I stood by the door, dripping wet, clutching my bag to my chest like a shield.
"Juno," I said.
He leaned his head back against the cushion, squeezing his eyes shut against the harsh light. He took a breath that rattled in his chest, a sound of fluid and panic.
"I tried," he whispered, his voice cracking. "I thought I could hold it until we got here. I thought I could purge the blockers."
"Hold what?" I asked. I kicked my shoes off and moved closer. My steps were hesitant, careful. The energy coming off the three of them was volatile, a powder keg waiting for a spark.
Mateo moved back, just an inch, giving Juno space but staying within striking distance. Stephen was locking the door, engaging deadbolts that looked industrial, his back to us.
Juno opened his eyes. He looked at me.
And for the first time, I saw him. Not the rebel. Not the manipulator who played the press like a fiddle.
I saw the biology he had been hiding behind the narrative for years.
"How long?" Mateo asked, his voice rough, staring at the floor.
"Suppressants are failing," Juno gasped, clutching his stomach. He turned his head away, a deep, burning flush of shame coloring his neck. "Since the broadcast. When Vance played the clip... the stress trigger... I couldn't stop the spike. I thought I had more time."
I stared, my brain finally discarding the spreadsheet entirely. "Time for what?"
Juno looked at me. Then at Mateo. Then at Stephen’s rigid back. Then finally, painfully, back at me.
His amber eyes were wet, swimming with tears fueled by a hormonal crash I couldn't comprehend.
"Time to tell you the truth," he whispered.
TWENTY-FOUR
Rowan
Juno sat on the dusty leather sofa, his knees pulled up to his chest, shaking so violently that the cushions vibrated against the frame. The air in the cabin was thick, oppressive, and tasted like a bakery burning to the ground, sugar scorched black, resinous timber, and a desperate, clawing sweetness that coated the back of my throat.
My hindbrain had known. It had flagged the data during the argument about my mother, during the car ride, during the broadcast. But my conscious mind, the part of me that relied on categories and neatly labeled boxes, had refused to process the error.
"Omega," Juno said. The word fell out of his mouth like a tooth he’d just ripped loose. "Heat triggered by the stress event. Suppressants compromised."
He didn't offer an apology. He just listed the structural failures.
I didn't yell. I didn't throw the folio I was still clutching like a shield. I went very, very quiet.
I am a processor. I take chaos and I build a spreadsheet around it until it makes sense. But the spreadsheet I wasbuilding in my head was rewriting the last week of my life in real-time.
Every interaction. Every look. The way Mateo and Stephen moved around him, not just with respect, but with a gravitational pull I had misidentified as friendship. The way Juno monitored the room, manipulating the emotional temperature not just because he was charming, but because he was hyper-sensitive to the biological data.
The Anchor Protocol.
The realization hit me harder than the smell. I thought about the drafting session. I thought about the specific language Juno had insisted on,retroactive voidance of any provision monitoring or commodifying reproductive cycles.
I had assumed he’d researched it. I had assumed he was a brilliant empathetic strategist who had read about the horror stories in trade magazines.
He hadn't read them. He remembered them.
Juno didn't build the Anchor Protocol from the outside, looking in at the damage. He built it from the inside, looking for a way out of the architecture that was designed to crush him.
"You wrote it from memory," I whispered.
