The broadcast did not wait for either of them to prepare anything to say about it.
"We have updates."
She listed the industrial zone eliminations. The gang leader. The assassin. One more, sowhere else on the island.
"That brings us to eighteen."
A pause. The sarcasm stayed in the pause. "Precisely half. We find the halfway point to be one of the more interesting monts in a ga like this. The field is small enough that the survivors are no longer strangers to each other. Large enough that the ending is still out of sight."
She let that settle. "We thought you should know."
Then she spoke of the next Pantheon ga. She did not na it. She said only that it would arrive during the night, that it would find them wherever they were, and that she had always found exhausted contestants more interesting than rested ones. She said it with the warmth of soone sharing a pleasant thought.
"Sleep well," she said. "We’ll see you soon."
The speakers returned the zone to silence.
Proxy considered this in about four seconds, which was the ti it took to reach the only conclusion available. The Pantheon upload would arrive soti during the night.
There was nothing to do with that fact except accept it. The ga had always run on the corporation’s schedule, not theirs.
"The next ga is coming during the night," he said.
"Mm," Nyx said.
That seed to contain her entire position on the subject.
"We may not have much ti before it gets to us."
"Then we should sleep," she said. "Since that’s the plan anyway."
She had already set her pack against the equipnt rack and was finishing the last of her ration block with the kind of satisfaction she reserved for als she had already decided were good, regardless of what they were, because they were with him.
The maintenance floor had received no bad review from her. She had nad it, which ant it was theirs, and theirs was enough.
He confird the network periter through the cyberware. Clean. The zone below was quiet. He ran the scan once and set it to a passive background loop.
He lay down on the grating.
The grating was tal and about as forgiving as tal grating at height tends to be. He had slept on worse on this island. He accepted it with the calm of soone who had stopped expecting comfort and started expecting rely tolerable outcos.
He had gotten about three seconds into that acceptance when she moved.
She ca over him. She moved with the calm certainty she always had when she had already made a decision and was now rely carrying it out. She settled on top of him, her chest pressed against his.
Her head found the side of his neck, and her lips ca to rest there with the warmth of sothing that had decided this was where it belonged. Her legs threaded with his in the sa unhurried way, her bottom resting on his waist.
Her full weight ca down and stayed there.
He lay still.
The tal grating was no longer the important thing in the room.
He was aware of her, which was exactly her body, spread over exactly him. Her warmth, which was considerable and now the main source of heat on the maintenance floor.
Her breath against the side of his neck, slow and even. The pressure of her in this position, all of it, the entire deal, which he was feeling thoroughly and which was created the familiar warmth at the back of his ears that he had noticed before and had, in the past, blad on the temperature. A convenient theory. Probably a cowardly one too.
"What-"
He started, and did not finish the sentence, because he would have to explain what was happening, which would in turn require the premise that she ought to be sowhere else, and that premise, once followed honestly to its end, did not seem likely to help either of them.
She made a small sound of satisfaction that was not a word and did not need to be.
"The Pantheon could upload us at any point," he said.
"Mm."
"It would probably happen during what it considers sleeping hours."
"Probably."
She snuggled, just enough to settle more firmly, not enough to move away. Her lips brushed against his neck.
He looked at the strip light in the corner. He looked at the narrow window. He looked at the ceiling, which was corrugated tal and offered no opinion worth hearing.
"Nyx," he said.
"My wish," she said.
He stopped.
She lifted her head just enough to look at him directly. The position was very close. Her expression was the warm, patient, entirely certain one she used when she had already decided sothing and wanted him to understand that the decision had been made and was not available for change.
"I want to sleep like this," she said. "Every night."
Not on the island. Not while the ga was running. The wish did not co with borders. Every night was every night.
He looked at her.
From this distance, her pale eyes were gentler in the maintenance floor’s ergency light than they had been in the presidential suite’s gold lighting, than they had been in the cabin’s firelight, than in any other light they had shared.
That was a fact, and he noticed it without comnt.
She looked back.
She was not acting patient. She had patience the way she had everything else involving him, without conditions, with the stubborn certainty of sothing that had always been pointing in one outco.
The deflection replies he usually relied on was still present. He was already deciding what he should say, so version of the repetitive quips, so technically accurate remark that would move the mont aside without denying it, when the mont did sothing he had not prepared for.
He did not know what he was going to say.
He opened his mouth.
He felt it in the network before he had said anything. The compliance device reaching out, the upload probe finding the neural interface with the cold precision of sothing built for exactly this and nothing else.
The sa sensation as the first Pantheon upload, the device locating the interface and informing it what happened next.
He was aware, for about two seconds, that he could work around it. The network he had accessed in the hub was still familiar to his cyberware. He could route around the probe.
He did not.
Because a broken upload would log as an anomaly. Because the false flag in the hub’s records had bought him exactly as much cover as it had bought him, and spending it here would spend it completely. Because the ga was still happening, and the cover had to hold.
She was still pressed against him. Her body and her warmth and her breath at his neck, all of it exactly where it had been, unchanged.
He had not finished the thought he had been in the middle of.
Everything went black.
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