Subject: Please.
No other text preview.
Just the word.
I stare at it for a long time.
The pulse in my jaw starts to tick.
I could open it. Just read it. No harm in reading, right?
I hover over the icon.
Click.
Delete.
Gone.
Because it’s not just harm I’m afraid of.
It’s what mightsurviveit.
What I mightletsurvive it.
I know myself too well. The way my body reacted to her voice. The way my hands remembered her before my mind did. If she walks through that door again with those eyes, I don’t know if I’ll scream or kneel.
And I can’t afford either.
Trust is sacred. In my culture. In my blood. You guard it like flame. You don’t hand it to someone who’d spit on your hearth and call it compromise.
So I kill the message.
I bury it with all the others.
The night after that, I stand in the alley behind the restaurant, smoke curling from my nostrils like old war breath. The dumpsters buzz with night-bugs. The streetlamps hum. I light a stick of crushed emberroot, hold it between my teeth, and breathe until the world fuzzes at the edges.
I can smell it coming. The erasure. The way they’ll smile while they do it. How they’ll say it’s not about race. Not about culture. Just about compliance.
Bullshit.
This isn’t regulation.
This is extermination by paper.
I think about the old days—when we stood shoulder to shoulder in the market during the height of the embargo. When human loyalists threw molotovs and we threw back pots of scalding stew. When we made barricades from overturned carts and sang freedom songs in three dialects.
Back then, I believed in unity. In resistance.
Now?
Now I just believe in closing the door before the next blade hits.
The emberroot burns to ash.
I flick it into the street and watch it crumble.
Back inside, the kitchen is empty. Quiet. I run my claws over the prep table—my temple, my altar, my battlefield. I light the old incense Kiv gave me, the one that smells like Vakutar pine and deep saltwater.
