Page 36 of Omega’s Forward

The Bureau app. Cheerful yellow banner, little bell icon. DAILY COMPLIANCE CHECK-IN. BOTH REGISTRANTS MUST APPEAR IN FRAME. RESPOND WITHIN FIVE MINUTES.

Today. Timing like that isn’t luck. The fuckers know exactly what they’re doing.

I think about ignoring it. I stand in my kitchen and run the play: miss the check-in, take the breach. But a missed check-in doesn’t mean a fine. It means a compliance visit. It means a Bureau car in the driveway and a stranger with a tablet in my hallway asking to sight both registrants in person, today, while Everett is—

No.

We have to do it.

I knock on his door. Nothing. I knock again, say his name. Nothing — and through the door, water. The shower, still going. Or going again. He’s in it constantly.

I try the handle, half expecting him to have barricaded the door, but it opens clear and easy.

I immediately scent cold air and orange, thick enough to taste. The bed is a wreck, the window is wide open, and the bathroom door is shut with the shower hammering away behind it.

The phone says a minute and a half.

I cross the room and knock on the bathroom door, loud. “Everett. It’s Brody.”

The water shuts off.

“Come in.” Instant. Desperate. Then, just as fast: “No. Don’t—” A breath I can hear from here. “Yes. Come in.”

“Bureau check-in. We’ve got under a minute or they send a car. I need you in frame.”

“Okay.”

I go in. He’s out of the shower, towel around his hips, dripping on the tile, one hand braced on the sink like it’s the only thing holding him up. His hair is plastered flat. His eyes are all pupil.

“Come here,” I say, and hold the phone up, and he steps into frame beside me without a word of argument. We look into the little lens. I tap. The app thinks about it, then throws up a green tick and a burst of confetti, because somewhere in a Bureau office a designer decided this moment should feel fun.

“Done. That’s it.”

And then I actually look at him.

He’s shaking. Not heat-shivers. His lips have gone faintly blue at the edges. When my hand brushes his shoulder reaching past him for the towel rail, his skin is cold. Cold as the rink. The window open all night, the water run cold for hours, no food, no sleep.

“How long were you in that shower?”

He looks at the wall and doesn’t answer me.

Every protective instinct I own floods in at once.

I forget I am supposed to keep my distance. Towels — all of them, the whole rail. I get one over his shoulders and one over his hair and I rub, hard, no ceremony, wringing the cold out of him.

“I’m fine,” he says. His teeth are chattering so hard the words come out in pieces.

“You’re half hypothermic in your own bathroom is what you are. Arms up.”

He actually obeys. He sticks his arms in the air and lets me towel his ribs. That tells me exactly how bad the night has been.

I pick him up. He makes a sound of protest with no force in it at all, and his body does the opposite of protesting — he curls in, face against my neck, nose right over the scent gland like he can’t help it, and breathes in so deep I feel it in my own chest.

I carry him to the bed, kick the wrecked sheets off one-handed, get him into the middle of the mattress and wrap the comforter around him. He’s still shaking. I pull the window shut, then sit on the edge of the bed and rub his arms through the fabric, his back, and the whole time his scent is doing something I have no defense against: the distress bleeding out of it, and the want soaking back in, orange and honey warming up as he does.

“Better?”

“No.” It comes out muffled. Then his head comes up, and he looks at me, and the fever is in it but he is in it too, right at the front. “I can’t do five days of this.”