Page 7 of My Tiny Human Wife

We shake them in the shattered country to the north. Miles on, when stopping is finally something we can afford, Avery pries my hand off the wound to see it, and her fingers are trembling, and the cold is not the reason. “You stepped in front of it,” she says. “You felt that coming and you put yourself in the way on purpose.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I could give her a soldier's answer. Protecting the asset. Preserving the mission. Both would even be true. But I am finished lying to her, and very nearly finished lying to myself. “Because a galaxy with you no longer in it,” I tell her, “has stopped being one I am willing to come back to.” She goes utterly still. The wind moves around us both. Then she presses her brow to my uninjured shoulder, only for a moment, only long enough to feel her breathe out everything she has been carrying, and after that we don't speak another word the whole way home, because nothing remains to be said that the last hour has not already decided between us.

CHAPTER 13

AVERY

We make it back with the crates intact and a hole in Torvak that I put there just by existing.

That is how I have started framing it across the eight frozen hours home: the round was meant for me, and the enormous stubborn body beside mine decided to be a wall instead. The children get their medicine. Tess works straight through the night, and by the following evening the fevers have let go across the whole ward, every small chest rising easy again, and the sanctuary tips back from the ledge it had been leaning over. That victory I can hold in both hands.

The rest of it I carry up to the equipment loft once the tower has gone quiet, a fresh dressing kit tucked under my arm and an apology I have practiced twice and will certainly mangle.

He is exactly where I expected him, folded onto a bench never meant for his frame, stripped to the waist, prodding at the shoulder himself with a field patch and no numbing agent and the mild annoyance of a man filing paperwork he considers beneath him.

“Put that down.” I drop the kit loudly. “You will drag it open again. Let me reach it.”

He surrenders the patch without argument, which tells me it hurts more than his face is willing to advertise. I clean the torn edge slow. The scales along his shoulder are warm and faintly ridged under my fingers, and I think about how a month ago the idea of touching him would have turned my stomach. Now my hands know the whole map of him. Now I catch myself gentling the work the way you do for someone whose comfort you have started to mind.

Outside, the wind changes pitch. I know that note. Another front, rolling down off the high ice, and a mean one by the sound of it.

“That is us sealed in for the night,” I say. “Nobody crosses the yard until it passes.”

“Then I am a prisoner of your infirmary.” A pause. “There are worse cells.”

I knot off the dressing and ease back, and for a while we let the storm do the talking. It is easier up here in the half-dark with the rest of them asleep below us. Down there I am the operator, the one who holds the room’s calm steady. Up here I am only tired, and only honest, and only close enough to a warm impossible person that pretending has begun to feel like more work than the truth.

“When this is over.” I turn a spare clamp over in my fingers instead of looking at him. “Assume it ends. Assume the war just — stops, one day, the way you keep telling me it never does. What do you want, after? A person like you must have wanted something, once, before all of this.”

He stays silent long enough that I begin to think I have overstepped.

“A stretch of coast,” he says at last. “On my homeworld. Cold water, black stone, nothing above it but weather. My grandmother kept a house there. As a boy I believed it was the one place the fighting could never reach, because it held nothing worth the taking.” His mouth tips, wry and sad. “I have not permitted myself to picture it in a very long time. It seemed a cruelty, to want a thing that quietly.”

“That is not cruel,” I tell him. “That is just wanting to go home.”

“And you?”

“I never let myself get that far.” The clamp goes still. “Wanting felt like daring it to notice. Every time I loved something, the war took a turn and reminded me I had gotten comfortable. So I made myself small. Keep the signal breathing, keep strangers breathing, and do not ask for anything with my own name on it.” I make myself meet the gold of his eyes. “Lately I have started asking again. It terrifies me, and I cannot seem to stop.”

The loft has gone very still. He shifts, and the bench groans under him, and in the shifting, the careful distance I have kept between us all this time simply is not there anymore. His hand comes up, slow enough that I could pull away, and the backs of two enormous knuckles trace the line of my jaw as though he is handling something he does not trust himself to hold.

“Avery.” Only my name. He says it the way other people announce a decision.

I lean in. He leans in. The gap between us fills with heat, and there is a breath, one whole breath, where I feel the warmth of his mouth a hair off mine and my entire traitor body decides it has been patient long enough —

The comm clipped to my collar squalls to life. Kalen, downstairs, apologetic and oblivious: the north relay has dropped again, and half the safe-zone grid has gone dark with it.

We jerk apart like the bench caught fire. I am on my feet with my pulse doing something athletic and my thumb already answering the call, and Torvak is watching me with an expression that is half hunger and half rueful understanding, because of course. Of course the signal would pick now. The signal is the entire reason either of us is alive to be interrupted.

“Go,” he says, low. “The grid first. This —” a small gesture that somehow contains the loft, the near-kiss, the two of us “— this will keep.”

I go. But I take the stairs fast with the ghost of his knuckles still printed along my jaw, and I understand, dropping back down into the noise and the need of the place, that whatever line I spent two years drawing between us, I have just crossed it in the dark — and I am in no hurry whatsoever to cross back.

CHAPTER 14