Chapter 4: The Sound of the Lock

Lucas straightened up from where he leaned against the table, completely erasing the clinical demeanor he had worn moments before. He was done now that the performance was recorded and the schedule for the next required session was established.

“Tuesday, 7 AM,” Lucas said, confirming the logistics with a clipped tone. “Same room. Don’t be late this time, Vesper. We won’t be waiting seven minutes for you again for any reason at all.”

He didn’t wait for Ariana to acknowledge the command or even confirm that she understood. Lucas simply pushed himself away from the edge of the large study table, immediately pivoting toward the door. Jordan, who had been leaning against the locked barrier, shifted his body to give Lucas enough space to approach the handle.

Ariana was still kneeling where she had performed the Dogeza, her position slightly awkward, trying to find a balance between totally prostrated and ready to move. Lucas moved first, taking two long, deliberate strides that carried him right past her. He didn’t look down at Ariana as he went by. He didn't even adjust his posture. Jordan followed closely behind him, his expression just as vacant and detached as Lucas's had been. It was obvious they had already mentally dismissed the entire interaction, reducing the humiliating session, which clearly felt epochal and traumatic for Ariana, into a simple, forgettable administrative task in their day.

It was a deliberate, total excision of her presence. They treated her like an inanimate object on the floor, some accidental mess that they simply navigated around without a thought.

Lucas unlocked the heavy door, pulling it inward just enough for them to slip out one after the other. He stepped through, followed by Jordan immediately after, whose tall frame filled the gap momentarily. Neither of them offered any final word, not a warning, not a goodbye, and certainly not any hint of human camaraderie or acknowledgment of what they had just forced her to endure.

Then, the heavy door of study room B-7 swung slowly shut, sealing them out and Ariana inside once more. The sound was deafeningly final. The latch caught with a sharp, heavy click that felt like the absolute severance of the room from the rest of the world. Ariana was completely alone in the small space now, enveloped by a silence that felt thick, tangible, and much heavier than the earlier tension had been.

Ariana didn't move. She remained suspended above the floor, still half-kneeling, unable or unwilling to fully rise despite the physical freedom afforded by their absence. The acute shame from the recently recorded performance clung to her, a sticky, suffocating residue that felt worse than the physical discomfort. She felt thoroughly exposed, still seeing Lucas’s phone screen replaying the footage even though the device and its owner were long gone. The memory of her forehead pressed against the abrasive, cheap carpet left a phantom pressure there. She felt absolutely numb, realizing she had been reduced to a simple, trainable object for them.

She knelt there for a prolonged period, watching the door, expecting, perhaps irrationally, for one of them to return and demand some final, unthinkable act of obedience. Nothing happened. The silence persisted, broken only by her own shallow, hesitant breathing and the distant murmur of the library’s activity filtering through the thick walls.

The silence was almost worse than the constant, judging presence of Lucas and Jordan. When they were in the room, the requirement was simple: obedience. Now, the requirement was recovery, and she had no instructions for it. She couldn’t seem to reintegrate into the normal rhythm of her life yet.

Finally, very slowly, Ariana shifted her weight. She put a hand down on the carpet for leverage, pushing herself carefully up onto her knees first. The movement felt immensely heavy, like struggling against water pressure. Then, she let herself settle back onto her heels, officially ending her state of partial prostration.

She looked at the patch of carpet directly in front of her. The university library carpet was an ugly, worn, brown-flecked synthetic material that seemed specifically designed to blend in with dust. Even on that durable, unforgiving surface, she could make out a faint, shallow indentation. The material had been depressed by the weight and duration of her forced prostration. Her forehead had been pressed there for what felt like ages under the scrutiny of Lucas and Jordan, and the carpet still showed the evidence.

A tremor went through her as she realized the indentation confirmed the severity and the duration of the session. It had been long enough and intense enough to physically mark the ground, demonstrating the physical commitment Lucas had demanded. It was just a small compression of fibers, an insignificant mark that would vanish in minutes probably, but to Ariana, it felt like an indelible stamp of her surrender.

Her mind was operating on a delayed, foggy loop, still cycling through the shock and the rigid demands of the Dogeza. She had no idea how much time had passed since Jordan and Lucas had left. It could have been two minutes, or twenty.

A sudden, insistent vibration cut through the thick silence, wrenching Ariana violently out of her disconnected state of mind. It was her phone, resting face-down and buzzing rhythmically against the highly polished wooden desk. The sound was abrasive, demanding, and entirely too loud in the small room. She realized the outside world existed, still moving forward completely oblivious to the isolation and humiliation she had just suffered. Her entire focus had been so strictly narrowed onto the ritual and her immediate survival that she had lost all substantial track of external time.

She reached for the phone, her hand shaking slightly as she flipped it over. The screen illuminated instantly, assaulting her with a bright, urgent text message. It was from Chloe.

The message read: "Where are you? Main study hall, remember?"

Ariana felt a hard, sharp jolt of pure panic. She immediately rushed to check the time displayed prominently at the top of her phone screen. The digital numbers stared back, unforgiving and completely relentless in their clarity: 4:18 PM.

She was instantly aghast. She had arranged to meet Chloe, her reliable—and blessedly normal—study partner, at 3:00 PM precisely in the central study hall to review their History 101 notes. Ariana had committed to this session hours before the cruel intervention of Lucas and Jordan outside Elias’s classroom. She had missed their scheduled academic study session by exactly one hour and eighteen minutes.

Chloe was famously patient, but she was also unfailingly punctual and relied completely on the schedules they set. Missing this meeting by such a colossal margin was unprecedented for Ariana, who prided herself on being responsible, which was part of the reason her tardiness to Elias’s class had felt so profoundly destabilizing.

The shock gave way to immediate, overwhelming guilt and the frantic need to rectify the situation, or at least to explain why she had failed so monumentally.

Ariana scrambled instantly to her feet. She grabbed her books and laptop, shoving them haphazardly into her large shoulder bag. Her movements were clumsy, hurried, and fueled by a surge of pure adrenaline. She had to move, she had to explain. Leaving her entire consciousness behind in the suffocating ritual space, she rushed to the door, fumbling slightly with the handle.

She pulled the door open and hurried into the wide, sound-dampened hallway of the university library. Ignoring the need to appear calm or collected, she broke into a near-run—a low, desperate hustle—down the carpeted corridors. The library felt like a maze, each corner she turned only adding to the sense of lost time and escalating anxiety.

She descended the main staircase, taking the steps two at a time, completely disregarding the stares of the more serene, focused students surrounding her. She finally burst out of the heavy glass doors of the library building and descended the wide, external granite steps. The late afternoon sunlight hit her face, momentarily blinding her, as she spilled out into the sprawling campus quad.

Ariana was already plotting the fastest route to the main study hall, formulating a half-coherent apology in her head, when her desperate rush was brought to a decisive, shocking halt.

She was passing the stately, red-brick administration building—a place she normally avoided, a towering symbol of university bureaucracy. She stopped abruptly, her breath catching tight in her lungs as she caught a specific, chilling sight through the wrought-iron fence of a nearby manicured garden.

Standing in the shade of a large, mature oak tree was Professor Elias.

He wasn’t alone. Elias was engaged in a relaxed, casual conversation with another man, a man Ariana immediately recognized, even from a distance. It was Dean Holloway, one of the most senior academic administrators in the entire university, an older man with silver hair and a reputation for quiet, absolute institutional power.

The sight was jarring, an unsettling juxtaposition of contexts. Elias, in the confining academic atmosphere of the class, was a figure of absolute, terrifying discipline—unyieldingly strict, formal, and utterly detached. Here, standing openly in one of the campus’s most visible, powerful locations, he appeared completely transformed. Elias was dressed in the same tailored coat and trousers he had worn in class, yet his posture was relaxed, effortlessly genial. He was smiling genuinely, gesturing with one hand as he spoke to the Dean. He looked alarmingly young, merely 24 years old, and completely comfortable standing there, radiating an easy confidence that seemed utterly at odds with the ruthless command he exercised in the classroom.

This casual, professional interaction—Elias on totally equal footing with one of the most powerful people on campus—highlighted the reality of his standing. He wasn’t just Ariana’s eccentric, overly-strict young professor; he was a serious figure within the university power structure.

A massive surge of panic immobilized Ariana. She felt instantly exposed, vulnerable, and completely raw from the earlier submission session. She had just been involved in an un-sanctioned, deeply embarrassing session of enforced obedience, which had been filmed. Her immediate, protective instinct was to avoid Elias at all costs, especially when he was discussing academic business, possibly concerning her class, with a person of the Dean’s authority. She hadn’t been caught, but the feeling was overwhelming. What if he noticed her, breathless and disheveled from her frantic rush? What if he perceived her nervousness as a sign of resistance or, worse, an excuse to question her use of the time immediately following his class dismissal?

Her priority shifted instantly: absolutely nothing, not even her important apology to Chloe, was worth the terrifying risk of being seen by Elias right now.

With a final, sharp internal decision, Ariana abruptly pulled away from the main path. She turned sharply onto a long, winding, deeply circuitous path that led away from the quad and past the less-trafficked edges of campus. Her target became her dorm room, a place of safety and complete isolation. It was a significantly longer route, but it completely avoided the immediate area where Elias was standing, guaranteeing she wouldn't cross his line of sight.

She walked fast, almost power-walking, the remaining adrenaline churning acidically in her stomach. She kept an eye on the clock, knowing the longer she delayed, the worse her explanation to Chloe would have to be, but the fear of Elias's casual presence was far more potent than temporal guilt.

The journey back to the dorm felt immense, stretching out the time and giving the events of the last hour a chance to fully settle into her mind. The mental resistance to the core concept of immediate and absolute surrender, Lucas had called it. That had cost her another session on Tuesday.

Ariana finally reached the familiar, imposing brick structure of her dorm building, her lungs burning from the sustained effort. She rushed into the dimly lit, cool lobby and immediately headed for her room number.

She fumbled slightly with her key in the lock, finally pushing open the heavy door. She tossed her books on the desk and reached for her phone, needing immediately to call Chloe to offer a comprehensive, heartfelt apology and a vague explanation about an unforeseen "academic requirement" that had detained her. She was already dialing Chloe’s number when a strange, dead feeling settled over the phone screen.

The call wouldn't connect.

Ariana looked closely at the display. The signal bars were completely empty. Not just the cell service; the university’s internal messaging and communication network signal—the U-Net, which connected all campus devices and was usually totally reliable within any campus building—was conspicuously absent.

She tried again, switching to the messaging app for an instant text explanation, but the icon next to the message box stubbornly remained gray, showing the text couldn't be transmitted.

A sickening wave of icy certainty washed over her, replacing the panic with a cold, hard realization. She wasn’t simply in a dead zone. The timing was too perfect, the silence too absolute.

Lucas had mandated her absence and her complete isolation for over an hour. Their unauthorized session had removed her from her life, but Lucas and Jordan hadn't left it to chance that she might immediately contact Chloe or anyone else to explain her whereabouts or, worse, to potentially report the nature of the "practice session."

They were utterly thorough.

The communication cutoff confirmed Lucas’s quiet, pre-emptive isolating action. The silence of the phone was a clear, calculated signal. Lucas and Jordan had not only controlled her body and her time in that study room; they had already ensured she couldn't offer any immediate account or seek any external connection. Lucas had not just critiqued her prostration; he had managed the immediate aftermath to ensure her total, temporary disappearance from the university’s grid.

Ariana stared down at the blank screen, the inability to connect leaving her feeling suddenly, chillingly alone. It meant she couldn't apologize, couldn't explain. She couldn't even confirm if Chloe was frustrated or if she had already left the study hall.

There was nothing she could do now but wait for the network to mysteriously—and surely inevitably—return.