I take the suppressor from Vera's palm.
The metal is warm. Body temperature, designed to integrate seamlessly, to feel less like a device and more like a part of you.I turn it over in my hands. The interior surface is lined with micro-contacts that will interface with the neural cluster at my brainstem, and the sight of them sends another wave of cold through me, clinical and intimate at once, like looking at the instruments laid out before your own surgery.
"Ethan." Aura's voice. Low. The first time she's said my name since we boarded the transport.
I look at her. Her mask is cracking at the edges, the tiniest fractures in the composure she built for this room, and through those cracks I can see the woman who presses her face into my throat at three in the morning when she thinks I'm sleeping.
"You don't have to," she says.
I place the suppressor against the base of my skull.
The micro-contacts find their targets. A faint click, more felt than heard, as the device seals against my skin. And then.
Silence.
Not the muted, pressured quiet of the station's dampeners, which at least left the ghost sensation of my abilities pressing against their constraints. This is total. Absolute. A door slamming shut inside my skull with a finality that makes my knees buckle.
I catch myself. Barely. One hand on the edge of a table, my knuckles white, my vision swimming not because the room is moving but because my brain is screaming for input that isn't coming. For my entire life, even before I understood what I was, there has been a layer of perception running underneath the standard five. A warmth. A current. The constant, low hum of other people's emotional presence, like background radiation I learned to filter and focus and use. It was always there. Even when I wasn't reaching, even when I was asleep, it was there, the quiet knowledge that the world was full of feeling and I was woven into it.
It's gone.
The room is the same. Vera stands where she stood, holding her drink, watching me with those cataloguing eyes. Aura is two steps to my left, her body angled toward mine, her hands at her sides. Ky is somewhere beyond the sealed door, waiting.
I know these things because I can see them. Hear them. The faint hum of the station's systems. The sound of my own breathing, ragged and too fast. The taste of copper on the back of my tongue where I bit down without realizing.
But I can't feel them. Not the way I always have. Vera is a body in a room. Aura is a body in a room. Shapes and sounds and the faint scent of whatever antiseptic the Consortium uses in its air filtration. I am alone in my skull in a way I have never been alone, sealed inside the cage of my own five senses with nothing, nothing, nothing reaching in or out.
The silence is so vast I could drown in it.
My hands are shaking. I flatten them against the table. The surface is smooth, slightly warm, alive in the way Consortium materials are alive, and I can feel it pulsing faintly under my palms but I can't feel it the other way, can't sense the station's low hum of engineered awareness the way I could even through the dampeners.
I am just a man. Standing in a room. With two women I can see but not reach.
I make myself look at Aura.
She is watching me with her whole body, every line of her taut with something I have to read from posture alone. No emotional resonance bleeding through. No warmth I can taste at the edge of perception. Just the visual: her eyes, wide. Her mouth, pressed into a line that trembles at one corner. Her hands, clenched at her sides with the same white-knuckle force I'm applying to this table.
And I want her.
Not the way I want her when my abilities are live, when desire is a doubled thing, my own hunger tangled with the echo of hers until I can't separate them. This is simpler. Starker. Stripped of everything but the animal truth of it. She is standing two steps away and I want to close the distance and put my mouth against her throat and feel her pulse under my lips, not because I can sense what it would do to her but because she is Aura, and my body knows her the way it knows how to breathe, below thought, below ability, below everything the suppressor can touch.
I still want her. I still love her. In the deafening silence where my abilities used to live, those facts remain like bones after a fire. The architecture burned away and the foundation is still here, solid under my feet, mine.
"Well," I say, and my voice sounds strange without the empathic feedback I usually use to modulate it, rougher than I intend, scraped raw by the silence. "I'm still here."
Vera watches. Assesses. The silence stretches, and I can't read her, can't feel the gears turning behind that precise exterior, can't taste whether she's satisfied or disappointed or recalculating. I have nothing but her face and her posture and the cool, unhurried way she brings her glass to her lips and drinks.
"Interesting," she says finally. "You genuinely care for her."
"I told you."
"Words lie. Biology doesn't."
She crosses the space between us. I don't flinch, though the animal part of my brain is screaming without the empathic data that usually tells me whether an approaching body intends harm or mercy. Her hands are cool and precise as they reach behind my head, and I feel the micro-contacts release one by one, tiny pricks of sensation as each one disconnects from my neural cluster.
The suppressor comes away. And the world floods back in.
I stagger. Truly stagger this time, my hand shooting out, catching nothing but air before Aura is there, her grip on my arm hard enough to bruise, holding me upright while my brain tries to process the tsunami of sensory input crashing through neural pathways that were sealed shut thirty seconds ago. Everything hits at once. Vera's cold, measured interest like a scalpel laid against my awareness. The station itself, that low hum of engineered consciousness pressing in from every wall. The observers beyond the sealed door, their curiosity a background haze. Ky's worry, bright and sharp, bleeding through from the corridor.
