Decisions required certainty; certainty required some feeling and knowledge and confidence in one's own beliefs that everyone on earth seemed to have but her. On a regular day she could decide, with some effort, whether she wanted coffee or tea. The idea of being certain enough to deciding to do anything today seemed impossible. Too many hours spent at an altitude of 35,000 feet and nowhere nearly enough of it sleeping, too much everything to even contemplate; her ankles hurt, her back was sore, her head was killing her, and here was Erik, offering up his heart again, and she could feel her heart aching in her chest, already wincing at the thought of having to refuse him once more.

It would be so much easier to just take his hand.

He would be so happy, and she felt a quiver in her shoulders just imagining it, Erik, happy... but there was no way to give him small affections, no halfway, no way to give him anything short of everything. The idea of taking his hand felt like inviting a dam to burst, with no way to contain it again; it seemed like her only options were to hold him at arm's length or collapse into his love entirely.

"…So are we going to be crawling under this security system's laser beams, or just rappelling down from the ceiling?" She finally said, far too tired to feel any surprise. Of course he was taking her to a nonexistent place in a skyscraper in Tokyo. Of course she, too, was technically on the lam now. She was exhausted and frank acceptance seemed the path of least resistance.

"Neither, actually" Erik said, with a frankness that almost sounded as though he'd taken her seriously. "The advantage of being the one who designs these buildings and their security systems is that I design their virtual trapdoors as well. Let me show off a rather clever bit of technology."

He briskly withdrew his hand, as though no invitation to physical contact had just been offered, and made quick work of taking off his long overcoat, turning it inside out to reveal a grey checked lining, and then putting it back on. "You see, my dear, a rather dull checked jacket. Not quite houndstooth, and not particularly interesting - unless you're a computer that's been designed to do intricate analysis of every frame of video that comes in on a building's security cameras."

"Why does a camera care about a jacket?" she asked, trying not to focus on the absurdity of the very question.

"The statistical photometric recognition behavior in the software is what the client requested; it allows the building's security officers to be alerted when the system recognizes the faces of any known suspects of corporate espionage. The ability of that same system to read a particular QR code and neglect to digitally record anything in a two foot radius of it is an outright exploit on the part of their architect's security firm. Which I also own."

He said the final sentence with something approaching pride, and she nodded, trying to keep up.

"So," he continued, gesturing at the jacket, "this sartorial disappointment is actually a precisely woven matrix-form barcode. The camera records it, the computer controlling the camera reads the barcode's content in the first frame, and then the software suffers a buffer overflow, due to this one case deliberately allowing unsanitized database inputs - and operating as root now, outside the normal software, it executes the remainder of the content in the barcode as a command. The command is that the camera should write neutral-state data for the frames where the coat was recorded."

It had been months since she'd seen him in magician mode, and Christine was surprised to find that she could recognize it now as an act he put on - that she could identify when he was doing his best to impress her, instead of just feeling so overwhelmed and impressionable that his mental leaps felt impossible to catch up with. That she was starting to understand anything about this man seemed even more surprising than the fact that she felt like she'd almost been able to follow the intricacies of system he'd been describing.

"So," she began, wrapping her head around it, as he began walking and she followed alongside, "the pattern on the fabric is a code to tell the video cameras not to save any footage of the coat itself... so the security tapes don't show us entering the building?"

He tilted his head and looked at her. "Clever girl," he said, doing little to hide that he was as much surprised as he was impressed. "I think you underestimate your own aptitude for technology; had you not been gifted with such a voice, you could have made your way in quite a few other careers."

Even now, even after everything, she still felt herself warm to his praise. She could feel herself turning toward it like a flower to the sun, like a child to be patted on the head, and she fought the urge to relax for a moment and bask in the admiration radiating off him almost visibly in the morning light. Trying to feel immune to his tone and gestures, the meaning of his words then struck her as ridiculous.

"...if I didn't have my voice?" She bristled, incredulous. "Would you still even be interested in me, if I didn't have my voice? You would have never noticed me in the first place."

"'Interested' in you... That is quite the choice of words, Christine." He looked at her intensely, and she couldn't read the expression in the mismatched eyes locked on her own.

"I'm not wrong," she replied, surprised at how confident and indignant she felt in saying it. "I would have just been another ballerina who dreamt of singing and couldn't, and you'd wouldn't have paid me any more attention than you would have paid a ticket-taker or a set-painter or any other anonymous employee at the Met."

"I will say this exactly once," Erik stopped sharply, and turned to look at her. "A man in my position in life would go mad if he dabbled in impossible what-ifs of alternate pasts. I cannot know what would have happened if we'd met under different circumstances and I cannot change the way in which we've already come to be who we are to one another. The past is outside my ability to change and wondering about it is pointless." The last words came out so rigidly resolute that she wondered if this was something he'd often told himself.

"But," he continued, seeming to soften somewhat, "I can tell you what is in my power - I can tell you the future. if you lost your voice tomorrow and never sang another note, I would mourn the loss of the world's most beautiful instrument - and I would still want to spend the rest of my days with the woman it once belonged to. Your voice is something you have; it is not the entirety of what you mean to me. Is that settled?" He asked, flatly, almost as though he were exasperated to have to say it expressly.

Christine looked up from her intense study of the immaculate pavement to meet his gaze, feeling somewhat chagrined, and she nodded and murmured, "Thank you."

He was looking at her curiously, and as they resumed walking she felt him start to speak and then withdraw, several times, before he finally just came out with it and asked quietly, "Was that a... hurdle?"

"What do you mean?"

"The mistaken impression which you apparently had up until several seconds ago, that I cared first and foremost about your vocal instrument. Was that something standing... between us, before?"

Yes," she said softly, feeling an immense vulnerability in the word.

He nodded slowly in understanding, not breaking eye contact with her.

"Do you keep a running list of what those things are?" she finally asked, with a gentleness that couldn't help sounding wary.

"Always," he replied with swift formality, his smile stiff and sad.

She exhaled a long breath in response, but after a minute she smiled, a little, trying to lighten the mood. "That's a tremendous amount of pressure for me to be under."

"Let me assure you, the pressure is worse on my end," he replied, with a tone that was genuine, but twinged with a sympathetic humor that almost felt like an endearing joke between the two of them instead of another round of trenchant self-deprecation. The extent of feelings she had felt toward him in the last 48 hours, from fury to mercy to... to whatever this was, was overwhelming, and -

"So for this to work," Erik said, interrupting her thoughts, "Our physical presence needs to be as forgettable as the digital one. There will almost certainly be a few people in the lobby coming and going, and we need to not cross their level of awareness. Walk into the building as though no one belongs there more than you. Imagine you have been here a hundred times, and you are just walking across the lobby and slightly to the right, toward the elevators that you know by heart are right there. We are going to an office. It is exquisitely dull."

Nodding, numbly, so tired she thought she might nod off if she did it another time, Christine confirmed his instructions and walked just slightly ahead of him into a central courtyard surrounded by new skyscrapers with glittering windows. A canopy of enormous glass squares patched together like blocks of a quilt soared overhead, supported by silver metal pillars that must have been ninety feet tall. Escalators criss-crossed between three levels of plazas and she could see office workers, begining to filter into the area for a day's work.

With a few subtle directions, Erik indicated the appropriate building to enter and trying her best to embody the character of someone who was not nervous, suspicious or anxious, she strode in through the revolving door, her heels clicking on the polished tiles, the whirr of her suitcase wheels echoing in her wake, Erik's footsteps snapping not much further behind. As they waited for the elevator to arrive, she fought the urge to look up at the corners of the room where the cameras probably were; employees in this building probably never thought about the digital eyes in the ceiling, watching - and they definitely didn't look at them.

The elevator arrived and she felt a bit of relief, stepping in, to not be out in the open; even if the security cameras could be made to forget that they'd seen a missing woman and a man in a mask, bystanders who worked in the office building might still remember - and a low, uneasy part of her was still afraid of what Erik might do to ensure their silence.

As the elevator began to ascend, he interrupted her thoughts. "Not much longer now. You're doing quite well, and there's rest ahead."

The front and back walls of the elevator were sleek stainless steel with black glass panels at the sides; were there cameras behind them? Unsure if she was able to actually talk, she finally let her eyes dart from side to side and raised her eyebrows at him, asking a silent question as her eyes met his own.

"Good of you to check, but you can speak freely. None of the monitoring anywhere records audio, just visual - and there aren't any cameras in the elevators or on the floor we'll be going to. Like I said, I designed it from top to bottom."

"That's good, I guess," she said, feeling her shoulders relax. "But... even if we're not on the security tapes, If I were looking for a guy who'd kidnapped a soprano... Erik, the first place I'd look is a building he designed."

"I'm still holding out for 'absconded with,' instead of kidnapped," he said lightly, as he turned away from her, slid open a panel above the elevator buttons and began to fiddle with a keypad there.

"As to the issue you pose, I have designed twelve different skyscrapers across four different continents under seven different architecture firm names," he continued, as though it were very boring, "so even if someone could pull together the appropriate clues to suspect which buildings I had a hand in, it would still take weeks to organize search warrants. And even if the swat team were to sweep the building from roof to basement, looking under every desk and in every maintenance area, they wouldn't find the place where we will be securely residing, because the blueprints show the space to be occupied by the building's air conditioning and ventilation system, the sub-risers for the water pressurization, as well as parts of the infrastructure for the elevators. I just designed each of those elements to be imperceptibly smaller and more efficient, and created space out of thin air. Think of it as the architectural equivalent of stealing the rounding errors on every banking transaction."

"Ok." She finally said, watching the lights above the door show their rise to the 32nd, 33rd, 34th floor. The lights stopped at 35, but the beep indicating they were rising continued three floors further, and she thought, idly, back to the last time she was counting the ascension of an elevator. The doors opened to reveal a dimly lit concrete and dull steel hallway completely unlike the design-concious modern lobby.

"Mechanical level," Erik said, by way of explanation, and led the way out.

Pipes lined the walls and tight bundles of wires ran taught across the ceiling, and each room they entered was filled with large, industrial air conditioners of some kind. Christine supposed she must have known that these things existed somewhere in every building she'd been in, but it had never occurred to her that there were entire floors full of them.

Erik stopped in front of a bank of these air conditioning units, almost like a wall of beige closets full of fans, and began entering what seemed like the thousandth code on the thousandth panel of numbers she'd seen. He flipped a half dozen switches then opened another panel, concealed in the interior wall of the air conditioning unit, and pressed his thumb against the square inch of glass inside. The heavy thunk that followed was quickly lost amidst the noise of the hundreds of fans around them, but the effect was obvious when the entire unit hinged open, like a two foot thick bank vault door, constructed entirely of industrial machinery.

He gestured that she should walk ahead of him and she stepped inside, the concrete passageway within just barely wide enough for the suitcase, and she pulled it behind her with some effort as it scraped the walls, and as he went through some intricate series of steps to close the door behind them. They walked for possibly eight more feet, then turned left, then the flooring abruptly changed from concrete to hardwood and the hallway widened significantly to reveal a small room that almost looked like a foyer.

"Welcome home, for the next thirty-six hours," Erik said, as he squeezed past her and opened the door in front of them.

The contrast between the mechanical level and this room was surreal; it was like stepping out of a factory and into some futuristic vision of a hotel room, rendered at half scale. The room was no more than 12 feet square, and ceiling and walls were all immaculate white, with every corner rounded. One corner held a bed with a meringue-like white duvet, and the other had an lounge chair of streamlined rounded wood with leather cushions and a small ottoman, surrounded by a set of floor to ceiling shelves containing books, a laptop computer, and a large set of headphones.

It was absurd.

All of this was absurd, and she was so tired that surely she was delirious, and Christine let out a laugh, high and strange, without really meaning to.

"The bed is yours, and yours alone, as promised," Erik said sharply, looking away from her.

"That's not it," she said, finally, getting control of her laugher. "I'm really, really tired, and you have a secret room in some industrial blind spot in a skyscraper in Tokyo, and you put an Eames chair in it."

"Ah," he said, and she could sense him trying to lower his defensive walls coming down as abruptly as they'd risen. "Well. This space was built for waiting out extreme circumstances, such as I hadn't even imagined when constructing it - but I did imagine that if I ever needed to make use of it, I would appreciate certain... standards being up to par," he said, relaxing somewhat. "Now, if you'll make yourself comfortable, I need a few minutes to address my increasingly annoying battle wound." She nodded, and he disappeared through a door along the back wall whose seams had barely been visible in the sleek white panels a moment before.

Busying herself with taking off her shoes and opening her suitcase to rummage for the toiletries case, she tried not to worry about the any of the fears and anxieties that were currently circling her like wolves. Erik had a gunshot wound. Raoul had made a bargain with the government to try and imprison Erik that might land her in jail or an institution as a result. She was teetering on the delirium point of sleep deprivation on a new continent, traveling with a man who loved her well beyond any rational measure, for reasons she was still trying to convince herself she deserved. And the man who loved her was impossibly difficult and confusingly wonderful by turns, and he was ugly, and his life had been traumatic, and he needed years - he needed decades, probably - of therapy.

Christine put both her hands over her face and drew a long breath in and focused on not letting her ribs shake, on not giving in. She couldn't deal with the wolves right now.

Food. Surely he had thought of food.

She walked toward the wall near the bookshelves and saw a faintly perceptible line in the wall to the left. She pressed on it, and a cabinet door swung open to reveal a streamlined, polished bar, bottles of fancy liquors lined up and lustrous, gleaming like an art deco cruise liner. She closed it, and tried pressing on the next surface to the left. This opened as well, and revealed a set of shelves of jars, cans, and vacuum-sealed foodstuffs. She turned a few of the cans around and decided that Confit de Canard was definitely not on the menu for breakfast, and finally found a few packages of dried fruit, and opened one, ravenously. The cabinet below revealed dozens of liter bottles of water; she took one and was placing it on the bedside table when the door opened and Erik emerged from the restroom.

He was wearing the same black lightweight wool trousers from his suit, but the white dress shirt and blazer had been replaced by a charcoal grey long-sleeved knit shirt that bulged obviously over the bandage on his arm. Her eyes went straight to it and she tried to avert them, tried not to stare, and wonder, and worry, before she finally just asked him, "Are you ok?"

"Given the multitude of circumstances," he replied wryly, "I suppose a 'yes' is in order, overall. I keep a rather decent first aid kit in each of my safe houses, so I had most of the supplies that I needed, and all I really need now to recover is a good day or two of rest and elevation to allow the hemostasis to really take hold."

"I'm glad," she said, relieved. "Is there anything else you need?"

"Well, if I'm going to keep traveling with you, I should probably add QuickClot to my everyday carry," he said, his tone implying it was a joke.

"Ok," she said, exhausted and growing tired of him talking over her head. "If you don't mind..."

"Please," he said, stepping aside fully and gesturing at the door to the restroom. "If you'd like a shower, the towels are in the cabinet above the sink." He walked across the room to where his suitcase was, and seemed to busy himself in putting things away.

"...When you were building an invisible room to 'wait out extreme circumstances,' you took the time to put in a shower." Her voice was half question, half statement.

"Of course," he said, without looking up from his suitcase. "I'm a sociopath, dear, not a Philistine."

XXXXXXXX

Twenty minutes of staring up into the rainfall showerhead mounted into the ceiling of a tiny glass cabinet in the equally tiny bathroom. Twenty minutes of hot water straight to her face and hair, and she was still in this surreal space outside her life. It seemed impossible that she was here, like that at any moment now she would wake up and find herself at home in her walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, piecing together the bits of a dream and realizing like always, in the aftermath, that the oddness had come from the fact that her imagination was limited. But this place was beyond her imagination and unlike most dreams, the architect of the very strange environs she now inhabited was exactly outside the restroom door. Christine took a deep breath, and stepped out, wearing the old-fashioned cotton poplin pajamas she'd found folded crisply at the bottom of her suitcase.

The back of Erik's head was just visible over the top of the elaborate armchair, and his hair was still so sleek and unmussed after hours of traveling that Christine found herself wondering for the first time if his hair was a wig, and felt immediately uncomfortable at the thought. He did not look up, seemingly engrossed in the slim computer now open in his lap.

She rubbed the towel across her hair with flat palms, feeling almost a little relieved that he hadn't had the infinite foresight to provision a blow dryer as well, and leaned against the doorframe, watching his fingers fly across the keyboard of a laptop instead of a piano, for once.

"What are you working on?" She asked, idly.

"One moment," he said, emphatically typing a few more lines. "And.. voila, success. Well! That's terribly satisfying."

"What is?" She asked, with a gentle smile. She was so exhausted that for a lovely moment, the entire scene struck her as domestic and charming.

He spun the chair around and looked over his shoulder at her with undisguised pride. "It looks to all the world like Ms. Christine Daae's credit card was just swiped at a hotel in Adelaide. Your CIA, FBI, and whatever agents of the Commonwealth they wish to enlist will have an excellent clue to follow up on the Australian continent now."

Erik's eyes gleamed with pride and affection, his desire for her praise and approval suddenly as obvious to her as her own need had been before, but she didn't have time to think about that because -

"How did you get my credit card number?"

He whirled around in the chair to face her fully, now, and stood up, setting his chin disdainfully. "I thought you would be appreciative of the news, but if you're not, perhaps it's time we get some rest."

It seemed like every time he spoke, his voice was the swell of a massive wave and it took every bit of alertness she had not to be swept away entirely in the direction he wanted her to go. Erik wanted her to drop the subject, and she resisted, leaned forward against the doorframe. "Did you go into my account?"

His eyes narrowed, and his defense came swiftly. "You used your father's first name as your password, Christine. A password I could guess on the second try is not so much security, as it is an exercise in fundamental fact recollection."

"What was your first guess?" she asked in a low voice, more interested in accusing him of his crime than in actually finding out what the answer was.

His eyes locked onto hers and the moment had suddenly escalated to brinksmanship. "...'Angel,'" he said, his gaze suddenly steely and mirthless.

"I had that account before I ever met you." Christine replied with sudden defensiveness, before her exhausted brain realized that by rights, she owned no explanation of her passwords to anyone. "Erik, every time I think I can trust you, it turns out you're just looking out for yourself and thinking of me as a token in a board game. Did you think about how I might feel when I found out you'd cracked my password? Did you go into my email too?"

Erik crossed his arms. "I'll ignore for the moment the wildly irresponsible implication that you've used the same password everywhere, and address the question at hand. No, I have never attempted to read your email. I have always been terrified of what I might find you had written to your - I'm sorry, would you say 'fiance,' or just 'boyfriend,' Christine? I dislike being imprecise with my words. What exactly would you call that young idiot you'd rather be with right now?"

She stared at him, numb, shocked, and furious.

"By all means," he said, glaring at her, "please, just stand there looking horrified."

"Stop!" she finally choked out. "Why are you doing this? We had a really nice morning."

"I might ask why you had done any of this!" he hissed in return. "I told you I loved you, and you certainly didn't tell me to take my sad case elsewhere; you just nodded, and demurred, and said anything but 'no' in a thousand half-hearted ways. You said you couldn't bear to lose me because you loved our lessons and I clung to it like a lovesick idiot."

His eyes were almost glowing now, with pain, and she couldn't even form words over the lump of misery in her throat before he went on.

"I tried to give you everything! I told you of hopes so pathetically earnest that I burn in shame to think of them now. And all the time, you just said didn't know what you felt, and you couldn't live without your Angel... but you certainly needed more time to spend with your dear friend from your summer seaside days. Christine, does that boy know your soul?"

"I don't know that I know it myself!" she cried, tears pushing trails down her face. Her chest was shaking with sobs, and she hoped that her tears would melt his anger, give them some time to discuss this - but Erik just took a long breath in, then picked up the chair with his good arm and strode toward the door. He deposited it in the hallway outside, maneuvering the door with some difficulty, then returned for the ottoman and wordlessly flipped the lightswitch on his way out, plunging the tiny room into complete darkness and slamming the door behind him.

Numbly, Christine felt her way toward the bed, slipped under the covers, and let her body finally give in to outright sobbing. She was completely overwhelmed; her entire chest rang with a despairing ache, and she found herself missing the days when she'd been naive and desperate enough to believe in angels.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Author's Note: You are wonderful, gorgeous, insightful readers for writing the kind of feedback you have so far, and so much of it has helped me make decisions about how things will play out between our dear heroes. Thank you for your reviews and PMs, they were a wonderful motivation to write this chapter much more quickly than the last one!

~Ver