Chapter 1 — The First Deadline

At 11:16 p.m., Eli Mercer’s phone told him to kiss his best friend.

He was still laughing when the screen lit up across the sticky black bar of the Wren, the neighborhood place where Rowan Vale was somehow allowed to wear a charcoal wool coat and still look as if he belonged.

HALCYON PROTOCOL: Before midnight, kiss Rowan Vale.

Noncompliance will result in loss.

Eli stared at it, then tipped the phone toward Rowan. “Congratulations. You’ve been selected for a deeply unsettling marketing campaign.”

Rowan’s easy expression changed so quickly Eli nearly missed it. A small tightening at his jaw. His thumb stopping halfway around the stem of his glass.

“What campaign?” their friend June asked.

“A robot wants me to kiss him,” Eli said.

June leaned over the table. “That robot has excellent taste.”

“The robot is a criminal.”

“The robot is brave.”

Rowan took the phone from Eli. The message vanished before he could unlock it. Not faded. Vanished, leaving only Eli’s dark home screen and Rowan’s reflection in it.

“Could be malware,” Rowan said.

“Malware with opinions about my love life?”

“Your nonexistent love life.”

Eli made an offended sound. “I repaired a seventies Marantz receiver today. The owner called me gorgeous twice.”

“He was eighty.”

“He was discerning.”

June’s grin widened. “Do it. One little kiss. Defeat technology with heterosexual confidence.”

“I never said I was heterosexual.” Eli glanced at Rowan, who was looking anywhere but at him. “I said it was a stupid idea.”

The air changed. Barely. But Eli felt it in the abrupt way Rowan went still.

They had been friends too long for a remark like that to matter. Since high school, technically. Since Rowan had found Eli behind the gym after a panic attack and sat beside him for forty minutes without asking questions. Since then, they had shared bad apartments, worse landlords, loans neither of them called loans, and finally this narrow brick walk-up above Eli’s repair shop.

They knew too much about each other for a kiss to be simple.

That was precisely why Eli stood.

“Fine,” he said. “One little kiss. Then you all shut up.”

Rowan looked up sharply. “Eli—”

“Relax. I’m saving us from the robot.”

He hooked two fingers beneath Rowan’s chin before he could think better of it. Rowan’s skin was warm. His breath caught once, quiet but unmistakable.

Eli leaned down and pressed his mouth to Rowan’s.

It was supposed to be ridiculous. A second, maybe two. A stunt for June and a phone that had already erased its own evidence.

Instead, Rowan’s hand closed around Eli’s wrist.

Not hard. Not stopping him.

Just there.

Rowan’s mouth was softer than Eli had prepared for. The contact lasted a fraction too long, long enough for the bar noise to smear at the edges, long enough for Eli to notice the faint scent of cedar on Rowan’s collar and the impossible fact that he wanted to tilt his head and find out what happened next.

Then Rowan let go.

Eli stepped back first.

June whooped. Someone at the next table applauded. Eli gave them all a bow, because comedy was safer than examining the heat in his face.

“There,” he said. “Humanity survives.”

Rowan finished his drink in one swallow. “We should go.”

The walk home was cold enough to turn their breath white. Rowan kept half a pace ahead, hands in his pockets, his shoulders set too rigid beneath his coat.

Eli hated that he noticed.

“You’re being weird,” he said.

“I’m always weird.”

“No. Usually you’re expensive weird. This is haunted weird.”

Rowan’s laugh had no weight in it. “You kissed me in a crowded bar. I’m allowed a minute.”

“You could have pushed me away.”

“Could I?”

Eli stopped walking.

Rowan stopped too, several feet ahead. Streetlight caught in his dark hair, silvering the edges. For a moment he looked less like the polished heir to Vale Biomedical and more like the seventeen-year-old boy who had once climbed through Eli’s window at two in the morning because Eli had texted only, can’t sleep.

“That sounds more serious than I intended,” Rowan said.

“Then tell me what you intended.”

Rowan looked at him. Really looked. “Nothing I’m ready to say on a sidewalk.”

His phone rang before Eli could answer.

Rowan glanced at the display and swore under his breath. “It’s the board. There’s a problem at the tower.”

“At nearly midnight?”

“A refrigeration failure in the lab wing. I’m closest.”

Eli should have gone home. Instead, he followed Rowan into a car service because the strange message had left a cold knot below his ribs and because Rowan had not looked right since he read it.

Vale Tower rose above Bellwether’s lakefront like a blade of glass. The overnight security guard waved Rowan through without asking for Eli’s name. They took the elevator to the thirty-second floor, where the air smelled of ozone and wet concrete.

“Stay inside,” Rowan told him as they stepped onto the unfinished terrace outside the executive offices. “The railing is being replaced.”

“I can read a warning sign.”

“I know. I worry recreationally.”

Eli opened his mouth to give him a better answer. Rowan suddenly staggered.

His face went blank first. Then all the color drained from it.

“Rowan?”

Rowan pressed a hand to his temple. “Don’t—”

The lights above the terrace flickered. Every pane of glass along the executive floor turned black.

Rowan took one blind step backward, toward the missing section of railing.

Eli lunged.

He caught the back of Rowan’s coat just as Rowan’s heel slid on rain-dark concrete. The force nearly pulled Eli with him. His shoulder slammed into a steel support, pain flashing hot down his arm.

For one terrible second Rowan hung over the city, his eyes open and unseeing.

“Rowan!”

Eli hauled with everything he had. Rowan’s body came back against him hard enough to knock the air from both of them. They hit the floor together. Rowan shook once, violently, then curled toward Eli as if his body had made a decision his mind had not.

The lights snapped back on.

Rowan blinked at the ceiling. “What happened?”

“You nearly died.” Eli’s voice broke on the last word, which made him angrier. “That’s what happened.”

At the hospital, the scans found nothing. No stroke. No seizure. No drugs in his blood. The doctor called it a transient neurological event and suggested rest, as if Rowan had simply forgotten how gravity worked.

Eli sat beside the bed until dawn, replaying the terrace in ugly loops.

When Rowan finally woke, his sleeve had slipped back from his wrist.

There, beneath the hospital bracelet, was a mark that had not been there at the bar.

H-17.

The characters looked burned into his skin.

Eli reached for his phone. It vibrated before he touched it.

HALCYON PROTOCOL: 48 hours remaining.

Obtain one truth Rowan Vale has never dared to tell you.

Across the bed, Rowan saw the message reflected in Eli’s face.

Then he saw the number on his own wrist.

All the color left him again.

“It shouldn’t be alive,” Rowan whispered.