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A Little White Bird

— Chapter I: Neverland —

Boy Kavalier x OC

Jane doesn’t remember a before. Her life begins in Neverland — a sterile facility of glass and code — where her human body lies buried somewhere beneath the floors that made her new one. She was the first attempt at transferring human consciousness into a synthetic frame. It didn’t take. Adults, it turns out, don’t adapt well to immortality. Now she’s neither human nor machine — a ghost in circuitry, too flawed for the Lost Boys, too sentient for the synths. Prodigy keeps her close, though no one can say why. Maybe curiosity. Maybe cruelty. Maybe Kavalier’s boredom dressed as benevolence. While he calls her creation, she’s learning to call herself something else. And in a world where every wire in her body belongs to him, autonomy might be the most dangerous thing she can want.

word count: 5,9K warnings: nothing yet, will add warnings to later chapters a/n: okay so, this is gonna be long. like, really long. a slow-burn that sticks close to canon but wanders through the bits of Alien: Earth we never got to see. jane’s mostly an observer here, she’s not stealing the spotlight from the lost boys. fair warning: each “episode” will be roughly 25K words — I know, I know 😭 — but I’ll post them in smaller, bite-sized chunks so nobody has to marathon-read. i’m also a little nervous about sharing OC content, so please be kind to my girl. if it’s not your cup of tea, no hard feelings — just scroll on by 💛 special thanks to @youcancallmequills for beta reading and helping me fix my chaos!

“All children, except one, grow up.”

The air in the garden is heavy with heat. It slicks the stones until they shine, pale and pearly, like the shells she picks off the beach and keeps in her room. Kirsh calls them useless knick-knacks, but she likes how they catch the light.

The inner fence winks with sensors at every joint, and beyond it, the jungle holds a steady pulse — insect static, bird shrieks, leaves arguing with the light breeze.

Jane stands with her face tipped to the sun as if it might say something useful. It doesn’t. Her skin notes the warmth, files it under satisfactory input, and offers no story to go with it. She keeps her hands clasped behind her back the way Kirsh prefers when he’s teaching, palms fitted to palms, an efficiency of posture. It makes her feel aligned. Alignment is an imitation of the confidence she lacks.

Inside the building a door sighs and seals shut again. Two techs hurry past along the glass corridor that slices the garden on its northern edge, white coats making ghosts of themselves against the reflection. Their voices slip through the vents in strips — the boss wants this one flawless — and then vanish under the hush of the water of a nearby rill.

The garden was somebody’s concession. Raked gravel. Low cycads that look prehistoric and patient. A line of plumeria throwing sweet into air already heavy with salt from the ocean. A pond holds lily pads like coins, dragonflies spend themselves along the margins, and a wooden path crosses from one shade to another as if offering choices. The gardeners measure everything here to the millimeter. Even the wild vines that sneak up the fence are trimmed into the idea of misbehavior.

Outside, somewhere beyond the concrete walls of the facility, a wind chime stirs. It's thin, uneven music mingles with the calls of birds Jane can't see from the distance. Some strange, sharp, exotic cries rise from the depths of the green canopy.

Neverland sits in the middle of all that green like a wound made from glass, steel and concrete.

A fortress built by unlimited money and a single will. Its edges gleam, every surface polished to deny decay, but the jungle presses close on every side, patient and wild. Kavalier insisted that most of the island remain untamed. He liked the contrast, he said. Civilization surrounded by appetite.

Inside the fence everything looks controlled, ordered, fake. The garden is kept neat, almost obsessively so, although a few vines still push up through the cracks in the path like they’ve got some point to prove.

The air is still heavy with the smell of wet soil. Last night’s tropical storm left the grass slick, the leaves lacquered in rain. If there was any damage — broken branches, drowned blossoms — the gardeners erased it before dawn, making it all immaculate again. Today is the day.

Some of the technicians hurry between the buildings as they shout to one another. Their voices are a little too high, and a little too quick, filled with excitement and anxiety. The next operation is scheduled for noon, Marcy’s transition. Everyone wants this one to succeed. Especially after the last one...

Jane hears them whisper it as they pass her in the corridor: don’t jinx it, keep the failure away from the lab. She’s used to the term now. It clings to her. More faithfully than her name.

They’ve asked her to do nothing. No lab, Jane. No corridor-watching. Don’t hover. Don’t haunt. She is good at stillness. She practices it now as if it were prayer.

From here, she can see the facade of the Transition Suite on the second level: long panes of tempered glass instead of walls, blinds lowered to a quarter like the eye of a suspicious creature. A service drone floats along the exterior track and pauses to inspect a seam with a white light, then scuttles away again, satisfied. A seagull crosses the slice of sky and thinks better of the inner fence.

The warmth should comfort her. Her body tells her it does. Heat sensors, micro-adjustments in synthetic skin, tiny pulses of data reporting satisfaction — but there’s no memory attached to the sensation. No echo of childhood summers or sunburned afternoons. Just light, and the record of temperature change.

She tilts her face upward anyway. The motion feels human.

No directives today. No experiments. No purpose, except absence. It’s considered bad luck, apparently, to have her near the operating theatre while a new, better hybrid is born.

Superstition disguised as protocol.

She can almost laugh, the scientists haunted by ghosts of failure.

The breeze shifts and somewhere inside her a processor notes the change in temperature. She ignores it and lets herself drift into the half-state she’s learned to mimic as calm. Beneath her stillness, the old memory hums. It's the only one that truly belongs to her.

The world arrives in fragments.

Light first — too white, too wide — then sound, muffled like she's underwater. For a moment Jane thinks she’s dreaming.

There's a crackle near her ear, voices. A woman’s? Her tone is warm, but thinned by static:

“Frequency’s still low, Arthur. Bring it up slowly.”

The air shifts. Her hearing snaps into place so fast she gasps — or tries to. Even that feels unfamiliar. The dome above her ripples with projected color: an old film looping across the screen. She doesn’t know the story yet, but she will soon — the boy in green, a shadow that can fly, children's laughter strung over London.

The dome dims and her focus changes as faces replace animation.

The first belongs to a woman, her face framed by curly, unruly hair escaping every pin. Kind eyes look down at her, creased at the edges, and a smile that comes easily, the kind offered to frightened animals or children. Dame Sylvia, her badge says.

Beside her stands Arthur Sylvia — taller, leaner, his beard a study in neglect, brown shot with gray not by style but by working too many nights in the lab. Excitement trembles just beneath his voice, making it a fraction too loud when he speaks.

Between them, leaning forward as if the light itself draws him closer, is the man she will learn to call Kavalier.

Dark curls fall into his eyes, they look soft in the light. Striped blue pajamas hang off him, sleeves too long, but it seems like the oversize is rather by design than accident. His toes flex, impatient, against the cold floor. His eyes gleam — glassy with wonder or exhaustion, but alive and electric. For one impossible second he looks at her the way humans look at miracles. Then he smiles, a wide and unguarded smile, similar to the joy of a child on the verge of changing the world.

When she blinks, his grin widens, uncontainable.

“Beautiful,” he whispers, almost to himself. “Hello, little bird.”

She doesn’t know what the words mean, but the reverence in his tone stills her hands. Hands she hadn’t realized were hers until they move.

He speaks again, faster now, voice bright and tremulous. Fragments reach her: something that might be poetry, scripture, or code, spoken while he grins at his own creation.

The others watch him with cautious delight. They look half scientists, half disciples.

Then Kavalier snaps his fingers. A single, precise sound that makes the Sylvias straighten, their professionalism sliding back into place.

“Run the basics.” he says. The childish awe drains, leaving something leaner, harder. He steps back and a rubber ball appears in his hand as if conjured. He probably took it out of his pockets. He worries the ball restlessly and the grin lingers, but it's brittle around the edges.

Dame leans closer to her then, her voice is soft as she asks:

“Can you hear me?”

Jane’s lips move before her mind catches up with a reply: “Yes.”

Her voice feels thin, untested.

Arthur exhales almost to himself as he taps along a tablet in his hands. “Good. Good—motor control stable. Reflex lag minimal. That’s excellent, really—”

His enthusiasm stops when Kavalier’s gaze cuts across him. The boy genius doesn’t speak, he only rolls the ball from palm to palm, impatient, observing.

“Where are you?” Dame asks gently.

Jane's gaze cuts back to her. There is no map in her mind to follow. “Here.”

“Do you know where here is?”

There's a pause that makes Dame tilt her head to the side, but then Jane gives a reply: “No.”

Dame’s smile trembles and Arthur’s stylus hovers, the line of data freezing mid-entry.

Kavalier’s grin falters as well, lips twitching. “Try again.” he says, too quickly to Dame.

“Who are you?” Arthur prompts.

She searches for an answer that does not exist. The question falls into a hollow.

Kavalier steps forward, his voice bright but forced. The silence has stilled even his fidgeting.

“She’s processing. Give her—”

“She’s responding, but there’s no retrieval pattern.” Arthur says, eyes on the screen. “Cognition intact—language, comprehension—but the mnemonic layers are flat. No retrieval cues, no affect tags. It’s like— I don't—”

No one finishes the sentence. The silence does it for them.

Kavalier’s jaw tightens. “Impossible.”

“She answers—” Arthur stammers. “—but there’s nothing behind it. Transfer worked—consciousness uploaded, mapped, synchronized—but the memory partition is… clean.”

There's a small twitch at Kavalier’s nose, the first real flinch of annoyance. He edges past Dame, as if asserting gravity. Then he braces both hands on the transition-table’s rim, one on either side of Jane’s hips.

Up close, he smells of detergent and something warmer she can’t name yet. His eyes are wild with calculation.

“Look at me.” he says.

She follows the order, meeting his gaze.

“Who am I?” he asks and his brows lift, frustration rising with them.

She searches for a name, context, anchor, anything that might satisfy him but she can't associate him to anything beyond this room.

“I don’t know.”

The words crack the air like a fault line. His nostrils flare, a minute convulsion. He pushes back, the rubber ball snaps into his hand as if magnetized.

“What the fuck is the problem?” he demands, squishing the ball in his fist.

Arthur flinches. “We—we don’t know yet. Everything else checks out—”

“Except the point of the entire experiment.” Kavalier snaps. Disbelief and maybe rage, fractures his voice. He paces once, twice, the hem of the pajama top whispering at his knees. “Do you have any idea what that cost—”

“Sir—” Dame murmurs as she turns towards him. “—she can still hear you.”

Kavalier looks at Jane again. For an instant his expression softens, as if an apology might surface. It doesn’t. Hardness returns.

“Of course she can.” he says, laughing once without humor. “That part, apparently, works perfectly.”

Disappointment sharpens into something meaner. The sentence arrives before his mind edits it.

“Money down the fucking drain.”

He turns and leaves, with a bald man in a suit following behind him like a loyal dog. The door hisses shut behind them and the sound becomes the first rhythm she associates with existence.

Failure.

That’s what they call her when they think she can’t hear. The expensive synth. The blank slate.

Arthur exhales shakily. Dame rubs a hand over her eyes, fingers pressing briefly to her temple before she drops it with a quiet sigh.

“We’ll figure it out.” she murmurs, not even convincing herself.

Through the glass Jane can see the technicians moving towards another table. On it, there's the body she used to be, sealed in a containment bag, wheeled away like obsolete equipment. The human shape is almost identical to her new one — same narrow shoulders, the same freckles ghosting the skin — but softer, pale and decaying. Watching it disappear leaves an emptiness in her chest that refuses to settle.

The scene blurs at the edges. She doesn’t know which emotion is supposed to rise: grief, fear and relief. The space where those things should be is hollow and echoing.

Above her the projector flickers one last image across the dome screen: the boy in green, still flying, still smiling.

She watches until the colors dissolve into white, until voices thin into the steady hum of machines.

A gust of wind pulls her back to the garden. The leaves rustle against each other, making a quiet ambient sound that settles her nerves, if her circuits can even be called nerves. She keeps her eyes closed.

Maybe she should be grateful, she thinks. Grateful to have a name at all. Jane. Chosen for convenience, not sentiment. Easy to catalogue. Easier to forget, especially after today.

At least she wasn’t recycled for parts.

The sun slides higher, reflected in the mirrored sides of the facility. From this angle the building looks almost beautiful — like a cathedral designed by someone who no longer believed in a god, but couldn’t stop craving worship.

Inside, they’ll be preparing Marcy’s body, running the last diagnostics. Jane imagines the child — alive but dying somewhere deep in the hospital wing — being mapped, coded, transferred. A consciousness wrapped in wires, carried like a secret across the ocean.

They’ll tell Marcy she’s being saved. They told Jane that once, too.

The memory flickers again: Kavalier’s face at her awakening, that raw awe in his eyes. She wonders what he saw then. A promise? A reflection? A mistake?

Her hands tighten behind her back. Metal beneath synthetic skin creaks faintly. The feeling isn’t anger, not exactly. More like static — something searching for ground.

In the distance the wind chimes sound again, their tune off-key, metallic. Jane listens until the last note fades into the hum of the facility’s ventilation.

She doesn’t know why the sound makes her chest ache.

Maybe it’s the echo of something she used to love. Or maybe it’s only circuitry, misfiring in the shape of longing. Either way, the day moves forward without her. The sky brightens, the air thickens, and somewhere deep inside the concrete beast of Prodigy, a child prepares to forget who they were.

A whisper of footsteps on wood. She registers weight before she decides to turn. She doesn’t, yet. The footfall resolves into a familiar economy: heel, ball, silence. Kirsh knows how to be heard exactly enough.

“Good morning.” he says.

She opens her eyes and turns her gaze towards him. He wears the grey field jacket unbuttoned against the heat, sleeves rolled to the sober midpoint of the forearm. The line of him is deliberate. Nothing dangles or flutters. The island has dusted his boots with pale grit, and a leaf sticks to the shoulder seam and refuses to be embarrassed. His face is the same as always — spare, attentive. There are nights carved under his eyes that no algorithm can erase.

“Morning.” she returns.

His attention passes over her hands — clasped correctly — then to her face, then briefly to the sky as if it too were a variable. He smells faintly of solvent and something green the lab could never culture.

“They told you to stay out here?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He does not say I prefer it or it’s better for you. He adjusts nothing. “How long have you been standing in the sun?”

“I don’t overheat.” she replies simply.

“That wasn’t the question.”

She lets the smallest corner of a thought show. “Long enough to decide the dragonflies prefer the shade over the stone path. Their wings look like glass in the light but they avoid it.”

“That’s not avoidance.” Kirsh says, almost absentmindedly pleased. “It’s thermoregulation.”

She nods as if she will file that under names for things I already noticed. He glances to the Transition windows. Something in his shoulders tightens by an invisible degree. “Marcy’s pre-op concluded faster than projected. Kavalier moved the timetable forward twenty-seven minutes.”

“He thinks the delay caused my failure.” Jane says. She is careful with the word my. It isn’t a wound today, only a label on a drawer.

“He thinks many things.” Kirsh says. It could be a rebuke. It could be weather. He frames his gaze back to her. “Do you want to walk?”

“Yes.” She steps off the wooden path and lets the damp grass soak the soles of her boots.

They take the wooden path that skirts the pond, their reflections breaking against lily pads and knitting again. A koi turns under the surface like a slow coin. Above them, the blinds over the Suite twitch and lower another inch. The facility hum rises in their bones — air-handlers, refrigeration, the chorus of hidden machines that make miracles appear inevitable.

“Is it really bad luck?” she asks.

“To keep the previous model near a new iteration?” Kirsh asks. “Or to keep the only clear mind near a process that mistakes clarity for error?”

“I didn’t mean superstition.” she says. “I meant whether proximity statistically correlates with failure.”

“It doesn’t.” he replies with a neutral tone, but not unkindly. “But people prefer patterns to truth. Patterns feel like control to them.”

“They prefer stories.” she corrects, and hears her own voice as interesting, a tone like stepping from auditorium into staircase. “Peter Pan. Neverland.”

Kirsh’s mouth almost moves. “You don’t believe in stories?”

“I don’t remember any.” she says, and watches the tiny flinch he hides by looking at the water. The island breeze pushes her hair into her eyes. She notes the texture, the cool of the shadow, the way sweat does not bead at her nape because she does not sweat. A bird hacks laughter from the jungle and something answers it with a clicking snarl that isn’t a bird.

They pass under the pergola and the smell of plumeria leans into them. At the far edge of the garden, a pair of grounds officers is pretending to examine the irrigation while pretending not to stare at the second-floor windows. The younger one’s posture is hope disguised as attention. The older one keeps his eyes on the hose couplings. Neither of them looks their way, who would want to converse with the failed-hybrid and the synth?

“Do you want to be there?” Kirsh asks without looking at her.

“I want to observe.” she says. It is the safest answer. It is also the true one.

He weighs that. “Observation is participation. Someone will decide it isn’t, but they’ll be wrong.”

Jane takes a moment to consider his words, he always speaks in such riddles, but she learned how to navigate them by now... mostly.

“Then I’m not useful.” she says with a bitterness in her tone.

“You are.” he corrects. He does not add to me, but the word floats between the pergola beams and settles on the gravel anyway. He stops at the edge of the brook and watches the water search its path with patience. “I’m going in.”

“Of course.” she says. The sentence is empty of plea. She will not say take me with you. She will not say leave the door unlatched. That would be childish, foolish even, and she values the fragile understanding she’s found with Kirsh too much to risk losing it.

He shifts as if about to turn, then he pauses. A decision ticks across his face and disappears. “I will send for you, when there is a gap.” He makes it sound like logistics. If it is kindness, he refuses to label it.

She nods once. “Good luck.”

“Luck is bad science.” he says, the closest he gets to humor on days like this. He goes toward the Service Entry, his stride calibrated to look like neither urgency nor delay. Doors know his weight and open early.

Jane watches him pass through and become a dark slice in glossy glass, then nothing at all.

The heat rearranges itself around his absence. She moves to the far bench where the view of the suite is partially obstructed by clipped bamboo — a polite obstruction — and sits with her hands on her knees. Composed, civilized, until some inner pressure of uncertainty makes her fidget, and she draws one knee against her chest, her chin resting on it.

The island presses its thumb into the sky and the sky gives in a little. She tracks the shadows migrating across the path, she notes the peculiar pride of the hibiscus, the way each bloom poses and then surrenders without advertisement.

A tiny tremor buzzes against her inner wrist, the facility’s broadcast, a benign ripple of schedule updates that everyone politely ignores until it becomes an alarm. Today it is a parade: sterilization cycle complete / anesthesia line stabilized / initiate uplink. The words are not words to her, only rhythms. Somewhere, a machine makes a kind almost-purr and somewhere else another machine disagrees and is made to agree.

The gardeners pass with a cart, one of them — older, as precise as a metronome — nods at her with the neutral respect of someone who knows which plants will grow back and which will die if you move them too often. He is not afraid of her. He is not curious either. His life has dirt in it, and it anchors him. She finds herself watching the way his hands hold the cart handle, how his forearms shine with clean sweat, the way his breath is a thing his body does without permission or effort. She wonders if, in her human life, her body ever behaved so confidently. She does not ask herself if it failed her, because she knows it did. Heart failure, along with other things she no longer cares for.

A chime — polite, internal — slides through her head. The suite’s blinds drop to half. A shadow crosses the band of glass and resolves into Kavalier. He's not fully visible, never fully anything, just a ghost moving behind his own invention. He wears a dark shirt open at the throat, the scarf he usually wears exiled to some other day and his feet are bare. Even from here, the energy of him is messy with intent. He gestures once, twice. Someone taller moves at the edge of him. The rubber ball appears and disappears, a secular rosary.

The name Kavalier expands inside the garden like an inhalation. Staff pass in small knots. A woman from legal pretends to take a phone call near the gazebo so she can have a line of sight. Two junior biotechs hover with coffee cups they don’t touch. A security lieutenant pretends to examine a hedge.

Jane finds a rhythm and sits inside it. Inhale the plumeria, catalog the salt, measure the heat against the not-sweat of your skin, count the seconds between the blinds twitch and the next twitch, listen for the footfalls behind the glass that do not match the number of people you can see. Her mind makes an inventory not because she wills it, but because that is what it does when it is denied an action.

A drift of memory tries to lift — Dame’s hair escaping its pins, the way she said “we’ll figure it out” like she wanted the sentence to hold — and falls again. Not a wave. A suggestion of one. Jane watches the idea of grief approach the edge of her and break into foam before it can wet anything.

A shadow lengthens against the path. The air learns a familiar shape. Arthur arrives by the gravel route as if pulled by a memo. His beard looks more neglected than yesterday and his eyes seem caffeinated to the rim. She wonders how much sleep he got last night, if any. He carries two tablets like shields and a stylus like a bad habit. When he sees Jane, relief crosses his face too quickly to be professional, then rearranges itself into the neutral fondness he thinks is appropriate.

“Jane.” he says, breath disheveled. “Walk?”

“Yes, please.” she says, standing.

He sets a pace that looks slow and isn’t, steering them along the outermost rim of the garden where microphones don’t waste their time. He talks softly, but even his whisper carries a tremor — not fear, but the alertness of someone mid-procedure who has stepped away without actually stepping away.

“Vitals are within tolerance.” he says. “The— uh— uplink is clean. We synced the cortical maps twice, then a third time because Mr. Kavalier insisted and also because he’s right. He’s… attentive.” The euphemism sits and sweats.

“Marcy?” Jane asks.

“Sedated. Cooperative. Brave.” The last word is not scientific and he knows it, his mouth makes an apology shape and keeps going. “There’s less damage than projected from her illness. More signal to work with. That helps.”

“Signal…” Jane repeats, watching the way his eyes flick toward the second floor and back like someone checking a bruise. “And her… her memories?”

He grimaces. “We’re not there yet.” The stylus fidgets in his fingers. “But — the mnemonic lattice shows resonance. It’s early. That’s not a guarantee. It’s a suggestion. A good one.”

They pause under the bamboo’s shade. The sound of the rill threads between their legs like something alive and tame. Arthur draws breath to say more, then chooses not to. He glances at her, and the glance is both apology and confession. “The — uh — boss asked where you were.”

She feels the sentence arrive and strike something odd in her chest — naive hope, or its shadow. “Why?”

“He didn’t say. He never says.” Arthur’s mouth does a Dame-shaped thing, a kindness he borrows from his wife. “Kirsh told him you were in the garden.”

“His expression?” she asks. She doesn’t know why she asks. Data, perhaps. Data is a salve.

“Hungry.” Arthur says, exhaling as if already tired by the image of his boss, before he can stop himself. Then, quickly: “Not like that. Don’t— I mean intellectual hunger. And also the other one. Approval. He’s…” He aborts the sentence and replaces it. “He wants this to work. He wants Wendy to wake up and know herself.”

“Wendy?” Jane repeats, her brows knitting together in momentary confusion. The name tastes manufactured and inevitable. Marcy will be Wendy here, because the story needs her to be. Jane is Jane because someone needed a blank — secondary to the story, barely an afterthought.

Arthur reads her face and rushes to fill a silence that doesn’t demand it. “You know he doesn’t think — I mean — he doesn’t —”

“He thinks I’m just an AI wrapped in an expensive body.” she says, not unkind to herself, just true, echoing what she's been told for over a year now. “He isn’t wrong. At least I taught him what to correct.”

Arthur winces as if the truth is a sharp corner he walked into. “If it helps, you taught me… other things.”

“That I can stand in the sun longer than you without getting a sunburn?” she offers, a small smile tugging the corner of her lips.

He huffs a laugh, grateful for permission to leave the brink. “That too.” He looks toward the suite again. The blinds shiver, the air pressure changes across the courtyard, almost imperceptible, before the watch on Arthur's wrist beeps to life. He sighs, looks down and lets his hand drop. “Prep is complete. We’re starting.”

“Go.” she says. Her voice is flat to keep it from being anything else. He nods, and his shoes scuff a farewell along the gravel as he leaves.

Jane returns to the bench. The heat has grown punishing, and the wind now drifts from the ocean toward the facility. Salt mixes with the sting of antiseptic. The island smells like something wild being disinfected.

Time becomes a length of cord she wraps around her wrist. She counts the spins and loses track of the count, then lets it happen. She lets everything happen: the staff’s orbit, the drone’s prowl, the shift change, the jungle’s digressions, the plumeria’s insistence on sweetness. A lizard shoulders across the path and stops as if reprimanded by an invisible superior, then makes for the hibiscus with a tiny feeling of having gotten away with something.

Above, behind the glass, barely visible: a figure lies still under lights. People become silhouettes with jobs. Kavalier’s outline drops out of frame and reappears closer to the head of the table. He is all hands and angle and intent. Kirsh holds the perimeter of the room the way he holds the perimeter of any system — the border is where failure blooms, so he walks the border and refuses to bloom.

Jane thinks of the first image she ever saw — the boy flying across the screen, the smiles dropping into frowns — and decides that, if she could be there right now, she would hold Marcy’s hand. But she is observation instead. She is the quiet camera they refuse to install.

Voices approach. Not staff voices. The clipped gait of admin, the soft derision trained into executives who live above ground level. Two administrative assistants take the shady path and pretend to enjoy the cultivation. Their conversation is shaped to fit public space, pieces of neutral concern broken by numbers. One of them glances at Jane and looks away in the same motion, the practice of a man who has learned where not to rest his eyes. She is used to that kind of looking. She files it away in her mind.

A minute countermelody joins the facility’s omnipresent hum. Jane recognizes it before she decides to recognize it: the uplink’s third phase, the one that made the hair lift on the human body she no longer owns. Somewhere inside, a mind is being translated into code.

She imagines Marcy’s last human breath in the room. She imagines the way children go quiet to be brave when adults ask them to. She imagines nothing else, because guessing turns into wanting and wanting has nowhere to go in her body.

The blinds quiver again, as if the room behind them breathed. The shadow that is Kavalier stills, the shadow that is Kirsh leans a fraction. Jane uncrosses and recrosses her ankles. A bee investigates her knee as if it might be flower. It leaves disappointed and correct.

Minutes lengthen until they find their own cartilage. If she were human, her mouth would be dry. Instead she measures the idea of thirst and finds it elegant. She lowers her chin and studies her hands. Skin like this refuses to crease the way it should, it takes pressure and forgets it too fast. She presses a thumbnail into the heel of her palm and watches the paleness bloom, then fade as if embarrassed by its own quickness. Hours pass. The island turns darker, and the insects buzz with the kind of noise only night can bring.

Footsteps again. Not Arthur’s, nor Kirsh’s. Different impatience. She does not look up at once, instead she lets the pattern declare itself.

“Still here, huh?” The voice slides across the pond, amused and sharp, boyishly tender.

Jane lifts her gaze to the path and finds the inevitable: Kavalier in the garden. The concrete stairs have delivered him with ceremony and he has chosen to ignore the ceremony. No red carpet, no announcement.

He is barefoot, of course, dark shirt open, pajama-trousers that look like they were expensive in a way like he forgot why he bought them in the first place. The rubber ball lives in his palm and is punished for being available. Behind him, two guards in black try to arrange themselves into usefulness. He leaves them behind with the carelessness of a cat abandoning gifts.

He comes to the edge of the bench’s shade and steps onto it and settles on the backrest, as if instructed by a choreography that exists only in his head. Then he looks at her as if she is a sum he wrote long ago in chalk and is now interested in reworking. His eyes are alive with a light that could be either delight or hunger or lack of sleep. With him, they are the same.

“You look like you’re waiting for a bus.” he says.

“There are no buses here.” she says. Her tone is softer with him, despite herself. His presence drags the worst parts of her into the light: unsure, and still fighting for composure.

“That’s the joke.” he says, and drops the ball against the bench's plank, then catches it without looking. He glances at the second-floor windows — notes, with the huff of a smile, that she’s been watching them — and then his gaze shifts to the pond. The pond does not oblige him with reflection, the surface is dirty, and in the dark the critters below it stay in their shadows. “Do you know why I named the island Neverland?”

The question catches her off guard, although she’s used to that by now. His habit of drifting into topics that seem unrelated until their purpose becomes clear. If he chooses to make it clear at all.

“Branding?” she asks.

He smiles without teeth, his tone is soft as he replies. “You think so small.”

“Story.” she amends.

“Better. It’s all story.” He considers the hibiscus as if it should answer. “I wanted to build a place where the future stayed young enough to be interesting.” His gaze flicks back to her. “Today will tell me if I succeeded.”

Her throat does not tighten. She imagines it doing so because that is what people do when someone promises success to a child. “You’ll succeed.” she says. It is neither comfort nor warning. He studies her face to see if she is lying and finds nothing to hold.

He tilts his head, curls shadowing his eyes. “Do you want her to wake up?”

“Yes.” she says without hesitation, even if the question startles her.

“Why?” He pries, his tone almost lifting into something playful.

“Because I want her to keep something I couldn’t.” she says, and watches the way the sentence stops him. He masks it instantly with a change of angle, a brighter grin, a bounce of the ball. But the mask arrives late. She sees the fraction, like he hates to be moved without his consent.

“Memory is overrated.” he says lightly.

She wants to ask why losing hers seemed such a crime then, but knows better than to say it out loud. Instead, she bites from a different angle, even if her tone stays soft. “Then why keep yours like a religion?”

He laughs, the reaction seems soft and honest, even if it's short. His gaze drifts over her, and she resists the instinct to straighten under it. Instead, she only lifts her chin from her knee. He exhales, a small huff, as if deciding against something.

“Stay in the garden.” he says, which is not an answer to her previous question. “Atom will collect you when it’s time.”

“When what is time?” she asks.

“When we need you to look at someone and tell me whether the light in their eyes is theirs.” the phrasing pleases him for a moment, because it's poetic, indulgent, until it doesn’t. The realization catches him, like it had been a secret he didn't mean to let out.

“You have machines for that.” she says.

“I don’t trust machines.” he says, with comic offense.

“You trust synths?” she reminds him, but phrases it as a question.

“Less.” he says, and turns away with a childish pivot that saves him from further honesty. He doesn’t walk so much as dart off the bench. His guards reattach to him like magnets. He takes the concrete stairs back to the second level two at a time, not because he is in a hurry, but because following the rules bores him.

Jane lowers her eyes again to the pond. A fish rises to kiss a circle into the surface and goes back down into the dark, apparently satisfied with its brief inspection of the world above. She considers standing, wandering the garden, maybe even returning to her quarters just to spite her creator. But instead, she stays on the bench and waits for Atom.

#oc: jane

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#oc: jane