Chapter 8 First Sign of Servitude

Emma took a winding route back to her suite, tracing the tour in reverse to familiarize herself with the layout. The house had an Escher logic to it: rooms appeared and disappeared according to the whims of glass partitions and walls that retracted into shadows. In the east wing, her own door glowed a soft blue-waiting, expectant.

She let herself in and stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. The lighting had shifted in her absence: indirect and golden, it washed over the walls and threw elongated shadows from the low-slung furniture.

The effect was soothing, designed to ease a body's tension before it had a chance to remember it. The muted palette-warm grays, charcoals, cream-offered the illusion of simplicity, even as every fixture and surface made it clear nothing here was simple or accidental.

She had always made do with borrowed spaces and chipped furniture, secondhand artifacts that never quite fit together. Here, every object seemed built for this place and only this place. She set her battered suitcase next to the king-sized bed, and it looked not only small but apologetic.

At the far end of the suite, a wall of glass presented the garden in cinematic widescreen: raked gravel, moss islands, a solitary cherry tree that hadn't yet budded. In the foreground, a small, perfectly still pond reflected the evening sky so cleanly it doubled the effect, as if the room floated between two versions of itself.

Emma wandered to the desk, which had been left prepared: a single white orchid in a glass vase, a set of stationary, a slim leather-bound portfolio. Beside it, a dark rectangle-her "work tablet," she guessed, and wondered if it could track eye movement, pulse, or mood.

She powered the device on, bracing for a security login or some intrusive welcome screen. Instead, it blinked quietly to life and greeted her by name.

Her schedule loaded automatically: dinner at 7:30, with a notation that said "casual attire preferred"; tomorrow's agenda began with a block at 9:00 am, simply labeled "Alexander-Study Session."

Emma scrolled further and found a folder: "Subject Materials, Carter." She opened it. It was all there-Alex's full academic record, psychological assessments, discipline logs, every test or quiz he'd ever taken. It was more data than she'd seen collected on any student, anywhere.

She started with the basics. The test scores were a mess of contradictions. In mathematics and the sciences, Alex posted numbers in the 99th percentile-sometimes higher, if that was even possible.

In the humanities, his grades dropped off a cliff, reading comprehension, C-minus; history, D. There were flagged notes about "refusal to engage," and, more ominously, "apparent pleasure in exposing flaws in curriculum design."

The discipline file was its own novella. Each year catalogued incidents-some petty, some inventive, one or two bordering on legendary. "Modified school firewall to redirect standardized testing page to adult content."

"Substituted faculty meeting agenda with creative manifesto."

"Engineered fire drill through surreptitious use of vaping device and laser pointer." The list went on, each offense annotated with a mixture of frustration and awe.

Her own notes, which she'd sent after reviewing his file in yesterday's meeting, had already been appended to his record, as if the house was adding her to the annals of failure preemptively.

She set the tablet aside and began to unpack, moving slow and deliberate. Every item was a piece of her old life, now recast as evidence of her inadequacy: the university sweatshirt, the four-for-ten-dollar socks, the travel-sized bottle of cheap perfume she'd never worn but kept as a hopeful reminder that she could still transform herself if needed.

She hung her handful of clothes in the closet, which was the size of her entire bedroom back home. She propped the photo of her last class on the desk, next to the orchid, and found herself oddly comforted by the contrast.

The bathroom was another exercise in intimidation. The mirror adjusted brightness as she approached, making her look less like a tired thirty-one-year-old and more like a glossy version of herself, smoothed and hyper-real. She tried out the climate controls for the room, which responded instantly, the temperature nudging warmer or cooler at her voice command.

She sat on the edge of the bed, which yielded just enough to promise a perfect night's sleep but pushed back to remind her not to get too comfortable.

At 7:00, she forced herself into the most neutral outfit she owned-black pants, gray sweater, boots that didn't squeak-and double-checked her reflection in the adaptive mirror.

For a moment she was tempted to add lipstick, maybe even try the perfume, but it felt like playing dress-up in someone else's fantasy.

She was about to leave when she heard it, the shattering, unmistakable sound of glass against tile. Then voices-one sharp, male, followed by a rapid-fire staccato of another, higher and younger. The language was indecipherable, all angles and spike, but the tone was clear enough: challenge, riposte, escalation.

Emma hovered at her doorway, unwilling to intrude but unable to ignore it. The voices batted each other back and forth, muffled by the layers of design meant to keep things like this out of public view.

For a second, she was back in the faculty lounge, listening to a teacher on the verge, or an administrator trying to hold it together while being undermined by a student with nothing left to lose.

Then, just as suddenly as it started, the noise cut off. Silence snapped back into place, heavier than before.

Emma checked the time, seven eighteen, and realized she was three minutes late by Dawson standards. She took a breath, let herself out, and followed the faint traces of sandalwood and citrus back through the halls.

The dining area was empty except for a staff member arranging silverware and glasses. The long table, three times longer than necessary, was set for two at one end. The staff member, young, shaved head, and wary, nodded her toward the seat with a practiced smile that held no invitation for questions.

Marisol entered a minute later, dressed in the same unadorned gray as before, and gestured for Emma to sit. She did, perching on the edge of the chair, posture attentive.

The chef appeared from a side door, set down plates-roasted vegetables, something that looked like vegan lasagna, a salad composed of microgreens so small Emma worried she might miss them if she sneezed.

Marisol waited for the staff to retreat before speaking.

"You've accessed the records, yes?"

Emma nodded, mouth full of salad she chewed carefully, in case it required a special technique.

"Do you have questions?" Marisol asked.

Emma did, but she wanted to discuss them with his father and not another member of the staff. Not sure if that was even allowed, Emma settled for the one question she thought appropriate for Marisol.

"Has anyone tried just..." Emma stopped, realizing how naive she sounded. "Has anyone asked him what he wants?"

A ghost of a smile touched Marisol's mouth. "He knows what he's allowed to want. The rest is irrelevant."

Emma thought about that as they ate. The food was excellent, but she could only taste the effort behind it-every bite a display of resources marshaled to anticipate and pre-empt even the tiniest complaint.

After dinner, Marisol accompanied her back to her suite, stopping at the door. She handed over a slim keycard with a blue stripe.

"This is your permanent access," Marisol said. "Do not lend it out, do not misplace it. If you require changes to your schedule, submit a request through the staff portal."

Emma accepted it, feeling the weight of protocol settle into her pocket.

"One more thing," Marisol said, with a pointed look. "Mr. Dawson expects results, not excuses."

Emma nodded. She knew better than to promise anything.

When the door clicked closed behind her, the silence felt different than before: less like solitude, more like a dare.

She stood in the center of her room, holding the keycard, and stared out at the garden. The sky above was cloudless, but the pond reflected a storm-a gathering of dark, swirling shapes on the surface, hinting at turbulence beneath.

She retrieved her tablet and opened Alex's record again, reading through the lines with new focus. In the comments from previous tutors, a pattern emerged: warnings about his charm, his ability to detect and exploit weakness, the inevitability of losing control. The word "hopeless" appeared more than once, always in the last entry before a resignation.

She closed the file, set the tablet down, and went to brush her teeth. The mirror obligingly brightened and displayed the time-just after nine. She wondered if Alex would bother to show up in the morning, or if he'd find some way to break her first.

She returned to the bed, slipped under the covers, and let herself drift until she heard it again: the faint but unmistakable sound of voices, arguing somewhere in the house.

This time she didn't move to the door. She just listened, tracking the contours of the argument-words she couldn't understand, but emotions that needed no translation.

Eventually the voices faded, replaced by the background hum of the house's own vigilance.

Emma turned off the light, stared into the blue darkness, and waited for dawn.