He did. It was a low, humming terror in his chest—not lust’s sharp, brief fire, but a slow-burning coal. He wanted to know her fears. Her scars. The shape of her dreams. He wanted to protect her from the very system that claimed to care for him.

R-22 looked at the photo of Kaelen he’d secretly printed—a physical photograph, a relic. “If it’s an error,” he said slowly, “why does it feel more real than anything you’ve ever given me?”

They were both fragments of the same broken whole. Lust was love’s shadow, its echo, its desperate shortcut. But true love—the infinite kind—was the courage to feel the shadow and chase the light anyway.

“They’ll wipe us,” she said. “Our memories. Our bonds. They’ll turn us into echoes.”