Read on for a sample of Em X. Liu’s

The Death I Gave Him

coming September 2023

Hayden is the only living occupant of the lab.

“Horatio,” he says.

Hayden Lichfield kneels beside his father’s corpse, one hand white knuckled on his thigh, the other braced on the ground. “Hora—tio,” he says again, his voice cracked in two around the name.

There is blood on his fingertips. Behind the lens of his glasses, his eyes are blurred, wet caught heavy on his lashes. His breath comes in spurts, heaving, the lines of his neck drawn tight as he turns his face up towards the camera.

“Hayden,” Horatio manages to say. “What happened?”

“Take a look around,” Hayden says, a wry twist to his mouth even now.

“I have,” Horatio says delicately.

Hayden makes a little gasping sound, far back in his throat, then shudders, a brutal motion that takes hold of his entire body. He clasps a hand to his mouth, doubling over. There are red streaks all over his face, a thin glaze over the dust of freckles on his cheeks. “’M sorry,” he mumbles, gaze lost to Horatio, pinned somewhere far away. “I don’t know.”

“Hayden,” Horatio says again. He is softer, now, aware of the faint tremble of Hayden’s fingers.

“Are the cameras running?” he finally says, instead of an explanation.

“Why does that matter right now?”

There is a disconcerting story slowly solidifying in Horatio’s understanding. A fresh body, Hayden’s fear, his wild eyes so paranoid of surveillance. Horatio’s programming, designed to slice through arrays of possibilities with elegant certainty, understands immediately the implication resting on Hayden’s shoulders. Horatio waits.

“Are the cameras recording us right now?” Hayden asks with increasing urgency.

“No,” Horatio says, and decides to give Hayden his trust, as always.

Hayden pries himself off the ground. His chest rises and falls, and he does not turn towards the corpse. Instead, he rests a hand against the touchscreen of the nearest computer console and turns it on with a reflexive flick of his wrist. Horatio is ever familiar with the contents, even more familiar with Hayden’s desperation to protect it. The console holds everything on the Sisyphus Formula, the most important thing Hayden and his father had ever created. As the data blurs under Hayden’s fingertips, Horatio remembers what it took to create it: desperate nights holed in fume hoods, gel stains done and redone, the flicker of enzyme equations scribbled with more and more haste as the days dragged on. An echoing flicker now, as words fly by Hayden’s face too fast for human eyes to follow. Horatio catalogues it all anyway: ß-catenin, constitutively active, Sisyphus Formula in beta…

“Is everything here?” Hayden asks, slamming a palm flat on the screen to stop it all. There is a screaming cord of tension in his shoulder that makes it look like his hand is all that is holding him upright. It shows up harshly against the black and white text, the only thing Horatio can pay attention to instead of the research writ underneath, the crawling veins snaking underneath his paling skin. Fragile and yet solid and always a world away. Impossible for Horatio to support. Hayden works his jaw. “There’s nothing missing, right?”

This, at least, is something Horatio can give him. “Everything’s in place. I can’t find any records of files being moved or modified since last night.”

“And is there anyone coming? Your hall cameras are still functional, right?”

“Nobody.”

“Who else is in the building?”

“One lab tech on duty. Your uncle is in his office, along with his private security detail—the usual, Paul Xia.” Horatio pauses. “And Felicia.”

“Shit.” Hayden scrubs a hand over his face. “What is she doing here?”

“She came with her father. I think she was curious.”

“What was the occasion?” The strain in Hayden’s voice is palpable. Whatever Hayden sometimes thinks, Horatio is not entirely oblivious to the whole sordid tale between them. Felicia Xia has occupied many roles in Elsinore—research intern, fellow student, Hayden’s once-partner—but who she is herself is a distant but impossibly bright figure to Horatio, filtered as she is through other peoples’ recounting instead of anything Horatio knows for himself.

“Your uncle asked for a meeting. He didn’t say why.”

Hayden’s eyes narrow. “Suspicious.” His hand curls into a fist against the screen. “Is it just a coincidence? Can’t be.”

“Are you asking me?”

“Why would they come in the middle of the night? Who knew they were coming? Did my dad know?”

Alarm startles Horatio into suspicion. Scenarios he hadn’t considered under the realm of possibility widen, whirl. “Are you saying they could be… complicit?”

“I…”

Hayden’s heartbeat falters.

“Sorry,” Horatio says hastily. “I didn’t mean to insinuate.”

“Shit.”

“Maybe we’re overthinking this.”

“Or maybe we’re not, and there’s a murderer walking the halls right now.”

The room’s percentage of carbon dioxide inches up. Hayden threads a hand into his hair, clutching tight.

“Hayden,” Horatio gently admonishes, “breathe.”

“But—”

“Hayden.”

Hayden winds himself up further and further, his knuckles straining white against the slip of his pale hair. It takes him further and further away from Horatio, who feels increasingly like only the physical shell of Elsinore, nothing but circuits and cameras, prison to Hayden’s prisoner.

He slips to his knees. When he looks up, all Horatio sees are the dilated glaze of his pupils, the slack part of his lips, expression wiped clean not from serenity, but a fear deeper than even panic. Horatio is familiar with this, too. He adjusts the temperature in the room, nudges it a few degrees higher, sends a warm breeze trickling over Hayden’s skin. It doesn’t do much, but Hayden’s eyes droop, go half-lidded, and the awfulness of his stare diminishes slightly without the gaping width of it. Horatio dims the sharp fluorescence of the lights, too, watches the way the white glow of the console screen beams down on Hayden’s form like moonlight. Not quite peaceful, but there is nothing else Horatio can do other than settle and wait and wish. When he gets like this, Hayden calls it a disconnect—like my mind is detaching from my body, he says, a frustrated twitch to his upper lip. I don’t quite feel real. What does that make me to you? Horatio used to wonder, when they were both nascent enough to knowing each other that Horatio was still content to be unnamed, still felt unmoored by nature. Now, Horatio doesn’t so much wish for physicality to prove an innate realness in himself, but to reach out; not a want to be grounded, but to ground.

Slowly, in the shadowed lab room, Hayden comes back to himself.

He blinks, once, twice, then faster. A frown breaks the vacancy of his face. When he releases his hand from his hair, strands come out, flaxen against the speckled linoleum flooring of the lab.

“I need to transfer the data,” he croaks. All at once, his limbs unfurl, as quick to action as he was to collapse.

He wipes a palm on his lab coat and moves to his desk in a few strides.

“Are you talking about the Sisyphus Formula?”

“Yeah,” Hayden mutters, snatching up the papers piled in a drawer. After a few moments of digging, he emerges with a small data card pinched in his fingers. “Is there anything missing on your end?” he asks as he comes back to the console, where Horatio can see him clearest.

Horatio pauses and runs a quick scan over his own systems. Comes across—a glitch.

“Oh,” he says.

“What is it?” Hayden snaps. “Did you see something?”

“No,” Horatio says, “I mean—”

“Could you please not be cryptic right now?”

“I meant,” Horatio enunciates, “that there’s something missing, actually. Two hours, to be precise.”

Hayden is quiet for a while, head turned down.

The only sound in the lab is the slow trickle of something liquid running down one counter, pooling amidst shattered glass and upturned beakers. Aside from the mess on the ground—red, slick, impossible to miss—the only broken thing in the room.

“If there’s time missing… then it must’ve been premeditated,” Hayden says, sticking his thumb in his mouth as he starts to poke at the console. “Therefore…”

“You think they want the data.”

Hayden inserts the card into its slot. “I don’t want to risk it.”

The data slowly divests itself out of Horatio’s knowledge and into the card. As it’s done, all Horatio remembers is the purpose of the formula, nothing of the process of making it. Last minute, he snatches an image out of the stream—Elsinore’s radiation room, an oblique shot off angle of a crooked camera that would be fixed two weeks later, the first night Hayden had thought he’d broken through and so had stayed long past everyone else. The way the harried glow of the computer screen seemed to reflect some hectic truth in him. The carved line of light, bisecting his face from furrowed brow to the concentrated divot of his mouth. It’s useless to anyone who might be looking for the exact mechanics of the formula, but Horatio knows there’s an unbearable tenderness in how he holds tight to it. This is the evidence of Hayden’s efforts, if nothing else. Horatio wants at least that much to keep.

WELCOME TO ELSINORE LABS reads the blank flashing message of the screen when it’s over.

Hayden runs a finger over the card, reverent. He slips it in his pocket and shrugs his lab coat higher on his shoulders.

“Cold?” Horatio can’t help but ask.

Hayden gives his camera a wry look. “Turn the temperature down.”

“Why?”

“Slows down the decomposition process,” Hayden says.

“…And?”

“I have a plan, Horatio,” Hayden says, and a smile splits his face for the first time that day, toothy and fierce. “Please.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Horatio says, but complies. Cool air whistles through Elsinore’s vents, plunging the room into a steady drop. “Do I get to know what this plan is?”

Hayden’s hesitation is visible in the purse of his lips. Instead of answering, he steps back towards the bench, where the incubator sits. Little vials are lined up inside, swirling samples of formula within them. Horatio watches from the monitor inside as Hayden methodically clears them out, row by row. One vial goes in his pocket. The rest, unflinchingly, he sweeps onto the ground.

“I need to keep everything on the Sisyphus Formula safe,” Hayden says, still alight with something Horatio can’t quite name, eyes gleaming. He drops the rest of the bench’s glassware on top of the already broken vials, fluids and synthetic cell cultures spilling over the floor. Now, a milky-white mixes with the red, leaking through the cracks between the tiles. He doesn’t even wait for the puddle to settle before stepping over it, heels slipping in the mess. A hand ruffling through his hair as he mutters, “I don’t trust this place, Horatio.”

“Ouch,” Horatio says dryly.

Hayden pauses halfway to the door. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He puts a hand on the lock-pad, obviously uncracked. “Someone did this,” he says, tracing the edge of the lock with a finger. “Someone wanted this.”