Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
DUTCH
Maren’s not in the lab. Her tablet’s there. Her coffee’s there. Her lab coat’s thrown over the back of her chair, one sleeve hanging low enough to touch the floor.
That means one of two things. She finally went to sleep, in which case several minor gods deserve paperwork, or she found somewhere else to be awake.
I check her quarters first. Door sealed from the outside. No motion inside.
Then I check the main viewing corridor.
She’s on the floor. No ice cream this time. Just Maren, sitting with her knees drawn up, shoes off, staring into the dark water.
The reef beyond the glass glows in thin pulses.
The elevated spore levels are still within human thresholds, according to the reports.
The reports aren’t the whole truth. Colors look too close tonight.
Sound carries differently. The air has less room between feeling a thing and having to admit it’s there.
I stop several feet away. “This seat taken?”
She doesn’t look at me. “By ruin.”
“Ruin have a badge?”
“Probably. Everything else does.”
I sit beside her, leaving the usual space between us.
“Everything locked down?” she asks.
“As much as it can be.” I lean back against the glass. Cold comes through my uniform, deep and steady. Outside, something small flashes silver and vanishes.
For a while, neither of us talks.
The silence has all the usual things in it: air systems, water systems, reef movement, distant staff voices over comms, the facility pretending the hum still means what it used to mean.
Then Maren says, “I’m scared.” She keeps looking at the water. “Not of the creatures. I mean, yes, obviously, I’m not stupid. But that’s not the part that has its hands around my throat.”
I wait.
“I’m scared of what I missed,” she says.
“What I explained away because the explanation was cleaner than the implication. What I chose not to put in the system because the system would have made it real in front of people before I was ready to stop being the person who understood it best.” Her mouth twists.
It’s not a smile. Not close. “Which is an absurdly elegant way of saying I was arrogant.”
“No,” I say.
She turns then. “Dutch.”
“No,” I say again. “Arrogant would have slept.”
“I’ve made several terrible choices while awake,” she says.
“Most people do.”
She looks back at the reef. Her shoulder is closer than it was.
“It’s not that I thought I couldn’t be wrong,” she says.
“I knew I could. I built correction into everything. Redundancies, review cycles, live modeling, confidence intervals, external evaluation, the whole sainted bureaucracy of doubt. But I still trusted the shape of my own thinking. I trusted that if something went wrong, I would see it soon enough.”
“And now?”
“Now I keep wondering if the reef was changing in front of me and I was too busy being impressive to hear it.”
I look out through the glass. “Fallujah had this alley.”
She goes still.
I don’t talk about Fallujah. Not properly. I mention it sometimes. Half a sentence. A bad joke with the door shut behind it.
“Buildings on both sides,” I say. “Too many windows. Bad sightlines. Everyone knew it. We’d been through worse streets.
Worse days. The map said one thing, the air said another, and we all trusted the map because the alternative was admitting we didn’t know what the street was doing until it did it. ”
Maren says nothing.
“I remember thinking, after, that the first sign wasn’t the sound. It was the quiet before it. We all heard it. No one called it.”
My hands are loose on my knees. They look like mine. That surprises me sometimes.
“I didn’t stop functioning when it happened,” I say. “That’s what people mistake for calm. I moved. Did the job. Got people out. Counted who I could count. Later was later.”
The reef pulses blue.
Maren’s voice is careful. “And later?”
I stare at the dark water. There are things behind me in that alley that don’t belong in this corridor. Things with heat, dust, voices, men laughing ten minutes before they weren’t. I can feel the edge of them, but I don’t step over.
“Later was loud,” I say.
It’s the most I can give her. For now.
She turns toward me fully, shoulder against the glass, knees angled my way. “You’re afraid right now.”
“Yeah,” I say.
Her eyes search my face. “I thought you were unshakeable,” she says.
“No.”
“I know that now.”
The corridor narrows around the words.
Her hand moves across the floor between us, palm down, fingers grazing the cold composite. She stops halfway.
I meet her there. Contact, warm in a corridor full of water and glass and ancient things trying new shapes in the dark.
She looks at our hands. “If this is the spores, we should stop.”
I’m already nodding before she finishes. “Yes.”
Her fingers tighten around mine. “I don’t want to stop.”
“Need to know that’s not just tonight talking.”
“It isn’t.” She looks up. “The spores are making it harder to pretend I’m not tired of wanting this. They didn’t build the wanting.”
My throat goes tight in a way that belongs to no crisis checklist. “No,” I say. “They didn’t.”
“What about you?”
“I wanted it before the reports had opinions.”
That gets the laugh. Small, breathy, almost startled. It hits me low and warm.
She shifts closer until her knee presses against mine. “Your quarters are closer.”
“Yes.”
“Do they have a bed?”
“Suspicious question.”
“Operational.”
“Yes. They have a bed.”
“Good.”
We stand. Her hand stays in mine, and the whole facility seems to notice the contact. Or I do. Same difference tonight.
We walk through the staff corridor without talking. I keep us on the quieter route, away from operations, away from the atrium, away from anyone who might see her face and decide they need the director. She’s been needed for hours. She’s allowed to be wanted now.
My quarters are small. Bed. Desk. Locker. The door seals behind us.
Maren looks around once. “This is aggressively practical.”
“That’s most of my decorating philosophy.”
The room is too small for all the things we are not saying.
I step closer. “Last check.”
She tilts her head. “I’m sober. I’m scared. I’m exhausted. I’m spore-adjacent, not spore-drunk. I know what I’m asking for.” Her eyes stay on mine. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
I lift my hand to her cheek. She leans into it, and that’s almost enough to take my knees out from under me.
“I want you here,” I say. “Not as director. Not as the person holding the facility together. Just here.”
Her eyes close for one second. When they open, she kisses me. Her hands come to my chest, fingers curling in my uniform shirt.
I keep one hand on her cheek and the other at her waist.
Her body comes against mine, warm and real, and for the first time all day there’s no glass between me and what I’m trying to protect.
That thought does not survive her mouth opening under mine.
I back her toward the bed because if I don’t put her somewhere solid, I may stand here kissing her until the ocean gives up and comes in to complain. She sits, looking up at me with her hair coming loose from its pins, her mouth soft from kissing, her eyes too bright.
“Dutch,” she says.
I kneel in front of her.
Her breath changes.
I put both hands on her knees.
Then her fingers slide into my hair, and that’s the end of my last clean thought.
I kiss her knee first. Her breath leaves her in a rough little exhale. I kiss higher, over fabric, slow enough to feel her attention narrow on me.
She says my name again, less steady.
I smile against her thigh and feel her fingers tighten in my hair.
There’s no performance in her when I undress her. She helps me with the buttons, lifts her hips, pushes fabric away. She lets herself be awkward for half a second when her shirt catches on her wrist. She swears at it. I fix it. She laughs, and then her laughter thins when my mouth finds her thigh.
Her hands move over my shoulders, my neck, the back of my head. Pulling me closer. Her control is still there, but it is not armor now. It’s communication.
I understand that.
I can follow orders.
I look up. Her face is flushed, her mouth parted, all that terrible intelligence fixed on me like she’s trying to solve the exact shape of wanting.
“Still operational?” I ask.
“Barely,” she says. “Continue.”
She’s wet.
The knowledge hits hard enough that I have to close my eyes for one second. Because wanting and being wanted back are different weapons, and the second one has no training manual.
Her hand closes around my wrist. “Dutch.”
“I’ve got you.”
“I know.”
I touch her slowly, learning her with my fingers. Pressure, angle, response. The slick heat of her. The places she goes still. The places she moves into my hand. The small sound she makes when I find the right rhythm and stay there.
Her head tips back against the pillow. One hand twists in the sheet. The other stays on my wrist, like she wants to feel the movement as much as the touch.
“Like that?” I ask.
“Yes.” Her eyes open, dark and bright. “Exactly like that.”
So I keep it exactly like that. I take my time, learning what makes her grip me harder, what makes her forget to breathe, what makes all that control start coming apart under my hand.
Then I lower my mouth to her, and her thighs tense under my hands when I find her there.
The sound she makes turns the room into something smaller, hotter, less survivable.
She says my name once, sharp enough to leave a mark, and I learn fast. The places she tries to go quiet. The places she can’t.
When she comes, her fingers lock in my hair and her whole body bows like the facility finally found a pressure point it couldn’t reinforce.
I work her through it with gentle kisses.
After, she pulls me up by the back of my neck and kisses me with none of the careful left in her. I go willingly.
“You’re still wearing too many clothes,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Fix it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her mouth curves.
I take off my shirt.