Chapter 6: Off the Record

Harlan did not send an email.

He walked to Ethan’s cubicle himself, stopped at the edge of the low wall, and said, in a voice that had lost most of its usual edge, "My office, now."

Kai stood up in Ethan’s body, smoothed the boring shirt, and followed.

The door clicked shut behind them. Harlan did not sit. He stood at the window with his back to the room, looking down at the late-afternoon traffic like it had personally disappointed him.

"I read your document," he said.

Kai waited.

Harlan turned. The tiredness Ethan had only glimpsed before was fully visible now. "It’s reckless, it’s inappropriate. If anyone in Legal saw it they would set it on fire and then set me on fire for letting it exist on a company drive."

"But you didn’t delete it," Kai said.

Harlan’s mouth twitched. "No, I didn’t."

Harlan rubbed a hand over his face. "Do you know how many people we’ve lost in the last eighteen months? Good people. Not the ones who were already halfway out the door. The ones who stayed late, who caught the mistakes, who made the clients feel safe. They left for ’personal reasons.’ That’s code for they couldn’t take it anymore and we pretended not to notice."

Kai stayed quiet. The soft body he wore made silence feel useful instead of awkward.

Harlan kept going, like the words had been waiting for an excuse. "My wife says I grind my teeth so hard at night she’s surprised I have any left. My kid asked me last month if I still lived with them or if I was just visiting. I laughed. It wasn’t funny." He looked at Kai. "And then the quiet intern almost dies on a scooter and shows up the next day with a document about ’biological and psychological costs of sustained professional repression’ like he’s been taking notes on all of us."

Kai tilted Ethan’s head. "I almost died. It clarifies things."

"Does it?"

"Enough." Kai leaned forward, elbows on knees, the picture of earnest concern. "I’m not saying we turn the floor into a brothel. I’m saying the current system is already failing. People are already finding release somewhere. Usually in ways that make them worse at their jobs. What if we stopped pretending the problem is individual weakness and started treating it like a structural one?"

Harlan stared at him for a long time. "You’re different."

"Near-death experiences will do that."

"No. It’s more than that. You’re present. The old Ethan would have apologized three times by now and offered to rewrite the whole thing in safer language."

Kai smiled, small and careful. "The old Ethan isn’t available right now. Will that be a problem?"

Harlan let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "It should be. God help me, it should be." He walked to his desk, opened a drawer, and took out a single printed page. Kai recognized the header. Draft 1. There were handwritten notes in the margins.

"I’m not approving anything," Harlan said. "I’m not circulating anything. But I’m also not deleting it.and I’m not telling you to stop thinking about it." He held the page out. "If, and this is a very large if, you ever produce a version that wouldn’t get both of us fired on contact with daylight, I might look at it again. Off the record."

Kai took the page. Their fingers brushed. Harlan’s hand was dry and slightly shaky.

"Off the record," Kai repeated.

Harlan nodded once. "Get out of my office before I change my mind."

Kai left.

In the hallway he looked down at the printed page and the tight, controlled handwriting in the margins. One note in particular stood out:

"People are already breaking. The only question is whether we admit it."

Kai folded the paper carefully and slid it into Ethan’s bag.

Ethan was in the middle of an argument with a man who claimed to have known Kai for three years and therefore had "certain expectations."

The man was tall, irritated, and standing too close in the hallway of Kai’s building. Ethan kept his new hands in the jacket pockets so no one would see them shaking.

"I told you," Ethan said, trying to keep Kai’s voice level, "I was in an accident. I’m not up for anything right now."

"You always say that when you’re bored of someone." The man stepped closer. "Then you show up two weeks later like nothing happened. I’m not doing the cycle again."

"I’m not" Ethan stopped. The body wanted to lean in. The body remembered this man, muscle memory was a bastard. "I’m not him right now. Not in any way that matters. Please just go."

The man studied him. Something in Ethan’s expression must have looked wrong enough, because the anger flickered into confusion.

"You’re serious," he said.

"Painfully."

The man shook his head, almost disgusted. "Whatever’s going on with you, fix it. The old Kai was an asshole, but at least he was consistent."

He left.

Ethan stood in the hallway until the elevator doors closed, then slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his new long legs stretched out. His heart (Kai’s heart) was beating too fast. He pulled the phone out and turned it back on.

Seventeen new messages. He ignored all of them and called the only number that mattered.

Kai answered on the second ring. "Miss me already?"

"Someone came by," Ethan said. His voice sounded thin even to himself. "One of yours. He knew the difference, he said the old Kai was an asshole but consistent."

"Yeah. That tracks."

"I don’t know how to be you. I don’t know which parts are performance and which parts are just the body."

Kai’s voice dropped further. "Most of it was performance. The body just made the performance easier, the rest was me being lonely and calling it freedom."

Ethan closed his eyes. "That’s the first time you’ve admitted that."

"Don’t get used to it. I have a reputation to maintain." A soft exhale. "You okay?"

"No."

"Good. Honesty looks decent on me." Another pause. "Harlan didn’t kill the document, he annotated it. Wrote in the margins like it mattered. I think we just got the closest thing to a green light this place knows how to give."

Ethan let his head fall back against the wall. "You’re actually going to do it."

"I’m actually going to try. And you’re going to help me not get us both destroyed in the process. Because if this goes wrong, it’s your name on the performance review and my face that has to look unemployed."

"That might be the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard."

"Yet here you are, still on the phone."

Ethan almost smiled. "Yeah. Here I am."

They stayed on the line without speaking for a while. The building hummed around Ethan. Somewhere above him a door slammed, somewhere across the city Kai sat in a neat little apartment that still smelled like someone else’s careful life.

Finally Kai said, "Come over. Not for anything filthy. Just, come over. We’ll eat something that isn’t terrible and I’ll tell you what Harlan actually wrote in the margins. You shouldn’t have to carry the whole panic alone."

Ethan looked at the opposite wall of the hallway and the scuffed paint and the place where the man had stood.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. But if you try anything I’m leaving and taking your good jacket with me."

Kai’s laugh was low and real. "Noted. See you in thirty. Bring the body in one piece, I’m still using it."

Ethan hung up, stayed on the floor for another minute, before pushing himself upright.