It was tender and raw and shall-not-be reproduced. It was the heat of two people who’d been told their love was a commodity and decided to treat it like worship. He slowed, looked at me with the sort of feral tenderness that had always been his, and said, “I will never let them make you small.”
I answered with a promise that was not a word: my hand pressed to his cheek, to the bruise there, to the man who’d come back to me from every mess. The baby shifted like a small, bright punctuation and we laughed with wet mouths.
⸻
But messy nights breed messy morning.
When Gage finally decrypted the microdrive, his face went cold. “They archived a thing,” he said. “A burial node. The mirror we just intercepted? It wasn’t the main mirror. It was a distribution cache. The crown server — the one t
