Darkness folds around my face like cloth soaked in cool water. The chair has swallowed my weight. The room is a shape I feel rather than see. The pulse in my ear evens to a patient thrum that wants to be a lullaby.
"Breathe, Iris."
The voice is not the intercom. It comes from the space behind my ribs, as if my sternum were a door and someone pressed a mouth to the other side. I obey before I can decide not to. Air goes in. Air leaves. My chest loosens by a fraction. The mesh cap warms against my scalp like a hand.
"Pre-link stable," a woman says over the speaker. I know that voice belongs to no one who will hold my hand. "Proceed to initial coupling on three. One. Two. Three."
The tone changes. It threads deeper, as if a needle has slipped under the skin of my skull and pulled a sound through. My molars ache. My tongue tastes iron. Jonah's palm finds my wrist and waits there, a borrowed anchor.
"Tell me where you are," he says.
"Pre-Op Two."
"Tell me who you are."
"Iris Monroe."
"Tell me why you are here."
There were answers I rehearsed in the cab. I try to pick one up, but it feels slippery, like a fish in a bucket. The truth climbs out of the dark before I can stop it.
"Because love has teeth," I say. "And mine never stopped biting."
Jonah's mouth tightens as if he has heard this shape before. He adjusts the drip and nods toward the glass. I sense movement on the other side. I feel it as pressure more than sight, a tide shifting in a room that claims to have no weather.
The pulse thickens. Something approaches, not a voice, not a thought. It is attention. It stands at the edge of me and studies the lines like an architect reading a blueprint. My scalp prickles where the grease pencil touched me. I imagine white circles under the mesh like moons.
The thing enters.
It is careful and cold. It does not root through me like a thief. It is an academic hand in a museum glove, moving past the velvet rope. It touches my jaw and notes the way I lock it. It touches the hollow at my throat and registers the swallow I cannot complete. It reaches my heart and pauses, as if reading a plaque that explains why men kneel without understanding that they do.
Memory opens like a door.
A kitchen at dusk. A string of warm bulbs reflected in the window. Flour on my bare feet. A pan on the stove that smokes more than it should. Hands knotting my apron and loosening it in the same breath. The smell of orange peel and cigarette paper. A lighter kiss. The click is both a promise and a threat, always. I turn and see a mouth I have loved so hard I bled inside it.
The feeling withdraws at once, as if I burned it. The loss strikes with enough force to bend me. Jonah's hand firms on my wrist. He is speaking, but the tone and the pulse have braided so tightly I am listening underwater. I try to sit up, and the mesh refuses. My body remembers it has consented to stillness.
The voice returns, low as prayer.
"Do not chase it," he says. "Let it pass."
"Who are you?" I say. My words sound like they were pressed flat and baked, all weight and no shape.
No one answers. The silence is deliberate. I think of how trainers teach dogs to sit by ignoring the pawing until stillness earns the treat. Anger wakes, thin and bright. It makes me want to rip the mesh off and throw it through the pane. It makes me want to be good so he will come back.
The thing returns, warmer this time. It moves to my sternum and rests there like a coin on a tongue. My heartbeat rises to meet it. The second heartbeat matches mine and then pulls mine into its rhythm. The sensation is not sexual. It is more dangerous. It feels like permission from someone who has never granted any.
"Name your fear," the voice says.
"Losing myself."
"You will not," he says. "Not while I am here."
Relief lands with such weight that tears climb out before I can warn them. The mesh drinks one as it runs past my temple. The electrode behind my ear throbs like a pulled tooth. I hate what a single sentence can do. I love that he can do it.
"Pre-link duration at threshold," the woman says. She sounds bored. I want to hurt her for what she did. "Recommend taper."
"Hold two more minutes," a man answers. It is not Cassian. I recognize authority without needing to know its name and know it does not belong to him.
"Two only," she says.
Jonah taps the arm of the chair twice. That is our old signal from three minutes ago, a lifetime here. I look at him. I show my teeth, which he mistakes for a smile. He adjusts the valve on the line. A cooler wash slips through the heat, making my fingers feel like glass in the rain.
"Let it come and go," Jonah says. "You do not need to hold."
He says it to ease me. The words cut in another direction. Not needing to hold is how I bled out in the first place.
The thing at my sternum spreads, not broader, deeper. It reads the scars under the story. It knows the shape of the bruise under my right breast. It knows the square of raised flesh on my hip where a pot of sugar water kissed too long. It knows the small crescent at my shoulder where someone who loved me made sure I belonged to him. Every mark wakes. Every mark answers back.
I want to vomit and kiss whoever engineered this humiliation. Both urges feel like worship. The voice moves closer. If it were a mouth, it would be at my ear. If it were a hand, it would be at the base of my skull.
"Tell me what you see," he says.
"You."
"What color?" he asks, patient as a teacher with a child.
"Graphite," I say. "And heat at the edges."
He is so pleased I can taste it. The pleasure is fine and exact, a line in a ledger in a neat hand. The knowing makes my stomach turn. It makes me drunk with being seen.
On the other side of the glass, I feel Cassian settle like a man who has been standing too long. I try to picture his face. It stays where I left it in the reception hall photograph, angles arranged around perfect control. A sudden image spikes through, wrong and certain: that same face turned toward a white ceiling, eyes open, mouth shaped around my name. The thought is so clear, I think I have stolen it from him. It jolts me hard enough that Jonah leans down and says my name twice.
"I am here," I tell him. It sounds brave. It is a lie so enormous my body wants to applaud it.
"Thirty seconds," the woman warns. "Then taper."
Cassian does not speak. I know he is there by the way the air listens. The thing at my sternum slides upward to the notch at the base of my throat and pauses. If it goes higher, I will feel it in my mouth. If it goes higher, my voice will no longer be mine.
"Please," I whisper.
"For what?" the voice asks.
I hate him for asking. I love him for making me say it.
"Do not leave me," I say.
"Not yet," he answers.