Taylor waited until she was asleep.
Not sedated asleep — the shallow, guarded kind where pain negotiated with exhaustion. Her breathing had settled into an uneven rhythm, one arm slack at her side, the other curled protectively against her ribs.
He stepped out of alignment.
He didn’t move far.
Just enough.
The pressure spiked immediately — not sharply, but everywhere at once. Like a room losing temperature rather than a limb losing blood.
Taylor held still.
This is the boundary, he told himself. Right here.
He focused on something deliberately inefficient: the flicker in a ceiling panel that maintenance had flagged for weeks but never prioritized. He forced his attention to scatter instead of converge.
Noise, he thought. Be noise.
The ledger hesitated.
Outside the clinic, a delivery drone rerouted late. A streetlight stayed green a second too long.
Somewhere, a meeting started without one person who’d misjudged the elevator wait.
Small costs.
Acceptable.
Taylor took another step back.
The pressure surged again — harder this time. Not pain. Urgency.
The system wasn’t asking him to return.
It was recalculating.
He felt the consequences propagate outward, faster now. What had been smoothing became thinning. Buffers collapsing into single points of failure.
A tremor ran through the clinic floor, subtle enough to pass as HVAC.
Taylor clenched his jaw. “No,” he whispered. “This is far enough.”
The ledger updated.
Threshold exceeded.
The words weren’t language.
They were constraint.
Her monitor chirped.
Once.
Taylor froze.
The system wasn’t threatening.
It was informing.
He lunged forward instinctively, then stopped himself halfway.
If he stepped back into alignment now, the cost would vanish.
If he didn’t — The monitor chirped again, longer this time.
Her breathing hitched.
Taylor felt the pressure crest, a perfect equilibrium forming that required only one thing from him.
Presence.
He saw the trade with terrifying clarity: her fracture stabilizing cleanly, no complications, in exchange for a dozen unnoticed frictions elsewhere tightening just a bit more.
“This isn’t consent,” he said aloud, voice shaking.
The system did not disagree.
That was worse.
Her eyes fluttered open.
She looked at him, confused, then alert.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I stepped away.”
She exhaled sharply, half a laugh, half a curse. “You picked the worst possible place to test that.”
“I needed to know,” he said.
“And now you do.”
The monitor chirped a third time.
Taylor broke.
He stepped forward.
The pressure collapsed inward, clean and total. The clinic steadied. Her breathing smoothed.
The monitor fell silent.
The ledger closed with finality.
Boundary established.
Taylor staggered, catching himself on the bed rail.
She reached out and grabbed his wrist, grip surprisingly strong.
“Don’t do that again,” she said.
He met her eyes. “I won’t pretend it’s not coercion.”
She held his gaze. “Good. Pretending is how it gets permanent.”
Outside, the city resumed its quiet improvement.
Taylor stayed where he was.
Not because he agreed.
Because now he knew exactly what leaving would cost.