Page 150 of Pocket Wife

I stay at the ridge wall a while longer, my hands still on the old valve wheel.

Then I hear footsteps.

I turn.

Rethan stands at the field’s edge.

He is not supposed to be there. Salo’s restriction. The hearing. The procedural line Helix drew around us.

He crosses it anyway.

The schoolteacher’s slate captures his movement. No one stops him. Sen’s voice cuts through the feed, objecting, but Noll cuts her off.

“Emergency physical danger declared.”

It is a fiction.

But it is enough.

Rethan crosses the lower field line and comes to me through the rows of golden grain. His face is calm, the calm of someone who held himself together through too many hours and finally reached the end of his restraint.

He stops before me.

The bond opens between us, warm and bright and desperate.

“You should not be here,” I say.

“Correct.”

“The tribunal⁠—”

“Is still recording.”

He makes no move to touch me.

But the bond does.

I feel it wrap around me, steady and fierce, the thing that kept me standing through every moment of fear and exhaustion and fury.

“The countdown,” I say. “There was a countdown. Thirty-two minutes.”

“Torren is analyzing the signal.”

“Helix was going to destroy the water. The clinic. Nara’s son.”

“Yes.”

My voice cracks. “They were going to do that.”

Rethan’s hands curl at his sides.

The bond holds.

He does not reach for me.

But he says, “They did not succeed.”

I look past him to the meeting hall, the field, the people gathering in the rows of grain. My people. My valley. The thing Helix tried to bleed and failed to kill.