The Apparatus thought about it for four and a half seconds, which Chloe spent not breathing, and then it resolved its number and displayed it, glowing, in the center of the screen.

100%.

Chloe stared at it.

It had to be a malfunction. That was her first thought, immediate and reflexive, the scientist's healthy distrust of a result too clean to believe. A hundred percent was not a real number. Real measurements were messy; they came with error bars and noise and decimal places that trailed off into uncertainty. A perfect score wasn't a finding, it was a red flag, a sign the instrument had failed, saturated, defaulted to its maximum because something in the calibration had gone wrong. She knew this. She'd built the thing. A hundred percent meant the machine was broken, not that the answer was perfect.

So she did what she always did. She tested it.

Leo had gone back to his gardening, cheerfully oblivious that he'd just scored a hundred percent on anything, and Chloe took the Apparatus back to her annex and spent the evening trying, with mounting desperation, to prove it wrong. She ran diagnostics. She checked the calibration against known baselines. She recorded her own readings against neutral stimuli, against the gauge symmetry problem, against a photograph of a stranger, and got the messy realistic mid-range numbers she expected, the noise and the error bars, the instrument behaving exactly as a working instrument should. She fed it edge cases. She tried to break it. She wanted, with an intensity that should have told her something, for it to be broken, because a broken machine was so much safer than the alternative.

The machine was not broken.

It worked perfectly on everything except the one reading, and the one reading was a hundred percent, and by midnight Chloe had exhausted every avenue of doubt and was forced to sit with the thing she'd been running from all evening: the number was real. The instrument was sound. By every measure she had spent three weeks designing specifically to be rigorous, she and Leo Evans were, physiologically, in the rhythms of their two nervous systems, as compatible as it was possible for the device to register.

She sat in the dark annex with the glowing number and felt the floor she'd been standing on her whole life - the floor made of data, of measurement, of the reliable solid certainty that the universe had rules and the rules could be known - hold firm beneath her for once, and tell her something true and enormous and terrifying.

It's real. What you feel. It's not a malfunction in you. It's not an error. The most honest instrument you've ever built looked at the two of you and found you suited, completely, and the loneliness you saw in him today was real and it matches yours and the thing you've been too frightened to believe might actually, possibly, be -

Chloe pressed her hands over her face.

Because here was the cruel joke of it, the thing the hundred percent threw into unbearable relief: if they were that compatible, if the suitedness was that total, if the machine and her own heart and his own lonely honest answer all pointed the same direction - then the only thing standing between her and the boy she wanted was not compatibility at all.

It was her.

The realization arrived with the clean devastating clarity of a proof reaching its conclusion. The obstacle had never been whether Leo could like her. The machine had just ruled that out; the potential was there, measured, confirmed, a hundred percent. The obstacle was that she could not bring herself to find out. That she sat behind instruments and jargon and clinical distance and let him hold her hands only when a device gave her permission, that she'd had the truth on her tongue that very afternoon - me too, I see you, I've seen you since the library - and swallowed it, fled into protocol, hidden. The barrier was not in him and never had been. It was the thing she'd carried since she was small: the bone-deep certainty that she was lovable only for her mind, that the human part of her - the cute flustered clumsy part, the part that wanted things and felt things and dropped papers and stuttered - was a liability everyone tolerated for the sake of the brain, and that if she ever stepped out from behind the brain and stood there as just Chloe, the actual girl, she would be found wanting.

That was the wall. Leo had built no wall. She had built the whole wall herself, brick by brick, over sixteen years, and the hundred percent had just shown her, mercilessly, that it was the only thing between her and everything she wanted.

And then she remembered the thing he'd said.

Not the loneliness - the other thing, the thing from weeks ago, the thing that had crashed her in the library and that she had replayed a thousand times since in the dark: you're really cute, you know that. He'd said it looking at her on the floor, papers everywhere, glasses askew, the human disaster of her - not the genius, not the mind, but exactly the part she was most ashamed of, the part she was certain no one wanted - and he'd found it cute. Found it endearing. Looked straight at the liability and called it lovely.

He'd already done it. The thing she was terrified to risk - being seen as the human part and wanted anyway - he had already, weeks ago, done. He had seen the part she hid and liked it. The evidence wasn't even hypothetical. It was sitting in her memory, glowing brighter than any number on any screen: of all the people in the world, if there was one who might want the cute flustered human Chloe and not just the brilliant useful one, it was demonstrably, provenly him.

The machine said a hundred percent. And her own memory said he already likes the part you're afraid of. And for the first time in her careful guarded life, Chloe Vance let herself do the thing she had always forbidden, the thing more frightening than any experiment, the thing she had no instrument to measure and no formalism to make safe.

She let herself hope.

It was terrifying. It felt like stepping off the edge of all her certainties into open air. But it was also - she noticed, sitting in the dark with her heart doing the thing and her face wet and a smile she couldn't account for tugging at her mouth - it was also the first time in as long as she could remember that the future felt like something other than a problem to be managed. It felt, faintly, impossibly, like a possibility. Like a door that might open. Like she might, if she could only become brave enough, get to be a person who was loved, the whole of her, the mind and the disaster both.

She made a decision, there in the dark.

She was not going to give up. The opposite. The hundred percent hadn't told her she'd won - it had told her she had a chance, a real one, and that the only thing she had to do to take it was the hardest thing she'd ever done: come out from behind the machine. Stop measuring and start showing up. Be, in front of Leo, the actual Chloe - not as a research subject, not through a device, not buffered by data, but as herself, the human girl, the one he'd already called cute. She would do it in steps, because steps were how she did everything, small and careful and methodical. But she would do it.

And the first step, she understood, looking at the Apparatus glowing on the workbench - the beautiful, brilliant, elaborate machine she'd built to avoid ever having to be vulnerable - was to put it away.

Chloe reached out and powered it down.

The display went dark. The number vanished. And she picked the whole thing up, carried it across the annex, and set it on a high shelf in the back, not thrown away - she didn't throw away true things, and it had told her something true - but retired. Set aside. No longer needed as a shield, because she had decided, in the dark, that she was done hiding behind it. The next time she sat close to Leo Evans, the next time she held his hands, it was not going to be because a device required palm contact for its sensors.

It was going to be because she wanted to, and she was brave enough to let it be that simple.

She wasn't there yet. She knew that. The wall was sixteen years thick and she'd taken down maybe a single brick. But she'd taken down a brick, which was one more than she'd ever managed before, and she'd put the machine on the shelf, and she'd let herself hope, and outside the window the night was clear and full of the kind of distant unrecoverable scattered light she'd once tried to explain to a boy who'd actually listened.

The information doesn't disappear, he'd said, that first day, turning her own physics back to her gentle and a little sad. It just scatters where you can't reach it.

Maybe, Chloe thought, looking at the stars, letting herself hope so hard it hurt. But maybe some of it scatters close. Maybe some of it scatters near enough to reach, if you're brave enough to put down the instrument and reach with your own two hands.

She was going to try.

That was the decision. She was, at last, going to try - and the midterms be damned, except that they could not, in fact, be damned, because they were in four days and she had, in her single-minded pursuit of one impossible boy, completely failed to study, and somewhere across town that same realization was dawning, with rather more alarm, on the boy himself.