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"You always have a number."

Darius considers the door a while.

"He has at least four people with him and probably eight, in a chamber we have never laid eyes on, and we arrive carrying a bar, a reader, and a concussion." He turns his hands over. "There is a version where we walk out. I would not put it above one in four."

"One in four."

"Perhaps one in five."

I turn that over. It doesn't do what I expected. I've been waiting for the moment I get properly frightened, ever since the ring gallery, and instead there's a kind of terrible clarity, like the last four minutes of a job when everything is finally simple.

"Okay," I say. "Then let's do it properly, because I have been putting one thing off for about three weeks out of pure cowardice and I'm not carrying it through that door."

"Claire—"

"I love you."

He goes completely still.

"I've said Ka'sheth and I meant it. I've canceled a berth and told a director I'm staying and asked a man to make a life with me on a ledge with no rail, and the actual words have never once got out of me, because they're the one part of this I can't take back with a form." My voice does something. I let it happen. "I love you. Not the bond. Not the job. You — the man who bawled me out over a survey reader on day two and then held a doorway for the better part of an hour. I love you, and I wanted to say it in a room whose walls carry the names of people who finished what they started."

Darius does not answer straight away, and when he does his voice is not level, and I know I have finally broken something in him that needed breaking.

"I have known since the Lung," he says. "The day you started it. I turned around and there you were on the deck under an intake throat, and I knew, and I said nothing, because I passed my whole life not asking the city for anything and I thought love was a thing you would have to be asked for." He covers my hand where it rests on the bench. "I love you. I have loved you since that chamber four hundred meters across, and I have carried it around for twenty-four days like an unfiled report."

"Twenty-four days."

"I am very thorough."

I laugh and it turns into something else halfway through, and then he pulls me in, and there is nothing careful left anywhere in him.

We have four hours before the retainers are cut, and we spend some of them here. I will not apologize for that to anybody, ever.

This is not the alcove and not the ledge. There is no safety waiting beyond this room, no eighteen-hour leave, no rescue crew cutting toward us through rubble. We both know the number now. One in four if Darius is being generous, one in five if he is being accurate, and accuracy has always been the part of him I trust most. The knowledge doesn't make us frantic; it makes us starving. Every touch becomes a desperate, deliberate claim because neither of us is willing to waste a single second of skin on skin.

He pulls me toward him, and the kiss is a collision—hard, hungry, and brief. There is no need for a slow burn when we are both already on fire. My hands are a blur, shoving his coat from his shoulders while he works with a maddening, focused precision around the split on my scalp. His fingers slide into my hair, avoiding the bandage, but the contrast nearly destroys me: the raw, crushing force in the rest of his body and the heartbreaking tenderness around the one place that hurts.

The markings are lit before I even get his shirt open.

They don’t flare this time; they glow with a steady, molten intensity, colored like the core shaft far below us. The light rises beneath his skin, running from his temple down his throat, over both shoulders, and along his forearms until the lines at his wrists are burning.

I press my palm over the fork at his chest, feeling the heat of him radiating through my skin. The light shines through the thin gaps between my fingers, painting me in gold.

Darius doesn't look at the markings. He looks at me, his eyes dark, pupils blown wide with a lust that is almost painful to witness.

"Claire."

"I'm looking."

"I know."

His voice is a wrecked rasp. Beneath the dust and blood, the smell of him hits me—warm skin, mineral dust, and that sharp, metallic scent of machine oil that has become my favorite smell in the world. I press my mouth to the line beneath his throat, tasting the salt of his skin, and feel his hands tighten in my hair, pulling my head back to expose my neck. The bond opens instantly, carrying his response back through me so clearly that I feel the jolt of pleasure strike his spine at the exact moment I deliver it.

I kiss the same spot again, harder this time, my tongue tracing the burning line.

His breath leaves him in a long, shuddering exhale.

"That one," I murmur against his skin.