28. Camille #2
Movement flashes at the edge of my vision.
Too fast. Too close.
One of the Mouthpieces breaks through Remy’s line and comes directly for me.
I recognize the executive from the hotel lobby. Council-adjacent, high clearance, and positioned close enough to Eon’s internal systems that his credentials could reach almost anything.
Including the contract interface in my hands.
His fingers clamp around my arm.
Cold drives through my skin.
Not temperature. Absence. The sensation of something hollowing out the space beneath his grip and replacing it with a path.
My skin wards activate instantly. Geometric lines ignite beneath my sleeve and spread from my wrist towards my shoulder, the same precise gold pattern that protected me in the corridor.
For one second, they hold.
Then the lines distort.
The Mouthpiece does not strike the barrier from outside. It moves through the executive’s Eon authorization, following a pathway the wards were designed to recognize as safe. The glowing pattern on my skin folds inward, beautiful even as it fails, and burns out beneath his hand.
The wards are not failing.
They are obeying.
He is not trying to injure me.
He is trying to move through me.
The bond flares open.
The Mouthpiece finds it instantly.
Pain tears from my wrist to my sternum as the thing inside him forces itself against the connection between Jules and me. My tablet slips from my hand and strikes the stage. The contract interface remains open across the cracked screen, clauses rewriting themselves too quickly to read.
I attempt to pull away.
My body does not respond.
The Mouthpiece’s access runs through my nervous system like a command. My muscles lock. My vision fractures between the stage and lines of Eon authorization text.
SECONDARY STABILIZING PARTY IDENTIFIED.
TRANSFER ACCESS AVAILABLE.
No.
The word remains inside my head.
I cannot force it past my teeth.
The Mouthpiece steps closer. The executive’s face remains expressionless, but something smiles through his eyes.
The official broadcast cuts.
I hear Blaire shouting through the comms as the arena screens go black, then switch to a static ECLIPSE RUN holding graphic. The music continues beneath it, buying the production team time and giving the international audience the appearance of a technical interruption.
Inside the arena, tens of thousands of people can still see the stage.
Thousands more lift their phones.
The system does not need the official feed anymore.
The executive’s hand tightens.
Cold reaches my chest.
The thing pushes against the bond, searching for a route through me and into Jules from the opposite side. If it succeeds, it will not have to fight her resistance directly. It can use my access, my authority, and the magical structure designed to stabilize her.
It will make me the mechanism that destroys her.
The contract interface flashes.
TRANSFER HOST: CAMILLE HART
AUTHORIZATION PENDING
I cannot move.
I cannot breathe.
The bond stretches until pain consumes every other sensation.
Then impact drives the Mouthpiece away from me.
My pain reaches her through the bond. The choreography falters. The Mouthpiece accounted for resistance, fear, and physical pain. It did not account for Jules choosing me.
Jules slams into the space between us with enough force to send the executive across the stage. Voltstep flashes in both hands, twin blades made from light and kinetic force.
Her landing is wrong. Pain rips through her ribs and floods the bond.
She does not acknowledge it.
“No one touches my wife,” she snarls.
The words cut through the arena.
The Mouthpiece rises with an inhuman movement, but Kaia reaches it first. Aurora sweeps between them in a burst of prismatic light, forcing it back towards Remy.
The executive’s grip is gone.
The cold remains beneath my skin.
I stagger once before Jules catches my waist.
Her eyes meet mine.
They are hers.
Only for a second.
Then the embedded pattern surges through the music, and her entire body locks.
The Mouthpiece inside the system pulls her away from me.
Jules’s hand slips from my waist. Her shoulders jerk into position, and her head turns towards the audience with mechanical precision.
The lights flare back to life.
Not through production control.
Through the system.
Every arena screen displays Jules’s face.
Her expression is blank.
The audience screams, believing the interruption is part of the show.
The emotional output spikes again.
The Patron draws harder.
“Kill the screens,” Blaire orders over comms.
“We did,” someone answers, panic breaking through their voice. “They’re not responding.”
Of course they are not.
The Mouthpieces own the infrastructure now.
Jules takes one step towards the center mark.
Then another.
The audience mirrors her, thousands of bodies shifting in perfect synchronization.
I retrieve my tablet and move after her.
“Jules.”
She does not react.
The Mouthpiece forces her into the next movement, attempting to restore the choreography and rebuild the pattern Remy damaged.
Jules’s body shakes with the effort of resisting it.
“You are Jules Navarro,” I say. “You are not a channel. You are not a system function.”
Her foot misses the mark.
The screens distort.
The Mouthpiece corrects her violently, wrenching her back into position. Pain tears through the bond.
I move closer.
“You are the woman who sends memes to people sitting in the same room. You steal food from everyone’s plates after ordering enough for ten people. You adopted a dog and named her Angel despite all available evidence.”
One of Jules’s hands twitches.
“You notice what everyone needs before they ask,” I continue. “You make jokes when you are afraid. You flirt when you want to be seen and pretend it means nothing when someone sees you.”
Her breathing stutters.
The pattern beneath the music loses a beat.
“You chose me,” I say.
Jules’s eyes find mine.
Something is still looking through them, but she is there behind it.
Fighting.
“You chose me when I gave you every reason not to.”
The bond opens between us, raw and uncontrolled. Her pain reaches me. Her fear. Her fury. The desperate effort of holding on to herself while the system tries to reduce her to an access point.
She feels everything in me in return.
There is no longer any reason to conceal it.
“And I choose you,” I say. “Not because of the bond. Not because of the contract or the role they assigned me.”
Her lips part.
“I choose you because I love you.”
The truth leaves me without hesitation.
“I love you, Jules. I will tear down every part of this system before I let it take you from me.”
The bond aligns. Like two parts of a structure finally accepting the same shape.
The bond was built on mutual acceptance. For the first time, neither of us is withholding it.
The force of it drives through both of us. Gold light flashes beneath Jules’s skin and races across the contract interface.
Her eyes close.
She inhales sharply.
“Camille.”
Her voice.
Not the Mouthpiece.
Hers.
“Now,” I say.
Jules moves.
Not on the beat.
Not according to the choreography.
By choice.
She twists away from the center mark and drives Voltstep into the stage between her feet. Electricity races across the LED floor, cutting through the symbols embedded beneath it.
The arena screens fracture into static.
The Mouthpiece attempts to seize her body again, but Jules plants her feet and rejects the movement before it can complete.
“No,” she says.
The word is quiet.
It carries through every microphone.
The crowd falls into uneven silence as the synchronization begins to fail.
Jules raises her head. “You don’t get to wear me.”
The bond surges again.
She takes hold of whatever the Mouthpiece has built inside her, not physically but fundamentally. It named her a channel. She answers with identity. It defined her by function. She refuses the definition.
Self over system.
Choice over authorization.
The hold on her breaks enough for me to reach the final pathway.
The contract architecture is collapsing across my tablet. Clauses duplicate and vanish as the system attempts to reroute around every override I made. It shifts from the audience to the arena wards, from the wards to the broadcast network, from the network back into Jules.
Every path leads to the same root.
I stop attempting to close them individually.
I follow the live connection beneath the performance clauses, engagement metrics, and Council permissions until I reach the structure no one was meant to access.
LIVE CHANNEL PATHWAY — OPEN
There.
The line that keeps everything connected regardless of interruption, injury, or consent.
The system was never designed to release them.
I open the override field.
A warning fills the screen.
TERMINATION MAY RESULT IN CONTRACT FAILURE.
BONDED TALENT STABILITY CANNOT BE GUARANTEED.
The system expects that threat to stop me.
It does not understand the variable it created when it bound me to Jules.
I would rather collapse the contract than leave her inside it.
I enter the rewrite.
LIVE CHANNEL PATHWAY — TERMINATED
The system rejects it.
I enter it again using my own bond signature.
The interface floods with Council authorization requests.
I deny all of them.
The Mouthpieces around the stage begin moving towards me. Remy intercepts the first, Inkthorn cutting through the glowing line connecting it to the control network. Kaia drives another back with Aurora while maintaining her position between Mina and the audience.
Mina lifts Heartglass.
Its translucent blade reflects something that does not fit inside the arena.
The Patron stretches across every screen at once, a shape built from absence and impossible distance. It has no face, but the certainty of its attention presses against us.
Mina trembles.
Then she turns Heartglass towards Jules.
The blade catches her reflection instead.
Not the Mouthpiece.
Not the channel.
Jules.
Red hair disordered. Makeup streaked. Body injured and shaking, but entirely her own.
“Look,” Mina says.
Jules sees herself.
The Mouthpiece recoils inside the bond.