Two weeks had passed since the first night at the lake.

Iris had been counting. Not compulsively — she had been compulsive about counting in the early months, had tracked every day of her displacement with the focused intensity of someone who believed that if she kept precise enough records the situation would eventually become comprehensible. It hadn't. She had stopped counting days around month four, when it had become clear that the number was information but not meaning. She had started again, now, because the number meant something different. The number now was: how long since someone had said her name.

Fourteen days.

He had come eleven of those fourteen nights. The three he hadn't come he had sent a text to her — she couldn't receive texts directly, obviously, but he had developed a system: he sent to a number she had blinked to him, a number that belonged to a phone in her apartment that she had sometimes been able to affect slightly, in the early months, by concentrating. She couldn't read the texts. But she knew they were there, and knowing they were there was its own kind of tether.

The pad had acquired forty-one pages.

She had been counting those too. Not compulsively.

Tonight was a clear night, cold in the way October became cold when it was committing to the season rather than visiting it. The lake was still. She was sitting on the bank rather than the water — she had been sitting on the bank since the third night, when he had arrived and there had been something in the way he settled into his spot on the grass that made the distance across the water feel unnecessary. She was not sure she could explain this reasoning if pressed. She had stopped pressing herself on things she couldn't explain and Aiden hadn't asked.

He arrived at his usual time — just past eleven, late enough that the campus had quieted to its nighttime configuration, early enough that they had several hours before his day began. She had started to think of this time as theirs, which she knew was a thing she was not supposed to do, which was another thing she had stopped pressing herself on.

He sat down. Opened the pad to a fresh page.

"You wanted to explain something," he said. "Last night you started and then — " he checked the notes from the previous night — "you wrote: too slow. Too slow to do it in blink code."

She had. She had been trying to tell him about the thread — not just its existence, which she had described in the first week, but its mechanics. How it worked. What she understood about the conditions that sustained it and the conditions that frayed it. It was a complicated thing and blink code was a limited instrument and she had felt the shape of what she needed to say slipping away from her in the time it took to blink each letter.

She blinked: YES. TONIGHT I WANT TO TRY.

He wrote it down, nodded. "Take as long as you need."

She blinked: I NEED YOU TO WRITE WHAT I SAY WITHOUT STOPPING ME.

"Understood."

AND WHEN IM DONE I NEED YOU TO READ IT BACK.

"All right."

She started.

It took forty minutes. The cold deepened around them while she blinked and he called letters and wrote, his handwriting becoming smaller and more compressed as the pages filled. She told him everything she understood: the thread between projection and body, the way it was maintained by memory, the specific quality of memory that maintained it — not general awareness, not someone thinking *oh yes, Iris Thorne, the girl in room 312* but the particular act of remembering her, her specifically, the details of her that existed independently of her medical situation. She told him about the fading — the way it had been progressive, the way her reflection had been the first thing she noticed and the dimming of her edges the second. She told him that she thought the Soul Eater, which she had not known to call a Soul Eater but which she described as a hunger she sometimes felt at the thread, was connected to why she had not been able to return on her own.

She told him, because he had asked once and she had not answered completely, what the worst nights had been like. The nights when she had been so close to simply — releasing the thread. Not fighting it. Not actively choosing to fade, but stopping the active choice not to. There was a difference. She had never been able to explain that difference to anyone because there had been no one to explain it to, and she had held it alone for a year, the knowledge of how close she had come on certain nights to the specific action of opening her hands and letting go.

When she finished, he read it back.

All of it. Every sentence, in the order she had given it to him, slowly enough that she could follow. He read the parts about the thread in the same voice as the parts about the worst nights — the same even, attentive quality, treating the information with consistent seriousness regardless of its emotional weight. She had been a little afraid, she realized, of what his face would do when he read the worst-nights part. She had been afraid of the adjustment she associated with the disclosure of difficult things — the slight withdrawal, the recalibration of how a person looked at you once they knew you had stood at that particular edge.

He read it and looked at her and his face did not adjust.

"The thing at the thread," he said. "I've heard something like it. When I was near you the first night — there was a frequency underneath yours. Parasitic."

She blinked: YES.

"It's been there since October 14."

Blinked: I THINK SO. I CANT TELL WHERE IT STARTS.

He wrote this down. Looked at the page. "I might be able to find where it starts," he said. "I'd have to get closer to it. Closer than I can get from out here."

She looked at him.

"Your body," he said. "The hospital. I'd have to go there."

She blinked: ITS THE THIRD FLOOR.

"Room 312. I know." He had written it on the first night. Of course he still knew. "I can go Thursday. My afternoon is clear."

She looked at him for a long moment. The lake was still around them and the cold was deep and settled and the campus slept in its patient October darkness.

She blinked, slowly: WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS.

He read it. Set the pad down.

She watched him think about it — the particular interior quality that came over his face when he was giving a question its full weight. She had come to look for that quality. It meant the answer would be true.

"Because you're here," he said. "And because I want to."

She looked at him.

"I know that's not a very detailed answer," he said. "I don't have a more detailed one. The thing I heard underneath your frequency — it shouldn't be there. And you've been dealing with it alone for a year, and —" He stopped. Started again. "I don't have a better answer than: I want to."

In her experience, which was limited and had become more limited over the past year, people who helped other people had reasons for it. They had frameworks — duty, obligation, affection, self-interest, any of the structures that made helping make sense. He did not seem to have a framework. He had a want, stated plainly, without apology or justification.

She had not, before now, encountered a want directed at her that felt like this — clean of agenda, not contaminated by what she could offer in return. She had nothing to offer in return. She was a girl who sat on a lake bank and communicated in blink code and could not touch the physical world. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it for the reason he stated: he wanted to.

She blinked, letter by letter: DONT FORGET ME.

He read it. Looked up.

"I know that's what you need from me," he said.

Blinked: NOT JUST BECAUSE I NEED IT.

A pause. He looked at the words he had written. Back at her. "Tell me what you mean," he said.

She blinked, slowly, taking her time with each letter: I NEED YOU TO REMEMBER ME BECAUSE OF THE THREAD. BUT I ALSO JUST. WANT YOU TO. EVEN IF IT DIDNT MATTER FOR THE THREAD.

He read it twice.

Then he said: "I know the difference."

She blinked: DO YOU.

"Between needing something from someone and wanting them to have something," he said. "Yes. I know the difference."

She looked at him with the feeling she still did not have an adequate word for, which had been growing for fourteen days and which she suspected was going to require a better vocabulary than she currently had.

"I won't forget you," he said. "Every day. Not as a task. As a — " He stopped. Chose. "As something I want to do."

She reached toward him — not reaching to touch, she had learned not to expect that, but reaching the way you reached when you wanted to indicate the direction of something. A gesture that pointed toward: *you.* Toward: *this.*

He watched her hand reach. He did not move back.

Her fingers met the sleeve of his jacket and she felt it — the faintest resistance, the lightest pressure, the barest suggestion of contact. Not touch. The memory of touch, or the beginning of it.

He went very still.

She held the position for three seconds and then let her hand fall.

"I felt that," he said. Quietly. Like something he was checking rather than announcing.

She blinked once.

They sat in the cold with the lake behind them and the campus sleeping around them and the forty-one pages of their conversation between them, and she thought about what he had said: *I know the difference.* Between needing and wanting. Between a thread maintained by obligation and a thread maintained by choice.

She thought about her reflection in the water, which was still dim, still fading at the edges.

She thought about his face when he had read the worst-nights part of what she'd said and had not adjusted.

She thought about: *because I want to.*

And she thought — carefully, holding it the way you held something that could break — that the thread between herself and the world might have, tonight, gotten the smallest amount stronger.

Not because of anything metaphysical. Not because of mechanics she understood.

Because someone had said: *I want to. Even if it didn't matter for the thread.*

And she had believed him.