"Horgox." She doesn't turn from the beacon. "What you said. During the disconnection."
The word. The one that escaped against her shoulder.
"I heard you," she says. "I'm not going to make a thing of it. But I heard you."
"It was involuntary."
"I know." The circuit tester clicks. A pause. "That's why it mattered."
She goes back to work. I sit by the fire, re-learning the feeling of existing in a body that is no longer being punished for existing, and I do not say the word again.
But I think it. Every time her hair falls across her face. Every time her fingers move with that competent precision. Every time she glances over her shoulder, quick and careful, and catches me watching, and holds the look for a beat too long before turning back.
Little flare.The name my body gave her before my mind agreed to it.
The markings on my arms pulse gold, and I let them. For the first time in decades of conditioning, I let my body say what it wants to say without trying to silence it.
Later, she'll ask me what the colours mean. Later, I'll have to decide how much truth to give her.
Right now, the fire is warm, and my skin is my own, and the woman who freed me is building our rescue out of the wreckage of my chains.
It is the closest thing to peace I have felt in my entire life.
6
What Gets Named Gets Kept
Krilly
Thebeaconworkgoesslowly, because my hands won't cooperate.
Not a fine-motor issue. Not fatigue, not cold, not any of the practical explanations I'm offering myself while I fumble the third connection in a row. The problem is that the seam pattern on this particular circuit junction matches the layout of his chest plate, and every time my fingers trace the connection path, my brain helpfully replays the feeling of his skin beneath my palms, the ridge of scar tissue under the metal, the way his whole body locked when I freed the first node and the sound that came out of him—
The circuit tester slips. Hits the stone surface with a clatter that echoes through the cave.
"Everything okay?" Horgox's voice from the entrance, where he's keeping watch with his back to me. Deliberately keeping his back to me. We've been very good about not facing each other this morning, which is either professional restraint or mutual cowardice.
"Fine. Just butterfingers." I retrieve the tester and press my cold knuckles against my cheeks. The heat there has nothing to do with the fire. "Bebo, how's the integration looking?"
"Component integration proceeding at sixty-seven percent. Your connection accuracy has dropped fourteen percent since you began this session, which correlates with the seventeen occasions your breathing rhythm has disrupted in the past hour." A pause. "Shall I provide a breakdown of what you were looking at during each disruption?"
"No, Bebo."
"I have the data if you change your mind."
Horgox makes a sound from the entrance that could be a cough. It isn't a cough. His shoulders are doing something suspicious.
"The secondary array needs calibration before we can test transmission range," I say, aggressively professional. "I'll need to reconfigure the amplifier housing, which means accessing the—"
He turns to hand me a water canteen, and his forearm brushes my shoulder.
The contact lasts less than a second. My skin registers it like a circuit completing, and the sense-memory hits before I can block it: straddling his thigh, the drag of fabric against muscle as I shifted to reach that final connection, his hands gripping my hips with the kind of controlled strength that saidI could move you wherever I wanted and I'm choosing to let you lead—
I drop the circuit tester again.
"You seem distracted," he says, and his voice is carefully neutral except for the faintest rough edge underneath, the harmonic undertone that I now know means he's controlling something.
"I'm not distracted. I'm calibrating."
