Chapter Thirty-two
Declan
Air forced itself into lungs I couldn’t control.
Pain burned through my right hand and climbed toward my shoulder. I reached for it, desperate for anything that belonged to the body beneath the glass, but I still couldn’t reach it.
Then the cabin came back in pieces.
My head spun as, one minute, a curved wall rose above me; the next, Grandpa’s table formed beneath my hands, and the floor was white and hard under my bare feet. Snow filled one window while pale figures in white uniforms moved behind another.
A voice entered from somewhere above the mantel.
“Participant Shaw. Orientation toward the original neural network will preserve both independent baselines. Continued retention within the shared field will require stabilization of the incompatible participant.”
The words reached me twice. Once in the Khevari language I had begun to understand. Once in the plain version my mind supplied.
In other words: Wake up, or we start doing things to Avena.
“Leave her alone,” I said. Or I think I did. I wasn’t sure whether my physical vocal cords worked.
“Participant Serath,” the voice continued. “Orientation toward the original neural network will preserve both independent baselines. Continued retention within the shared field will require stabilization of the incompatible participant.”
The same threat, turned toward Avena and wrapped in more Khevari words: Wake up, or we start doing things to Declan. Assholes.
The chair beside mine appeared empty but then Avena filled it all at once. Her head was bent forward under a white restraint that did not belong in the cabin, her silver-white hair hanging across her face. It gutted me.
Her now-darkened Steward bracelet and the glowing band that marked her involuntary participant status flickered on her wrist before her blue-gray sleeve covered them.
She lifted her head.
“Do not answer.” Her voice was a rasp.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“Selari describes stabilization as if it preserves both participants,” she said. “Within Central Integration, it can include suppression, externally maintained containment or reduction of the activity classified as incompatible.”
“He hurts whichever one of us we don’t choose.”
Her mouth tightened at my simplified translation. “Yes.”
The room shifted around us. For half a second, I saw my body under the glass. Vapor covered my face. A white support pressed across my chest while a machine breathed in a rhythm I could feel but not control.
Then the cabin returned.
“Can you feel your body?” she asked.
“The restraint. The support at the base of my skull. My hands.”
“Good.”
“It’s so not good.”
“It’s a way back.”
Her eyes moved to mine. Fear stripped the careful distance from them.
“We do not know that.”
“No. But we know they want us scared enough to pick the answer for them.”
The voice above the mantel repeated the first condition.
I looked up. “You can stop. We heard the threat the first time.”
“The conditions have been entered into the record,” Selari said. “Both participants may respond or decline.”
“Declining is the response you’re threatening us for.”
“No punitive action has been specified.”
“You have a very polished name for everything,” I answered, still wondering how she was understanding me while denying that I was a thinking being. The whole thing made me want to shut down and return to my artificial state. Now, though, there was Avena.
Central Integration took its place in a narrow strip. White uniforms stood around the cradle. Selari’s face watched from a suspended panel. A second Khevari man entered the room wearing silver instead of white. A triangle emblem was emblazoned on his chest.
He had platinum hair, a square jaw, and cheekbones sharp enough to make Selari’s people look soft. Lavender eyes moved once across the equipment, Avena’s restraint, and the glass holding my body. He did not look surprised by any of it.
“Brevak of House Korven,” he said. “Dominion Intelligence.”
The name meant nothing to me. The way Selari’s expression changed did.
“This procedure is under Integration authority,” Selari said.
“Vaeron of the First House and the seized archive are under mine.”
Brevak placed one hand above a dark console. Lines of text opened beneath it too quickly for me to read.
“The historical witness entered an interpretation of the Janus fragment before provocation was authorized,” he said. “The evidence rules require the interpretation to accompany any procedure derived from that fragment.”
“The interpretation is speculative.”
“It is labeled as such.”
Nothing in Brevak’s face suggested he cared whether Selari agreed. Nothing suggested he cared whether we survived either. He was only a man applying a rule exactly where it had been written.
The cabin came back before I could decide what side he was on. Vaeron’s recorded voice moved through the walls.
“Janus did not require one participant to select survival over the other. Each pattern resumed independent containment within the body already its own. Severance followed only after both participants recognized that the other remained whole.”
The recording ended.
Selari began saying something about unsupported interpretation. I stopped listening.
Avena had gone completely still.
“Each chooses home,” she whispered.
“No.”
“That’s where we kept getting it wrong. The cabin feels like home. My body doesn’t. Not yet.” I looked at the walls Grandpa had built and the fire that had waited for me through years I couldn’t count. “But this place isn’t where my body is.”
“It may be the only location where the shared field can remain stable.”
“That doesn’t make it ours to live in forever.”
Blue-white light moved beneath her skin. “If the field closes, we may not be able to find each other again.”
There it was. Not a technical objection. Not a calculation.
Fear.
Mine answered it so fast I had to breathe before I spoke.
“I know.”
“I choose my body,” I said. “You choose yours.”
Her light flashed gold then vanished.
“That creates independent orientation. It does not establish continued contact after severance.”
“Avena.”
She looked at me.
“We will find each other again.”
Her face changed in the small way that always cost her more than anyone else understood.
“You cannot walk,” she said.
“Probably not.”
“Your lungs remain mechanically assisted.”
“I noticed.”
“You may not be able to speak.”
“That might be harder on me than you.”
“I am restrained,” she said.
“You’ve been difficult from a seated position before.”
“I do not know how to reach you,” she said.
“But, Tinkerbell, you already have.”
I gripped the pain and followed it. It began in my smallest finger, ran through the hand I had forced closed and climbed an arm that felt too heavy to belong to me. I found my shoulder. The hard support beneath my head. Air pushing into lungs that resisted it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Locating my physical boundaries.”
“In English.”
Her eyes opened. “Finding myself.”
“There you go.”
The line through the mantel clock widened. White light poured across the table.
“My body is mine,” Avena said.
“Independent return orientation detected,” a distant voice said.
I looked down at my hand around hers. For years, the Dominion had owned my every breath, every heartbeat and every inch of a body they claimed no one lived inside.
“Mine, too,” I said.
My pulse spiked.
“Two return states confirmed,” Selari said.
No satisfaction entered his voice. He had what he wanted.
INTERNAL SEVERANCE COMMAND REQUIRED
Avena read it. Her fingers tightened around mine.
“We can refuse,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The return states may remain preserved without severance.”
“Maybe.”
“Further evidence may clarify the physical risk.”
“Maybe.”
She looked at me. “You have decided.”
“I’m deciding.” My lungs in the cabin breathed heavily. I was lying. I had decided, but I didn’t want to admit it to her. I didn’t want her to panic, too.
Outside the cabin, Selari ordered the conditions repeated. Brevak said something too low to hear. A warning tone began near my physical head.
The Dominion would keep going until it turned our answer into something they wanted. If we waited, they would tighten the choice, alter the conditions and call every new injury information.
I was still scared. I wasn’t ever going to be ready for this. I was going to do it anyway.
“If we do this,” I said, “we do it because we chose our bodies. Not because Selari threatened them.”
“Agreed.”
“And we do it knowing neither one of us gets to decide what happens to the other after.”
“Agreed.”
“The cabin might be gone.”
Blue-white light filled her eyes. “I know.”
I stood. My legs shook even here.
Avena rose with me. The white restraint flashed across her chest, then disappeared. I took two steps around the table and took her in my arms. I held on tightly.
“We have to let the field go,” I said.
“Yes.”
Neither of us moved.
“I’m not ready,” she said, her normally calm voice trembling.
The truth hurt less than a brave answer would have.
“Neither am I.”
“Together?” she asked.
“Together.”
I looked at the fire, the clock that was back in its place, and the windows full of Michigan snow. Then I looked at the woman in my arms.
The cabin had given us a place to meet before either of us knew how badly we needed one. The cabin had never been the promise.
She was.
The connection between our hands broke.
My body hit me all at once.
Voices rose around me.
“Shared-field activity terminated.”
“Independent baselines holding.”
“Reduce respiratory assistance by two increments.”
“Do not reduce anything,” Avena said.
Her voice was not inside my head.
My eyelids snapped open.
Pain from the light sliced through them. Black shapes moved behind the curved glass. White uniforms. Black equipment. A shining figure standing near Selari’s image.
Silver-white hair. Lavender eyes. My bright, opinionated Tinkerbell.
“Declan.” Her lavender eyes were wild, her hair unruly around her face.
I tried to answer. My mouth moved but nothing useful came out. Her face broke anyway.
The cradle wall slid down with a hiss. Cold air touched skin that had not felt it in years. Every muscle in my body tried to pull away and failed.
“Release Participant Serath,” the senior technician ordered. “Proximity is the only established voluntary orientation stimulus.”
Selari objected.
Brevak’s voice cut across his. “The independent response requires preservation.”
It sounded like agreement with the technician. Maybe. But it also sounded like another rule. At this point, I couldn’t be sure what I was understanding.
The restraint across Avena opened.
She stumbled when she stood. One of the white-uniformed specialists reached toward her. Gold flared along her arms, and she glared at him. He reconsidered.
Avena crossed the space between us herself.
She looked taller than she had in the cabin. Less perfect. Much more beautiful. Her loose hair caught against the dark monitoring band when she lowered herself beside the cradle.
She stopped before touching me.
Even now. Even here.
Her hand opened beside mine.
Her palm slid beneath my hand. Real skin. Real pressure. A pulse moving against the base of my thumb.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I had imagined a hundred things I might say when I woke. Angry things. Necessary things. Her name.
My throat couldn’t give me any of them.
Instead, tears ran hot down my temples into my hair.
Avena’s light flooded gold, then blue-white, then every color I had learned to read and several I had not. She didn’t tell me everything was all right. She didn’t ask me to forgive her.
She just stayed next to me and held my hand. It was enough.
And this time, when I weakly closed my hand around hers, neither of us disappeared.