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I want to call it monstrous.

I cannot.

I want to call it mercy.

I cannot do that either.

My eyes sting so badly that the symbols blur. “They lied to everyone.”

Sira’s voice is barely audible. “They protected everyone.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive.”

“No,” she says. “They are not.”

Ghar releases a breath that sounds like it has been trapped in his chest for years. “My people built temples from the lie.”

I turn toward him, my heart twisting. “Ghar⁠—”

“We sent warriors to die beneath it.” His voice remains controlled, but the control has splinters in it. “We told children their pain served a design. We told the dying they had not suffered for nothing.”

I step closer. “Maybe the lie wasn’t the part that mattered.”

His gaze cuts to mine, desperate and angry at the same time. “Do not soften this for me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“No, I am trying not to let the worst possible interpretation win by default because that is also a choice.” My voice rises, then shakes, and I force it lower. “I don’t know what this means. I really, really do not know what this means. But I know your kindness was not fake because the First Ones were careless. I know Teren mattered even if the universe started as an accident. I know Sira’s compassion is real, and Brakk’s courage is real, even when he complains like a malfunctioning trash compactor.”

Brakk wipes at his face with the heel of his hand. “That was almost touching until the trash compactor part.”

“You are welcome.”

Ghar looks at our joined hands. His thumb moves once across my knuckles, slow and uncertain. “And us?”

The question is quiet enough to destroy me.

The archive’s silver light pours over us, carrying records from before stable reality, before sacred design, before every comforting structure people built to keep despair from eating them alive. The jalshagar bond aches between us, as powerful as ever and suddenly stripped of every noble explanation anyone has ever put around it.

I want to tell him we are sacred.

I want to tell him the bond proves something.

I want to wrap meaning around us quickly enough that neither of us has to stand naked before the absurdity.

Instead, I tell the truth.

“I don’t know what started us,” I whisper. “I don’t know whether the bond is biology, Precursor engineering, First One residue, cosmic nonsense, or some awful combination of all of it.”

I hold his hand harder. “But I know what I feel when you stand beside me. I know what I choose when I reach for you. I know that whatever the origin is, the experience is mine.”

He stares at me, and the fortress in him cracks just enough for grief to show through.

“My experience is mine,” he says, as if testing the words against the ruins of his faith.

“Yes.”