Page 16 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

I love her. And I have spent my entire adult life proving that loving a fixed thing is how a man gets destroyed when it is taken, which is what happened, in eight weeks of fever, to everyone whose names I do not say.

Keep moving. Stay untouchable. A horizon cannot die on you. It didn't work. I didn't want the horizon. I wanted the woman at the rail with the good coat and the merciless quiet voice, and no distance I could put between us was going to fix that, because the distance was the disease, not the cure.

She found me in the corridor after, lit up and shaking, the adrenaline of a fight just won burning off her in the cold hospital light of the Council building.

“Was that too much?” She was still vibrating with it. “That was too much. I told a committee I was afraid to leave it in charge of a stapler. Priya’s going to make me apologize.”

“It was not too much.”

“You have to say that. You watched me threaten a subcommittee.”

I reached up and turned the translator off.

I didn't know why I kept doing that around her, except that the machine made me fluent, and I didn't want fluent, I wanted her to hear my words. So I said it in my own bad English, slow, hunting each word down and setting it in front of her.

“You were.” I searched for the word. “Extraordinary. Eleven systems. Nothing like you.”

It came out plain and halting. She went still, looked away, then looked back. She was no longer talking about the committee.

“You turned it off.” Her eyes came back to mine.

“Yes.”

“You keep doing that.”

“Yes.”

“Say the rest of it.” Not a demand. Almost a dare. “Whatever you turn the machine off to not-quite-say. I can see you not saying it. You go this specific color.”

I could have said it there. I love you. I have loved you sinceI first heard you spoke. I am lying to my own service to stay in your city and I do not know how to stop. The translator was off. There was nothing between my mouth and the truth but fear. I gave her the extraordinary again instead, which was true and also a coward’s substitution, and she heard both.

“That’s not the rest of it.”

“No.”

“Okay.” She let me keep it, the way she lets me keep everything, which is its own mercy and its own trap.

She didn't finish the thought, and I didn't make her. We stood in a Council corridor a beat too long, and then she laughed, unsteady, and said she needed a drink and possibly a new career. We went back out into the wet city, and I didn't tell her.

We got coffee she didn’t finish and I couldn’t taste, at a place she likes because the owner argues with her about the weather. She came down slow off the fight, and somewhere in there she bumped my shoulder with hers.

That night the channel pinged. My leave was up again.

I sat at the terminal in the dark office and didn't file the honest paperwork, the paperwork that says reassign this officer, he is compromised, he has stopped being able to survey his way out of himself. I filed the lie instead. Cartographic anomalies in the Pacific Northwest region. Additional survey time requested. There are no anomalies. There is a woman who defends strangers’ leaps with her whole chest and cannot see her own path. I was extending a falsehood through a government channel to stay near her, and the specific cruelty of it didn't escape me. I would rather be a coward standing next to her than an honest man alone with a clean conscience and a clear horizon and no one, anywhere, reading the color of my hands.

I closed the terminal. Upstairs, a floorboard squeaked under her foot. I sat in the dark and let myself love her. The form would need another answer soon. So would she.

CHAPTER 11

Astoria

As I awakened to the light filtering through the window, a whisper of warmth washed over me, a sensation I almost didn’t recognize. The morning in Portland felt crisp, fresh, and impossibly full of potential. I held my breath for a moment, afraid to chase away the hope blooming within me, a small yet defiant bloom amongst the cautious, familiar fronds of my herb garden waiting just beyond my bedroom door.

The garden had always been my anchor, each leaf and stem a reminder of my place in the world, a position built on stability. Basil, mint, thyme… the scents mingled with the promise of the new day, each plant telling a story of the past as I watered them just before dawn. There was something soothing in the repetition of it all: the soil damp beneath my fingers, the steady rhythm of care. My world thrived in this routine.

Yet, a thought flickered uninvited. What if this comforting space held me back from something greater? The intimacy of my garden whispered of safety, but I felt an underlying tension that hinted at the fragility of it all. If I left for the stars, what would I give up? Would I relinquish the sanctuary of my herbs, the part of me that knew how to stay, and the very identity that defined my existence as the one who holds the door for others?

I plucked a few mint leaves, the sharp scent cutting through the ambivalence swirling in my chest, and closed my eyes. Could I leap into the unknown? It was the idea of Azyr that caused my heart to race; I imagined what it would be like to look out into a vast universe and share that view with him. In my mind, I traced the shape of his presence, the way his skin shifted colors in the light, a landscape of cerulean depths blurring into silver-grey as he moved.