When he finally spoke, his voice came out quieter than intended, or maybe exactly as intended. Things said in a greenhouse at night seemed to earn their own register.
“I love you.”
Three words. He’d structured them, assessed them, run them through the same mechanism that processed threat assessments and resource calculations and probable outcomes of actions taken and not taken. He’d known the truth of them for longer than he could honestly account for. But spoken aloud, directly, without a vine’s gesture or a plant’s growth to carry the meaning sideways—
They landed differently than he’d expected.
Heavier. Cleaner. Like a root finally finding rock bottom.
Selena’s thumb moved against his jaw. She didn’t look surprised. She looked like someone arriving at something they’d been patient enough to wait for.
“I know,” she said. “And I love you too.”
He believed that.
She stood eventually, and he stood with her, and she took his vine instead of his hand—she’d always understood which was more natural—and they walked out of the greenhouse together into the corridor where the rest of the villa waited, quiet with late night.
Tomorrow, the countdown started in earnest. The day after that, he and V’dim would walk to the landing pad with their gear and their careful faces, and he would become, again, the version of himself that war required—the one who didn’t hesitate, who didn’t wait three hours in a greenhouse to say the obvious thing.
But tonight he carried this—witnessing the first tessara blooms with his nestqueen under the stars.
Whatever the war distilled him into, it would have to reckon with these roots.
They went deep.
22
Xylo
The bandages were sorted by width.
Xylo knew this because he had sorted them himself. Twice. The first time near dusk, when the light through the villa’s narrow windows had turned the supply room amber and he’d told himself he was simply being thorough. The second time an hour later, when thorough was no longer a sufficient lie and he’d needed something—anything—to keep his hands from going still.
Now, past midnight, he was doing it a third time.
He worked with the same methodical calm he brought to every procedure: roll, assess, align, stack. The coagulant strips went beside the plasma-burn compresses. The bone-knit splints nested in their case by size. He moved through the inventory the way he moved through triage—systematic, efficient, each item in its place—and tried not to think about Zirene.
Tried. Failed.
Zirene was at the front.
Xylo could feel Selena through their bond—the faint gold thread of her winding through him like a second pulse. Alive. Present. Distant. The bond gave him what was familiar: the steady hum of her consciousness, the low strain she carried like breath, the constant pressure of a Beacon holding too many minds at once.
But Zirene…
There was nothing for Xylo to catch.
No binding connection threaded Zirene into the clan’s web. No shared shieldline. No telltale flicker of pain, no sudden silence that would ripple through them all and make every spine go rigid at once. If Zirene took a wound, if he fell, Selena wouldn’t know in that instant—not the way the rest of them would know if one of the clanbrothers went down. There would be no internal alarm, no reflexive surge ofminesnapping tight around her ribs.
Only absence afterward. Only news delivered too late.
It sat wrong in Xylo’s chest, heavy and helpless. Zirene had chosen distance—duty demanded it, his pride demanded it, the war demanded it—but the cost of that choice was brutal in its simplicity.
Selena could feel the clan.
She could not feel her Shadow.
And Xylo hated that the universe had left that gap open, as if daring fate to slip a blade through it.
