On the fifth day, Mika didn't try to escape.
Not because he'd given up. He didn't give up things — it wasn't a muscle he'd developed, it didn't exist in his body. He didn't try because he was running a fever of thirty-eight point four degrees and the suppressant taper had entered a phase he recognized as the third stage, which was the one where his body started arguing with him seriously instead of just registering mild complaints, and he had allocated all of his management resources to keeping that argument quiet and internal and invisible.
There was nothing left over for an escape attempt that required anything above seventy percent function. He'd learned that in Singapore: attempting precision work below seventy percent was how you ended up worse off than before you started.
He sat on the floor. He drank water. He did breathing exercises he'd learned from a woman in Seoul who'd never told him her name but had kept him alive through the first serious suppressant gap when he was nineteen and thought he could handle anything by force of will alone. He could handle a lot by force of will. He'd learned in that apartment in Seoul that his biology had a will of its own and that will was patient in a way that made his seem amateur.
He was thinking about Seoul — which he didn't do, as a rule, because Seoul was a box in the back of his head with a good lock on it — when the door opened and Luka came in and stopped.
"You're on the floor again," Luka said.
"Fascinating observation," Mika said. "Do you want a chair? I'm not using any of them."
Luka set something on the table — a small paper bag, which was new, not a full tray — and came and sat on the floor a few feet from Mika without apparent self-consciousness, in his good trousers, on the floor, again, like this was simply where the conversation was going to happen and he'd adapted without drama. Mika found this quality in him specifically infuriating. He found it difficult to name why.
"You didn't try to leave today," Luka said.
"I try to leave every day," Mika said. "Today I'm doing it strategically."
"What's the strategy?"
"None of your business."
Luka looked at him. He had this way of looking at things directly that didn't feel like aggression — it felt like the absence of pretense, like he'd never learned to look sideways at things and had never needed to. It was the single most disarming quality Mika had encountered in another person and he was handling it by being maximally unpleasant in return, which hadn't stopped it.
"You're running a fever," Luka said.
"Dante already covered this."
"Dante told me. I'm asking on my own." He reached into the paper bag and set something on the floor between them — a small pharmacy box, the kind with a temperature readout on it, and next to it a bottle of electrolytes and a packet of pain relief. Mika stared at these objects. He looked at Luka. He looked at the objects again. Something moved in his chest that he identified as irritation and chose to leave at that. "You don't have to tell me why," Luka said. "But you should manage the fever. You're not going anywhere if you're running a temperature."
"Thank you for the medical analysis," Mika said.
"You're welcome." Luka leaned back against the wall beside the bed, which meant he was now sitting approximately two feet from Mika, which was a proximity Mika had complicated feelings about and was suppressing with the dedication of someone suppressing something they found complicated. "Tell me something," Luka said. It wasn't a command. It was the conversational version of him sitting on the floor — an offer with no obvious price.
"Tell you what," Mika said.
"Anything." Luka looked at the window, at the city, apparently comfortable with whatever answer came or didn't. "You've been in this room for five days. I know your file, which is false. I know what you can do with a palm strike, which is considerable. I don't know anything actually real."
Mika looked at the pharmacy box on the floor between them. He thought about Seoul. He thought about the box in the back of his head with the good lock. He thought about what Luka had said on the first night — that there was an angle to everything — and about what he'd said on the floor two nights ago, that it was a tired way to live. He hadn't been able to stop thinking about that, specifically, which was itself annoying.
"Seoul," he said, finally, because it was less dangerous than most things. "I grew up in Seoul."
"Your file says Germany," Luka said, without inflection. Not accusatory. Just noting it.
"My file says a lot of things." Mika looked at the window. Outside the glass the city was doing its afternoon thing, grey and indifferent. "I was born in Seoul. My mother was Korean. She taught music — piano mostly, some strings. We lived in Mapo-gu, near the river." He paused. He didn't know why he was still talking. He continued anyway because stopping now would make the thing he'd said mean something and he'd rather it mean nothing. "She used to play in the mornings. Before I woke up. I'd come out and she'd be at the piano and the whole apartment would have sound in it, you know. Like the sound was structural. Like it was holding the walls up."
He stopped. The room was quiet. Forty-seven floors below, the city was entirely uninterested in any of this.
"Is she still there?" Luka asked. Quiet. No weight on it.
"No," Mika said.
Luka didn't ask the follow-up. He just sat there in the silence with it, which was — and Mika identified this with precision and discomfort — the correct thing to do, and that Luka knew it was the correct thing and did it without being directed was a piece of data that Mika filed and then tried to unfile and found he couldn't.
After a while Mika reached over and picked up the electrolytes. He opened them. He drank. His temperature pulsed at the base of his skull and his skin was doing the textured thing and Luka's scent was right there in the two feet of air between them, that warm dark thing that Mika's nervous system had apparently decided was information it needed to keep collecting, and Mika drank the electrolytes and breathed and held the grip.
"Your mother," Mika said, eventually, because the offer was still there and fair was fair. "Tell me something real."
Luka was quiet for a moment. Then: "She left when I was eleven. Not dead. Just — gone. Took herself out of the Romano orbit and never came back." He paused. "I used to be angry about it. I'm not anymore."
"Why not?"
"Because," Luka said slowly, like he'd thought about this many times and was choosing the most accurate words, "she was smart enough to know what staying would cost her. I can respect that even when I don't like it."
Mika looked at him. The grey eyes were on the window, on the city, not performing anything. He was just there — sitting on the floor in good trousers talking about his mother with the same quality of attention he brought to everything, like nothing was beneath being looked at properly. Mika's chest did the thing it had been doing and he filed it under manageable and took another drink of electrolytes.
"You should take the paracetamol," Luka said.
"I know," Mika said. He took it. He didn't say thank you. Luka didn't expect him to, which was somehow the most annoying thing about him.
They sat on the floor while the city went grey outside and the light changed the way it changed in late afternoon and Mika's fever ran its course under the medication and his body staged its quiet insurrection under everything else, and Mika held the grip and held it and told himself he was fine and told himself this was manageable and told himself the morning piano in an apartment by the Han River had nothing to do with the sound that had been missing from every room he'd been in since he was sixteen.
He was an excellent liar.
He was starting to understand that Luka Romano was the first person who might be better at it than him — not at lying, but at seeing through it — and he didn't know yet whether that was a threat or something else entirely.
He was going to figure it out. Before his grip slipped. He had to.