Asa
The air in my apartment tastes wrong. It isn't the smell of old coffee or the faint scent of pear and vanilla that usually lingers in the drapes. It’s the absence of privacy.
Every shadow in the corner of the living room looks like a camera lens, and the silence of the hallway feels like a held breath.
Jorak moves with a twitchy grace, his boots silent on the hardwood as he checks the locks on the windows.
He doesn't turn on the lights. He uses the glow from the streetlamps filtering through the blinds, his silhouette a jagged cut of darkness against the glass.
He checks the closet, the space behind the bathroom door, and the seal on the balcony with a meticulous, bone-deep paranoia that makes my skin prickle.
"It's empty, Jorak," I whisper, leaning against the kitchen counter. My legs feel like they’re made of damp cardboard. The distance test has left a hollow ache in my marrow. "They're gone. They got what they wanted."
He doesn't answer until he’s circled back to me, stepping into my space, his heat radiating off him in waves that smell of cedar and the sharp, metallic tang of the Black Current.
He reaches out, his hands trembling with a restrained violence as they frame my face.
His thumbs brush over my cheekbones, his touch so light it’s almost a question.
"They touched you," he rasps. His eyes are dark, the pupils blown wide until the gold is just a thin, flickering ring. "I can still smell their chemicals on your skin. That clinical, bitter rot."
He moves his hands down, tracing the line of my throat, his fingers lingering over the pulse point as if he’s counting the beats to make sure I’m still alive.
Then his palms slide down my chest, over my ribs, stopping at my waist. He doesn't pull me in.
He just holds me there, his touch moving to my wrists, checking the faint reddening where the suppression cuffs sat.
"I'm fine," I say, though the lie feels heavy in my mouth. "I'm intact. They didn't break anything, Jorak. They just... looked."
"They shouldn't have been allowed to look," he growls.
His hands move again, dropping to my stomach.
He splays his fingers across the fabric of my shirt, his touch turning sudden and reverent.
He stays like that for a long time, his head bowing until his forehead rests against mine.
The Black Current, usually a storm, feels like a low, protective thrum against my skin.
I catch his wrists, my fingers small against the thick cords of his muscles. I pull his hands up, forcing him to look at me. The intensity in his gaze is enough to make me want to look away, but I hold it. I need the truth more than I need the comfort.
"Tell me what changed," I say. "In the containment room. Before you broke the glass. You looked at me and the air shifted. What did you feel?"
Jorak’s jaw tightens, a muscle leaping in his cheek. He tries to pull back, his instinct for control warring with the raw honesty that always seems to bleed out when we’re alone.
"Your scent," he says finally, the words sounding like they’re being torn out of his throat. "It wasn't just the heat. It wasn't just the stress. It changed, Asa. It got... deeper. Heavier."
I hadn’t wanted to believe it after my heat because it didn’t make any sense. "It's too early," I whisper, my hand instinctively dropping to where his had just been. "Biologically, it’s impossible to tell this soon. The hormones haven't even peaked."
“It’s too early for certainty,” he says, voice low. “I know that. But your scent changed. Under the fever. Under the stress. Something soft. New.” His hand flexes near my stomach, like he wants to touch and doesn’t trust himself. “An Enigma notices what belongs to him.”
My knees don’t hold long enough for me to keep standing.
Jorak guides me out of the kitchen, one hand braced at the small of my back, and I make it as far as the living room before I fold.
I sit down abruptly on the edge of the sofa, the weight of the realization crashing over me.
Pregnant. In a city where the ground is literally rotting under our feet.
In a world where the government has just forced me to sign away my autonomy so I can be a stabilizer for an S-Class weapon.
It’s terrifying, and yet, somewhere deep in the center of the Anchor-well in my chest, a small, stubborn warmth flickers to life.
The sudden trill of my phone on the coffee table makes us both jump. Jorak is over it in a second, his hand hovering over the device like he wants to crush it. He looks at the screen and grunts, tossing it toward me.
"Mira," he says, his tone clipped. "She’s persistent."
I swipe the screen, my fingers shaking. "Mira?"
"Asa! Thank god," her voice explodes through the speaker, breathless and sharp.
"Where have you been? I've been calling for six hours. The university is a madhouse. Mercer put out a press release—he’s calling it an 'emergency stabilization partnership for public safety.
' He’s framing you as a hero, Asa. A civic-minded Guide stepping up to save the district. "
I close my eyes, a bitter laugh escaping me. "A hero. Is that what we're calling it now?"
"He’s shaping the narrative before we can," Mira says, her voice dropping as if someone’s listening.
"He knows people are asking questions about why an F-Class Guide is suddenly being paired with the ESA's most dangerous asset. He’s burying the Anchor truth under a mountain of patriotic bullshit.
I'm coming over. I’m five minutes away."
"Mira, the building is crawling with—"
"I’m a B-Class Guide with a research permit and a very loud voice, Asa. They aren't going to stop me without making a scene, and Mercer hates scenes. Sit tight."
She hangs up before I can argue. I look up at Jorak, who’s pacing the length of the rug again. He looks like he wants to board up the door. He doesn't like Mira, not because of who she is, but because she represents the world outside the two of us.
"She’s coming over," I say, standing up. "She has more from the archives. We need to know what we're dealing with, Jorak. If I'm really an Anchor, if the math Mira found is right, then the way you process power isn't just about me draining you. It's about a sequence. A pattern."
"I don't care about patterns," Jorak says, stopping in front of me. He looks haunted, the shadows under his eyes matching the dark bruise of the city sky. "I care about the fact that they took you. I care about the fact that they'll do it again the moment you look useful enough to keep."
A knock at the door, sharp and rhythmic, cuts through the tension. Jorak is at the door before I can move, his hand on the hilt of the tactical knife he’s hidden in his waistband. He checks the peephole, his shoulders dropping just an inch, before he hauls the door open.
Mira practically vibrates into the room.
She’s disheveled, her hair escaping its bun, and she’s carrying a heavy leather satchel that looks like it’s been dragged through a coal mine.
She doesn't wait for an invitation. She walks straight to the dining table and dumps the contents out—yellowed papers, microfiche printouts, and hand-drawn diagrams that smell of dust and ozone.
"They're trying to erase it," she says, her eyes wide as she looks at me, then at Jorak. She stops, her nose wrinkling as she catches the air. Her gaze darts to my stomach, then back to my face, her expression softening into something terrified and knowing. "Oh, Asa."
"Not now, Mira," I say, my voice cracking. "The records. What did you find?"
She takes a breath, forcing her professional mask back into place, though she stays just outside the perimeter of the nest-space we’ve carved into the living room.
"Anchors weren't just Guides," Mira says, spreading out a diagram of the Redbrook suppression network.
"They were the engineers of the system. The ESA didn't build these nodes to cleanse power; they built them to bury it.
But you can't just bury energy forever. It builds pressure.
It creates friction. Anchors were the only ones who could bleed the pressure off without the system exploding. "
Jorak leans over the table, his gaze fixed on a drawing of a central node.
"Legends," he mutters. "The older Espers at the facility...
they used to talk about it in the wards.
Stories about Guides who could hold monsters without dying.
We thought they were just fairy tales told to keep the recruits from screaming when the suppression kicked in. "
"Legends don't usually come with archived classification language," Mira says, pointing to a string of equations at the bottom of a page. "Look at this, Asa. This isn't Guide theory. This is applied mathematics. It’s design theory. It’s exactly what you’ve been teaching for ten years."
I lean in, my eyes scanning the familiar notation. My heart skips a beat. It’s a calculus of resonance. A way to map the flow of entropic energy through a physical structure. It isn't about holding the power. It’s about directing it.
"This is why the distance test failed," I whisper, the realization blooming in my mind like ink in water.
"Mercer thought he was testing our bond strength. But he was actually testing the network’s capacity.
When we were apart, the resonance shattered.
The energy had nowhere to flow, so it started eating itself. "
"Which means," Mira says, her voice dropping, "that Redbrook isn't just experiencing unrest. The entire central network is reaching a critical mass.
Mercer isn't trying to fix the nodes. He’s trying to find a way to contain the blast when they finally go.
And he thinks you and Jorak are the only ones who can survive the fallout. "
The room feels colder. I look at Jorak, who’s watching me with a look of such raw, agonizing protectiveness that it hurts to see.
He reaches out, his hand finding mine on the table, his fingers interlacing with mine.
His grip is tight, a physical anchor in a world that’s rapidly dissolving into chaos.
"He won't use you," Jorak says, the words a vow. "He won't turn you into a filter for this city's filth."
"Jorak," I say, squeezing his hand. "If we don't do something, the district will burn anyway. And everyone in it."