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I’ll set down only what belongs in an account of the day, which is this: neither of us goes carefully, and there’s no need to. No arithmetic is left anywhere in it. She has filed a deposit in four archives with her uncle’s name at the head and mine absent, and I have refused a contract before witnesses and will forfeit a bond for it inside the month, and each of those things predates this room and neither is in doubt.

Ten millennia of patient record just past the partition, transmitting outward without pause, and for a stretch the two of us are the only presence in that archive that isn’t a record of something already over.

I pull her down onto the warm floor. The stone radiates gentle heat into both of us. I strip her fast—mouth on her neck, hands shoving her pants and underwear down her thighs in one rough motion. She yanks my shirt open, nails scraping down the plating of my chest as I free my cock, already hard and aching. I shove her legs apart, settle between them, and sink into her in one deep thrust, groaning at how wet and tight she is after everything the day has already taken from both of us.

“Fuck yes—give it to me,” she moans, heels digging into my back. “Harder, Draeven. Like you mean it.”

I brace on my forearms so I don’t put weight on the damaged shoulder and fuck her with long, powerful strokes. Every ridge along the underside of my cock drags along her walls on the way out and forces back in, the wet sound of it loud in the small room. She arches under me, gasping, one hand fisted in my spines while the other claws at my ass, urging me deeper. The warm floor holds us. Outside the thin partition the archive keeps broadcasting, patient and tireless.

“Deeper—right there—,” she begs, voice breaking on every thrust. “I love how you stretch me. Fill me up, I want to feel you come deep inside.”

I shift the angle, grinding deeper, and her whole body tightens around me. The first orgasm hits her hard—her cunt clamping down in long, rhythmic pulses that nearly drag me over with her. I fuck her through it, relentless, until the last flutter fades and she’s panting, eyes glassy.

I pull out, flip her onto all fours, and slam back in from behind in one smooth stroke. The new angle wrings a fresh, broken moan out of her. I grip her hips hard enough to leave marks she’ll feel tomorrow and set a harder rhythm, pounding into her with the full weight of everything the day has left in me. The wet slap of skin on skin echoes off the warm stone. I reach around and find her clit, rubbing in fast, tight circles while I drive into her.

“Come again,” I growl. “Milk my dick while I fill you.”

She does. The second orgasm tears through her with a sharp cry, her walls spasming hard around my cock. I keep thrusting through it, chasing the way she squeezes me, until the rhythmic clench pulls me over the edge. I bury myself to the hilt, forehead pressed between her shoulder blades, and come with a guttural groan, pumping thick rope after thick rope of hot cum into her until it spills out around my shaft and runs down her thighs onto the warm floor.

We collapse together, still joined, breathing hard. I stay inside her while the aftershocks fade, one hand stroking slow circles over her stomach, the other careful around the fresh stitching on my own shoulder. The stone under us is still warm. The archive beyond the partition keeps talking to the stars.

Eventually I ease out. Cum slips down her inner thighs. I gather her against me on the floor, her head on my uninjured side, and we stay like that for a long time while our breathing slows.

Afterward I let her take the jacket off me properly, and the shirt under it, and I lie still while a schoolteacher swears at my shoulder for twenty minutes.

“This needed closing four hours ago.”

“It needed closing six hours ago.”

“You are not helping your case.” She has the field kit open and her jaw set. “Forearm. Ribs—don’t argue, I saw you favoring them on the stem. Shoulder last because it’s going to take the longest and I want you unconscious by then.”

“That isn’t how it works.”

“It’s how it’s going to work.”

She eases around the plating at the wound edge, lifting it clear rather than tearing, the way she learned in a marsh with a bird watching. Her hands are steady. They weren’t steady a short while back and they have decided to be steady now because now there is a task for them, and I know that mechanism far too well to mention it.

Somewhere around the ribs she starts talking, as she does, about nothing much: about Old Berin’s wrist, and how Pip will be dining out on this for the rest of his life and it’ll be unrecognizable inside two years, and about whether a village of three hundred can absorb an Authority research station without becoming a different village.

“It can’t,” I say.

“I know it can’t. I’ve been turning it over since the seventh hour.” She ties something off. “That’s the next fight, isn’t it. Not Vane. What comes after Vane.”

“It is.”

“And you’ll be there for it.”

“I will.”

“With no licence and no contract and no plan.”

“I have a plan.”

“You have a plan?”

“I’ve had one since a ranger post,” I tell her. “It has no end date in it, which took some getting used to, and I’ve been adding to it steadily. It currently includes a boat, a very serious conversation with Elder Moss about what a protected site actually requires, and learning to eat what Edda cooks without commenting on it.”

“That last one’s ambitious.”