She watches me carefully, not speaking.
I take a breath.
“The bond.”
She goes still.
Not tense—just alert. Like a switch flipped inside her. I nod, confirming it.
“I know you’ve felt it,” I say. “It’s not subtle.”
“No,” she says softly. “It isn’t.”
I shift forward slightly in the chair, forearms resting on my knees, palms open.
“Jalshagar,” I say, letting the word hang.
She mouths it once, lips moving soundlessly. Like it tastes strange in her mouth.
“It’s old,” I continue. “Vakutan. Doesn’t translate clean, but it means something like… soul convergence. Or tether. The knot.”
Roxy blinks slowly. “Sounds romantic.”
“It isn’t.”
Her brow lifts again. “Okay.”
I lean back and let my head rest against the chair’s edge.
“It’s a biological reality. Not metaphor. Not poetry. When it happens, it’s involuntary. Rare. Unpredictable.”
She’s watching me now the way she watches live feeds before a breach—intent and silent.
“The bond forms in high-stress environments,” I say. “Usually life-or-death. We don’t know why. Some think it’s chemical. Some think it’s ancestral memory. Doesn’t matter. What matters is once it happens, it’s permanent.”
I let that settle before going on.
“It’s not just emotion. Not just attraction. It’s…recognition. Something inside that says: This one.”
She exhales through her nose. Not laughing. Not smiling. Just letting the shape of this reality curl around her like smoke.
“I felt it,” she says after a while. “When you left for the compound. It was like…”
“Like something tearing.”
“Yeah.”
I nod.
“That’s the bond reacting to distance. Danger. Separation. And it’ll get worse the more we ignore it.”
She frowns. “You ignored it?”
I don’t answer right away.
Then I nod.
“I recognized it after Elkaru,” I admit. “When we came out of that collapse together. When I touched your neck and the static hit like a detonator.”
