I frowned and scrolled through the code again anyway. “There has to be.”
“Thereisn't.”
The heat signature pulsed quietly on the map of Earth behind us. A small dot along the western edge of what used to be the United States. Elias turned his chair toward me and drummed his fingers on the console.
“You’ve been awake for how long?”
“Not long.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I didn’t answer.
He stood and stretched his back with a quiet groan. “Go to bed, Ransom.”
“I’m not done looking at this.”
“Yes you are. The system checks out. There’s no corruption in the code, no sensor faults, no network lag. Which means one of two things is happening.” He held up two fingers. “Either SOL is suddenly hallucinating, or there’s actually someone alive down there.”
I stared at the amber dot as if I could force it to tell us what it meant. I’d watched it crawl across the screen for hours, shifting from one position to the next while Elias traced its path directly onto the glass with a whiteboard marker, trying to triangulate the location. It was human. It had to be.
Elias dropped his hand. “Get some sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we will bring in a translator and contact the bunkers we still have communication with. If anyone else has heard something from that region, they’ll know.”
I exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
He nodded toward the door. “I’ll brief Commander Zhang. You go get some sleep.” The lab hummed softly as he shut down the secondary monitors, though the dot on the map kept blinking beside the others that were strewn across earth.
I rubbed my eyes and finally pushed away from the console. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me so much. Maybe there really was someone down there. Maybe they’d managed to make it into a bunker. There were countless in that region. My own mom had tried to reach a military bunker when the Scourge began.
But why now? Why all of a sudden? And there was only one, which meant if someone was down there, from what we could tell…
They were alone.
Earth had been blotted out by soot for years. That part of the United States had been dark since the beginning. Nothing should be alive there. Not animals. Not plants. Nothing. Whatever it was—whoever it was—that SOL had found… might be the beginning of hope.
Which was too dangerous.
I couldn’t help a tremor of relief though as I dragged myself toward the door to find my bed. Sleep had been interesting lately as I’d gotten hardly any of it, because when I did, I opened my eyes to find her in my space. No longer only in my head.
Solace was kept alive in my dreams and if that meant waking up groggy and half-exhausted, I’d do it until I collapsed because stealing glimpses of her was like a drug, to which I was an addict.
The burning came first. Then her touch.
Fingers drifted down my chest, hooking into the waistband of my boxers. I caught Solace’s hand in mine, willing her to slow. To make it last.
Each night she appeared, and each night it was the same harried minute of frenzy. Of bliss I’d never experienced before.
Was it selfish to desire lingering here, rather than actually sleep? If it was, I didn’t care. I missed her so much it physically hurt most days. Every night I drifted in and out of these pockets of euphoria, and every morning I woke up debilitated as if the time we spent together was real and my body never rested at all.
Tonight she laid across my chest, hair tucked loosely behind her ears. I sat up, gently cradling her face in my palm. She shifted between my legs, and I couldn’t help but savor the warmth of her skin against mine. Even if it only lasted a moment. Sometimes the dreamscape flickered.
I wasn’t sure where I was. The room was dark and cold, and all I could make out was the shape of her. She was bare from the waist up, having lost her shirt somewhere in the trail of kisses she’d left along my jaw.
Like a masochist, I thought,you’re not real, murmuring it against the soft skin behind her ear as my hand tightened gently in her hair.
“Neither are you.” She pushed me back into the covers and swung a leg over mine, settling against me like she belonged there. “If I must dream of you, Jude,” she whispered, “let it be this. Us. Together.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. It was one thing to remember her voice. It was another to hear it—to hear the shape of my name on her lips. “Slow down, Solace.” However, the words lost meaning the moment she swallowed thedistance between us, the warmth of her breasts brushing my chest.
