The Guard's Debt

Theresa Mullen, thirty-four years old and tired down to her bones, locked the last door on the south hall and stood there for a second with her forehead against the metal. The key stuck the way it always stuck. You had to lift it and jiggle it and curse at it, and then it finally turned.

"Oh, come ON," she muttered, giving it one more jiggle. "Just work! For once in your sad little life, work!"

It worked. Of course it worked. Everything worked tonight, which was exactly the kind of night that made her nervous, because in her experience the universe didn't hand out quiet shifts for free. It always billed you later.

She started her walk back toward the security office, boots squeaking a little on the freshly mopped tile. The janitor had gone home at eleven and left half the floor wet, which was against policy, which she would write up, which nobody would ever read. That was the job. Night security at a community college. Thirty-four years old and walking around with a flashlight checking that fire extinguishers hadn't wandered off, eight years after a divorce that had taken everything but her name and one enormous, rotting favor she still owed.

That favor. God. She didn't even like thinking about it, and here she was thinking about it, again, at eleven, again.

It had been eight years ago, the last month she and Varian were still married and still pretending it was going okay. She'd crashed his car. Not a little crash, either. A wrap-it-around-a-parking-garage-pillar crash, drunk, at his brother's wedding, and his brother was a cop. Varian had taken the blame, told everyone he'd been driving, eaten the whole thing without blinking. Never brought it up. Never guilted her. Just said, once, in that calm voice of his, "You owe me a favor, Theresa. Someday I'll ask, and you'll say yes."

She'd laughed at the time. She wasn't laughing now, because her phone had buzzed an hour ago with a text from a number she'd never deleted, no matter how many times she'd told herself to delete it.

"Room 312. Tonight. You remember our arrangement, don't you? Wear something nice."

Who even texts like that? Wear something nice! She'd stared at it for ten full minutes, then typed out about six different replies and deleted every single one, because what was she going to say, no? Could she say no? She honestly didn't know. Eight years of not knowing. He'd covered a felony-level thing for her, basically, and she'd never once paid it back, and now the bill had come due in a biology lab at midnight like some kind of weird ransom note.

She checked her watch in the elevator. 11:52. Third floor. Room 312.

The third floor was the science wing, and it was always creepy at night. Not scary creepy, just... lonely creepy. Fluorescent lights humming. The HVAC groaning somewhere down the hall like an old man getting out of a chair. That faint pickle smell of formaldehyde that soaked into everything up here, into the carpet, into the walls, probably into her lungs. She clicked her flashlight on even though the emergency lights were on, because holding the flashlight made her feel like she had a reason to be anywhere.

Room 312 was the big biology lab. Dissection tables in rows, specimen jars lined up on the shelves along the back wall, fetal pigs and cats and one enormous preserved squid that the students had named Gerald. The door was unlocked. It shouldn't have been unlocked. She'd locked it herself at nine.

"Well, that's not great," she said to nobody.

She pushed it open anyway, because what else was she going to do, call the actual police on her own weird past? Yeah, great plan. "Hello, officer, my ex-husband summoned me like a demon, arrest him." She'd never live it down.

He was there, of course. Varian Krieger, thirty-eight and somehow looking exactly like the day she'd met him, standing by the specimen shelves with his hands folded in front of him like a man waiting politely at a bus stop. In a suit. At 11:52. In a biology lab.

"Theresa," he said, and he smiled, and the smile was still the worst part, warm and easy and patient. "You came. I had a whole speech prepared in case you didn't."

"Yeah, well." She let the door swing shut behind her. The click sounded loud in all that hum. "You know I'm contractually obligated to throw you out of this building, right? Campus is closed. Are you a visitor? Should I get a visitor form? I have a clipboard."

"I'm sure you do." He didn't move. He never fidgeted, never shifted his weight, never did any of the little human things people did without noticing. "You look well. The job suits you."

"The job pays nothing and the janitor leaves wet floors everywhere, but sure, it suits me." She crossed her arms. "Okay. Cut to it. I'm here, you got your text answered, whatever this favor is, say it so I can go home and drink about it."

"So direct. You never used to be direct."

"Yeah, well, you never used to text me at midnight after eight years of nothing, so we've both changed!"

He laughed a little at that, a real one, and it made her chest do a thing she didn't want it to do. Eight years and he still sounded like Sunday mornings and cheap coffee and the good years before the bad ones.

"Fair," he said. "You're right, of course. I'll be direct too." He reached out and rested one long hand on the shelf, right next to Gerald the squid, like they were old friends. "Do you remember what I told you, the night of the wedding? What I said you owed me?"

"A favor. One favor. You said someday. Vague. Menacing. Very you."

"And you've been waiting eight years for the other shoe, haven't you? Checking. Wondering what I'd want. Money? A kidney? Testimony?" He tilted his head. "It's none of those. Theresa, I want you to stand still for about ten minutes and not scream, and then we're going to talk about what happens next."

"...Not scream. About what, exactly?" Her hand drifted toward the flashlight on her belt, which was not a weapon, but it was something to hold. "Varian, if this is some midlife crisis thing, some puppet master thing, I swear..."

"Nothing like that. Well." He paused, and she hated how much she remembered that pause, the little tilt of his mouth right before he said something that changed everything. "Something adjacent to that."

And then he did it. Right there, in front of the jars, with the fluorescents humming and Gerald squatting in his brine like a rubbernecking bystander. His skin went wrong. Not gory wrong, not movie-monster wrong, just wrong, like a photograph of a person printed on the wrong material. His outline softened. His suit settled into him like it was made of the same stuff. And his eyes, his eyes stayed exactly the same, which was somehow the worst part.

Theresa's flashlight came off her belt and came up between them before she even knew she'd grabbed it.

"Don't," he said, calm as ever, hands still folded. "Please. It's still me. It's always been me. This is just the part I never showed you."

"You're... okay. Okay! You're standing in my building looking like a melted candle and you want me to not scream, and you're asking me for ten minutes, and I'm standing here doing MATH with a flashlight, so!"

"Breathe."

"Don't tell me to breathe!"

He held up one soft, wrong hand, and the strangest thing happened, which was that she did breathe. Because that was Varian. Eight years gone and he could still talk her down in four seconds, and she hated him for it, and something under the hate was taking notes.

"The favor," he said gently, "is a meal. That's all. I feed on what people feel, and you, Theresa, have always been the best meal I ever had. Ten minutes. Then we talk terms. I promise you'll walk out of here free of me either way."

"Free of you," she repeated, slow. "Either way. That's a weird way to put it, Varian. That's a really weird way to put it!"

"I know," he said, and smiled that smile. "I chose it on purpose."

* * *

Theresa didn't run. That surprised her, honestly. Her legs had a whole plan about it, some emergency sprint right out the fire exit, and instead she just stood there in the biology lab with her flashlight shaking in her fist and stared at the thing that used to be her husband.

"You're not human," she said. Flat. Stating it out loud like saying it would make it more believable. It didn't. "Say it. Say the words, Varian, because I'm not doing the therapy-speak version of this. Say it."

"I am not human," he said, in that calm Sunday-morning voice. "I never was. I'm a mimic. An old one. I wear people the way you wear that uniform jacket, and I've worn this shape for longer than I should have because it fit so well."

"Because it fit so well," she repeated, and laughed, and it came out ugly. "Oh my god. You're doing a bit. This is a bit. Did the divorce teach you nothing? You can't just come into my workplace and..."

"Theresa."

"Because listen! Because here is the thing!" She jabbed the flashlight at him like it could hurt him, which, given everything, maybe it couldn't. "Even if I believed you, and I'm not saying I do, the mimic part, the feeding part, that's not a favor! You can't owe a favor and the favor is I let you EAT me! That's not how debts work!"

"It's exactly how debts work," he said. "The words were yours."

"...The words were mine? What words? What are you talking about?"

He turned and faced the specimen wall, hands behind his back like a professor about to lecture, and god, that posture. He used to do that in their kitchen. "Your words. May I quote you?"

"Did you write them down? Oh my god, you kept a diary of my stupid wedding-reception promises..."

"May I quote you?" he asked again, patient as a rock.

"Fine! Quote me! Go nuts!"

"Thank you." He cleared his throat, which mimics apparently do, which was somehow more upsetting than the melted-candle thing. "'Whatever you need, Varian. Whatever you need from me, ever, for the rest of your life, you can have it. You saved my life and I'll pay it back with my whole life if I have to.'"

Silence. Even the HVAC seemed to lean in.

"...That was a toast," she said weakly. "That was a DRUNK toast. I was crying in the hotel lobby because I'd just wrecked your car and you'd just lied to a cop for me, and I got emotional and I said whatever came into my head, that is not a CONTRACT, Varian!"

"You were not drunk. Not by then. Three hours and a pot of lobby coffee had seen to that. I remember everything about that night, Theresa. That's not a figure of speech for my kind. I remember every word, every... feeling. It was the most intense evening of emotion I had ever been part of. Fear and relief and love and grief, all in one room. You said those words looking directly into my eyes, and you meant them, and I accepted them, and that's what a bargain is."

"A bargain is a bargain when two people..."

"Two people," he agreed. "Present. Sober. Witnesses. You even wrote it in the guest book."

"I did NOT write it in the guest book!"

"May I?" He didn't wait. Of course he didn't. He reached into his jacket, which was made of the same stuff he was, which made her stomach flip, and produced a folded piece of paper. He held it out.

She snatched it because she had to know. Because eight years of waiting for the other shoe, and here was the shoe.

It was the guest book page, torn out, one corner stained with champagne that had to be eight years old now, and in her own handwriting, slightly wobbly with feelings, it said: Varian, whatever you need, ever, it's yours. T. And underneath, in a second line she had zero memory of writing but zero doubt was hers: witnessed by me, you know the words. V.

"You made me write a receipt for a drunk toast," she whispered.

"Three hours of coffee. And I made you write nothing. You took the pen yourself." He tapped the page. "You asked me what I'd need someday. I said I'd tell you when I knew. Eight years, Theresa. I didn't call it in for eight years. Do you know what that cost me? Do you know what eight years of hunger costs a creature like me?"

"...You said you'd walk out of here free of me either way. What does either way mean, Varian? Say the terms plainly, because I'm the one with