Chapter 32: Failure Modes
Timeline: 14:00, Saturday
Location: Unit 3, Staff Rowhouses, GIG/Apex R&D Campus, Agonwood
The living room of Unit 3 looked less like a home and more like the inside of a conspiracy theorist's brain. It was only missing the red strings. After Dan and Ellie left for the outlets and Alex retreated into his perfect, coffee-scented sanctuary, I had spiraled. Not emotionally—that was a mess I was currently deferring—but intellectually.
Alex was sending us into the Greyson Textile Factory on Monday. He wanted to take the latest version of the chaos emitter—which was currently bolted to the frame of a luxury SUV and tethered by a fifty-foot cable—into a derelict industrial site to hunt for a hole in reality.
I had combed through my unpacked boxes still listed as "home office stuff" and found a stack of sticky notes. Now, the wall behind the bean bag was a neon color collage.
PINK: Electrical Spike Dangers
YELLOW: Voltage Drop vs. Distance.
BLUE: Structural Collapse.
ORANGE: Data Corruption.
And right in the center, a single, lonely
GREEN note: Null Result.
I grabbed a sharpie and wrote ARC FLASH on a new pink note, and paced the length of the rug.
Alex wanted to check if there was maybe an anomaly at the family factory. He says it's just an inspection of 'irregularities,' but he's pushing for this hard. Dave is too quiet. Marcus is just happy to drive the truck.
I stopped. The variable that didn't fit was Alex's confidence. He wasn't a gambler. He was a structural engineer. He didn't bet on maybe.
I stuck a PURPLE note on the wall: Alex's motive?
The whole thing was a logistical nightmare. We had to set up the portable mesh to narrow down the area for the emitter pulse. If Alex's suspicion was correct about there being another spatial anomaly in what was built to be a decommissioned fallout shelter, we had to figure out how to send the pulse from outside of the shelter to verify the anomaly's existence.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. I ignored it. I was in the zone.
"The tether is the weak point. If there is drag on the emitter that exceeds the tensile strength of the connector ..."
Buzz. Buzz.
I frowned at the phone. It was disrupting my flow.
"...the cable snaps. The safety interlock should kill the power, but if not and the arc sustains itself, we'd be standing next to a plasma torch.
Buzz. Buzz.
I groaned and picked up the phone.
[VANE]: Your heart rate is 110. You're pacing.
[VANE]: Stop vibrating and look at the logistics file Dave uploaded.
I stared at the screen. He was watching the biometrics again. Of course he was.
I swiped the notification away. "I am not vibrating," I told the empty room. "I am calculating contingencies." I put the phone face down and went back to the wall. I peeled off a fresh sheet of sticky notes.
"Okay. Worst case scenario. We find one. We're tethered. We can't run. We have a fifty-foot radius of movement. And we hit a water pipe."
Buzz. Buzz.
I didn't look.
"...we need thick, rubber-soled boots..."
Buzz. Buzz.
It was relentless. He was poking me. He was sitting in Unit 2, probably drinking perfectly brewed espresso, bored out of his mind because I wasn't there to entertain him, so he was deciding to annoy me remotely.
I picked up the phone.
[VANE]: I know you're reading these.
[VANE]: Ignoring me is childish.
[VANE]: Answer me.
I typed back two words:
[LON]: I'm busy.
"I'm being childish?" I huffed, throwing the phone onto the bean bag. It bounced satisfyingly. Then I turned back to the wall.
"Environmental hazards. The factory has been closed since '98? Dust. Mold. Chemicals. Gases like carbon monoxide…Standing water in the basement? Chemical seepage?"
I wrote ELECTROCUTION in big black letters on a pink note and slapped it on the wall. Then I added ASPHYXIATION followed by POISON GAS.
The front door chirped. The electronic lock whirred, the deadbolt slid back, and the door swung open. Julian stood there, wearing dark jeans and a gray sweater that fit him a little too well. He looked annoyed. No, he looked affronted.
He stepped inside, closing the door firmly behind him. "You're ignoring me," he stated.
"I'm working," I countered, gesturing to the wall. "And you're trespassing. Again."
Julian walked into the living room and looked at the wall. He scanned the chaotic collage of neon paper, his gray eyes darting from ARC FLASH to COLLAPSE to ELECTROCUTION.
"You're catastrophizing," he observed.
"I'm scenario planning," I corrected. "We're going to drag a lightning bolt on a leash into a ruin. I'm trying to make sure we don't electrocute the entire team."
"We won't," Julian said dismissively. "Marcus is armoring the cable. And I will be holding the…" He noticed the discarded phone and turned. "Why aren't you answering your phone?"
"Because I'm busy figuring out how many ways we can die on Monday."
"You're not busy," Julian said, stepping closer. "You're hiding. Making busy work."
He stopped just outside my personal bubble—close enough to be a threat, far enough to be a tease. "You're hiding because of last night," he said.
"I'm not hiding from anything," I lied. "I had breakfast with my friends. I had coffee with Alex. I am having a very productive Saturday."
"Coffee with Alex," Julian repeated. His eyes narrowed slightly. "Did he offer you a comforting shoulder? Did he tell you I was a storm you needed shelter from?"
I blinked. That was uncomfortably close to the truth. "He told me he wants to build a fireplace," I said. "To keep the house from burning down."
Julian laughed. It was a sharp, humorless sound. He took a step forward, collapsing the distance between us. "You can't put a forest fire in a hearth, Lonna. It consumes the oxygen. It cracks the brick."
"Is that what you are?" I asked, looking up at him. "A forest fire?"
"I'm the inevitable result of entropy," he murmured. He reached out, his hand hovering near my arm, but he didn't touch me. He pulled back at the last second, a deliberate denial.
It was frustrating.
"You want to talk about last night?," I challenged. "You… do what you did, then tell me to get out. And when I hesitated, you told me to run away. I still don't even know why." I was clearly annoyed. "And now you're demanding my attention as if you weren't the one who had just rejected it. Which one of us is 'childish?' You make no sense Julian. None at all."
"I make perfect sense," Julian said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. "You just don't like the variables."
He took another step, invading my personal space until I had to tilt my head back to look him in the eye.
"I told you to run because I know you're not ready. I exhaust resources and break systems so I can rebuild them. And I burn people out until I get the result I want."
Sounds like typical bad boy… Nope. I'm saying this out loud.
He reached out and placed his hands on my shoulders. It wasn't a comforting gesture like Marcus's, or a gentle one like Alex's. It was heavy. It was grounding. "What are you not getting, Lonna? Marcus knows it. That's why he steps in whenever I push too hard. Alex knows it. That's why he tries to manage everything—to keep the environment safe and manageable."
His thumbs pressed into my collarbone, just hard enough to register. "But you… you don't look for safety." He leaned down, his gray eyes searching mine with an intensity that made my breath catch. "You just keep looking for the source of the chaos. You have no sense of self-preservation."
I closed my eyes to reset myself. "Now you're just playing the cliched 'bad boy' archetype. You intentionally make me think you want me but when I give in, you abruptly stop and kick me out. It's like you expect me to store infinite potential energy without ever converting to kinetic energy. And then you wonder why I want to explode." I sighed. "Go play with someone else."
Julian's eyes flared. His grip on my shoulders tightened for a fraction of a second before he loosened it again. "If that's what you believe, then you're a fool," he rasped.
"You can say that, but insulting me isn't really an answer, is it?" I continued dismissively. "I gave you your entertainment. I gave you attention when I wanted to be working. What else do I need to do to make Julian Vane pivot from theory to practical?"
"Nothing while you're still thinking about how two people normally relate to one another." Julian seized my chin and tilted my head back again. "Look me in the eyes, Lonna. I told you, I don't do 'normal.'"
He was exhausting.
"Fine. I understand. You don't do 'normal,'" I responded, exasperated. "Just stop trying to stare daggers into someone who does do 'normal.'"
"You clearly don't understand." Julian barely stepped back and pulled his sweater over his head, removing it and revealing the crisp button down, pin-striped black shirt underneath. He put the sweater over my hands, twisting the fabric a few times, then tied the sleeves into a big, binding knot in front of me.
He lifted my hands above my head and stepped us both back until I was against the wall, my hands were pinned with the crinkle of sticky-notes behind me. He had that predatory look I saw in his kitchen and at the club the night before.
"Your first correction: normal or not, no one touches what's mine without my permission. Say 'Yes, Sir,' to indicate you have heard me. Go it?"
I nodded.
"Don't nod."
I swallowed hard. "Yes, Sir."
"Your second correction: I don't demand your attention. It is already mine. So when I text you, you respond. Got it?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Good girl," he praised with that tone that made me feel like his praise was the most important thing I had achieved all day. And that thought made my skin shift to a deep red.
"Now, your third correction," Julian said, his voice low and provocative. "If you can't even tell me whether you want me to kiss you or not, then you're not ready for the things I want to do to you. And I will need your consent. Do you understand it a little better now?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Think about who you are and what you really want from me, Lonna. I can train you to shut everything out but me."
He was so close. So strong. I could only tremble beneath him—not because I was afraid. It was because I was excited. "Train me like a pet?"
Julian breathed in deeply as if he were savoring my scent. "I don't know any pets with a mind like yours." He rubbed his thumb across my cheek. "Your imagination, your creativity… they can make things so much more enjoyable for the both of us. Understand?"
"Yes, Sir," I said, which came out in a whimper.
He grinned and moved his thumb down and across my lips. "I'll keep pushing you to the edge until you tell me to stop or you tell me you'll submit. If it's the latter, I intend to explore what other cute little sounds you can make."
He untied his sweater and softly coaxed my arms back down to my sides. He picked up a pen and the pink sticky note pad from the floor. He wrote something on it and stuck it in the center of the danger zone, between ARC FLASH and ELECTROCUTION.
It said: JULIAN VANE.
"Variable identified," he whispered.
My phone buzzed again with a new text.
[Dan] Go hiking with us tomorrow.
[Ellie] You know you want to.
[Dan] Save work for Monday.
[Ellie] We'll keep texting until you say yes.
I looked up to see Julian already out of the door.