That he was interesting enough for men to risk their relationships, their self-image, their mornings-after for him.

  He told himself they wanted this.

  He told himself the parts they didn’t want, the parts they didn’t remember, were small compared to the lives they went back to.

  He told himself that replaying those images didn’t hurt anyone, because the hurt had already happened.

  He told himself the hurt didn’t count, because they never said the word.

  His thumb slowed over a third photo.

  This one had been taken closer. Just a face, slack and boneless against a pillow. Drool at the corner of the mouth. A smear of mascara under one eye from some earlier, messy wipe. Vulnerable in a way no one chose to be seen.

  He looked at it a long time.

  Something like guilt broadened in his chest.

  The seam felt it.

  It wasn’t the clean, sharp guilt of oh God, what have I done. It was muddier, more self-centred. It tasted like I am not the person I tell people I am.

  He flicked out of the folder with a jerk. He opened a different app.

  Mail. Foundation accounts. A draft donation sitting half-written, from earlier in the week, unsent.

  He finished it now.

  An extra zero added to the amount. A line about how much the stories he’d heard last month had moved him. A request that it be used specifically for counselling services, for emergency housing.

  He hit send.

  The seam watched the ledger upstairs respond. A spike of good tallied. Memos written. People who would have slept cold that winter getting beds instead.

  He exhaled, shoulders loosening.

  He went back to the photos.

  He repeated this pattern enough times that, from the tower’s distant viewpoint, a correlation formed.

  Nights of uncontrolled wanting.

  Morning-after pictures.

  Donations.

  It was a self-soothing loop.

  Hurt someone. Look at proof. Feel powerful. Feel sick. Send money. Feel better.

  He never dragged the pictures into the light. No jokes about them with friends. No group chats. No blackmail. That would have forced him to say aloud what he was doing.

  He kept them like saints’ relics no one else believed in.

  The seam hung them in the air above his overdose scene now, like a constellation.

  Men on beds. Men on couches. Men partly dressed, partly not. All of them with that same slackness, that same absence.

  Each one got a line.

  Not for pornography.

  For evidence.

  The bar for PREDATORY PATTERN thickened.

  The bar for PHILANTHROPIC ACTS stayed the same height—real good didn’t shrink—but slid further away from anything that could be called “balancing”.

  Up on the ring, the girl could feel the knot easing as those lines snapped into the right places.

  Down in the reconstruction, she watched him flick between windows: flesh, cheque, flesh.

  “Is it working?” she heard the Auditor’s dry voice say, very faintly, from somewhere back at the rail where he stood with his slate. He was talking to the tower as much as to her. To the way it had been weighing all this.

  The answer came in numbers, not words.

  You are not the only man, the seam told her, on a whisper borrowed from a dozen bruised mornings.

  Then she stepped out of the trailer, out of the flat, out of the club, out of the morning light.

  Back toward the stall where he’d died and the quiet column of his file, being rewritten line by line so that whatever hurt came next, at least it would know which way to fall.

  She looked down at him.

  He looked… surprised.

  Of course you’re surprised, she thought. The world always bent for you. Even gravity waited for your cue.

  She let her eyes flick from him to the hovering columns, then back.

  He had held men’s bodies the way he now held this floor: without consent, without real comprehension that he didn’t have the right.

  He had taken photos of them slack and gone, and called it proof that he was desirable, daring, special. He had watched those images on warm, well-lit sets while people powdered his face and called him brave for talking about other men’s trauma.

  When the guilt pricked, he had thrown money at it. Real money, that did real good. Beds, therapy, food, clean sheets for people who needed them.

  But the loop always came back here. To rooms where only one person got to decide what counted as harm.

  She tipped her head back, looking through the flickering numbers to the nothing above, to where the tower’s invisible attention sat.

  “This one belongs to you.” she told it. “Keep him.”

  The bars brightened, as if acknowledging receipt.

  The knot under her ribs loosened. Not all the way. Never all the way. But enough that she could draw a clean breath in the stink.

  She pushed herself to her feet, legs complaining.

  “I don’t care if you cry when you get here.” she said to the frozen body, almost as an afterthought. “I don’t care how many speeches you give about pressure and pain. You had choices. They didn’t. That’s the difference.”

  She stepped back, out of the stall, out of the bathroom.

  Behind her, the scene shivered, beginning to dissolve now that it had given up what she’d come to take.

  By the time she reached the ring again, her verdict had already sunk into the stone — another line in the tower’s endless ledger.