“Do you want me to die?” Wren’s voice splintered on the last word. “Is that what this is? You want me to wait another two hundred years while you play house with five women who didn’t know you existed until six months ago?”“Wren, that’s not what I’m saying.”“You promised me.” Wren’s fingers dug into his shoulders. Her voice rose, broke, reformed into something fierce and wounded. “You promised you would live well. You promised you would come back. You promised we would be together when you were grown. And instead you died choking on a burger in some other world and came back in a body that doesn’t even remember my face.”Her gloved hand moved from his shoulder to his collarbone. She traced the orange red bird mark beneath his shirt.“She marked you here.” Wren’s finger pressed against the bird. “Your sparrow. Right where I used to rest my head when we were small.”Her hand moved to his wrist. She pulled his sleeve up. A black panther mark sat there, dark and sleek, pulsing faint.“Y

The terminal shelter sat at the edge of the settlement’s south wall like a gray metal box dropped from the sky and forgotten. No windows. One door. A steel slab that opened at six in the morning and sealed at five in the afternoon, every day, without exception, controlled by a robot that did not care whether the children inside were fed, happy, or alive, only that the headcount matched the register.Jason Cole was eight years old, and he was running out of time.“Four thirty.” Blake Sterling walked beside him on the cracked road leading back to the shelter, his hands in his pockets, his dark hair combed flat even though no adult in the building had combed it for him. Ten years old, two years ahead of Jason in the shelter’s education program, and carrying himself with the composed posture of a boy who had already decided what kind of man he was going to become.“We have thirty minutes.” Jason was walking fast, his short legs pumping, his eyes scanning every ditch and gutter along the r

A faint shimmer passed through the air between Blake and the robot, invisible to everything except the machine’s processing core. The shimmer carried data, clean and precise, rewriting a single line in the robot’s active memory.Jason Cole. Checked in. 4:45 PM. Status: inside.The robot’s screen flickered once. The line appeared. The machine’s processors accepted the edit without question, because the edit came formatted in the exact language the system used to talk to itself, and no ten year old child should have been able to speak that language.Blake opened his eyes and walked to his bunk without another word.Outside, Jason ran. The cub bounced against his chest, its crimson eyes squeezed shut, its small horns digging into his collar. He could see the shelter door. He could see the gap narrowing as the hydraulics began their five o’clock cycle.He reached the entrance at 5:00:03.Three seconds late. The steel door had sealed with a hiss that sounded like a coffin closing. The lock

The hand released. The corpse dropped. Kyle looked down and saw a figure standing at the base of the tower, tall and thin, holding a bent metal rod in both hands. The corpse at its feet had a caved in skull, gray matter leaking across the asphalt.A girl. Older than Kyle, maybe ten or eleven, with matted dark hair and a face streaked with mud and dried blood. She wore torn clothes that hung off a frame too thin for her age, and she stood with the metal rod raised and her feet set wide, the stance of someone who had been fighting for longer than any child should ever have to.Her right leg was wrong. Even in the dim fog light, Kyle could see it. Deep claw marks, three of them, running from her knee to her ankle, the flesh torn open in ragged lines that glistened wet and dark.“Climb!” The girl’s voice was hoarse and raw. “I’ll hold them off!”“You’re hurt!” Kyle shouted from the ladder.“Climb now or die down here!” She swung the rod as a second corpse lurched out of the fog. The metal

Kyle’s hand was still resting against Wren’s mask. The porcelain was warm under his fingers, holding the heat of the face behind it, the face he had never been allowed to see, the face that carried five scars earned in a war fought for him.“You got those protecting me.” Kyle’s voice was barely a thread. “Fifteen days of fighting corpses on a water tower while I sat on the platform holding a cub. And I forgot all of it. Every single day.”“You didn’t forget.” Wren’s voice was gentle in a way that sounded wrong coming from a ten star predator who had demolished his living room with a finger. “Someone took it from you. That’s not the same thing.”“It feels the same.” Kyle pulled his hand from the mask and pressed both palms against his eyes. Something hot and sick was crawling up through his chest, settling behind his ribs like a stone made of guilt. “You fought for fifteen days with a torn open leg and five scratches across your face. You killed a hundred corpses to keep me alive. And