Page 139 of Dose

“You listened.”

“I always listen.”

“You also catalogue.”

“Only important things.”

Her fingers lace through mine.

“At Site Nine, choices were questions with one permitted answer,” she says. “Here, people tell me no. I argue. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes I am. Then the door still opens.”

“And you stay.”

“Because I want to.” She turns her face toward mine. “I still want to be yours. That hasn’t become less true because Korte used it against me.”

The claim moves through me with the same force it always has.

“You are mine,” I say. “For exactly as long as you keep choosing it.”

“Every day so far.”

I kiss her slowly. There is no emergency in the contact, no need to prove either of us survived. Her hand closes in my shirt and holds me where she wants me.

Her tablet chimes on the low table.

Both of us stop.

Isla reaches it first.

The message is signed with Ezra’s current one-time key.

FOUND THE WOMAN FROM THE FILE. ALIVE. SHE KNOWS MARCHANT. DO NOT FOLLOW THIS RELAY. NEXT WINDOW 0600. —E

I check the time. The next window is at oh-six-hundred.

“He found her,” Isla says.

“Or she found him.”

“We tell Nikolai.”

“Already forwarded.”

Another notification confirms Marcus has received it. A third says Dominic is moving on the visible relay even though all of us know it may be another empty room.

Isla sets the tablet down.

We do not say Ezra will be fine. We do not say he always comes back. Neither statement is ours to guarantee.

Mia is alive and asking questions. Seventeen sites are closed. Korte is dead. Marchant is not. Ezra owes us his next contact at oh-six-hundred, and the program still has people we have not found.

Isla takes my hand again.

She is here because she wants to be.

For today, that is the fact I trust.

Thank for reading Dose. I hope you enjoyed Isla & Theon’s story.