After she’s gone, I don’t move for a long time. The echoes fill the gym. The weight lies on the floor. The machines are silent watchers. I taste my anger. A bitter tang.
Night comes later, and sleep is no refuge. I pace my quarters. I watch the sky. The stars are cold witnesses. I feel too much, and not enough. Bones ache, metal hums, memories burn.
At dawn I slump to the window sill. Dawn tastes of ash and glass, of promise and threat. The wind brushes my cheek and it feels like judgement.
I think,If I were whole, would she stay?
And the silence answers with nothing but my own ragged breathing.
I slip out of the sleeping quarters before the first flux of daylight betrays me. My joints ache with memory. Every metal pin, every synthetic wire in my limbs hums in protest. But I need air. I need space. I need—something unmoving and real.
Outside the therapy bay, I find her. Jaela. Kneeling by the edge of a panel workbench. Hands stained with copper wires and solvent. She’s adjusting a neural-feedback collar—tiny interface nodes, delicate conduits, a design I recognize as hers before I even see the insignias. The low hum of the lab’s backup systems buzzes around us. The smell of warm circuit boards mixed with sweat and ozone presses in.
She doesn’t notice me at first. I stand two paces off. My stomach roils with guilt, regret, and that thread of desperate hope I’ve been telling myself was dead.
I clear my throat. She jumps, fumbles a connector. Sparks flicker. She steadies.
“Caffeine?” I hold out a nutrient cube. Unflavored, bland, but it’s something. She glances at it.
I step closer. “Thought you could use this.” My voice is rough, but soft. Vulnerable.
She takes it, studying me. “You don’t owe me apologies,” she says. “And I don’t know what I’d do with one.”
I crouch beside her, laying the cube on the bench. “You don’t have to. I’m here instead.”
We sit, side by side, knees angled. The lab light warms my face with sterile white. I keep my hands to myself.
I say, “When the shuttle exploded… I thought I was dead. I saw fire, and flames, and fragments of my friends’ faces as they screamed. I held my own arm in what was left of my hand, trying to find if I was still me. If I could… if I could bleed.”
My throat hurts. Blood rings metallic in my mouth.
She doesn’t flinch. She listens. Her fingers twiddle a stray copper wire. “My father—after he came home from his tours—he was here physically. But not here. He walked around the house like a ghost. I’d talk to him. He’d only stare. He got new legs, but never a new mind.”
I glance at her in the corner of my vision. Her eyes glint wet. She shifts.
We talk. We share bits. I tell her the friend who turned when the blast hit, whose name I still taste in my nightmares. She tells me about her childhood rooms, the silent dinners, the way her father’s laughter died in stages.
It’s not flirtation. It’s not seduction. It’s two wounds opening so each can see the scab.
After that, I look up and she’s watching me. Just—watching. Like she’s memorizing the lines of my face, the patterns in my scales, the tension in my spine. Her lips part. I catch the memory of heat in her eyes.
I cough, shift.
Later, when no one else is around, we slip to the therapy pool. The humid steam clings to us. Chlorine stings our eyes. The water’s cool but forgiving as I enter behind her, both of us fully clothed—my jacket, her scrub shirt.
She stiffens when I step in beside her. The water laps around our hips. Shadows drift across the pool floor below us.
We swim—the motion is clumsy. Hands drag wet fabric. I splash inadvertent droplets onto her shoulders. The wet cloth molds to her skin, intimate in a way that’s dangerous. We circle each other.
She laughs, short. “This is ridiculous.”
“It’s necessary,” I grunt. “To feel water again. To remember life beyond steel.”
She doesn’t answer. She glances at me, the reflection broken by ripples. “You’ve got fire in your ribcage you don’t let out.”
I move until I’m close. We tread water. Lights overhead refract in her eyes. My heart thunders. My arms ache. My curse is desire.
I lean in. She’s so close her breath is salt, her heat is flame. My lips hover—too close. The world narrows. I taste the wet chlorine and the tang of metal in my own mouth.
