I pause for a moment, watching the arena replay screens showing highlights from the challenge.
One clip shows us crossing the suspension bridge together—steady, coordinated, calm.
Not flashy.
Not dramatic.
Just effective.
I think about Jesse again.
About the life he’s been living for two years without knowing I exist.
And about the man he might eventually meet when he’s old enough to ask questions.
The reckless performer.
The adrenaline addict.
The guy who treated danger like a punchline.
Or someone better.
I turn away from the screen.
“Well,” I say quietly to myself, “guess we’ve got some work to do.”
CHAPTER 23
TILDA
By the time I decide to let Bron see Jesse properly, I have already argued with myself about it so many times that the debate has gone from moral dilemma to background noise. The questions keep circling anyway. Is this selfish. Is it overdue. Is it crueler to delay it now that the truth is out than it was to hide it in the first place. I turn those thoughts over while I lie awake, while I walk to training, while I stand in the shower letting compound-hot water strike the back of my neck hard enough to sting. Every answer I arrive at comes with an equal and opposite answer attached to it, and I am tired in the marrow of my bones from being the only person who has had to carry this decision for so long. The thing that finally settles it is not logic, though I would prefer it to be. It is memory. Bron in the canyon, listening when I said wait. Bron on the climbing wall, following my sequence without trying to rewrite it into something flashier. Bron in that corridor after I told him the truth, going pale and quiet instead of cruel. None of that erases what he was. None of it magically heals the years that are gone. But it does something worse to my certainty. It dents it. And once certainty is dented, it stops fitting in the place where you stored it.
The next visitation period opens in the late afternoon, right after a compact but vicious strategy session with production and a light recovery block the trainers insist on calling “restorative mobility” as if stretching in public can ever be restorative. I spend the hour beforehand acting like a woman who is perfectly composed and absolutely not preparing for one of the most consequential moments of her life. I answer questions. I review the next challenge packet. I make a note about hydration and sleep cycles and audience metrics because apparently my brain thinks clerical behavior can hold back emotional collapse if I perform it with enough rigor. It cannot. By the time I reach the family wing, the air in my lungs feels thin. The corridor smells faintly of child-safe sanitizer, warmed formula, and the sugar-bright scent of fruit chews. Somewhere nearby, a little voice is singing to itself with great seriousness. A caretaker laughs softly. The whole wing is still offensively gentle, a padded pocket of ordinary life bolted onto the side of a machine built to wring spectacle out of people, and today that contrast nearly undoes me.
Jesse is in the commons floor area near the low activity tables, kneeling with his feet tucked under him in the exact compact way Vakutan children do when they are focused. He has a cluster of objects in front of him: two smooth stones from the sensory bin, a magnetic block, a plastic shuttle wing, and the small fossil-shaped rock he has decided is one of the great treasures of civilization. He is sorting them with intense concentration, brow furrowed, golden eyes narrowed. When he sees me, his whole face changes. The solemnity breaks. Light comes in.
“Mama!”
He gets up too fast, nearly loses his balance, catches himself with one little hand on the table, and barrels into my legs anyway. I crouch and gather him up, pressing my mouth to thewarm side of his head. He smells like baby shampoo, graham crackers, and the faint mineral sweetness that clings to his scales after a nap.
“Hi, baby.”
“You came back.”
“I always come back.”
“I made a pile,” he informs me, as if this is the opening matter of state I need briefed on immediately.
“I can see that.”
He pats my cheek and peers at me with unsettling perception. “You weird.”
That gets me despite everything. I laugh once, low and helpless. “Excellent diagnosis.”
He considers me another beat, then nods with the grave satisfaction of a tiny doctor whose concerns have been acknowledged. “Okay.”
I sit with him on the padded mat and let him show me the pile. The fossil rock is, unsurprisingly, the centerpiece. He places it in my palm with ceremony.
