Chapter 2 — Truth Has a Pulse

“What is H-17?”

Eli asked it softly. That was the only warning Rowan got.

They were back in the apartment by noon, moving through the rooms with the brittle politeness of people pretending a hospital night had not rearranged the world. Rowan had changed into a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants, which should not have been distracting. It was. He looked too human without the armor of a suit.

Rowan stood at the kitchen counter with his wrist tucked under his opposite hand. “An old patient identifier.”

“For what?”

“A sleep study.”

Eli laughed once. “That almost sounded convincing.”

Rowan’s gaze lifted. “When we were seventeen, my father funded a private treatment program. You were having panic attacks. I was having insomnia. They called it neural sleep therapy.”

“I remember therapy.” Eli rubbed at the center of his chest. “I remember white walls and someone asking me to count backwards. I don’t remember you being there.”

“You were sedated most of the time.”

“And you weren’t?”

Rowan didn’t answer.

Eli put both palms on the counter. “No more half answers.”

“I’m trying to keep you out of something dangerous.”

“You nearly walked off a roof because of a message that appeared on my phone. You don’t get to decide I’m out.”

For a moment, Rowan’s expression did something raw and unguarded. Fear, yes. But something worse beneath it: guilt so old it had settled into him.

“All right,” he said. “We investigate. Together.”

Eli spent the next four hours making Rowan prove it.

They checked the apartment’s router logs. Nothing. Eli opened the security camera app mounted above the shop door. The footage from the night before was a clean black rectangle, except for one frame at 11:16 p.m.

In it, both of them were standing in the hallway.

Eli looked straight into the camera.

Rowan was behind him, though neither of them had been home at that time.

“That’s impossible,” Eli said.

“Yes.”

“Please stop agreeing with me as if this is normal.”

They found the old phones in a box beneath Rowan’s bed. Eli had expected a sleek collection of upgraded devices. Instead there was one battered silver flip phone, one cheap blue smartphone with a cracked corner, and a bundle of charging cables tied with an elastic band.

“You kept these?”

Rowan’s mouth tightened. “Apparently.”

The blue phone belonged to Eli. His name was scratched into the back in a familiar crooked handwriting.

It powered on after twenty minutes connected to a charger. No password. No photos. No contacts.

Only one audio file.

Rowan went very still when Eli pressed play.

Static hissed through the room. Then a boy’s voice, younger but unmistakably Eli’s, whispered, “If I forget, you have to forget too.”

Another voice answered, cracking with fury. Rowan.

“No. I won’t.”

The file cut off.

Eli’s stomach turned. “What did we forget?”

Rowan stared at the dead screen. “I don’t know enough to tell you safely.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the only honest one I have.”

His phone chimed.

Both men looked at it.

The screen had changed to white letters on black.

HALCYON PROTOCOL: 31 hours remaining.

Truth must be freely given.

Eli turned to Rowan. “Fine. Give me one.”

Rowan looked as if he would rather have faced the terrace again.

“Eli—”

“A truth you never dared to tell me. Those are the rules.”

“The rules are sick.”

“I know.” Eli stepped closer. “But if following one keeps you from becoming a human weather vane, we follow it while we figure out how to break it.”

Rowan’s eyes dropped to Eli’s mouth. The look was fast, almost desperate.

Eli felt it like a hand at the back of his neck.

“Say it,” he said, too quietly.

Rowan exhaled through his nose. “I’m not afraid of these tasks.”

The sentence lodged between them.

“Then what are you afraid of?”

Rowan met his eyes. “That I’ll want to complete them.”

The apartment seemed to shrink.

Eli should have made a joke. He should have laughed and called Rowan dramatic. Instead he noticed every detail at once: Rowan’s pulse beating hard in his throat, the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes, the way he held himself perfectly still as if any movement might be mistaken for permission.

“That’s not a truth,” Eli said, though it was.

“No?”

“It’s a threat wearing a confession.”

Pain flickered across Rowan’s face. “You asked.”

“And you always answer the hardest version of a question.”

Eli turned away before he could say something cruel. A sharp sting caught his finger as he shoved aside a tool tray on the coffee table.

“Damn it.”

The cut was small, but blood welled bright against his skin.

Rowan crossed the room immediately. “Let me see.”

“I can manage a paper cut.”

“You’re dripping on the evidence.”

That made Eli hold out his hand.

Rowan took it with an unbearable gentleness. He rinsed the cut under cold water, then pressed gauze to it. His thumb steadied Eli’s palm. The touch was ordinary. Medical. Safe.

It did not feel safe.

Eli watched Rowan bend over his hand, lashes lowered, mouth set in concentration. He remembered that mouth against his own in the bar. The thought arrived unwelcome and vivid.

Rowan taped the bandage in place and started to pull away.

Eli caught his wrist.

The H-17 mark had faded to a pale red shadow.

“You don’t get to make me responsible for your feelings,” Eli said.

“I know.”

“But you also don’t get to vanish every time you have one.”

Rowan’s thumb brushed once against the inside of Eli’s wrist. “I’ll try.”

The phone chimed again.

TASK COMPLETE.

Eli’s vision snapped white.

He was seventeen. He knew it with the terrible certainty of a dream. There was a room made of glass and an alarm beating through the walls. Rowan was on the floor in front of him, gripping both of Eli’s hands.

“Don’t let them make you keep it,” Rowan said. “Please. Don’t let them make you remember alone.”

Then the memory broke.

Eli staggered into the table. Rowan caught him by the waist.

“What did you see?” Rowan demanded.

Eli clutched Rowan’s shirt, trying to breathe. “You. You were begging me not to forget you.”

Rowan’s face went blank in the way it did when he was trying not to fall apart.

Before either of them could speak, the phone screen darkened.

New words appeared.

NEXT TASK: Within 24 hours, voluntarily share one bed.

Failure will result in Eli Mercer forgetting Rowan Vale’s face.