"I don't know. I've never done this before."
"Neither have I."
"Then we'll figure it out."
Her hand came up and fisted in the front of my shirt. Not pulling, not pushing. Just holding. Her knuckles pressed against my sternum, and I could feel my own heartbeat reflected back through the pressure of her grip. We were both breathing hard, which seemed disproportionate for an argument about storage organization, but nothing about this was proportionate. We were two people who'd agreed to build a life together withoutknowing how to build anything that wasn't a weapon or a lie, and the fight had cracked open something that all our careful coexistence had been sealing shut.
"Together," she said. Her grip tightened in the fabric. "Since we're stuck with each other."
I covered her hand with mine. Not to remove it. Just to be there, on top of it, holding on to the thing that was holding on to me.
We stood like that for a while. Not kissing, not moving toward anything. Just breathing in the same small space, learning the specific tempo of each other's anger and finding that it wasn't so different from everything else we were learning. Clumsy. Honest. Harder than it should have been and worth more than I'd expected.
The next twodays settled into something that wasn't routine but approached it. Mornings in the intelligence hub, afternoons reviewing data, evenings in quarters where we orbited each other with decreasing caution. I noticed she read before sleeping, technical journals mostly, her lips moving slightly when she hit a passage that interested her. She noticed I paced when I was thinking, three steps to the viewport and three steps back, a habit I'd developed in much smaller rooms during my years with the Protocol.
We negotiated the storage unit. She kept her organizational system for shared spaces. I kept my entropy for my designated areas. The socks remained in their cylinders because, and I would never admit this to her face, her method was actually more efficient.
I saw Elissa three times in those two days.
Once in the commissary, where she was eating alone at a corner table with the focused intensity of someone fueling abody she was pushing hard. Her tray held twice the calories I'd have expected, all protein and complex carbohydrates, the diet of a person in serious physical training. She didn't look up when I entered. She didn't need to. The angle of her shoulders changed, a subtle contraction, the body's involuntary recognition of a threat even when the conscious mind was occupied elsewhere.
Once in the training corridor, through a viewport that looked down on one of the sparring rooms. Astra was with her, demonstrating something I couldn't see clearly, and Elissa was repeating the movement with a precision that bordered on obsessive. Her human body had changed in the weeks since I'd last allowed myself to look closely. Leaner. Harder. The softness burned away by whatever furnace she was stoking inside herself. She moved like someone who was trying to make her body into a weapon because the body she'd had before, the Nexari body, the body I'd played a role in taking from her, had been weapon enough.
Once in the corridor outside the intelligence hub, passing each other with three feet of space between us that felt like three inches. Her eyes met mine for exactly one second. Long enough for me to see everything in them. The anger I deserved. The grief I'd helped cause. And underneath both, something worse than hatred. Understanding. She knew what I was, and she was watching, and she was waiting, and I couldn't tell what she was waiting for.
I should have spoken to her. I should have stopped, and turned, and said the things that needed saying. I'm sorry. I know what I cost you. I know that sorry doesn't cover it and probably nothing ever will. I should have stood there and let her say whatever she needed to say to me, taken whatever she needed to give me, because I owed her that. I owed her more than that.
I wasn't brave enough. Not yet.
The cowardice tasted like copper in the back of my throat, and I carried it with me into our quarters that evening, where Aura was waiting with an expression I hadn't seen before. Controlled, the way she always was, but with something moving underneath the control like current under ice.
"Elissa Torrence came to see me today."
I went very still. The kind of stillness I'd learned in training, when the handler's voice changed pitch and you knew the next words would determine whether you walked out of the room. Every muscle locked. My breath held between one beat and the next.
"She wanted to know what you'd told me. About her. About what you did."
"What did you say?"
"I told her the truth." Aura's voice was level, each word placed with the same precision she applied to everything. "That you confessed. That you feel guilty. That I married you anyway."
The three facts of my life, laid out in a sequence that sounded like an accusation because it was one.
"She asked why," Aura said.
My throat was tight. "What did you tell her?"
Aura's expression held steady, unreadable in the way that meant she was reading me and choosing not to let me read her back. The asymmetry of it settled in my stomach like a stone.
"I told her I didn't know," she said. "That I'm still figuring out why I married you."
The words hung between us in the recycled air of our shared quarters, above our negotiated storage system and our carefully divided space and the two toothbrushes touching in their cup. Elissa's ghost stood in the room with us, the woman I'd helped destroy watching through the eyes of the woman I was trying to build something with. Both of them asking the same question. Both of them waiting for an answer I didn't have.
This couldn't end cleanly. I knew that the way I knew the architecture of lies, instinctively, structurally, in the bones of the thing. Some damage doesn't resolve. It just changes shape, moves through the people it touches, becomes the weather they live inside.
I was afraid of how it would end. More than that, I was afraid that I already knew, and that knowing wouldn't be enough to stop it.
Chapter 7
