She had told him the port was dead, and he had believed her the way people believe things they've decided not to investigate.
The window was open to the heat that should have broken weeks ago. From two streets over came the delivery corridor's hum, even and tidal. On the nightstand, Theo's clock kept its idiot precision, and Sable found she resented it — the way it knew, second by second, exactly what came next.
He did not know what came next. That was the thing she had crossed a continent to buy and could not have named at the desk downstairs.
*The last time I felt this,* Theo thought, *I was holding a torque driver.*
His hands were too warm; they always were. He set them on her hips and pressed, learning the angle, and the not-knowing in him was a live current. The night he took apart his last rig he had worked from memory — fourteen years of it — and somewhere around the third coupling his hands had simply stopped obeying the plan. He had sat on the floor of the fabrication bay and wept without a single thought attached to the weeping, and it had been the most honest thing his body had done in a decade.
Her mouth found the hollow of his throat. She tasted salt and the warm-stone smell that had come in through the window and settled on both of them. He made a sound he hadn't authorized.
*There,* she thought. *That one wasn't predicted.*
The mattress was sheetless, ticking rough under her knees. Too narrow for what they were attempting, which meant they kept correcting, kept sliding into each other by accident, and the accidents were the point. His chest under her palms was broad and going soft and entirely specific. She had mapped ten thousand strangers' grief from the inside and could anticipate a widow's neural cascade to the half-second. She could not anticipate Theo. He shifted his weight and she lost her breath on the inhale, surprised, *surprised*, and the surprise was almost unbearable in its sweetness.
She felt it then — the faint warmth behind her left ear. The port, waking. Logging.
She knew what it was doing. The algorithm classified this — a stranger, a single night, the body's full attention given to a man she would never see again — as anticipatory loss. Grief in advance. The firm paid premium for it. She had let it run before, every time, because the data was clean and she was good at her work and there had never been a reason not to.
She let it run now. She took him in hand and guided, and the broken fountain in the courtyard said nothing, and the clock said everything, and Theo's tattoo had gone dark as a bruise along his forearm.
*I don't know where this goes,* he thought, and the terror of it was indistinguishable from the pleasure. He moved into her with deliberate pressure, watching her face for the thing he could not preview. Her eyes were open. Ink-stained fingers braced against his sternum. She gasped and he felt it travel through both of them like the hum from the corridor — rhythmic, tidal, alive.
They fit and unfit and fit. The narrow mattress threw them together. Her short hair was damp at the temples and his hands slid up her spine and she arched and the sound she made was nothing she had ever heard herself make, which meant the machine behind her ear was recording a Sable she didn't recognize.
She came first, biting down on his shoulder to keep it in the room, and he followed close after, finishing against the inside of her thigh as she held him through it, his face buried in her neck, breathing like he'd run somewhere.
Afterward the clock kept on. The jasmine had thinned. She lay with her cheek on his slowing chest and felt the warmth behind her ear and reached up, two ink-dark fingers, and found the manual interface she had not touched in nine years of doing this work.
She deleted the file.
She had never done that. Not once. The data was always clean and she was always good and there had always been a reason to keep it.
On his forearm the tattoo went pale — the cortisol dropping all at once, the terror spending itself into something quieter. He didn't see it. She did, and said nothing.
The corridor hummed. The clock ticked. Neither of them mentioned the silence where the recording had been.
