"So for starters, can you tell me the name of your species, dear brother?"

Aaron stood very still for a moment.

This was the kind of question that required a brief internal meeting — the sort where various parts of your brain gather around a table, look at each other, and collectively decide on a strategy for the next thirty seconds of your life.

His strategy turned out to be: look around casually, as if the question had been directed at someone else, or possibly at the large metallic walls themselves.

The walls did not answer. He was forced to.

"What is that supposed to mean, Ariana?" He turned to look at her.

"You know exactly what it means, brother." She smiled, drifting slightly closer with the unhurried confidence of someone who is very aware they hold all the cards and is in absolutely no rush to play them. "And why are you saying my name instead of calling me sister like normal, brother? Do you hate me so much?"

Aaron looked at her.

He took in the bright smile. The perfectly put-together appearance. The general aura of someone who had never lost an argument in their life and didn’t intend to start today.

He pretended to think about it. Really gave it the full performance — the slight tilt of the head, the thoughtful pause, the slow build toward an answer.

Then he flashed her the most genuinely cheerful smile he had produced all day.

"Yes," he said warmly. "Yes, I do."

The smile on Ariana’s face did something complicated.

It didn’t disappear entirely, because Ariana was far too controlled for that. But it twitched — caught somewhere in the narrow territory between a forced smile and a frown that was being physically restrained from existing.

She couldn’t find a response. This was, Aaron suspected, a rare occurrence.

Then she flicked her hand, made a small sound of dismissal that conveyed approximately seventeen different flavors of whatever, and turned on her heel to walk deeper into the metallic hallway.

Aaron followed.

The place was enormous and almost entirely empty of other people, which was the kind of detail that pleased and unsettled him in roughly equal measure. On one hand, fewer witnesses. On the other hand, fewer witnesses.

They walked for five minutes through corridors that all looked identical in the specific way that places designed by people who prioritize function over personality tend to look identical. Metal walls. Metal floor. The persistent background sound of machines doing whatever it was machines did in a cutting-edge scientific facility, which Aaron imagined was mostly whirring importantly and justifying their budget.

Then they stopped in front of a door.

It was a futuristic latch — the kind that looked like it belonged in a film where someone says "we need to get into the mainframe" — with a fingerprint scanner mounted beside it. Ariana pressed her palm to the scanner without ceremony. The door opened. But before she went through, she turned to the scanner and began tapping at a set of small bluish buttons with the focus of someone adjusting settings they had adjusted a hundred times before.

"Press your palm on the scanner," she said, not looking up. "It will record your prints for future use."

Aaron looked at the scanner.

"Why?"

Ariana finally looked at him, with the expression of a person who has just been asked why food goes in the mouth.

"This is your quarters where you can go to sleep. A bed. Or if you want, you can lodge around outside on this cold metallic floor."

Aaron considered the cold metallic floor, which had given him absolutely no reason to trust it, and considered the fingerprint scanner, which had also given him no particular reason to trust it but at least came with a bed attached.

He was apprehensive. He was several different flavors of suspicious. But he also recognized when the practical choice and the cautious choice were pointing in opposite directions and the practical one was simply going to win on the basis of being attached to a mattress.

He stepped forward and pressed his palm to the scanner.

The fingerprints recorded. Clean. Smooth. Professional.

He was just about to pull his hand back when he felt it — a small, sharp prickling sensation right in the center of his palm. Brief. Precise. Completely unexpected.

Aaron’s hand was back at his side before he had consciously decided to move it, the way you pull away from a hot stove before your brain has finished processing the word hot. He looked at his palm.

A small needle mark. Already healing, because that was apparently something his body did now, but the tiny smear of blood was still visible on his skin, a dark little reminder that yes, something had absolutely just happened, and no, nobody had asked him about it beforehand.

He looked at Ariana.

Ariana had the face of someone watching paint dry. Peaceful. Undisturbed. Vaguely interested in something happening slightly to the left of the actual situation.

She had no intentions of explaining anything.

Aaron took a breath. Then another one. A third for good measure.

Be civil. Be civil. Be civil.

He smiled. It was the smile of a man who had made a decision about his emotional state and was enforcing it through sheer willpower alone. He raised his hand and showed her his palm — the healed puncture, the smear of blood, the entire small exhibit of this happened and you know it happened.

"This," he said. Calmly. Impressively calmly, all things considered.

"Ah!" Ariana nodded with the energy of someone who had just remembered a completely unremarkable detail. "That’s normal. Maybe you haven’t used a fingerprint scanner before, but blood is extracted when a new entry is saved — just in case of an emergency, so that DNA can be matched if the fingerprint isn’t working."

She paused, then tilted her head.

"Geez, I know you must be on edge, but don’t freak out over little things. Or is it because that needle hurt you?" Her voice went somewhere warm and slightly unbearable. "Is my cute little brother hurt? Need big sis to apply some medicine?"

The maddening part — the part that really got under Aaron’s skin and set up a small irritating residence there — was that he genuinely could not tell if she was mocking him.

The tone was sweet. The concern sounded almost real. The words were the words of a caring older sibling checking on a younger one, and if he’d heard them from literally anyone else in any other context, he might have believed them.

From Ariana, in this hallway, thirty seconds after she had extracted his blood without permission, they occupied a horrible middle ground where they were simultaneously possibly genuine and almost certainly not.

He had no way to challenge it. He had no confirmation that fingerprint scanners in this world didn’t do that. He had no authority here, in this facility, in these corridors dense with mana so thick he could feel it pressing against his senses like a change in altitude — denser than anywhere he’d been, night-and-day different from the outside world, the kind of density that suggested this place was operating on a level that made the rest of the world look like it was running on backup power.

He let the matter go. Through gritted teeth and a significant act of will, he let it go.

"Anyways!" Ariana said brightly, as if the previous thirty seconds had been a brief intermission, and walked through the door. She gestured for him to follow. "This is your new room — there’s a bed, bathroom, closet, table, TV, and a refrigerator already stocked with food and liquor."

She winked. "And if you need anything else, you can always ask your big sister."

Aaron rolled his eyes and walked in.

He had been prepared to be dissatisfied on principle. He had prepared a list of internal complaints to inventory upon arrival. He looked around the room and found, to his mild annoyance, that the list wasn’t going to be very long.

The metallic walls were present, obviously — this was a metallic everything kind of facility — but the room itself was genuinely well put-together. The bed was neatly made, a plush mattress that looked like it had been selected by someone who understood that sleep quality affects productivity. A large closet. A large TV. The refrigerator was stocked as promised — rows of ready-to-eat food and beer.

Though calling beer "liquor" was, in Aaron’s honest assessment, an impressive stretch of the definition. But he would address that grievance another time.

The bathroom was not the futuristic marvel he had briefly let himself imagine — no floor-to-ceiling glass or climate-adjusted surfaces — but it was clean and functional. Western toilet. A shower with a sliding glass door. Enough space to get dressed without performing contortions.

He was searching, genuinely searching, for a flaw, and coming up somewhat empty.

And then he found it.

"Why the hell is there a camera in my room?"

He stared at it. Then stared at Ariana with the expression of a man who has just confirmed a suspicion he wished he hadn’t had.

The sunglasses remained on his face, which continued to be deeply unhelpful for conveying the specific shade of dangerous he was going for. But the tone carried it.

Inside Ariana’s head, a very brief and extremely colorful internal monologue occurred, mostly directed at unnamed subordinates who had been specifically instructed to use hidden cameras and had apparently interpreted "hidden" as "slightly above eye level and slightly to the left, but otherwise visible."

Outside, she maintained a perfectly calm expression.

"That’s not just in your room, brother," she said pleasantly. "It is standard protocol to add cameras to the guest rooms since we cannot afford any sort of leaks about the place. And also because the TV is connected to the database." She paused. "Once there was a guest that hacked into the TV and stole quite a few trade secrets. Of course, he is dealt with now, but we cannot afford any sort of mistakes like those."

Aaron looked at her.

"Why not just remove the database from the TV then?"

Ariana raised both hands in a gesture of surrender that was perfectly calibrated to communicate reasonable point, above my pay grade, moving on.

"I will forward that question to my superiors." She smiled. "As of now, please don’t be alarmed about the camera. And also, you wouldn’t get any sort of signal or network inside here, so enjoy the TV, brother."

She turned to leave.

"I will call for you on the telephone."

The door closed behind her.