"Since when do we?"
The sound he makes is almost a laugh. Almost. It lives in his chest and never quite reaches his mouth, and I feel it more than hear it, a vibration against my cheek that settles something restless in my bones.
I lie there in the near-dark and think about what I'm leaving behind.
My mother, who looked at her infant daughter and saw raw material. Who spent eighteen years shaping me into a weapon with a Consortium crest and a smile that could open doors before the blade came out. I was her finest work. Her masterpiece of manipulation and genetic potential. I wonder if she knows I'm gone. I wonder if she's already building my replacement.
The Consortium itself, that vast organism of power and protocol that I was born to serve the way a heart is born to pump blood. Useful. Essential. Never asked if it wanted the job. I spent my whole life believing the framework was the point, that the structure held meaning, that serving it well was the same as having purpose.
I know better now. The structure was a cage with a prestigious name, and purpose isn't something they hand you.It's something you tear out of the wreckage with your own bloody fingers.
I think about the life I thought I'd have. Political marriage to a Consortium-approved match. A position in the upper echelons of diplomatic command. Children engineered for optimal integration. A life measured in usefulness, catalogued in service records, ending in a footnote on some classified file.
None of it. None of it touches what I have now.
The man beside me shifts, pulling me tighter against his body, and the warmth of him is so real, so solidly, stubbornly present, that the rest of it fades like signal noise.
"You're thinking loud enough to wake the whole ship," Ethan murmurs.
"Just saying goodbye to some things."
"Anything worth keeping?"
I turn my face into his neck. Press my lips to the place where his pulse beats slow and sure, a man so fundamentally unafraid of what's coming that his heart won't even bother to race.
"Just you."
His arms tighten. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. The pressure of his hold says everything. Mine. Here. Not letting go. The vocabulary of a man who speaks fluent silence.
The final morning, if morning means anything when the stars have been replaced by something that bends light into colors that shouldn't exist.
We stand at the main viewport. The anomaly fills it completely now, a living wound in the fabric of space, its edges rippling with energy that makes my teeth ache and my skin prickle with static. The geometries have gotten worse. Or better. Structures that fold through themselves, passages that seem to lead both inward and outward simultaneously, depth without distance, surface without edge.
The threshold.
Between here and somewhere else.
Ethan stands beside me, close enough that our arms touch. I feel the heat of him through both our sleeves, feel the steady architecture of his body, the coiled readiness that never fully leaves him even in stillness.
"Last chance to turn back," he says.
I look at him. His profile against the impossible light, jaw set, eyes fixed on the thing that's about to swallow us whole. There's no fear in his face. There's focus. Calculation. The expression of a man who has already decided and is simply waiting for reality to catch up.
"Was that ever an option?" I ask.
He turns to me then. Those eyes. The ones that saw me before I saw myself, that stripped away every layer of Consortium conditioning and diplomatic armor and found something underneath worth keeping. Worth claiming. Worth following into a wound in the universe.
"For you, maybe." His voice is low. Certain. "Not for me."
"Then we're well matched."
His mouth curves. Not quite a smile. Something fiercer. Something that belongs to me, only to me, the expression he never shows another living soul. He takes my hand, and his fingers lace through mine with the precision of a man who has memorized every way our hands fit together.
The ship begins its final approach.
I feel it in the deck plates first, a vibration that climbs through my boots and settles in my chest. The hum of the engines changes pitch, straining against forces the engineers never designed for. Warning lights flicker at the edges of the viewport, amber pulsing to red, the ship's systems registering something beyond their parameters.
Through the viewport, the anomaly reaches for us. Tendrils of light, if light is even the word, curling around the ship's hull like fingers closing around a throat. The colors deepen. Purples that shade into frequencies my eyes can't process, leaving afterimages like bruises on my retinas. The geometries accelerate, folding and unfolding, and for one vertiginous moment I see through the surface of it, into something vast and structured and alive with purpose.
