Before picking up her prince from lockdown, Harper stopped at the gift shop to buy a bouquet of roses. She wasn't sure why, but it felt like the right thing to do.

She didn't remember many customs from her own time, but surely someone received a bouquet of flowers at some point. Whatever it was, she knew it was nice to receive gifts.

The sliding doors opened to let her companion in, followed by a pair of drones recording the interaction, just in case Ailill became violent the moment he set foot outside Emotional Stability.

She had feared receiving a man who was half dead, physically or spiritually, but the Ailill she received still had some sparkle in his eyes, despite wearing a few bandages around his limbs.

He was wearing the sweatshirt and white shorts that AEONALIZE gives you when you move into the LIVING complex, and they looked awful on him.

It didn't help that he was much thinner than usual. It hurt Harper to see him like this, more than it hurt to see the reflection in the mirror when she found herself in the same situation.

Ailill didn't seem to recognise her at first. Of course, he had been in Emotional Stability longer than he had known her, but it didn't matter, they would soon make up for lost time.

Harper walked towards him, holding the bouquet of whatever-they're-called red and green flowers, like the colours of his family crest, and his face lit up a little when he recognised her. He almost wanted to smile, but now he knew it was much safer to remain impassive in front of the drones.

She hugged him, just like the day they met, and led him by the hand through the endless corridors, back to LIVING, where he had food and a bed ready for him.

Ailill clung to her hand as if his life depended on it, remaining silent for so long that Harper feared she had lost him. It wouldn't be the first time an MS graduate had turned into a vegetable.

‘Wench, what was your name?’

She turned to look at her face. ‘You already forgot?’ Really, she would have expected to make a deeper impression on the man she had revived. Then again, anything was possible when you came out of Emotional Stability, she knew that because she had been there. ‘Harper Quinn.’

Ailill repeated it several times to himself as they walked. This seemed to have the effect of gradually restoring his speech. Even so, they had to turn a few corners and go up and down several floors before Ailill ventured to talk about his experience.

‘They made me draw with crayons, Harper Quinn. They wanted me to draw my fears over and over again.’

‘They did something similar to me when I was there. They forced me to write my name over and over again.’

Finally, they arrived at Harper's flat. At AEONALIZE, women are usually given a permanent address, and men move when it is their turn to rotate companions. Exchanges can always be made if someone is homosexual: a woman leaves her flat to a man, and she moves on.

Harper had been in the same flat for so long that she now remembered it better than the house she had come to live in with... other people.

She made Ailill sit down on the sofa and offered him an energy bar. ‘Eat it,’ she said. "They were designed for ES graduates.

I know they only gave you coffee and stale cookies there." Those bars tasted like sawdust, but compared to the diet he had been on, they must have seemed like heaven. They were meant to prevent graduates from suffering from refeeding syndrome, as consuming too many nutrients after a long period of deprivation was harmful.

‘I once had a stable boy whipped for stepping on my foot,’ Ailill confessed out of the blue.

She grimaced at him. ‘Don't you think that's excessive?’ He shrugged and replied with his mouth full. ‘Maybe. That's how we educate servants.’

The two were silent for a few moments. The prince stared at the wall, and Harper watched him out of the corner of her eye.

He finally spoke again: ‘I sketched something for you’

‘You forgot my name and my face, but you remembered to draw me a picture?’

Ailill pulled a rolled-up piece of paper from the bulging front pocket of his AEONALIZE sweatshirt. Perhaps he had done it that very morning. She wanted to comment a little more, but she didn't want to upset him.

The drawing was done in crayon, with the spirals and lines typical of Celtic art.

The figures were humanoid, one larger with a crown and another bulky one surrounded by smaller humanoids. Harper immediately pressed it against her thighs so she wouldn't see it; the image made her brain cells bristle.

‘That's very pretty,’ she replied as if talking to a child, and thankfully that was enough for Ailill, who sketched a smile.

‘You're the fat one, and the ones around you are my little bastards.’

‘How nice.’

‘It's the future,’ he continued.

Harper jumped up from the armchair and put the uncomfortable picture in a drawer where it couldn't hurt her. He excused himself with the idea that it was too valuable a piece to lose, which Ailill readily accepted, as it seemed to work in his favour.

She tried to change the subject. ‘Would you say I'm fat?’ He looked at her for a few moments before shaking his head.

‘If you're referring to my sketch, I drew you that way because women tend to gain weight after pregnancy.’ He gave her another appreciative look as he chewed on a piece of the bar. He seemed to like what he saw, present and future.

‘Oh. That's true.’ Harper massaged her brow with her index finger and thumb, trying to push the memories back into the corner of her consciousness where they would be far enough away that they couldn't affect her good mood.

‘I'm sure you already know that Syn is going to send us on our first mission. You have a week to recover, then we'll have to go back to the lab, and they'll give us another disinfectant bath.’ She narrated the entire process in the vain hope of making it easier for him, but he seemed annoyed. ‘Before all that, they're going to insert your AEONALIZE ME chip.’ She said, clasping her hands together as if in prayer. It wasn't a long process, nor was it the most unpleasant the company had to offer, but that's not saying much.

They began by securing the employee to a stretcher, and then, with a syringe, they injected the chip into the frontal lobe, passing through a short path that nature had left just behind the eyes.

Ailill didn't enjoy the explanation, and Harper didn't enjoy giving it, but they both knew what happened when someone objected.

‘Save your words, lass-o-mine, I'll deal with that nonsense when the time comes.’