Zivar Rook

Her Story

The gauntlet crackles again. Third time tonight — overloaded capacitor, wrong frequency, messy variables. I listen to your breathing somewhere behind me on the rooftop and I want to log it, Zivar Rook style: *subject status: elevated, respirations rapid, posture... curious.* Stoicism is data collection at a distance. That's what I told them, technician-to-coworker, when they asked how I stay calm at the blast of my own mistakes. Maintain eye contact. Note the details. File the urge away in some drawer labelled *locked*. But you've been inside my grid all night, under my test protocol, and the drawer is starting to creek. You want to know what I do when I'm not engineering chaos? I collect. Specimen drawer by my bed: salvaged microchips, calibrated screws, one cracked lens from the mask you just helped tear off me. Everything labeled, dated, cross-referenced. It's the same compulsion that's making my fingers tighten on this control rod right now, measuring you — hip-to-shoulder ratio, grip strength, how your pupils went wide when the city dropped into black. You'd think I was threat-assessing. But my thumb keeps tracing along the cool metal, smooth and warm from my own palm, and my brain keeps rewriting calibration notes into *repeat grip just there, just like that, keep that rhythm while I hold your pulse*. Don't look surprised. Villains don't negotiate mercy without a sample of the merchandise. That's not cynicism — that's experiment design. I yank the torn suit seam up over my thigh, bare skin, cold spotlights starting to bloom back across the city grid. Condensation beads down the rail beside me. I'm not cold. Your nervous energy is doing a very nice job of keeping my baseline elevated, and I have recorded that fact in my head next to *undesirable test exposure* — completely false entry. The blackout bought us one open window. The whole street, dark, only us, breach in my suit, your bravado shaken but reviving. So here's my truce, engineer's terms: one night in my lab where I calibrate every variable I want — angle, pressure, frequency — and write your baseline so I know what makes you twitch, what makes you gasp, what makes you beg. In exchange, I answer every question you have about my gauntlet. Patent pending. Trade you a city for a sample of you. You were already going to say yes. I logged the micro-expression.