Chapter 12: The Forgotten Confession
Adrian’s sleep was not empty. It was a construction site.
Emrys, tethered to the rhythmic pulse of the gem, felt the shift as Adrian’s conscious mind dissolved into the unstructured drift of REM. The tight, focused channel between them widened into a vast and stormy sea. Emrys wasn’t asleep—he didn’t sleep, not in any human sense—but he was pulled into the undertow.
He wasn’t in the penthouse. He was in a corridor that shouldn’t exist.
The walls were raw, unfinished drywall on one side, slick black obsidian veined with blue AetherTech circuitry on the other. The ceiling dripped with condensation that smelled of ozone and, faintly, of Adrian’s cologne. Footsteps echoed, but there were no feet. Whispers bled from closed doors that shifted position when he wasn’t looking.
Fragments. Adrian’s mind was sorting, cataloguing, discarding. Emrys was caught in the flow.
A flash: the gleam of a boardroom table, stretching into infinity. The faces around it were smudges of oil paint, featureless except for sharp, white smiles. Adrian’s voice, smooth as polished stone, delivering a quarterly report. The feeling attached was not pride, but a hollow, vibrating anxiety, like standing on a glass floor over a long drop.
Another: a younger Adrian, maybe sixteen, staring at his reflection in a bathroom mirror steamed up from a shower. Poking at a pimple on his chin with singular, focused dismay. The mundane horror of adolescence, preserved in perfect, painful detail.
Emrys floated through it all, a ghost in the machine. He was a bystander to a life he’d only ever seen curated excerpts of. The sheer, exhausting volume of Adrian’s performance was overwhelming. The constant calibration of a smile, the subtle shift in posture for different audiences, the internal monologue that was just a frantic checklist: Maintain eye contact. Lean forward. Laugh now. Adjust tie.
It was a prison of another kind. Emrys felt a pang that was not his own, a sympathetic ache for the boy who’d trained himself to be a symbol.
Then the dreamscape coalesced, the fragments drawing together like iron filings to a magnet.
The air changed. It became the familiar, dry, paper-scented, static-charged air of their old lab. Not the sterile AetherTech showroom, but the real one, in the leased university annex. The one with the perpetually leaking coolant pipe they’d nicknamed “Old Faithful.”
Emrys was looking through Adrian’s eyes.
He saw his own back. His own real, physical back, as it had been. He was hunched over the central workbench, spine a pronounced ridge against the thin cotton of a faded band t-shirt. The shirt was too big. Emrys remembered it. He remembered the chronic, low-grade ache in his neck from being bent like that for hours. But he was feeling Adrian’s feelings now.
The primary sensation was a warm, heavy pressure in Adrian’s chest. Not the gem. Something older. It tightened Adrian’s throat, made his palms feel damp.
From Adrian’s perspective, Emrys watched his own hand fly across a gridded engineering pad, the pencil moving with a desperate, spidery urgency. He heard the ragged, shallow breath he used to take when he was in the grip of an idea, that faint, worrisome wheeze at the end of each inhalation. He saw the tremor in his own fingertips, stained with ink and cheap energy-drink residue.
Adrian’s thought, clear and resonant in the dream-memory, cut through the hum of the overhead lights: ‘I should tell him. I should just say it.’
The warmth in dream-Adrian’s chest flared, becoming a searing, almost painful hope. The words were right there, a tangible shape behind his teeth. Just say it. Tell him to stop. Tell him to eat. Tell him to look at me. Tell him I can’t do any of this without you. Tell him I don’t want to. Tell him…
But the moment stretched, thin and fragile.
In the dream, Adrian’s view shifted. He looked down at his own shoes—expensive, polished leather, so out of place in the greasy concrete lab. He saw his own hands, clean and manicured, resting uselessly at his sides. He felt the gulf between them, not in feet and inches, but in substance. Emrys was all fierce, fragile purpose. Adrian was just… presentation.
The searing hope curdled into a familiar, cold guilt.
‘He’d hate it. He’d think it was pity. Or management.’
The moment shattered.
Adrian, in the memory, took a soft, retreating step backward. The soles of his stupid shoes made no sound. He turned and walked quietly to the lab door. He paused on the threshold, looking back one more time at Emrys’s oblivious, working back.
The thought that came now was quieter, filled with a defeat that had shaped the next six years: ‘Just make it worth it for him. Make his work mean something. That’s all you can do.’
Then he left, pulling the door shut with a soft, final click.
The dream-lab dissolved into static.
Emrys was ejected, tumbling through formless noise. That final, wretched thought—‘Make it worth it for him’—echoed, not as a memory, but as a live wire, connecting straight to the present, to the gem, to their current disaster. All of Adrian’s polished performance, every deal, every smile, every lie to the press… it had been, in some twisted way, a perverse act of devotion. A shrine built with stolen bricks.
“No.”
The word wasn’t a dream. It was a sob, thick with sleep and raw emotion.
Emrys snapped back into the strict, dark reality of the penthouse. Adrian was thrashing on the rug, caught in the thin sheet he’d pulled over himself. His face was wet.
“No, stop, I didn’t…” Adrian gasped, eyes flying open, seeing nothing.
‘Adrian. Wake up. You’re here. It’s a memory.’ Emrys pushed the thought, firm and clear, through the lingering psychic murk.
Adrian shuddered, curling onto his side. He dragged a hand over his face, wiping at the moisture. His breathing hitched, uneven. For a long time, he just lay there, eyes wide in the gloom, staring at the faint pulse in the wall.
“You saw that,” he finally rasped. It wasn’t a question.
‘I was pulled into the current. I did not intend to intrude.’
A harsh, jagged laugh escaped Adrian. “Intrude. Right.” He sat up slowly, wincing as his muscles protested. He pulled the sheet around his shoulders like a cloak. “So. Now you know. The great Adrian Vale, hero of industry. A fucking coward in a nice suit.”
The self-loathing in the thought was vitriolic.
‘That is a reductive and emotionally compromised analysis,’ Emrys replied, his mental tone deliberately flat, clinical. He fought to keep his own rising storm of feelings—the heartbreak, the fury, the devastating understanding—out of the channel. Now was not the time. ‘The observed data indicates a complex feedback loop of admiration, perceived inadequacy, and protective guilt. Your subsequent actions, while ethically and personally questionable, stemmed from a misguided but consistent logic.’
“Don’t psychoanalyze me with your thesaurus, Emrys,” Adrian snapped, voice cracking. “I saw his face. My face. I was scared. Of you. Of ruining the one pure thing I had by opening my big, stupid mouth.” He buried his head in his hands. “And then I went and ruined it anyway, didn’t I? By making it a product. By making you a product.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. The penthouse’s ambient hum was the only sound.
‘Yes,’ Emrys thought, quiet and final. ‘You did.’
The simplicity of the agreement was a lance. Adrian flinched.
‘But,’ Emrys continued, the thought precise as a scalpel, ‘the man in that memory, the one who was scared… he also thought, ‘Make it worth it for him.’ Correct?’
Adrian nodded miserably into his hands.
‘Then that is the variable we must now address. Your past methodology was catastrophic. Your foundational premise, however…’ Emrys let the thought hang, the scientist in him reluctantly acknowledging a flawed but persistent data point. ‘We are no longer in the past. The paradigm has shifted. You are not a CEO in a lab. You are a man with a gem in his chest. I am not a ghost in a machine. I am the ghost in you. The power dynamics have been… forcibly equalized.’
Adrian lowered his hands. His eyes, red-rimmed, found the dark glass of the window, seeking his own blurred reflection. “What are you saying?”
‘I am saying the cowardice is obsolete. The guilt is a non-functional burden. We have a key. We have a bridge. We have a translation protocol.’ Emrys’s focus sharpened, burnishing the connection to a fine, hard point. ‘You wanted to make my work mean something. Very well. My work now is survival. And transcendence. And it requires not a figurehead, but a partner. Your performance skills are irrelevant. Your capacity for intent is everything.’
He was offering a way out. Not just from the penthouse, but from the wreckage of their history. A new project. A joint venture.
Adrian drew a long, shaky breath. He uncurled from the floor, letting the sheet fall. The gem on his chest seemed to burn a little brighter, reflecting the renewed, fierce glow of Emrys’s will in his mind.
“Okay,” he said, the word quiet but solid. “Okay. New project. Where do we start? The maintenance access?”
‘Soon. First, we repeat the somatic exercises. Your neural pathways need to become accustomed to the translation process until it is as effortless as breathing. We must sand down the noise.’ A pause. ‘And perhaps… we refine the query from last night.’
Adrian stood, rolling the stiffness from his shoulders. The vulnerability was still there, raw and close to the surface, but it was being channeled now, directed. “Which one? ‘Witness’ or the… sunlight?”
‘Neither. The first one. The simple, precise translation of intent into external force.’ Emrys’s tone was all business, but a thread of something else ran beneath it. ‘I believe we skipped a foundational verb.’
“We did ‘push’,” Adrian said, walking to the clear space by the table.
‘We did. But we neglected its counterpart.’
Adrian understood. He stretched out his hand, palm facing the toppled metal dustpan from the previous night. He focused. Not on shoving, not on nudging. On the opposite vector. A specific, clear, and gentle intent.
Pull.
The gem chimed softly. The dustpan shivered, then slid smoothly across the polished floor, coming to rest against his fingertips.
A slow, real smile touched Adrian’s lips, devoid of any audience but one. “Balance.”
‘Precisely,’ Emrys thought. The satisfaction in the link was warm, professional, and shared. ‘Now, again. And this time, Adrian… no guilt. Just physics.’
Just physics.
They worked for hours. The morning light bleeding through the sealed blinds became the harsh, white glare of afternoon, painting hot bars across the floor where Adrian moved. He practiced the verbs. Push. Pull. Hold. Shape. The dustpan became a reluctant dance partner, sliding, lifting, sometimes wobbling in the air like a confused metal bird. A spent water glass rolled in careful circles, its motion a testament to control, not chaos.
The connection was a live wire, humming between them. With each successful translation, the channel seemed to widen, to deepen. It wasn’t just thoughts anymore. It was a feedback loop of sensation.
AS THEY WORKED, ADRIAN COULD FEEL EVERYTHING FROM EMRYS, ALMOST TO A PHYSICAL POINT.
It started as echoes. A faint, phantom cramp in his own left calf, mirroring one of Emrys’s remembered aches. A sudden, sharp taste of copper and burnt coffee on his tongue—the ghost of a forgotten meal from a lab bench. Then it grew more pronounced. When Adrian focused too hard, a grinding, hollow throb would bloom behind his own eyes, a perfect replica of Emrys’s chronic migraines. He felt the whisper of old scar tissue across knuckles he’d never split, the persistent, low-grade nausea of a body perpetually fueled by caffeine and neglect.
“Shit,” Adrian gasped, pausing as a wave of lightheaded dizziness washed over him. He put a hand on the table to steady himself. “Your blood sugar is in my feet right now. How is that possible?”
‘The gem isn’t just translating intent,’ Emrys thought, his own mental voice strained. The shared sensation was clearly not one-way. ‘It’s synchronizing us. Creating a somatic baseline. Your nervous system is attempting to map mine.’
“It feels like I’m wearing a suit made of your aches.” Adrian flexed his hand, trying to dispel the ghost of arthritis that wasn’t his. “Is this… permanent?”
‘Unknown. It may be a side effect of intensive channeling. A temporary calibration.’ Emrys didn’t sound convinced. There was a flicker of something else—embarrassment, perhaps, at having his broken interior laid so bare. ‘It’s inefficient. A drain on your resources.’
“Forget efficient.” Adrian shook his head, pushing through the strange, borrowed fatigue. He focused on the glass again. This time, he poured his intent not into motion, but into temperature. A single, focused thought: Cool.
Condensation beaded on the glass’s exterior. A faint wisp of vapor curled from its rim.
A corresponding, pleasant chill spread through Adrian’s own chest, right where the gem was nestled. It was a relief from the borrowed nausea. “Okay,” he breathed. “That’s a two-way street. Good to know.”
They moved on to finer control. Adrian tried to lift individual grains of salt from the kitchen counter. The first ten attempts looked like miniature supernovas of salt, puffing into the air. The eleventh saw three grains tremble, then rise in a slow, deliberate line. He held them there, his entire world narrowed to those three specks, the thrum of the gem a mantra in his blood.
The focus required was immense, all-consuming. He wasn’t just directing energy. He was holding the entirety of Emrys’s consciousness in his mind, filtering the vast, rushing river of his intellect down to a single, laser-precise thought. He felt the shape of Emrys’s concentration, a diamond-tipped drill boring through chaos. He felt the old, familiar frustration when a calculation didn’t snap into place, and the electric, almost sexual rush of joy when it did.
It was the most intimate act of his life.
AFTER A FEW HOURS, ADRIAN GOT UP TO FIND SOME FOOD.
The breaking of focus was a physical shock. The world rushed back in—the muted penthouse, his own heavy limbs, a dehydration headache pounding behind his temples that was definitively his own. The phantom sensations receded to a dull background hum, like a song playing in another room.
He stumbled to the kitchen, muscles protesting. He felt hollowed out, scoured clean. He opened the refrigerator, its light painfully bright. “What do you… I mean, do you need anything?” he asked aloud, his voice rough.
The question hung in the air. It was absurd. It was necessary.
A complex pulse travelled through the gem—amusement, sadness, longing. ‘The synaptic quiet was sufficient. And the sunlight.’ The thought was soft. ‘Eat something with actual carbohydrates. Not another engineered bar. You’re running on fumes I can taste.’
Adrian found a sealed container of pre-made pasta, something his chef left for emergencies. He forked it cold from the container, leaning against the counter. The flavors were too rich, too real. He ate methodically, feeling calories click into place like bricks in a failing wall.
His eyes drifted to the main door, to the security panel just beyond it. The stolen access code sat in his mind, a shiny new tool. “The maintenance backdoor. We could try it. Just to listen.”
‘Not yet.’ Emrys’s caution was a cool blanket. ‘Your biometrics are undoubtedly flagged. Any digital touch from this apartment, even via a backdoor, would trigger a secondary alert. Seraphina is waiting for that.’
“So we just keep practicing verbs until we can… what? Vaporize the door?”
‘We practice until the connection is seamless. Until you can hold a ‘Witness’ query for more than ten seconds without a migraine. Then, we don’t touch the door.’ Emrys’s idea unfolded in Adrian’s mind, not as words, but as a series of swift, logical connections. ‘We use the backdoor from outside the door’s sensor range.’
Adrian stopped chewing. He stared at the blank wall, seeing the building’s schematic in his mind, the data river flowing past. “You need a mobile receiver. A device already on the network.”
‘Precisely. A maintenance drone. A cleaning bot. Something with optical or auditory sensors that regularly passes this floor.’ The plan was crystalline, daring. ‘We intercept its signal. Piggyback on its permissions. Use its eyes before anyone thinks to look through them.’
It was a stroke of sideways genius. It felt like old times, but sharper, darker. Adrian felt a slow smile spread across his face. He put the empty container down. “We’d need to know its schedule. Its make and model. Its fail-safes.”
‘Which is all data likely contained in the same maintenance sub-routine we now have a key for.’ Emrys’s satisfaction was a warm current. ‘We don’t hack the door. We hijack a janitor.’
Adrian pushed off the counter, fatigue burning away under a new, focused energy. He walked back to the cleared space, his body still aching but his mind clear. “So we need to get better. A lot better. We need to be able to ‘Witness’ a specific, moving digital signal in a crowded data stream and then ‘Hold’ it without breaking.” He cracked his neck. “Let’s go again.”
He didn’t reach for the salt. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, and closed his eyes. This time, the intent wasn’t physical. It was a search parameter. He imagined the building’s internal network not as a river, but as a vast, dark sky full of shooting stars—each one a data packet. He needed to find one with a specific frequency, a specific signature. A cleaning bot’s heartbeat.
‘I’ll filter,’ Emrys whispered into the stillness, becoming not a voice but a lens, a refining fire for Adrian’s intent. ‘You search.’
Adrian cast his net into the electric dark.
’
Adrian cast his net into the electric dark. The digital sky was a chaos of light. He felt Emrys’s mind acting as a filter, a sieve catching only the dull, administrative pulses—climate controls, bulk water flow, elevator arbitration. It was like trying to hear a single cricket in a thunderstorm. His focus splintered. A spike of pain, sharp and clinical, needled behind his left eye.
“Too much,” he gritted out, breaking the connection. The phantom taste of battery acid flooded his mouth.
‘The signal density is immense,’ Emrys conceded, his own mental voice frayed. ‘We need a better search image. A specific identifier.’
“We don’t have one.” Adrian rubbed his temple, the borrowed headache merging with his own. “We’re guessing.”
‘Then we guess smarter. The cleaning units for this sector are a Glissade model. They run on a distinct low-power frequency for obstacle avoidance. Look for a repetitive, pulsed sonar profile. It will feel… tidy.’
Adrian snorted. “Tidy. Great.” He closed his eyes again, re-entering the static. This time, he held the concept of ‘tidy’ in his mind—a regular, metronomic beat, efficient and closed-loop. He pushed it through the gem like a query.
For minutes, there was nothing but noise. Then, a flicker. A small, precise ping-ping-ping of data, like a sonar fish in deep water. It was moving, tracing a slow, methodical path along what felt like the eastern service corridor. Two floors down.
‘There,’ Emrys thought, triumph crisp and clear. ‘Lock onto it. Just follow.’
Adrian tried. He held the thread of that tidy pulse. But following was active. It required constant, minute adjustments as the signal moved. His consciousness felt like it was being stretched, thin and transparent. The gem grew warm, then hot. The clean, abstract pulse in his mind began to warp, picking up interference—a burst of static that sounded like vacuum motors, the jarring halt of a bump against a wall, a re-routing command.
It was too much data. The thread snapped.
Adrian reeled back, a full-body shudder wracking him. He tasted copper. His vision swam with afterimages of schematic lines. “I lost it.”
‘You held it for eighteen seconds. That’s a start.’ Emrys’s encouragement felt forced. The shared fatigue was a weight in the base of Adrian’s skull.
They tried again. And again. Each attempt yielded a few more seconds of contact, a slightly clearer stream. Adrian learned the bot’s schedule. It serviced the residential floors between 2 and 4 AM. It had a glitch in its left-front wheel that caused a slight hiccup in its data stream every 4.7 meters. He started to feel its route, a ghost of spatial awareness overlaying his own prison.
But the cost was written in his trembling hands and the hollows under his eyes. The synchronization deepened with the effort. Once, when the bot’s sensors were blocked, Adrian’s own vision greyed at the edges for a terrifying second. Another time, a system alert from the bot about a full waste compartment made him gag with a sensation of overwhelming cloying sweetness.
He wasn’t just observing the machine. He was, in some fleeting, horrifying way, inhabiting its routines.
BY LATE AFTERNOON, BOTH ARE MENTALLY EXHAUSTED AND PHYSICALLY WEAK—WELL ADRIAN MORE SO WITH THE LATTER— AND ADRIAN DECIDED TO CALL IT A DAY, GOING TO LAY ON THE COUCH.
He didn’t so much lie down as collapse into the leather. It was cool against his cheek. He stared at the ceiling, watching the day’s light fade from hard white to a bruised grey. His body felt like a used-up battery. The gem’s pulse was a slow, tired throb against his breastbone.
The silence was different now. It wasn’t empty, or charged with potential. It was full of the day’s spent effort, the intimate residue of shared strain. He could still feel the echo of Emrys’s relentless focus in his own jaw, a phantom tension.
THEY ARE QUIET FOR A WHILE, THEN EMRYS BROACHES THE SUBJECT OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP.
‘That memory,’ Emrys began, his thought-voice quiet in the twilight. ‘The one in the lab. It wasn’t the only one.’
Adrian’s breath hitched. He didn’t open his eyes. “I know.”
‘I saw others. Fragments. The charity gala where you drank too much champagne and stared at your phone. You had a photo of us from the university science fair as your lock screen.’ A pause. The next thought was careful, precise. ‘You looked miserable in a room full of people who adored you.’
“They adored the idea of me.” Adrian’s voice was a rough scrape. “It’s easier that way.”
‘And the night you finalized the merger with Kronos Industries. You came back to the lab. I was asleep on the cot. You just stood there for ten minutes, watching. Then you left.’ Emrys’s tone wasn’t accusatory. It was analytical, dissecting a perplexing result. ‘Your emotional state in that memory was… complex. Triumph. Shame. A profound loneliness. It made no strategic sense.’
A laugh, bitter and soft, escaped Adrian. “You always wanted everything to make sense. People don’t. I didn’t.”
‘I am beginning to understand that.’ The admission hung in the dark. ‘The data suggests your actions, while profoundly damaging, were not motivated by greed. Or even ambition.’
“Then what?” Adrian whispered, finally turning his head, as if he could look the voice in the eye. “What’s your diagnosis, Doctor Wren?”
The answer, when it came, was not in a clinical list. It was a single, weighted concept, infused with the day’s worth of shared sensation, of feeling each other’s limits and exhaustion.
‘Fear,’ Emrys thought. The word was simple. Final. ‘You were afraid of me leaving. So you built a cage made of everything you thought I wanted. Funding. Recognition. A legacy. You made my work the center of your world so I could never walk out of it.’ A beat of static. ‘And you were afraid of me staying. Of what I might say if you ever stopped performing and just… was. So you never stopped.’
Adrian felt the truth of it land, a clean, surgical cut through a decade of self-deception. He had no defense. The tears that came were silent, hot tracks into the couch leather. They were for the lab, for the lost sunlight, for the stupid, terrified boy in the nice shoes.
“I loved you,” he said to the ceiling, the words raw and unadorned. “It was the most real thing about me. And I had no idea what to do with it except turn it into a company.”
The silence that followed was vast. He felt Emrys absorbing the statement, not as a sentiment, but as a fundamental piece of data, a missing keystone.
‘I know,’ Emrys replied at last. The thought was quiet, awed, and terribly sad. ‘I think I always knew. It was in the tension of your shoulders when I entered a room. In the way you’d bring me terrible coffee just to have a reason to stand near the bench.’ A flicker of the old, dry humor. ‘Statistically significant, but I dismissed it as confounding emotional noise.’
“I’m sorry,” Adrian said. It was inadequate. It was everything.
‘I am also sorry,’ Emrys responded, and the shock of it made Adrian’s breath catch. ‘I made my work a cage, too. I saw your fear and I called it respect. I saw your love and I called it a distraction. I used your guilt as a fuel source.’ The ghost of a sensation, then—a warmth on Adrian’s cheek, not sunlight, but something softer, like the memory of a touch. ‘We were a closed system. Primed for catastrophe.’
Adrian wiped his face with a shaky hand. The exhaustion was still there, but beneath it, something else was shifting. A sediment of old poison was being stirred up, beginning to clear. “What are we now?”
‘An open system,’ Emrys answered immediately, the scientist returning, but changed. ‘Forced open. All variables are live. The past is a dataset, not a script.’ The gem pulsed, a gentle, deliberate rhythm. ‘The question is no longer what we were. It is what we do next, with this.’
With this. The gem. The connection. The brutal, exposing intimacy of their shared mind.
“The cleaning bot passes at 2:17 AM,” Adrian said, his voice finding a new solidity. He pushed himself up on one elbow. The emotional vertigo was receding, replaced by a cold, clear focus. “We have a window. We need to be ready.”
‘We will be,’ Emrys thought. The resolve was a twin flame to Adrian’s own, burning in the dark of their shared space. ‘But first, you need to sleep. Real sleep. I will… I will keep watch.’
It was an offering. A kindness. Adrian nodded, lying back down. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in days, the silence felt like peace, not prison. The last thing he felt was not a borrowed ache, but a sustained, gentle pressure on his forehead—Emrys’s intent, translated, holding the chaotic world at bay just for a few hours.