Later, after the supplies are distributed and the hallway lights dim to conserve power, I slip into the old maintenance closet where the signal's strongest and tap into the secure line Kenron hard-coded into my pad.
Three tones. A pause. Then his face blinks onto the screen.
I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath for hours.
“Hey,” I whisper.
His voice comes low and rough. “Hey yourself.”
His eyes scan the screen. “You alright?”
“Tired. Hungry. But yeah. I’m alright.”
A pause.
He looks like hell. Eyes shadowed, stubble thicker, tension wound into his shoulders. But there’s something in his gaze that softens when he sees me.
I don’t even try to hide how I feel.
“I miss you.”
“Same.”
Another pause. We don’t fill it with nonsense. We just breathe through it, tethered by static and unspoken things.
“I talked to a Drevia kid today,” I say eventually.
“Oh yeah?”
“Asked if I was your mate.”
His mouth twitches. “That so?”
“Yeah. I told him I didn’t know.”
He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t tease. He just looks at me, long and deep like he’s memorizing my soul.
I add, quieter, “But I wanted to say yes.”
That silence again. Not empty. Full. Heavy. Fragile.
Then he says, “We make it through this, we’ll talk about what we call each other.”
“You think we’ll make it?”
He doesn’t answer immediately.
I hate that. But I respect it too.
At last, he says, “If we don’t... then we become ghosts.”
My throat tightens.
He adds, softer now, “But not forgotten ones.”
And that’s enough.
For now.
