[Elena]

The polished ebony threw back a warped reflection of my face — dark eyes, sharp jaw, the loose collar of the linen shift — distorted by the curve of the lacquer into something less like a person and more like a figure seen through deep water.

I stood before it, fingers resting against the raised fallboard.

The lacquer was cool beneath my fingertips. Not cold like concrete or steel, but an organic coolness that spoke of real wood beneath the finish. Spruce and maple, decades of resin aging in a European vault.

The piano was real. Not a projection. A genuine acoustic instrument tuned with obsessive precision — a single cent of deviation from A440 would register in the body before the ear could name it.

I pressed middle C with the pad of my index finger. Just enough to engage the hammer.

The note bloomed clean and bright. The vibration traveled up through the keybed, through bone, into my wrist, my forearm.

A real piano in a subterranean prison. Not a luxury. A diagnostic tool.

Alistair wanted to see what I would do when given an outlet. Music was emotional bandwidth — raw signal that bypassed the rational cortex and spoke directly to the limbic system. Play something melancholic and his software flags emotional deterioration. Play something frantic — Ligeti, Xenakis, clusters of dissonance — and he reads destabilization, increases containment pressure.

Both responses fed his model.

So I chose neither.

I sat down on the bench. Hard, unpadded wood biting into the backs of my thighs through thin linen. Spine straight, shoulders dropped, wrists level with the keyboard — the way Professor Aldridge had drilled into me during seven years of weekly lessons my father paid for because musical accomplishment looked good on a Princeton application.

I struck the opening chord of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor.

The sound detonated.

Three notes in the bass register — C-sharp, G-sharp, C-sharp an octave below — hit the walls and came back doubled, tripled, overtones stacking in the sealed chamber until the air itself felt thick with sound. The vibration traveled through the bench, through my pelvis, into my spine.

I played with controlled violence. Each strike deliberate, the full weight of my forearms behind every hammer.

This wasn't a performance. This was a siege weapon.

The Prelude's opening was built on repetition — the same chord struck again and again in a funeral march, each iteration heavier, darker, like a stone dropped from increasing height. Sound filled the suite the way water fills a sealed chamber: completely, leaving no pocket of silence untouched.

But beneath the thunder, I was working.

My left hand carried the bass line — the visible architecture Alistair's monitoring would track. My right hand played the melodic upper voices. And buried inside the left-hand accompaniment, threaded between the notated rhythms like a wire hidden inside a wall, I embedded a secondary pattern.

Four strikes. Pause. Two strikes. Pause. Four strikes.

A staccato pulse repeating every four bars, syncopated against the natural meter so subtly that a casual listener would hear nothing but Rachmaninoff. But a spectral decomposition of the waveform would reveal a structured, non-musical signal riding beneath the harmonics like a parasite inside a host.