By the time I reach the fourth floor of Hawthorne’s science building, the hallway already sounds like a trial.
Murmurs. The squeak of anxious shoes. The uneven rhythm of fingers drumming on plastic binders. The glass wall of Conference Room B glows with the blue of a projector and the collective stress of ten overcaffeinated grad students.
I stop just out of sight, press my palm briefly to the cool cinderblock, and exhale. This is fine. This is what I’ve been aiming at for three years: the big meeting. The merged lab. The mega-project that will decide who actually gets to stay in this field and who ends up back home explaining to their family why you can’t pay rent with half-finished PhDs.
I smooth the cuff of my cheapest blazer—black, slightly shiny in the wrong light—and step into the doorway.
Half the room turns to look at me. The other half is turned toward him.
Jaxon Reid sits at the far end of the table, one arm draped over the back of his chair like he owns the air molecules. Dark button-down, no tie, collar open just enough to say I’m not intimidated by any of you. His hair is doing that infuriatingly casual thing that probably took zero effort, and his laptop is angled away from everyone as if state secrets live there.
His gaze slides to the door, finds me, and cuts sharp.
“Lane.” He says my name like a diagnosis.
“Reid.” I answer like a cure he can’t afford.
There’s a tiny, delighted noise from somewhere near the middle of the table. Priya. Of course she snagged a seat with prime viewing angles. She covers her mouth with a notebook, eyes bright behind her glasses.
“Aria, hey,” she says, a little too casually. “We were beginning a betting pool about whether you’d blow off the opening salvo.”
“I was working,” I lie smoothly, dropping my backpack on a chair near her. Technically true—I was at my campus job resetting lab equipment until five minutes ago. “Some of us need the stipend, remember?”
The way Jaxon’s jaw moves tells me he heard that and resents it. Good.
At the head of the table, Dr. Elena Cross clears her throat. Everyone snaps their attention forward. If Jaxon owns the oxygen, Elena owns gravity. She leans on the table with both hands, neat gray bob severe, lipstick perfect, eyes sharp enough to cut funding.
“Now that we’re all here,” she says, with a pointed glance from me to Jaxon and back, “let’s get started.”
She taps a key, and the projector blinks to life. A slide appears: HAWTHORNE SYSTEMS NEUROSCIENCE MEGA-PROJECT, followed by a subtitle in donor-friendly font.
“Mr. Hale has made his expectations clear,” Elena says. “This department is on probation, financially and reputationally. We need a flagship result. We will produce it.”
She looks at Jaxon. Then at me. I don’t miss the infinitesimal lift of her brow when she looks my way, as if silently asking whether I’m going to combust.
I straighten my spine. Don’t worry, doctor. If I burst into flames, I’m taking the golden boy with me.
“As you know,” she continues, “we’re merging the Cross Lab and the Reid Lab into a single team. One project, one major publication pipeline, one shot with Victor Hale.”
A few chairs creak; someone shifts nervously. On the slide, two logos overlap—CROSS COGNITIVE SYSTEMS and REID COMPUTATIONAL NEURO, with a garish little plus sign between them.
“Co-leads,” Priya mouths at me, her eyes doing a little drumroll.
Elena doesn’t make us wait.
“Effective immediately, Aria Lane and Jaxon Reid will serve as co-principal investigators for the graduate arm of this project.”
The room inhales as one organism.
I feel my pulse in my fingertips, a hot rapid thrum. Co-PI. It’s not the grant, not yet, but it’s the gate you have to pass through to even see that future. Paid time, authorship priority, visibility. A chance to prove that my name belongs at the top of a paper even if my bank account disagrees.
I realize I’m gripping the back of my chair hard enough to leave dents.
Next to me, Priya nudges my elbow under the table. When I glance at her, she flashes all her teeth in a silent scream of excitement.
Across the table, Jaxon’s mouth curves—not quite a smile, too sharp around the edges.
“Congratulations,” he says, voice light. “I look forward to our… partnership.”
It’s theatrical enough that a couple of first-years snicker.
“Our partnership,” I echo, folding into my seat. “Right. That’s the word that comes to mind.”
Elena clicks to the next slide, either oblivious or choosing not to intervene.
“The project will focus on adaptive learning in chaotic neural systems,” she says. “Specifically, we’re integrating Aria’s work on non-linear behavioral modeling with Jaxon’s dynamical network simulations.”
My ears heat. “Aria’s work” and “Jaxon’s simulations” side by side, as if our shared history of trying to annihilate each other’s posters at conferences is a cute origin story.
My models earned me exactly one departmental paper and a lot of muttered praise about ‘promise’ and ‘grit.’ His simulations got a co-authorship with his father in a glossy journal and invitations to speak in rooms where people drink water from bottles that cost more than my rent.
“Each of you,” Elena continues, “brings a necessary perspective. Alone, your approaches are impressive. Combined, they have the potential to be transformative. Victor Hale likes transformative.”
There’s a faint, weary disdain when she adds his name, like she’s chewing aspirin.
“And just so there’s no confusion,” she says, letting her gaze sweep the room, “Hale has confirmed—again—that the international fellowship tied to this project will go to a single recipient. One of you will secure three years of fully funded research abroad. The rest of you will still have my recommendation, but not his money.”
Her eyes rest on me a second longer than on anyone else.
I hold her gaze. I make myself look like someone who isn’t mentally calculating exactly how many months of rent ‘fully funded’ would cover. I will not be the charity case in this room.
“Questions?”
A few minor ones about schedule, access to equipment, how we’re dealing with IRB. The usual. I answer one, automatic, about data cleaning pipelines. Jaxon answers another, his voice smooth, explaining some tweak to his code base like he isn’t also silently sizing up the person sitting opposite him.
When the practicalities wind down, Elena fixes the two of us with that surgical stare again.
“I’ll leave the methodological roadmap to my co-leads,” she says. “You’ll need to present a joint plan to Mr. Hale in two weeks. He wants to see synergy, not civil war.”
Her mouth tightens.
“I chose you both because you’re the best we have,” she adds. “Don’t make me regret it.”
There it is. The not-quite-blessing, not-quite-threat.
She gathers her notes and steps out, already pulling out her phone. The door closes behind her with a soft click that feels louder than the projector fan.
For a moment, the room is silent.
Then everyone starts talking at once.
“Okay, so,” one of the first-years says, nervous energy bubbling over, “are we, like, Team Aria or Team Jaxon, or—”
“Team ‘don’t get fired,’” Priya cuts in. “Sit down, Lucas.”
I stand, because sitting feels too close to being trapped. “All right,” I say. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it correctly. No miracle results, no p-hacking, no sexy but meaningless visualizations for Hale’s PowerPoint addiction. We build something that actually works.”
Jaxon leans back in his chair, watching me with that irritating half-amused expression, like he’s at a play and just realized the leading lady can also do her own stunts.
“And who made you ethics czar?” he asks lazily.
“The part where I’m not coasting on legacy helps,” I say. “We can’t afford to fake this.”
His eyes flash, quick and sharp, before he hides it with a slow blink.
“Coasting,” he repeats. “Right. Because spending my nights debugging stochastic models is basically a spa day.”
“You could do it at an actual spa,” I say. “The code would still run because your father already got you the cluster time.”
A soft “oooh” ripples from down the table. Priya kicks my ankle, hard. Her version of shut up, you’re spiking the data.
Jaxon’s fingers tap once on the table. Then he pushes his chair back and stands, closing the distance between us by a measured two steps.
Up close, he smells faintly of coffee and something sharper, like cedar. I hate that I notice.
“If you want to question my methods, Lane, be specific,” he says. His voice is low enough that most of it is for me alone. “Otherwise you just sound jealous.”
My heartbeat does a traitorous thing at the word jealous.
I lift my chin. “That’d require wanting what you have.” I let my gaze flick over his watch, his laptop, his ridiculous composure. “I don’t.”
For a moment, something like hurt flickers in his eyes. It’s gone before I can be sure I saw it.
“Great,” he says. “Then this won’t be a problem.”
Priya slides discreetly between us, all five-foot-three of human Switzerland.
“Methodology, remember?” she says brightly. “Not murder. I, for one, would like to graduate before our lab space is repurposed as a crime scene.”
I step back a fraction, enough to register the distance. My skin feels too tight.
“Fine,” I say. “Look. The non-linear behavioral data are messy. They won’t play nicely with your pristine little networks unless we rethink how you’re defining nodes.”
His mouth quirks. “My pristine little networks?”
“Your words,” I lie shamelessly.
He crosses his arms, considering. “We could adapt the weight-update rules to incorporate your prediction errors,” he says slowly. “Treat the behavior as feedback to the system instead of just output.”
“And drop the assumption of stationarity,” I add before I can stop myself. “Let the parameters drift with context. People aren’t robots.”
“Some of them are,” he mutters, but the interest in his eyes is real now, bright and focused. The way it always is when he’s chasing an idea.
I know that look too well. I’ve been competing with it since the first semester I watched a professor defer to him in seminar like he was a visiting scholar instead of a nineteen-year-old with a famous last name.
“Why don’t we—” he starts.
“Break into subgroups,” Priya says loudly, cutting him off. Her gaze flicks warningly between us. “You two should…uh…synchronize your big-picture plan before you scare the newbies with math.”
“Good call,” I say, seizing the excuse. “We’ll… coordinate later.”
I glance at Jaxon. “Lab at eight?”
He arches a brow. “That late?”
“I have to work,” I say, before I can swallow it.
That gets… something. A tiny crack in the easy façade. His eyes drop for half a second, noting the frayed strap on my bag, the cheap laptop I’m tugging closer.
“Fine,” he says. “Eight.”
By the time I make it to the basement lab that night, my feet ache and my brain is humming on the edge of depletion. The hallway is quiet at this hour, the fluorescent lights humming with that high, insect whine they get when they’re tired too.
Our merged lab sprawls behind a set of double doors: rows of workstations, a glass-walled testing room with cameras and sensors, whiteboards already colonized by ghosted equations. It smells like solvent, coffee, and dry-erase ink.
Jaxon is already here.
He’s perched on a stool by the central bench, sleeves rolled up, staring at a whiteboard dense with scribbles. His laptop is open, lines of code glowing on the screen. For once, he doesn’t seem aware of being observed.
I pause in the doorway, my hand on the push bar, unexpectedly unprepared for the absence of an audience.
When he’s arguing with me in front of other people, I know my role. I know his. Without them, everything feels… less scripted.
He must sense me, because he glances over his shoulder.
“You’re late,” he says, but there’s no real bite.
“Wow,” I say, letting the door swing shut behind me. “You waited a whole ten seconds before starting with the condescension. New record.”
He huffs out a quiet laugh. It startles me enough that I almost drop my notebook.
“Relax, Lane,” he says. “I meant we’re both late. For impressing Hale. Two weeks isn’t much time for you to fix your code.”
“My code works,” I say, moving to the opposite side of the bench. “It just doesn’t perform circus tricks for rich men.”
“Then we’ll teach it to juggle.”
He caps a marker and tosses it lightly in my direction. I catch it on reflex, fingers closing around the smooth plastic.
The board between us is crowded with his handwriting—equations, block diagrams, arrows looping back on themselves. In one corner, in a different pen, is a rough sketch of a behavior trajectory plot.
My plot.
I recognize the shape of it instantly: the weird lurch at trial thirty-two, the oscillation that had my advisor frowning for a week before deciding it was noise. He’s drawn it with almost photographic precision.
“When did you—” I begin.
“First-year symposium,” he says, without prompting. “You had that poster in the back corner by the bathrooms. Everyone else left after ten minutes. You stayed and kept talking to the three people who stuck around like they were a crowd.”
Heat prickles at the back of my neck.
“I remember thinking,” he continues, “that you were either delusional or terrifyingly stubborn.”
“What a compliment,” I say, my voice thinner than I’d like.
“Terrifyingly stubborn,” he repeats. “Is a compliment.”
I look at the curve again. “You redrew my data from memory?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “It was interesting.” He pauses. “And it didn’t look like noise.”
The words land somewhere deep, in that quiet, frightened part of me that lives on a diet of self-doubt and instant noodles.
There it is—the heartbeat moment.
No one has ever defended my data like that. Not without a but attached.
I grip the marker a little tighter.
“You didn’t say anything,” I manage. “Back then.”
“You were busy pretending I didn’t exist,” he says lightly. “And my father was already lobbying for me to present next. I didn’t think you wanted my… validation.”
He says the last word like it tastes bad.
“I don’t,” I say automatically, because it’s safer.
His mouth twists like he expected that.
“Good,” he says. “Then you won’t care that I integrated your function into my update rule.”
He turns his laptop toward me. Code scrolls by, dense and clean. In the middle of it, a function name I recognize: lane_error_term(). All lowercase, but undeniably my derivation.
My stomach does something complicated.
“You named it after me?” I ask, before my brain can send a filter.
“Calm down,” he says. “It’s just so I remember where it came from.” His gaze flicks to my face, searching. “I can change it if you want.”
Part of me wants to say yes out of sheer reflex. To not owe him anything. To not let him hand me that little slice of credit like a favor.
Another part—the rational, research-partner part—knows this is what I’ve been fighting for: acknowledgment that my messy, unfunded work has value even in his shiny, well-equipped universe.
“Leave it,” I say quietly.
For a second, our eyes lock, and something shifts between us. Just a millimeter. Not enough to rewrite our history, but enough to redraw the next line.
He clears his throat, breaking the moment.
“Okay,” he says. “So. Your models show that behavior under uncertainty doesn’t settle into a stable strategy. My networks assume eventual convergence. Let’s design an experiment that proves us both half right and makes Hale’s head explode.”
I exhale, some tension unspooling.
“You really think he cares about the theory?” I ask.
“I think he cares about buzzwords,” Jaxon says. “So we give him ‘adaptive intelligence’ and ‘resilient agents’ and hide the real work in the appendices.”
“Devious,” I say.
“Practical.”
We bend over the bench, markers moving in tandem. For a while, it’s almost easy. The way our ideas slot together is… annoyingly efficient. He spots structure where I see chaos. I see human variance where he sees noise. Somewhere in the overlap, a project begins to emerge.
As the clock creeps toward ten, my eyes grit with exhaustion. I rub them, fingers pressing into the sockets.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say. “Just been on my feet since six.”
“At your job?”
“Yes, at my job,” I snap, more sharply than he deserves. “Some of us don’t have a trust fund of compute credits to fall back on.”
His mouth opens, then closes. For once, he thinks before speaking.
“I don’t… actually have a trust fund,” he says finally.
I snort. “Sure. And I don’t have student loans.”
He watches me for a moment, something unreadable in his face.
“You know this fellowship isn’t a game for me either, right?” he says quietly. “If I screw this up, it’s not just my ego on the line.”
The mention of the fellowship sits between us like a third person at the bench.
I picture the email I got last year: We regret to inform you that your application for the Hale International Fellowship has not been successful at this time. No explanation beyond a perfunctory We had many competitive candidates.
I’d found out later that Jaxon hadn’t even applied. “Not ready,” he’d said when someone asked at a party, like it was a strategic choice, not a barrier.
Now, he looks anything but unready.
“I know what it means,” I say. “For all of us.”
But what I don’t say is this: If you win, you get a door opened that would have been cracked for you anyway. If I don’t, I go home.
He studies my face like he’s trying to solve for x with too many unknowns.
“We’re going to have to make this work,” he says. “Whether we like each other or not.”
“We don’t,” I say instantly.
His lips angle up. “Obviously.”
He caps his marker, sets it down with a quiet click.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asks.
I hesitate. My whole body is humming with fatigue, but my brain is sparking with the shape of what we’ve sketched out. The grant. The fellowship. The narrow, terrifying path between failure and escape.
“Yeah,” I say. “Same time.”
As I pack up my bag, he turns back to the whiteboard, adding one last arrow from my messy behavior curve to his clean network diagram. The line connects them in a single stroke.
I’m halfway to the door when he speaks again, without turning.
“Lane?”
“Yeah?”
He pauses, like the words are heavier than he expected.
“Don’t sandbag your ideas to make me look good,” he says. “If we’re going to war over this fellowship, I want to know I actually beat you.”
The arrogance in the sentence should infuriate me.
Instead, something dangerous sparks under my ribs.
“Who said you’ll beat me?” I ask.
He finally looks over his shoulder, eyes dark in the lab’s harsh light.
“No one,” he says. “That’s why I’m not sleeping.”
The truth of it hangs in the air between the hum of the lights and the faint whir of the computers, unsettling and strangely reassuring all at once.
I let the door swing shut behind me, my mind already racing ahead—to code, to models, to the brutal, beautiful possibility that my worst rival might be the only person who understands exactly what I’m willing to risk.
And for the first time, I wonder which is more dangerous: losing to Jaxon Reid… or winning with him.
