I see her face in the firelight.
I hear her voice cracking when she told me not to cage her life.
I feel the way her body went slack in my arms when she finally blacked out.
I think of Oversight hands on her.
Scanners on her skull.
Needles in her spine.
I make a sound low in my throat that doesn’t belong to any human language I know.
“No,” I whisper.
This is the decision point.
This is the fork in the road they trained me my entire life to take correctly.
I can leave her.
Disappear.
Run.
Let the Nine and the Alliance tear each other apart over her without me in the middle.
Survive.
Again.
Or I can stay.
Fight two empires at once.
Expose myself permanently.
Become a public containment failure.
Become exactly the destabilizing variable they engineered me to never be.
I look down at my shaking hands.
“Fuck you,” I whisper to the ghosts of my handlers. “You don’t get to choose this one.”
I turn and walk into the other room.
She’s sleeping restlessly, brow furrowed, lips parted slightly as she breathes, one hand curled weakly against her chest like she’s holding onto something invisible.
She looks small like this.
Human.
Breakable.
My chest aches so hard it feels like something inside me is tearing loose.
“I’m not leaving you,” I say quietly, even though she can’t hear me. “I don’t care what it costs me. I don’t care what they do to me. I am not walking away from you.”
