And then she pulls back. A quick flinch. A break.
I stare. The water parts. My heart roars. My hands tremble.
She turns and swims toward the exit. Her footprints disturb the water as she climbs out. The pool echoes emptiness.
I remain. Shoulder deep in water that tastes of sorrow and maybe, just maybe, hope.
I lift a hand to my lips. The memory of her skin echoes there. The damp air, her scent, the clarity in her eyes.
I don’t move for a long time. My fists curl. My chest aches. I feel dangerously alive. And heartbreakingly unmoored.
Eventually I exit. The lights flick overhead. The corridor smells like wet concrete and chlorinated air. I pull off my jacket. The wetness clings to me, cold.
I walk slowly back to the quarters. My legs feel too long, too foreign. I pause outside her lab. She’s gone. The collar she was building sits on the bench.
I trace the edge with my fingertip, heart like a fist clenched in my ribs.
I whisper to the silent walls:I almost touched you. I almost meant it.
CHAPTER 7
JAELA
Ibury my face in the data screens until my eyes burn. The hum of server racks, the low whirr of anonymized cyber-limbs clinking through rehab bays, the sharp scent of antiseptic—it all coats me like a suit of armor I can’t shrug off. My hands shake just slightly when I enter the interface logs, rerouting kinetic scripts, cross-checking neural feedback calibrations, tucking safety failsafes inside safety failsafes.
Still, enough of me is elsewhere—always elsewhere. In the memory of his laugh in that dim hall. In the iron-sweet tang of his sweat when we collapsed in the pool. In the electric flicker I feel every time his name glows on my screen.
I take double shifts today—patients waiting, defects piling up. One with spinal implants refusing to stand, despite every coax, every nerve stim I feed. Her name is Mara, twenty-three, stubborn. Her eyes flicker every time the neural pulses surge. She gives me attitude; it’s good. Attitude keeps someone human.
I stoop beside her bed. “Lean forward. Rock with me,” I murmur. My voice is low, rough. She gives me hell. I match her hell. After thirty minutes she quivers upright—just a breath. Shestands—shaky, lungs ragged. The monitors sing. She smiles at me, voice small: “Thank you.” My chest twists.
I tell Mara to rest. I slip out. The corridor is empty. My boots echo. The screens in the hall flash light that tastes like bleach and cold steel. I pause at the therapy bay. Door cracked open. I peer inside—no one there.
I take a breath and walk in. And there he is.
The morning light drapes across the lab in pale gold and shadow. Kyldak leans on his cane, half of his face illuminated, the other half seared by darkness. He looks at me, surprise flickering in his red eye as though I’ve become something new in his gaze.
“Morning,” he says, voice rough, dusty from sleep or from the weight of himself.
I blink. “Morning.” My heart cracks in places I didn’t even know were still raw. “You’re early.”
He shrugs, posture rigid. “Wanted a head start.”
We get to work. The stability bars I fashioned using modular servos and adaptive feedback systems glint under overhead lights. We move through drills—step one, two, balance, center. He’s careful, deliberate, slower than he was before the explosion. I mirror his movement, banter lightly—he teases me about making him scrub the floor or recalibrate his sensors. I laugh, though it tastes strange in my throat.
Then the sensor twitches. The prosthetic leg’s interface floods red. I hear the servo whine, sharp and high, like a string under too much tension.
“Stop,” I hiss.
Too late.
His leg spasms, the joint overheats, modules snap. Sparks arc. The bar we were using clatters, metal tangent across the floor. We collapse onto a crash mat in a mess of wires, flesh, and scale.
Instinct sends me crawling beside him. His breath is hot in my hair. The scent—ozone, burned circuitry, the metallic tang of blood—is everywhere. I feel him trembling.
“Stay still,” I command, fingers dancing over ports, micro-wires, interface nodes. Sparks flick. I splice, reroute power, rerun the diagnostic sequence. The servo whispers back to life, screeching but alive. I wipe my palm on my jeans. Taste grit.
He props himself up, gasping. I slump beside him. We’re pressed close—too close. Skin, scale, circuits. The lab hums around us, machines flicking. My heart pounds like war drums.
