Page 61 of Fifth
He froze.
He reduced the sweep to half speed. Recalibrated. Ran it again. The machine obliged, precise, unruffled. The result didn’t change.
He touched the side console and routed the stream into a second diagnostic, cross-verification in a different mode. Same answer. No error flags. No thermal drift. No spurious interference from the preserve’s chemical haze clinging to their clothes. He checked again because sometimes a heart needed time to understand what a mind alreadyknew.
Then he sent a priority pulse to his commander. Encrypted. Tagged urgent. He included the med-strip and a clipped status string that fit the mission profile and the new variable. Apex returned a three-part acknowledgment inside a breath:confirmation, resource allocation, and a simple directive—Stand by for vector.
Hannah turned her head on the cradle pillow. “Your face,” she murmured, voice hoarse from smoke and adrenaline. “It just did a thing. What did it do?”
He turned without answering and crossed the space between them. She tried to sit up. He set his hand to her shoulder and the cradle eased her down again with a gentle pressure field. “You will be still,” he said. “Two more minutes.”
“You’re bossy,” she said, exhausted affection threading the words. “Has anyone told you?”
“Affirmative.” He let his palm rest on the cradle’s edge so his heat met the warmth of her skin through the film. “Often.”
The final sweep chimed. The med-suite lit blue, then green. Her cradle cycled out of lock as his had already done. He dismissed both rigs with a fingertip and slid an arm under her knees, an arm behind her back. She made a small noise of protest that wasn’t protest at all when he liftedher.
“Locus—”
The way her mouth formed his name made something inside him lock in place. He quieted the surge with a kiss that wasn’t patient. She softened against him in a way that had nothing to do with sedation and everything to do with the fact that she was alive and so was he. He carried her through the door like avow.
His quarters received them with a hush. Amethyst fabric hung in long falls against dark steel. The bed was thick and wide, layered in gray and violet, dense enough that a body sank and was held. Soft light bled in along the baseboards like dawn caught in glass. The room carried the faint salt-spice of his skin and the cold-iron scent of space held just outside thehull.
He set her on the bed and straightened. She pushed up on her elbows, intent flaring through fatigue. “My sister, Emmy—”
He didn’t let the fear build momentum. He leaned in, caught her mouth, and drew the words away. She inhaled against him, ashattered sound that had nothing to do with panic now. Her hands trembled on his chest, her nails scraping through the thin med-garb he still wore. Heat leapt like a live thing between them. He letit.
She breathed his name again, and it traced a small quake all the way down to the hard places that held him together. He stripped the last sterile fabric from her, his hands careful where the auto-sutures had closed, gentle where bruises had previously mapped the story of the night. She caught his wrist and brought his palm to her mouth. He stilled. She kissed the heel of his hand, slow as prayer.
“Look at me,” she whispered.
“I am looking,” he said, and it came out harsher than he intended.
What followed wasn’t gentle at first. It couldn’t be. He’d been nothing but restraint for hours, for days. He’d been calculation and map-lines and violence organized into clean arcs. Now the only geometry he wanted was the kind made of breath and pulse and the long curve of her back beneath hishand.
He gathered her in, and she rose to meet him without flinch or flight. Their mouths found an old language and made it new. The room tilted around them and then steadied, the bed taking them down into its hold. He moved over her and then with her, letting the rhythm deepen until it wasn’t a rhythm at all but atide.
When she tried to speak of fear he gave her something else to hold on to. When her hands trembled he found places on her body that answered to warmth instead of memory. When the past tried to climb the bed with them he set his shoulder against it and wouldn’t let itin.
He didn’t hurry. He didn’t break. He carried her forward with a patience that was hunger and a hunger that was patient. She arched and he followed. She pulled and he went where she led. She whispered and he answered with the kind of sound he only ever made forher.
He lifted her when he wanted the long line of her thighs tightening around his hips. He smoothed her hair back from her temple when he wanted to see her eyes without shadow. He rolled and drew her above him when he wanted her to take what she wanted with her hands braced and her gaze unwavering. When she faltered, he steadied. When he took, he remembered to give. When she gave, he remembered to take so she would know what she did tohim.
He could’ve cataloged every breath by the way it shook his name out of her. He could’ve mapped every tremor along her spine by the way her fingers slipped and held and slipped again on his shoulders. He didn’t bother to count. He followed heat to heat, replied ache with answer, and when the world went white behind her eyes he held her there and went with her, teeth set, throat open, silent because the sound would have been too much for the ship tohold.
Their bodies didn’t still quickly. After the first crest they found one another again, laughter breaking into sighs, sighs breaking into fresh gasps as he turned her beneath him once more. He took his time exploring the places that made her voicecatch, pressing his mouth to the inside of her wrist, her hip, the hollow of her throat, the peak of her breast.
She answered with restless hands and daring touches, sliding her palms across the lines of his chest, tracing scars with reverence and heat. Each time she arched, he was there; each time she trembled, he steadied her, only to coax her higher again. The second wave was deeper, their rhythm a conversation made without words, only the press of skin and the rough edges of need turning smooth in the giving.
When exhaustion should have taken them, they lingered still. She shifted above him, hair falling like a curtain as she leaned down to kiss him. He let her lead, let her claim, and it undid him more than any storm could. He held her hips, giving her the freedom to move, to discover her own rhythm until she cried out his name and collapsed against his chest, spent and shivering. He wrapped her close and whispered nothing, only held her while their breathing steadied together.
After, they lay the way planets do when orbit breathes—close, falling and not falling, tethered by something the ship’s instruments couldn’t chart. The sheets were a tangle. The air tasted like sweat, like salt, like the sweet, unique scent of their joining. He stroked his palm down her back, her small muscles unclenching, one by one, like a fist opening to light.
She spoke first, voice thready but sure. “My sister,” she said, and the word didn’t break. “We have to find her.”
He had been waiting for the moment when the room would have to hold more than the two of them. He kissed her belly and set his hand flat over the quiet plane, let his thumb draw a small circle there that neither of them could pretend was accidental.
“Apex has the query,” he said. “He will assign a vector and a retrieval unit. Emmy will be found.”
