13. Luna
LUNA
Itold a stranger online about the impossible man I was falling for. The impossible man read every word.
That was the whole arrangement of my life, and I was proud of it.
There were two sealed worlds that never touched.
In one of them I was a wanted woman hiding in a fortress full of armed men who would not laugh at my jokes.
In the other I was just Nyx, talking to a stranger on a screen who had never asked me for anything I couldn't give.
I was very good at keeping systems separate.
It was the one thing I was certain I would never get wrong.
They moved me the morning after we had bled the same fight, Pavel and I, side by side in the dark with our hands flying over one problem until Nightjar's intrusion folded like wet paper.
The Pakhan permitted it, was all Kirill said, which I had learned was the closest this house ever came to explaining a decision.
So I got walked deeper into the compound, through a door that took two men and a keypad and what I can only assume was a blood sacrifice to open, into a wing that smelled like cedar and gun oil and old money.
My new room had a window that did not open, a bed I could have slept four across, and a chair positioned so precisely I suspected it had been surveyed.
"This is nice," I told the guard who delivered me. "Do I get a mint on the pillow, or is that a decadent Western thing you people frown on?"
He looked at me the way you would look at a smoke alarm chirping at three in the morning. Then he left.
That set the tone. The men in this wing did not react to me.
I workshopped material on them for a full day.
I told the one by the stairwell that his tie was crooked, which was a lie, and also he was not wearing a tie.
He gave me nothing. I asked the tall one guarding the corridor whether the Bratva kept a suggestion box.
He blinked once, like a lizard deciding I was not food.
Kirill, at least, gave me something back.
"There's a schedule," he said, handing me a printed page. It was an actual page, listing meals, work blocks, and a line that said quiet hours in a font that meant it.
"A schedule," I said. "For a grown woman."
"For everyone."
"Does Pavel get one too?"
"Pavel is the schedule."
I decided on the spot that I liked Kirill. He delivered every line like he was reading a weather report over a corpse.
The real war was the kitchen. Baba Luda ran it the way a general runs a contested border, and within an hour of my arrival she had decided I was starving to death in front of her.
I was handed things, constantly, on trays.
A bowl of something with dumplings arrived at my elbow while I was mid keystroke, then a second one before I had finished the first, and when I said I was full she treated it as an opening bid.
"Eat," she said, and set the ladle down on the counter with a sound like a gavel.
"I ate. I ate the entire ecosystem you brought me."
"Still no color in you. You are the shade of a fish left too long on ice."
"I'm pale because I stare at screens for a living and I run on caffeine and spite."
That was my fatal error, because the caffeine was the other front.
Smuggled in the lining of my bag like a woman moving state secrets, I had four cans of a violently green energy drink that tasted like a scented candle and kept my brain firing.
Baba Luda found them the way she found everything, which is to say instantly and with contempt. She held one up between two fingers.
"This is poison."
"That is a strong word for a beverage."
"You will drink tea."
"I will perish."
"You will drink tea." She confiscated two cans on the spot, dropping them into the deep pocket of her apron, and I understood that we were now negotiating.
I got to keep the other two if I ate breakfast, a real one, sitting down, where she could watch me do it.
It was the worst trade of my life and I took it, because she was terrifying, and because underneath the terror she kept touching my hair like I was something that had wandered in out of the cold, and I had not had that in a long time.
So a rhythm formed. That is the thing nobody warns you about danger, that it can settle into a shape, and the shape can start to feel like a life.
The days were work, and the work was good.
Pavel and Zoya and I built countermeasures for HELIX, the three of us bent over the same problem like it was a fire we were feeding.
Zoya was fast and mean about it in the best possible way, catching my logic and bending it a step further, and Pavel sat between us being the thing he was, quiet and enormous and impossibly precise, and when the three of us locked in, the room hummed.
But it was Pavel and me that the air kept noticing.
We had not talked about the almost-kiss.
That night he had come close enough that I felt the heat coming off his jaw, and then he had stopped himself like he had hit a wall only he could see, and he stepped back, and said nothing, and left me standing there rebuilding my whole understanding of the evening from scratch.
We had both quietly decided it never happened.
That is its own strange kind of intimacy, pretending in perfect sync.
"You're doing that wrong," he said one afternoon, leaning over my shoulder to point at a line of my code.
"I'm doing it efficiently."
"You're doing it in a way that fails at scale."
"So will the sun, eventually." I tipped my head back to look up at him, which was a tactical blunder, because he was very close, and he smelled like cedar too, and I started to wonder if the entire wing had been built out of him.
"Are you this generous with feedback for everyone, or am I getting the special rate? "
Something moved across his face. He did not answer right away, and the not answering was louder than any answer he could have given.
"Fix the loop," he said at last, low, and he straightened and set a careful yard of air between us, and I watched him do it and hated how closely I was watching. He crossed the room like it was on fire and he refused to run.
"You could just tell me I'm special," I called after him.
"Fix the loop, Luna."
He said my name like it cost him something to spend. I could not read him, and that was the entire problem. I could reverse engineer any system on earth except the one man built like a locked door, and I could not tell whether it was bolted to keep me out or to keep something else in.
That was what the nights were for.
I tried Ethan first, most of those nights.
I would ping the old relay two or three times, just to hear one voice from my real life tell me I was still a person and not a headline, and every time the channel sat dead.
I told myself he was only being careful.
A man who had stuck his neck out for a fugitive had earned the right to go quiet.
It was a decent story, and I almost let it hold me.
Then, alone, with the wing gone quiet and the terrible schedule insisting I should be asleep, I opened the channel that was mine, the one thing in my whole upended life that nobody had assigned me or confiscated or delivered on a tray.
I had been talking to Shadow for eight months.
I had never seen his face. I knew the shape of his mind better than I knew most people's bodies.
NYX: you awake?
SHADOW: For you. Always.
NYX: ok i need to tell someone something and youre the only person i trust who cant see my face while i say it
SHADOW: That is a very specific kind of trust. I'll take it.
NYX: theres a man
SHADOW: There is often a man.
NYX: shut up. theres a man and he saved my life. like actually saved it. and hes impossible. hes this locked box of a person and i keep trying to pick the lock and he keeps refusing to open and it is driving me insane
SHADOW: Define impossible.
NYX: he almost kissed me. and then he didnt. he just stopped. no reason, no explanation, backed off like id done something wrong, and now we both pretend it never happened and i CANNOT read him and its making me stupid
There was a pause on his end, longer than usual. Then it came.
SHADOW: Maybe he stopped for a reason he can't give you.
NYX: what reason could POSSIBLY be good enough?
SHADOW: I don't know his. But a man like that, the careful kind, he doesn't pull back because he wants less of you. Sometimes he pulls back because he wants too much and can't afford what taking it would cost you.
NYX: cost ME? im the one standing there feeling like an idiot
SHADOW: You are not an idiot. Listen to me.
If he stopped, it is far likelier that he was protecting something than that he felt nothing.
Men like that can lie in every direction except one, and the one they cannot lie in is the one that matters, so they go silent instead.
It looks like rejection. It is much closer to the opposite.
I read that three times. Something in the phrasing hooked under my ribs, a familiarity I could not place, like a song heard faintly through a wall.
NYX: that is unreasonably specific for a guy who has never met him
SHADOW: I have met men like him.
NYX: are you men like him?
SHADOW: We're talking about you.
NYX: classic shadow deflection. fine. real question then. what if i actually want him? not the dumb adrenaline version, the real one. because that scares me more than the mercenaries did and i genuinely do not know what to do with it
SHADOW: Then you tell the truth to someone who can hold it. Which you just did. That is not nothing, Nyx. That is the hardest part, and you did it in your pajamas at an ungodly hour to a man on a screen.
NYX: how did you know im in pajamas?
SHADOW: You are always in pajamas. It is the one thing about you I would bet my life on.
I laughed out loud into the empty room, and then the laugh went somewhere quiet and strange, because he was right, and because nobody else alive knew that about me, and because for one warm second I felt held by a person I would not recognize on the street.
That was the thing about Shadow. He made the ache of everything else bearable.
He was the soft place I landed after a whole day of throwing myself at a locked door.
I never thought to ask why the two of them pulled at me with the exact same gravity.
NYX: i wish you were here sometimes. is that weird? not necessarily like THAT. just, you always answer. the impossible man never answers anything and you answer everything
SHADOW: It isn't weird.
NYX: hes probably in this building right now not thinking about me at all
SHADOW: I doubt that very much.
NYX: youre just being nice
SHADOW: I am being honest. There is a difference. You should learn to tell them apart before you decide what he feels.
NYX: ok wise elder. tell me what to do
SHADOW: I can't tell you what to do. I can only ask you one thing.
NYX: ominous. go
And then he asked it, the way he always asked the ones that mattered, plainly, with no armor on it at all.
SHADOW: Do you trust him?
I sat with that. The window that would not open, the wing gone still around me, the ladle no doubt hanging in the dark kitchen like a threat. I thought about a hand moving next to mine on a keyboard in perfect time. I thought about a careful yard of air.
NYX: I want to. Isn't that stupid?
I hit send.
Then I waited for the thing that always came, the reply that had never once failed me, the reliable warm certainty of him catching whatever I threw at him.
The cursor blinked.
The typing indicator flickered on, three small dots, and I knew he had started.
I sat forward. Then it stopped, and there was nothing.
It came back and started again, and my chest did something hopeful and small, and then it stopped a second time, and the screen just sat there, white and silent and awful.
I waited. I told myself he had gotten up for water. That the connection had dropped. That anything at all had happened except the single thing his silence felt like, which was a door closing very softly in a room I could not see into.
The dots did not return.
I stared at the little space where his words were supposed to appear, the one man who never left me hanging suddenly gone somewhere I could not follow, and I had no way of knowing, none at all, that a few doors down the same silence had settled into a room, and that the room was not empty.
That someone was sitting inside it, unmade, reading my answer over and over, unable to type the only true thing he had left to say.
I just sat there staring at the empty space where his answer belonged, and I did not understand.