The glow of the medgel applicator casts her face in cool blue. Her brow’s furrowed, mouth tight. Concentrated. She’s got that reporter’s intensity even now—like she’s threading truth out of blood and bone.
I watch her hands. They don’t shake. Not even when she presses gauze into the gash and I grunt loud enough to shake the walls.
“Told you,” she mutters. “Big baby.”
“You’re enjoying this,” I growl.
“Maybe a little.”
She finishes wrapping my shoulder and sits back on her heels. There’s a smear of my blood across the side of her hand, red against her pale skin. She wipes it on her pants without blinking.
“You done?” I ask.
“For now.” She leans back against a crate, legs stretched out, arms loose at her sides. “You’re lucky. That shot missed the artery by half an inch.”
“Luck,” I snort. “Sure.”
The silence after isn’t heavy. Just… there. Present. Honest.
I study her in the blue wash of the medgel light. Her face is bruised across one cheekbone, lips cracked, dirt smudged along her jaw. She smells like copper and old sweat and that cheap field soap the medics hand out like candy.
She smells like war.
But there’s something else, too. Something cleaner. I didn’t notice it before. Maybe I didn’t want to.
She’s the only one I’ve ever let this close while I’m bleeding. That thought hits like a hammer wrapped in velvet. I’ve been torn open on twenty different battlefields, held together by corpsmen with hands like machines. Never trusted one of them.
But her? She got through my armor without asking.
I don’t know when it happened. When she stopped beingAtaxian Amy,the reporter I was supposed to loathe, and became just… Amy.
I don’t say it out loud. I wouldn’t even know how. But the thought sticks, prickling under my skin worse than the wound.
She looks at me. Really looks. “You thinking again?”
“Trying not to.”
She smiles. It’s not a big one. Not that smug curl she wears when she’s poking holes in Kanapa’s logic. Just a quiet, tired,I see youkind of smile.
“You’re not what I expected,” she says.
“Good,” I grunt. “Neither are you.”
She shifts closer, resting her head against the crate beside me. Our arms barely touch. It shouldn’t feel like anything. We’ve been elbow-to-elbow in tighter quarters before. But this time? It’s different.
This time, it feels like the silence has teeth.
Like it’s waiting for something neither of us can say.
A cold gust slips through the broken wall. I pull my arm tighter across my chest, wincing as the bandages stretch.
She catches the movement. “Try not to tear it open again.”
“I’ll live.”
“Promise?”
Her voice is too soft. Too damn human.
