“Same. They must be close to a sweep.”
Static turns into Kiro’s clipped whisper.
“Blackbird to Gray Wolf. The Council bought the story. They think you’re dead. Anton and Inessa are driving the narrative hard. But they’re hunting everywhere.”
Snow taps against glass as Kiro pauses.
“They want proof your bodies burned in that van.”
Damian stiffens at the same time as me.
He answers, low and steady, “Then they won’t find what they want.”
The transmission cuts, swallowed by static. I reach for the switch with numb fingers and kill the line.
For a moment, all I hear is the fire and Damian’s heavy yet controlled breathing.
“They really believe it,” I echo. “That we’re dead.”
“They need to.” His tone doesn’t waver. “It buys us time. Not much.”
Time seems to be everywhere and nowhere inside this snow globe we’re trapped in.
Our routine is a strange one. We spend the daylight hours rebuilding connections one encrypted whisper at a time.
Damian maps out contact chains from memory, cross-referencing political grudges and family loyalties until the table is littered with notes written in three languages and two alphabets. He writes fast, like the ink is burning through paper.
Meanwhile, I keep the equipment alive. The generator has the temperament of a retired warhorse. I coax it, clean it, bribe it with hope and profanity. Some days, it behaves. Others, it seems to wait for my fingers to go numb before sputtering out.
Between these tasks, Damian and I have begun doing something I never thought we would do.
Talking. Not strategy, not danger. The isolation has stripped us of our armor, it seems. Here, we use different words.
Sometimes he asks me about what I wanted to be before all this. As if “before” is a place I can still remember without wincing. Sometimes I ask him if he ever sleeps—not the kind where your body collapses, but the kind where the world stops pressing its thumbs into your windpipe.
He never lies, but he rarely answers directly. His honesty is diagonal, like sunlight through old curtains.
At night, when exhaustion has rubbed our edges raw, our conversations take on a tone that feels… dangerous.
Danger has always been part of Damian, stitched into the fabric of him—but this emotional kind, the version that threatens the walls we spent months building is very new.
It starts small: a shared laugh over our matching dark circles, a moment of accidental eye contact that lasts one heartbeat too long, a brush of fingers when passing tools.
Each one is tiny, insignificant, a chisel blow at something I pretended was impenetrable.
It’s on the fifth night—at least, I think it’s the fifth—that something shifts.
The fire is low, casting the room in a warm, flickering half dark. Damian is sitting on the floor across from me, backs both against the hearth, our legs stretched toward the rug that still smells faintly of cedar.
He rubs his thumb against the edge of a compass, one of the old ones, brass and worn smooth. His eyes are unfocused.
“You’re not sleeping,” I say quietly.
He huffs a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Can’t.”
“Why?”
He hesitates. That in itself is new. Damian rarely hesitates; he calculates. But now, he struggles with the weight of something unsaid.
