The fever came fast. One moment she was at the stove, carefully flipping an egg the way he'd taught her, the next she was on the floor, her skin so hot it seemed to steam in the cold air of the apartment. Her small body convulsed, muscles seizing in patterns that looked less like illness and more like a machine tearing itself apart from the inside.
Sam carried her to the mattress. Her pulse was a frantic, stuttering thing beneath his fingers. Her eyes, when they opened, were glassy and unfocused, the irises ringed with something that wasn't quite blood and wasn't quite shadow, a dark creeping stain spreading outward from the pupil.
"It's activating," she whispered. Her voice was raw, scraped clean of everything except fear. "I can feel it. It's burning."
"You're going to be fine."
"Don't lie to me." A ghost of her old analytical precision surfaced through the fever. "You're not good at lying."
Sam's smile held, but it was a brittle thing now, cracked at the edges. He pressed a cold cloth to her forehead and watched it grow warm within seconds.
He had no hospital to take her to. No doctor who would understand what she was. No handler to call for emergency protocols. The briefcase sat on the table, still unopened, its contents a catalog of the ways she was meant to die.
The bomb was biological, woven through her cardiovascular system, tendrils of synthetic tissue wrapped around her heart like the roots of some parasitic plant. There was no extraction procedure in the manual.. The trigger phrases would detonate her instantly; the only alternative was the slow self-destruct that happened when containment failed.
Containment was failing now.
He opened the briefcase anyway. Spread the documents across the table. Diagrams of her circulatory system, the bomb's tendrils mapped in red ink like a second, malevolent anatomy.
Removal wasn't impossible, the documents said as much in cold, clinical language, but it required a surgical team, a sterile facility, and weeks of recovery. He had a kitchen knife, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a sewing kit from the convenience store downstairs.
And he had her. Dying on the mattress. Burning alive from the inside.
"Alexei." Her voice was barely audible. "The stars. Can I see them?"
"Later," he said, and the word felt like a blade in his throat. "I have to fix something first."
The surgery took place on the kitchen table.
He sterilized the knife with alcohol and a lighter, the blue flame dancing in his steady hands. His hands were always steady, that was the first thing they'd taught him.
He'd performed field medicine before, bullet extractions, wound cauterizations, once an emergency tracheotomy in the back of a moving van. But those had been on soldiers. Combatants. People who'd signed up for the risks.
She was conscious. He couldn't risk anesthetic, didn't have any. So he gave her a leather belt to bite down on and told her to focus on breathing.
"I'm going to open you up," he said, his voice calm in the way that came from years of separating action from emotion. "I'm going to find the main tendril cluster near your heart. I'm going to cut it out. It's going to hurt more than anything you've ever felt. But if I do it right-"
"I want to live," she finished. Her dark eyes met his. There was no accusation in them. No blame. Just that quiet, unsettling trust she'd given him since the moment he'd bought her shoes.
"Something like that," he said.
The first incision was the hardest. Her skin parted beneath the blade, and she screamed through the belt, her small body arching off the table.
Blood welled up, dark and hot, and beneath it he could see the bomb's tendrils, black, glossy, pulsing with a rhythm that wasn't quite in sync with her heartbeat. They were thicker than the diagrams had suggested. More deeply embedded. Years of growth, of feeding on her body's own systems, had turned them into something almost indistinguishable from the organs they'd invaded.
He worked fast. Minutes blurred. His hands moved with mechanical precision, cutting and clamping and suturing, while Dill's muffled screams faded into whimpers and her whimpers faded into something worse, a brittle, terrible silence that meant her body had simply exhausted its capacity for pain.
The main tendril cluster was wrapped around her left ventricle. He had to cut it free millimeter by millimeter, the knife scraping against the surface of her heart, each beat sending fresh blood pulsing into the cavity he'd opened.
Twice he thought he'd lost her. Twice her heart stuttered and nearly stopped.
When it was over, he dropped the mass of black tissue into a metal bowl. It was larger than his fist, still twitching, still alive in some fundamental, horrifying way. The kitchen smelled of blood and cauterized flesh. The table was a ruin.
Dill lay still, her chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged breaths. He'd closed the incision as best he could, layers of sutures holding her together. But he could see it now.
The tendrils had been too deeply integrated. Too many connections severed. Her body was shutting down, organ by organ, the damage too extensive for even her augmented biology to repair.
She had hours. Maybe less.
"I'm sorry."
He wrapped her in the cleanest blanket he could find and lifted her into his arms. She weighed almost nothing. A paper doll. A handful of cherry blossoms.
"Let's go."
"Where are we going?" Her voice was a whisper against his chest.
"To see the stars," he said.
The forest was two hours outside the city by car.
A rental sedan he'd stole, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other on her pulse. She drifted in and out of consciousness, her fever burning hotter with each passing mile. Sometimes she spoke, fragments of memories, questions she'd never gotten to ask, the names of stars she'd only just learned. Sometimes she just breathed, each inhale a small miracle.
He parked at the edge of a nature reserve. The trees were old here, their branches forming a canopy that broke the morning light into scattered gold.
He carried her along a path that wound through the trees, her head resting against his shoulder. The blanket had soaked through with blood in several places, but she'd stopped bleeding, which meant her body was running out of blood to lose.
"Alexei." Her voice was so quiet now he had to lean close to hear it.
"I'm here."
"Did it work? The surgery?"
"I'm sorry."
She was quiet for a moment. The path opened onto a small clearing, a meadow ringed by ancient oaks, the grass soft beneath his feet. Sunlight pooled on the ground like liquid gold. Above them, the sky was a deep, endless blue.
"It's okay," she said finally. "You tried."
"That doesn't make it okay."
"No."
"But it means something. That you tried. I think... I think that's what matters."
He found a spot beneath one of the oaks, its roots forming a natural hollow in the earth. He sat down with his back against the trunk and arranged her in his lap, her head cradled in the crook of his arm, her small body curled against his chest. The blood had stopped entirely now. Her skin was cool to the touch.
"Can you tell me about the stars?" she asked.
He looked up. The sun was still out, the stars invisible. But he'd memorized them once, during a long-ago mission that had required navigation.
"That one," he said, pointing to a patch of empty sky, "is Vega. It's the brightest star in the constellation Lyra. The lyre of Orpheus. He played music so beautiful it made the gods weep."
"Music," she murmured. "Like the man on the corner. With the guitar case."
"Yeah. Like him."
"What about that one?" She pointed vaguely, her hand barely lifting before falling back to her side.
"Polaris. The North Star. It stays fixed while everything else moves around it. Sailors used it to find their way home."
"Home." She tested the word. "I think... this feels like home. Here. With you."
He blinked, and something hot and unfamiliar stung at the corners of his eyes. His smile, that permanent, unshakeable smile, was trembling at the edges. Cracking. Falling apart like mortar between old stones.
"Alexei?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you. For giving me a name. For showing me the pastries and the goldfish and the stars. For... for letting me be a person. Before."
He couldn't speak. His throat had closed around the words, leaving only silence and the distant sound of birdsong.
She smiled. It was the same smile he'd seen in the kitchen when she'd finally made the eggs right, bright and fragile and full of something that might have been joy.
"I'm glad it was you," she whispered. "I'm glad you came for me."
Her eyes drifted closed. The shallow rise and fall of her chest slowed. Slowed. Stopped.
Alexei held her for a long time. The sunlight shifted through the leaves, dappling her still face with gold and shadow. The birds continued their endless songs. Somewhere far away, a stream ran over ancient stones, patient and eternal.
When he finally moved, the sun had crossed half the sky. His legs were numb from sitting so long. His arms ached from holding her.
He laid her down in the hollow of the roots, arranging her small body with the care of someone handling something infinitely precious. He folded her hands across her chest.
Smoothed her hair back from her face. Removed the too-large sandals and set them beside her, because she'd loved feeling the ground beneath her feet.
Then he walked out of the forest alone.
The city was the same as it had always been. The same streets.
The same neon signs flickering in the evening gloom. The same vendors hawking the same goods to the same indifferent crowds. Sam walked through it all like a ghost, his smile back in place.
He stopped in front of the bakery. The woman behind the counter recognized him—she waved, her tired smile brightening for just a moment. He didn't wave back.
She would never eat another croissant.
He sat on the bench until the streetlights flickered on, one by one, casting their cold glow across the empty playground. Then he stood, straightened his jacket, and walked to a payphone on the corner.
The number he dialed was from memory. A number he hadn't called in years. A number that represented everything he'd spent his life serving.
It rang once. Twice. Three times.
"Report," said the voice on the other end. Flat. Mechanical. The voice of someone who had been doing this long enough.
Sam's smile didn't waver. "The weapon is neutralized. The target remains alive. I'm calling to inform you that I am terminating my contract, effective immediately."
A pause. "You understand what that means."
"I understand perfectly." His voice was pleasant. Affable. The voice of someone discussing the weather.
"The moment you leak your contract, you're going to be executed."
"I understand."
He hung up before the voice could respond.
Then he walked into the night, his smile fixed in place, his hands still stained with the blood of a child who'd taught him how to be human. Somewhere behind him, the city continued its endless, indifferent life.
"Fuck you. All of you."
Orange.
A flash of ginger hair.
She was tall, unnaturally so, her face pale.
"Miss Reina?"
"What have you been up to this past week? Hoshimi has woken up."