“I think it’s trying to make me see,” Mira said. “It wants something.”
“You know why I came,” he said. The question was false. Both of them knew why. That knowledge sat between them like steam—the fog of something both natural and manufactured. It was called the True Bond, a phrase used in whispers and contracts, in the soft, liturgic tones of those who trafficked in loyalties.
Mira tilted her head. “And if the origin node is…inside?”
Mira laughed, abrupt and jagged. “Want? You mean, do I want the part of me that’s already being remade by pulses I didn’t consent to? No. Want doesn’t cover it. Survival covers it. Curiosity covers it. A kind of stubbornness covers it.”
She felt the answer rise like steam. Readiness, she realized, was not a state but an action. “We go in hot,” she said.
“You can refuse,” Jalen said. “You can isolate the node until the surge passes.”
As they walked into the city’s soft, ordinary glow, the last thing Mira realized was that the Boy with Wheat Hair hadn’t been a memory at all. He had been a possibility the Bond had offered—one of many images it used to seduce. The difference between memory and possibility was a blade-edge. She’d chosen the blade.