The pen was gone from her hair, and she was not going to mention it.
Somewhere in the dark between them it had fallen, along with the adhesive moth from his temple. The port showed now, a small dull eye that did not pulse. He was not checking it. That was the thing she kept returning to, lying on the wool with the concrete cold seeping up through it: he had not once reached for the interface, the way other men reached for cigarettes or excuses.
Below, the holo-marigolds bloomed and died across the skyline in their ten-second loops. Copal smoke climbed the water tower's flank and found them. The library breathed paper at their backs through the open door, that amber rectangle the only warmth she trusted.
Then it came, unwelcome and precise. She had mapped this. Last spring, for a bereavement system meant to simulate the loss of a long partner — she had built exactly this signature, the longing wired to dread, the wanting that already mourned itself. She had named it. Given it coordinates. Taught a machine to perform it convincingly enough to comfort the dying.
So this was a thing that could be faked. She lay very still with that.
Cristóbal did not know what she was deciding. He decommissioned endings for a living; he carried other people's last words home in his wide patient hands. He would understand if she pulled away. He would not flinch.
His fingers found her wrist. Not holding. Just resting there, the weight of them, asking nothing.
She had mapped the feeling. She had never mapped the hand. She let it stay.
