Later, I find her at the edge of the lot, head tilted up to the smog-smeared stars.
“I don’t want to fight,” I say, stepping beside her.
“Then don’t start them.”
“I didn’t mean to. That guy just?—”
“Looked at me like I was more than leftovers?”
I flinch.
She softens. A breath. A beat.
“You hurt me,” she says quietly. “Worse than anyone ever has. I know you didn’t mean to. But that doesn’t erase the fallout.”
“I’m not here to erase anything. I just want to be where you are.”
Her eyes shine in the half-light. “That’s not fair.”
“Life’s not.”
We sit in silence for a while, just watching a delivery skimmer buzz past overhead.
CHAPTER 22
ALAINA
“You’re lookin’ at him again,” Jorla says around a straw, her pink cocktail fizzing like it's got something to prove.
I blink, caught mid-gawk. Across the bar, Troka’s hunched under the hood of the hoverfridge again, that stupid heroic silhouette outlined in flickering light. “No, I’m not.”
Jorla snorts. “Girl, if you stared any harder, he’d catch fire.”
“He already did,” I mutter. “Years ago.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” I slap a towel down and start wiping a perfectly clean table. Classic me—over-cleaning when my brain’s a mess.
Later, after closing, he stays behind to fix the neon flicker above the taps. The bar hums with that late-night silence only the dead of shift knows—the kind full of ghosts and gum wrappers and half-swept regrets.
“I think it’s the capacitor,” he says, elbow-deep in sparking wires.
“I think it’s cursed,” I reply.
He smirks. “Everything here is cursed. Even you.”
“Excuse me?” I throw the towel at him. “You saying I’m hexed?”
“Doomed,” he deadpans. “Cursed. Bewitched. You walk like sin and sass had a baby.”
“That’s poetic,” I grumble, turning away too fast.
But I hear the way his breath catches. Feel it like heat against my spine.
He doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
