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My own release follows a second later, a violent, shuddering explosion that leaves me breathless. I don't experience it separately from her; the bond folds our sensations together so completely that the climax is a shared event, a single, unified peak of pleasure that leaves us both shaking.

For a long time, neither of us moves. My breathing is loud in the silence of the alcove, mirrored by hers. The Jalshagar markings remain bright, casting a soft light over the damp strands of hair at her temple.

I shift my weight off her injured side, and Claire immediately catches my shoulder, pulling me back.

"Don't go anywhere."

"I was moving six centimeters."

"Too far."

I settle back against her, and she smiles. "Better."

We remain tangled together until the bond quiets from a blaze to a steady, humming warmth. Claire traces one of the lines across my chest with her taped finger, watching the light dim beneath her touch.

"Say it," she says softly. "Whatever the actual words are. You've been carrying them around."

I have.

"Ka'sheth vaal Jalshagar." My voice is unsteady. "It means: I have found the one I was measured against. You answer it, or you don't."

"What's the answer?"

"Ka'sheth. I have found."

Claire props herself up on one elbow. She is bruised, taped, and utterly exhausted, looking at me with a steadiness that makes the world outside this room feel insignificant.

"Ka'sheth," she says.

Nine thousand years of warm slate, a basin of water, and a woman pronouncing an Alzohn word badly in a room beneath a dying city. I have no language for what I feel. I don't think the Precursors had one either.

"Say it," she says. "Whatever the actual words are. You've been carrying them around."

I have. Among my people you say it once, aloud, and both people say it, and afterward nobody raises it as a question again.

"Ka'sheth vaal Jalshagar." My voice is not entirely steady. "It means: I have found the one I was measured against. You answer it, or you don't."

"What's the answer?"

"Ka'sheth. I have found."

She props herself up on one elbow. Filthy, taped, bruised, entirely unbothered.

"Ka'sheth," she says.

Nine thousand years of warm slate, a basin that fills when you reach toward it, and a human systems architect pronouncing an Alzohn word badly in a room beneath a dying city.

I lack adequate language for it. I am not certain the Precursors had any either.

"So that's official," she says, eventually. "We're fated mates. That's the position."

"That's the position."

"Good, because I want it on record before this whole thing turns bad." She lies back against my shoulder. "Kovic's calling an emergency session. Horizon knows we hold the archive. The contract expires in four days, and there is a thing at the bottom of this city that everybody now understands is worth killing for." A pause. "None of that changes this. I need you to say out loud that it doesn't."

"It doesn't."

"Politics."