Chapter 8 No Filter
No Filter
Horgox
Maximum distance. That’s the strategy. Five metres of stone between us, my back against the far wall, every centimetre a barricade I am telling myself is adequate while every nerve ending in my body calls me a liar.
Krilly sits cross-legged on the moss bed, pupils blown wide, cheeks flushed the shade of her hair.
The truth fruit has turned her expression into something between a confessional and a detonation countdown: the particular focus of someone whose brain has decided every thought she’s ever suppressed should exit her mouth immediately, in order of devastation.
She opens her mouth. Catches herself. A visible effort, the muscles in her jaw tightening, her hands gripping her knees.
Three seconds of the old Krilly fighting the new chemistry, her expression shifting between the woman who keeps things back and the version the fruit is building from the raw material of her honesty.
The fight lasts exactly three seconds.
“Your shoulders are absurd,” she announces, and the defeat in her own voice suggests she’s aware she lost.
“I—thank you?”
“That’s not a compliment. It’s a formal complaint.
I’ve been trying to learn jungle survival from you for days, and every time you push a branch aside, your shoulders do this shifting thing and I lose approximately thirty seconds of critical instructional content.
” She gestures at me accusingly. “I can’t identify six edible plants because your deltoids are unreasonable. ”
Something hot and inconvenient moves through my chest. My tactical mind files this as relevant intelligence: she watches my shoulders during navigation instruction.
It also, unhelpfully, calculates the number of times I’ve pushed branches aside in her presence and cross-references each instance against her subsequent performance accuracy.
The correlation is not useful information for a male trying to maintain discipline.
“My deltoids are standard for—”
“Bebo, confirm.”
“Krilly’s attention metrics show periodic lapses during navigation instruction that correlate with Horgox’s upper body movement,” Bebo says, with the tone of an AI who has been waiting for this moment.
“Average lapse duration: twenty-seven seconds. Frequency: approximately once every twelve minutes. Cumulative instructional content lost: forty-three percent of plant identification training.”
“Forty-three percent!” Krilly is triumphant. “I am going to die on this planet because you have shoulders, and I need you to know that’s your fault.”
Five metres is not enough distance. Five kilometres would not be enough distance. My markings are doing something I can’t suppress, jade cycling toward gold at the edges, and if she looks at my forearms right now—
“They’re doing the thing,” she observes, pointing. “The jade-to-gold shift. I’ve been cataloguing your color patterns. Want to know what I’ve learned?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Dark jade is threat assessment. Light jade is thinking. The warm shift toward gold is want, and you’re doing it right now.
” She ticks them off on her fingers with the brisk efficiency of someone delivering a diagnostic report.
“The brightest gold is happiness; I’ve seen it twice, and both times it made me want to climb you like infrastructure.
Dim means pain or suppression. And the white-gold from the harness night, when I was on your thigh and you were shaking?
” Her voice drops. The memory hits me like a blow to the sternum.
“That color meant something my whole body understood before my brain caught up.”
She’s mapped my emotional spectrum. Without instruction, without asking, she observed and catalogued and learned the language my body speaks involuntarily.
No one has ever done that. In the arena, my markings were entertainment.
The crowd watched them shift during combat and cheered when the colours meant pain.
She watches them and knows when they mean longing.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you other things too.
” Apparently full inventory is the order of the evening.
“Your hands. You hold weapons like you’re cradling something fragile, even when you’re about to kill with them.
This precise, careful grip, every finger placed deliberately.
And then you strike and something dies and your hands go right back to gentle.
” She mimes the grip, fascinated. “My brain cannot reconcile these two things, and the failure is—it does something to my whole body.”
My fingers are pressing into stone. Pressing hard enough that a hairline crack branches beneath my thumb, which is something I will not be examining for symbolism.
“Like a short circuit. Gentle-to-lethal-to-gentle. I keep watching it happen and every time it’s like touching a live wire.”
“Krilly, you should—”
“And the sound.” She leans forward, eyes wide, as if she’s about to share classified intelligence.
“The bass frequency. That harmonic undertone you make when you’re trying not to react to something.
Did you know it bypasses my ears entirely?
It goes straight into my chest and down my spine and all the way to—” She pauses.
Considers. Then finishes with devastating specificity: “Places that make sitting down afterward complicated.”
The harmonic she’s describing escapes my chest before I can trap it. Low. Involuntary. Exactly the frequency she was narrating, produced by the exact stimulus she was cataloguing, and her pupils dilate at the sound like a system receiving a signal it was designed to detect.
“That one,” she breathes. “You did it. Right now. While I was talking about it.”
“Horgox’s heart rate has increased significantly in the last four minutes,” Bebo announces. “I recommend—”
“Nobody asked you.”
“I am programmed to—”
“Water.” Movement is the only thing that isn’t crossing the cave and putting my mouth on hers. “You need water.”
“I need several things and water is not the most urgent,” she calls after me.
Cold stone against my forehead at the spring.
Thirty seconds. The breathing techniques arena surgeons taught for pain management are spectacularly unhelpful.
Pain I understand. The stimulus here is a five-foot-two engineer who has demonstrated that she knows me better than anyone alive, and who is delivering that knowledge without filter while sitting on the bed we share.
When I return with the water, she’s tugging at the collar of her jumpsuit with the single-minded intensity of someone trying to solve a temperature emergency.
“Is it hot in here? It’s hot in here.” She fans herself with one hand, the other working at her zipper. “Bebo, what’s the ambient temperature?”
“Cave temperature is consistent at sixteen degrees Celsius. However, the truth fruit elevates core body temperature by one to two degrees, and elevated heart rate compounds the effect. You are experiencing a subjective thermal event, not an objective one.”
“I don’t care if it’s subjective, I’m cooking.
” The zipper drops three inches. Four. Five.
The jumpsuit gapes open at her throat, showing the flush that extends from her cheeks all the way down her collarbone and past the edge of the fabric, and my entire visual field narrows to the strip of flushed skin widening between the teeth of the zipper.
“Krilly.”
“It’s thermoregulation, Horgox. Perfectly natural biological response.
” She shrugs one shoulder free of the jumpsuit with the casual practicality of someone who has not considered the tactical implications.
The strap of something underneath—thin, dark, clinging—slides into view.
“You walk around shirtless half the time. This is the same thing.”
It is not the same thing.
It is not the same thing in ways I cannot articulate because my language centres are experiencing system failure.
The second shoulder. She peels the jumpsuit down to her elbows, and the garment underneath is a ribbed undershirt that covers everything and conceals nothing, clinging to the architecture of her body like a topographic map of the terrain I have been refusing to survey.
Her skin is damp at the throat, flushed and luminous in the firelight, and the temperature differential between her overheated surface and the cool cave air is producing exactly the kind of visual data my brain has no capacity to process right now.
“Krilly, stop.”
“Why? It’s a shirt. I’m wearing a shirt. You can see that I’m wearing a shirt.” She gestures at the shirt as evidence, which draws my attention to every single thing the shirt is doing, which is the opposite of helpful.
Three strides. That’s all it takes to cross the cave, catch her wrists, and stop the jumpsuit’s descent before it reaches her waist. My hands wrap around both of hers easily, her fingers small and warm against my palms, the jumpsuit bunched between us like a barricade made of insufficient fabric.
Close. Too close. The heat radiating off her skin hits me like walking into a thermal vent, sweet and sharp with the fruit’s chemistry and something underneath that’s purely her.
Her head tips back to look up at me—all the way back, the full two-foot differential on display—and the angle puts her throat on offer in a way that shorts every higher function in my brain.
“Oh,” she says softly, staring up at me, her wrists still caught in my grip. “Your markings are doing something new.”
They are. I can feel them pulsing in a pattern I don’t recognise, something brighter and more desperate than the standard jade-gold want spectrum she catalogued, and I cannot make them stop because she is inches from me and my body is responding to every signal hers is broadcasting.