Asa
The dreams are always the same: equations that don't balance and a violet sky that refuses to stop bleeding. I’m drifting in that half-light where the world makes sense only in integers, my head resting on Jorak’s chest. I smell the cedar.
I smell the whiskey. I feel the heavy, protective weight of his arm draped across my waist, pinning me to the mattress, to the nest.
The smell changes into cold iron and clinical rot.
One moment I’m warm, the lingering friction of our heat still hummed into my marrow, and the next, the air is thin and tastes of recycled oxygen and high-voltage static.
My lungs hitch, searching for the scent of him, but I find only the sharp, sterile bite of a medical-grade disinfectant that sticks to the back of my throat like a film.
I open my eyes, and the ceiling is wrong. It isn't the soft, shadowed plaster of my bedroom. It’s a grid of flat LED panels, humming at a frequency that makes my teeth ache. I’m not on my bed. I’m on a table, the surface hard and covered in a paper sheet that crinkles under my weight.
"Subject 02 is responsive," a voice says. It’s flat, detached, coming from a speaker hidden somewhere in the corner of the room.
I try to sit up, but my limbs are leaden.
A familiar, heavy sluggishness anchors my joints.
Sedatives. They must have used a high-yield aerosol at the apartment.
I have a vague, jagged memory of the front door splintering, of shadows moving in the dark, and Jorak’s roar being cut short by a hiss of gas.
"Jorak?" I rasp. My voice is a wreck, dry and thin. I try to swing my legs over the side of the table, but the room tilts. I’m in a glass box. That’s the only way to describe it.
A containment room, ten by ten, with reinforced transparent walls that shimmer with the subtle, iridescent ripple of a suppression field.
I look up, squinting against the glare of the lights, and see him.
He’s in a mirrored room across a narrow hallway, maybe thirty feet away.
He’s already awake, or perhaps he never went under as deeply as I did.
He’s standing against his own glass barrier, his hands pressed flat against the surface, his eyes glowing with a dark, entropic violet that I haven't seen since the first night we met.
I can see the muscles in his jaw working, his mouth moving as he screams my name, but the sound is swallowed by the acoustic dampening of the cells. The Black Current lashes out in invisible waves that make the air in the hallway between us shimmer and warp.
"Professor Renwick, please remain seated," the voice says. "We are beginning the baseline calibration. We need you to describe the sensation in your chest. On a scale of one to ten, quantify the constriction you feel now that the physical proximity has been broken."
I look toward the observation window, a strip of one-way glass high on the back wall. I know who is behind it. I can almost feel the weight of his gaze, calculating and cold.
"Mercer," I spit, the word tasting like bile. "Where are we? You can't just take people out of their homes. This is illegal. This is kidnapping."
"This is state security, Asa," Mercer’s voice replaces the technician’s.
It’s smooth, reasonable, and utterly devoid of empathy.
"You are an unregistered stabilization asset of vital importance to the stabilization of Redbrook.
Your home was a liability we could no longer afford.
Now, the scale. Quantify the ache. Does it feel like a pressure, or a pull? "
It’s a physical tether, a wire wrapped around my heart that is being pulled taut.
With Jorak thirty feet away and behind a suppression field, my skin feels like it’s being peeled back, one layer at a time.
The heat-weariness that should have been a soft afterglow is turning into a jagged, shivering fever.
"I feel like I'm going to throw up," I say, clutching the edge of the metal table. "And if you don't let me out of here, I'm going to do it on your expensive floor."
"Nausea recorded," a technician says. "Increase distance by five meters. Move Asset Thorn to Chamber B-4."
I watch in a haze of mounting panic as the floor beneath Jorak’s cell begins to move.
It’s on a track. He realizes it the same time I do.
He slams his fist against the glass, a soundless impact that nevertheless vibrates through the floorboards and into the soles of my feet.
The Black Current flares, a visible corona of oily black smoke licking at the edges of his cell, but the suppression mesh holds.
"No!" I scream, lunging off the table. My knees buckle, and I hit the floor hard. The glass is cold against my forehead as I crawl toward the edge of my cage. "Stop it! You're hurting him!"
"We are measuring the dependency threshold, Asa," Mercer says. He sounds like a man explaining a weather report. "A standard Guide-Esper bond has a fatigue radius of approximately fifty meters. An S-Class pairing usually extends to a kilometer before physical symptoms manifest. But you and Jorak... you’re different. You’re an Anchor.
We need to know where the anchor snaps."
The distance increases. Thirty feet becomes fifty. Fifty becomes eighty. As Jorak’s silhouette grows smaller down the long, white throat of the hallway, the world begins to dissolve. The energy sickness starts as a hum in my ears, a high-pitched whine that drowns out the facility’s ventilation.
Then comes the heat.
Not the warmth of a nest, but a dry, scouring fire. I can’t breathe. I gasp, my chest heaving, but it’s like inhaling sand. I look at my hands. They’re shaking, the skin pale and clammy, a thin sheen of slick breaking out on my palms even though there isn't a drop of desire in my body.
I look back at Jorak. He’s stopped screaming. He’s slumped against the glass of his receding cell, his forehead pressed to the surface just like mine. Even from this distance, I can see the way his chest is laboring.
"Professor, your heart rate is two hundred and ten," Mercer observes. "Your body temperature is climbing toward a critical fever. Tell me, do you see the patterns yet? Can you mathematically define the point where your stability fails?"
"Go to hell," I whisper. I can’t get the words out any louder. My throat is closing. I slide down the glass, my cheek pressed against the cold surface. It’s the only thing that feels real, this transparent barrier between me and the only person who makes the world quiet.
"Subject is entering the secondary phase of energetic collapse," the technician notes. "Slick production without arousal. Phantom heat response."
"Continue the separation," Mercer commands. "I want to see the break."
The world tilts. I’m on my side now, my vision tunneling until the only thing I can see is that distant, glowing violet light in Jorak’s eyes. He hasn't looked away. Not once. He’s watching me fail, watching me drown in the air of this room, and I can see the murder in his expression.
My lungs give another useless pull. Fever crawls over my skin. My palm slides against the glass, slick with sweat, searching for a surface that will never open.
Across the hall, Jorak slams his hand against his own barrier again.
The staff don't stop.
They note my reaction.
It finally clicks into place, cold and clean beneath the fever. Mercer isn't checking whether distance hurts us. He already knows it does.
He’s measuring exactly how much.
I slide farther down the glass, trying to breathe through the fever while Jorak watches from the other room with murder in his eyes.