The room had the wrong temperature. I adjusted it three degrees down on my phone, then nudged the airflow to silent. The drip set a metronome I didn’t like, so I changed it. The noise went away.
I checked her chart on the tablet at the foot of the bed. They’d chosen the right analgesic. Good. If they hadn’t, I would have made them choose again.
A text rolled across my screen—power team asking if they could reroute load from the west end casino to another grid to accelerate the hospital ring. I typed back one word: Do. A minute later, the far skyline came back to life.
Bastion stroked her shin. Up, down. Repeat. His knuckles were split and bandaged. He hadn’t let anyone clean the glass out until she was under and declared stable. I didn’t argue with him. I understood the math.
He glanced up at me. “You saw it.”
“I saw enough.”
“You should see less.” His thumb traced another line. “It sticks.”
“It always sticks.” I squeezed her hand once. Not enough pressure to wake her. Enough to tell my body she existed. “How long since they settled her?”
“Thirty.” He didn’t take his eyes off her face. “Forty.”
I checked anyway. Thirty-seven.
That was when the fear came. It does that. It waits until you’re not running, ordering, stealing power out of a casino floor to feed a hospital corridor, and then it sits on your chest and whispers you’re too late.
I looked at the door and imagined Alexander walking through it—voice cold. I saw the way Emilia would make room for him out of old habits and good manners. I pictured a nurse with the wrong badge trying to separate the bed from us with a policy.
We wouldn’t be okay.
I could leave a thousand men in the hallway and it wouldn’t fix the feeling. It wasn’t about the number of bodies. It was about being told to go. If someone told us to leave, something in me would break in a clean, permanent line.
So I made sure no one could tell us to leave.
Alexander’s route was already burnt. His people were calling Sovereign security; Sovereign security wasn’t answering. Not because I told them not to, but because they were busy remembering who signed their checks. The city lights turned back on in pulses. I watched them come alive in the window and felt the anger rise.
He didn’t get to arrive tonight. Not into this room.
The monitor chirped once—artifact. I reached with my free hand and tapped the reset because I needed to touch the thing that made the sound. Bastion didn’t flinch. He was still tracing that same line. Up. Down.
Sovereign is good at keeping its voice down. The hallway kept a polite distance from our door. I’d made a quiet call in the elevator and given them the rules: no students, no staff with Alexander’s crest, no family except ours. The night nursepretended not to understand the word ours and then followed it perfectly.
I watched Emilia’s mouth. She had the kind of mouth that made you think yes before you heard the question. The tape above her eye bothered me. Not the tape—what it implied. Someone had cut into her and put their hands on her face. Medical, necessary, lifesaving. I still wanted names. I wanted to sign their competence myself.
Bastion finally sat back a fraction. “You going to tell me what else you broke?”
“The tunnel registry for the night,” I said. “Traffic will blame the weather. The weather will forgive me.”
He almost smiled for real. “Good.”
“I thought so.”
My phone vibrated again. Not an alert. A message from the power room—Ring three back. Ring two in two minutes. Our city, was coming back to life. One grid at a time.
I breathed. The breath didn’t fix anything. It just existed.
Her fingers moved under mine, barely a flex, then still. The fear on my chest got lighter.
“You can sleep,” Bastion said to her, thumb finding the same path again. “We’re here.”
She didn’t answer, obviously. That wasn’t the point. He needed to say it. I needed to hear it.
“We are,” I added. “We’re not going anywhere.”
