Page 41 of 8-Bit & Cat

She held them up before her, inspecting them as she sat in the other seat at the small table.

“The weight,” he explained. “The texture of the surface you touch. The sensation of the room around you. I can feel all of it.”

She stared at him with open amazement. “You’re saying you have my sense of touch right now?”

Zero hesitated. “Not fully.”

She remained perched in eagerness at the edge of her seat. “Then what?”

He didn’t know how to quantify that answer. “… Enough.”

****

CAT:

Cat exhaled hard. She still wasn’t sure how to process this. Zero was in her head. And she was in his. And it wasn’t scary. It was… kinda freaking amazing.

Her pulse was at a constant giddy-up and she didn’t think it would ever slow down. “Okay, so—this is insane.”

Zero hummed, more of a measured acknowledgment than agreement. “Itisnew.”

Cat huffed a small, breathless laugh. “You have a real talent for understatement.”

He didn’t react—at least, not outwardly. And she was dying to know whathisside was feeling like. He had a lot more to experience than she did.

She felt something shift in her mind and tried to focus on it. Was it him? “Is that you I feel in my head?”

He put his forearms on the table, angling his green eyes at her. “It is,” he said, just as amazed.

“I can sort offeelwhat you’re thinking. It was something close to funny.” She couldn’t stop grinning for some reason. “What if I do this?” She held her hands at her sides to balance herself then closed her eyes, mentally pushing against the new presence in her mind. She gasped a laugh at feeling him react immediately. “You felt it?”

“I did,” he assured.

“You feel like…a warm dense liquid that has a… magnet. It seems like it sucks in stuff. Let me try it again!”

She repeated the steps, biting her lip to focus. This time when she pushed it seemed to push back! Her mouth and eyes both opened wide. “Did you just firewall me?”

Zero sat there, eerily still. “Stop poking.”

She laughed at how serious he was. “You sound like you’re on a tightrope and might fall thousands of feet.”

His breath released. “That’s a very accurate description.”

She got serious at hearing that. “Oops. Are you scared?”

“More like hyper-focused. I’m living in two spaces at the same time. And your laugh is...”

“Uh-oh, here we go. Go on. Tear it down.”

“It’s… unstructured.”

Cat arched a brow. “Unstructured?”

His head tilted. “Chaotic. Erratic. No predictable pattern, no clean repetition. It doesn’t loop. It doesn’t conform. It just... happens.”

She smirked. “So basically, a glitch.”

He focused again, his eyes on the air between them. “No. A glitch is an error. Your laugh is like… a system override. The kind that rewrites everything before it can be corrected.”

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