“You said that before when you turned down the blood panel.” She didn’t move from the doorway. “If the symptoms are persisting, I need to understand why.”
“They’re not. I feel better.”
“You’ve lost weight. Your color’s off. And two of the training staff mentioned you’ve been dizzy during drills.” Her eyes dropped to my midsection for a fraction of a second. Professional instinct but my skin crawled. “I can’t treat what I can’t diagnose, Mira. One blood draw. Five minutes.”
She didn’t say the word. But the way her gaze lingered told me she was circling it.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “First thing. I promise.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“This time I mean it.”
She held my gaze long enough to communicate that she didn’t believe me, then left. I closed the door and leaned my forehead against the wood and pressed both hands to my stomach where heartbeats pulsed in a rhythm that was getting harder to hide.
The nausea had eased slightly since Solomon’s visit. But the improvement was fading already, the absence returning now that he was gone, and the exhaustion underneath was getting worse.
The babies needed their fathers close. My body was telling me that in every way it knew how, and I was running out of time to pretend otherwise.
Thiago found me in the archive room at noon.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time in here.” He stood in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me the way he always did. Fond on the surface, calculating underneath. “Find anything interesting?”
“Your record-keeping is meticulous.” I held up a binder of Purifier research notes, the decoy I kept on the table for exactly this moment. “I’m trying to understand the science behind the formula.”
“And do you?”
“Some of it. The neural targeting mechanism is elegant. Cruel, but elegant.”
He smiled. The compliment landed the way I’d intended: confirmation that his daughter appreciated the sophistication of his life’s work. He walked to the desk and sat on its edge. Casual, relaxed, the posture of a father having a chat with his daughter.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“The bond?”
I let the hesitation read as vulnerability. “It still pulls. Less than before, but it’s there. Some nights it’s worse.”
“That will fade. The further the separation, the weaker the connection.” He studied me. “Unless you’re feeding it.”
My heart rate held steady through sheer force of will. “Feeding it how?”
“Thinking about them. Dwelling on the connection. The bond is a parasite, Mira. It feeds on attention. Starve it and it dies.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.” The fondness in his voice didn’t waver but his eyes had gone flat. The same flat eyes my mother had described in her journal. “You’ve done remarkable work here. The trial proved that. I’d hate to see sentimentality compromise your progress.”
“It won’t.”
He held my gaze for three more seconds, then stood and squeezed my shoulder. “Good. I’ll have lunch sent to your room. You need to eat more.”
The door closed behind him and I exhaled until my lungs were empty.
Wyatt was waiting in the training yard at two.
We’d fallen into a routine over the past weeks: combat drills in the afternoon, intelligence sharing in the margins, trust built through repetition and proximity. He was good at this. Patient, steady, the kind of man who showed up at the same time every day and did the work without needing to be asked.
