Epilogue
Six months later…
The new safehouse we’ve moved into, the moment I started showing, is silent; the world outside is reduced to a distant hush of wind against the siding and the slow ticking of old baseboard heaters.
The house has an older charm to it—the floorboards creak, the pipes rattle, and the wallpaper is older than any of us.
It feels more honest than the penthouses and compounds we’ve bled through.
No city glow, no sirens, just a black sky full of stars and a dirt road that ends half a mile from the front porch.
Six months along… I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore; I can’t see my feet below my belly.
Sterling’s had to help me shave this last month.
It’s fucking exhausting to even breathe right now.
Lying on my side, Sterling’s body curves behind me, his hand resting on the swell of my belly beneath the quilt.
His breathing is deep and even. He only ever looks vulnerable in his sleep.
Awake, he’s all edges and calculation. Asleep, the guard drops, and I see the boy Cicada never fully got its claws into, no matter what their files say.
I sit up as my laptop lights up from the bedside table, the screen casting a faint blue glow across his face, sharpening the angles of his jaw.
The raised scar I carved into his ribcage six months ago in the ruins of St. Jude’s catches my attention.
Mine. For a moment, I just watch him, counting the rise and fall of his chest, the subtle twitch of his fingers against my skin when Briar shifts.
I reach for the computer, moving carefully so I don’t jostle Sterling.
Cam sent the file three hours ago, apologizing for the delay.
Forgot I mirrored the raw data before we torched the drives. Found a folder labeled “Terminated Assets.” Thought you should see it.
I open the first document. There’s some kind of genetic map–two sequences spiral side by side; one labeled Subject 001-A, the other Subject 012-B.
The letters and colors would mean nothing to most people.
I’ve read enough lab reports to know exactly what I’m looking at.
The compatibility analysis blazes in red at the bottom of the screen.
99.7% Genetic Compatibility Pairing With Exceptional Stress Response Synchronization.
My breath catches as I scroll down, my finger trembling against the trackpad.
Pair subjects demonstrate unprecedented limbic resonance. Hypothesis: Natural selection via forced proximity is unnecessary; subjects are biologically predisposed to imprint. However…
I scroll further, the words starting to blur together.
…bonding has exceeded acceptable parameters.
Subjects demonstrate lethal mutual protectiveness—attempted isolation of either subject results in acute physiological distress in their counterpart.
Termination of one subject, projected to result in immediate psychogenic collapse in the other.
Recommendation: Removal from the general population.
Subjects are too dangerously entwined to be utilized as independent operatives.
They fail compliance because they fortify each other.
A laugh bubbles up in my chest, sharp and soundless.
They fail compliance because they fortify each other.
We were a failure in their system because we refused to break the way they wanted us to.
We did what the program wanted, yet still failed because the bond became unbreakable.
There’s a handwritten annotation in the margin, scanned in, the ink smeared like it was written in haste.
They were never meant to be controlled. They were meant to be each other’s weapon. Burn the facility. Separate them or kill them. They are proof that the concept mold is broken.
Proof. As if we were just a prototype, they regretted the second it worked too well for them to hold. Attached below is a secondary file with what has been completed by Cam and Lila.
Manifest: Active Facilities
Nesting House – Appalachia (DESTROYED)
Ketchikan Sanctuary– Ketchikan, Alaska (DESTROYED)
Bitterroot Lodge– Bitterroot, Montana (DEYSTROYED)
Osage Valley Resort – Osage County, Oklahoma
(We have a side job here when you have the baby)
Crater Lake Haven – Crater Lake, Oregon
Tidewater Retreat– Outer Banks, North Carolina
Fall River Manor– Fall River, Massachusetts
Out of seven houses, four are left standing.
Out past these walls, other kids are lying awake under other roofs, listening to other humming machines, waiting for footsteps in the hall.
The list sits on the screen like a dare and a roadmap.
I stare at it until my eyes burn. The need in me to save them is itching.
I know Cam and Lila have been busy taking down some of the houses while I’m out, but I still feel the need to be a part of it.
More than just sitting behind a screen. And because of that feeling, these fucking assholes have taken me off even that.
According to my doctor, my blood pressure was getting too high.
I read the email over and over. We weren’t random.
We weren’t accidents. We were designed for each other.
And we failed the program because we loved each other too well.
Because Sterling would burn the world for me, and I would empty magazines for him, and together we were unbreakable. Uncontrollable. Bad lab rats.
A small heel, or an elbow, or some god-forsaken, unnamed part, presses hard against my skin from the inside.
Briar kicks under Sterling’s hand, a sharp, insistent reminder that she is still here, still ours.
He doesn’t wake, but his fingers flex automatically, tightening over where she lies as if answering a call only his body can hear.
His thumb strokes once, unconscious, soothing someone who can’t hear him yet except through my skin.
Briar, my love, you’re already a thorn in my side.
I could show Sterling. I could turn the screen around so the red numbers and cold conclusions stare back at him.
He’d read every word, his eyes going flat and distant the way they do when he’s bleeding out on the inside.
He’d start asking himself how much of this is us and how much of it is code—where his instincts ended and their programming began.
Sterling already carries too much of their weight, their scars and sins.
Whether it was by design or a glitch in their system, this is the only truth that matters now.
I chose him. I chose him in blood and candlelight at an abandoned church with a knife carving into his ribs while he carved into my hip.
Two lunatics writing each other into our skin like a contract.
Every time the world tried to break me, I reached for him.
Not because a file told me to, but because something in me recognized him as mine, long before I was ready to admit it.
I turn off the laptop quietly. The screen goes dark, taking Cam’s summary and the manifest with it.
My reflection ghosts back at me for a heartbeat: messy hair, dark circles, the faint hollow at my throat that never quite goes away, and then it’s just black.
I close the laptop with a soft click and set the computer back on the nightstand, out of sight.
The gun sits beside my laptop, loaded, within easy reach. This can wait for now.
Briar kicks again, making my heart swell at the little family we created.
Sterling will teach her how to shoot, and I’ll teach her to survive.
Mara will teach Briar that sanctuary can be more than a word on a church sign.
Lila will teach her that a good insult is better than armor in some scenarios.
And Cam…well, he will teach her how to break into systems from the inside.
Probably landing us a trip to the local police station to bail her out. But none of that is happening tonight.
Tonight there is only this—the dark, the weight of Sterling’s hand on my womb, the tiny heartbeat under my skin, and the truth humming through my blood like a second pulse.
I turn my head until my lips brush the shell of his ear.
The cabin settles around us—a soft pop in the wood, a sigh from the old heater, the wind brushing past the eaves.
My voice is barely more than breath. “I am your thorn,” I whisper to his sleeping form, “and you were always meant to be mine.” Sterling doesn’t wake.
But his fingers press harder into my skin, spanning scar and worn cotton and six months of impossible new life, as if some part of him hears me anyway and answers without words.
Outside, the night stretches wide and empty, the safehouse just a pinprick of light in the middle of nowhere.
And somewhere in the mountains, the ashes of the Nest House are still under dirt and snow, waiting for us to come back to the fire with our child on my hip and a different ending in our hands.
The game they played is just getting started.
Only this time with new rules and players.
This time, we will not be the ones burdened with carrying their sins.
They will feel what the weight of that burden feels like.