5. Olivia #5
He is asking me something. Without words, without sound, through glass and distance and the cold light of the terminal chamber. He is asking me the only question that matters to him right now.
“Five.”
I know exactly what he needs to know.
I shake my head.
Small. Clear. One motion, slow and steady, nothing ambiguous in it.
His face doesn't change yet. The question is still there.
He needs more, he can't take one gesture as the whole answer, not with this, not after this.
He stares at me with an intensity that has no performance in it at all, nothing managed or controlled, just the bare, unguarded fact of him needing to know.
I step forward until I'm as close to the glass as I can get.
I press my palm against it, flat, fingers spread.
I look at him — at his face, at those bloodshot gold eyes, at the creature who smiled at me while he was dying so that I would see something other than fear — and I lean forward and I whisper.
He cannot hear me.
I say it anyway.
"I'm still yours. "
“Four.”
My voice cracks on the last word and I don't try to stop it.
The tears come, and I don't try to stop them either.
Because they're not embarrassing, they're just the residue of a platform where I burned alive rather than give myself to someone who wasn't him.
That choice was not hard. That's the thing I want him to know.
That choice was the easiest thing I've done in these damn Games.
I am still his.
Still exactly what I was before they grabbed me, before the platform shook, before Varketh's hand found my cheek in the basin's waiting light.
Still clean and whole and nobody else's.
I stood in lava and I threw away the relic that was keeping me alive and I let the dark come. I am here, and I am still this.
Still his.
“Three.”
Kaelor's chest heaves.
A visible exhale. I can see it clearly from here, the full-body release of something enormous, the whole structure of him settling in a way that it wasn't settled before. His eyes close for a moment. Just a moment. And when they open again, what's in them has changed.
He raises his hand.
Slowly. Fingers spread. He presses his palm against the glass and matches mine, exactly, from across the chamber — hand to hand through the barrier, separated by glass and a yard of air and all the things we can't say to each other right now. The warmth I feel isn't from the pod.
I know it isn't from the pod. It’s the bond between us. Still there. Still alive.
A sound, then, from beside him. From the neighboring pod .
I glance at it.
Varketh.
“Two.”
He is still. The frightening stillness of a creature cataloguing a big loss — measuring it, assigning cause, already working on the next calculation.
He watched the exchange between us. He knows what my shaken head means.
He knows the reset wasn't due to consent and wasn't an accident.
It wasn't anything except exactly what I intended.
He had expected me to lie, I think. He had expected that whatever happened out there would give him a claim he could use.
He hadn't expected this. He hadn't factored in — me.
Specifically this version of me, who jumps into magma for someone, who says I'm still yours to an alien male through glass with tears on her cheeks.
The fury on his face is the anger of someone who cannot find anywhere to put a calculation that came out wrong.
Good.
“One.”
I look back at Kaelor.
He is still watching me. That unguarded, fully mine look, unchanged.
His hand still pressed to the glass. I think about his hand in mine on the platform, the careful weight of it, the way he held it like he knew exactly what he had.
I think about the relic and the corridor and the arena beyond and everything that comes next — the next round, the next Arena, whatever the Games decide to throw at us with the volcano closer to permanent eruption.
I think about running.
The two of us, across the stone, into whatever comes next, together.
I think about all of it, and underneath every thought, steady as a pulse, steady as the heartbeat I could hear in the relic's light:
Love.
Not the bond mechanics. Not the Games working as intended, the relic amplifying attachment, the engineered pull of proximity and shared danger. Not what Varketh called it, with that careful, reasonable, try-to-get-inside-my-head voice.
Love.
The real kind. The kind that doesn't need to be explained because it's not complicated. The kind that shows up in a moment when a creature is dying and spends the last thing it has on a smile aimed at you. The kind that says come back to me like a prayer and means it.
I know it the way I know his face.
The way I know the sound of him.
The way I know that in whatever comes next, whatever the platform looks like, whatever the rivals still standing decide to throw at us — I will take his hand the first moment I can.
And I will not let go.
I keep my palm against the glass.
I keep my eyes on him.
And I wait.
“Launch.”