The sentence lands on a Tuesday.

MC doesn't mean it as a weapon. She means it as gratitude — the casual kind, the kind that comes out between bites of dinner, between topics, between the moments that people fill with words because silence is harder. She's talking to Caleb. They're in her apartment. The girl is at the desk, writing in the steno, not listening.

"She gave me everything back," MC says. "All of it. Every memory, every timeline. Things I didn't even know I'd lost." She looks at Caleb across the kitchen counter with the unguarded face she only wears around people she trusts completely. "Without her, I'd have forgotten you again."

Again.

Caleb hears the word the way a soldier hears a detonation — the sound arriving before the comprehension, the body reacting before the mind. His left hand clenches under the counter. His right hand — the prosthesis, the one that doesn't feel — stays exactly where it is. Still. Positioned. The hand he trusts.

MC keeps talking. She doesn't see what the word did. She doesn't see it because Caleb's face doesn't change. His face never changes — not in front of her, not when the thing inside him is detonating. He learned that in a facility that no longer exists, from a commander whose name he can't remember because they took that too.

Again. She would have forgotten him again.

Not theoretically. Not hypothetically. MC remembers now — all of it, every cycle, every version. Which means she also remembers the forgetting. The lives where she looked at him and didn't recognise him. The lives where he found her and she said who are you? The particular violence of standing in front of the woman you've crossed centuries to find and watching her eyes slide past you like glass.

The girl at the desk turns a page. Her pen scratches. She doesn't look up.

She gave MC back the thing that Caleb has spent every cycle trying to protect: the memory of him. She did it on accident, on day one, by touching MC's heart on a bench. She wasn't even trying. She didn't know what an Aether Core was. She didn't know what she was fixing. She fixed it anyway, and MC remembers, and MC will keep remembering as long as the girl is near her.

As long as the girl is near her.

The thought forms in Caleb's chest like a fist closing.

---

He drives home at eleven. The route takes twenty-three minutes. He takes the long route — forty-one minutes, through the park district, past the apartment blocks, along the river. The route he and MC used to cycle as children, in a life that happened in this city, in this century, the only cycle where he grew up beside her instead of searching for her.

The car is dark. The engine hums. His left hand is on the steering wheel. His right hand is in his lap.

He replays the sentence. Not once — on a loop. The way his training taught him to replay mission briefings: extract the data, isolate the variables, identify the threat.

Without her, I'd have forgotten you again.

Variable: the girl. Function: Aether Core stabilisation. Effect: MC's memory retention. Dependency: proximity-based. The girl leaves, the stabilisation degrades. Half-life six to twelve months. Zayne's data. Clean numbers.

The girl leaves. MC forgets. MC forgets HIM.

His left hand tightens on the wheel. The knuckles go white. The tremor starts — small, deep, the vibration that lives in the hand that feels.

He's thinking in categories now. He can feel it happening — the shift from Caleb to operative, from person to function. The way the facility taught him. The way the commander taught him. Assess the threat. Classify the variable. Determine the response.

Classification: the girl is not a threat. The girl's departure is a threat.

He amends the classification before the car reaches the river.

Classification: the girl is a variable that must remain within operational proximity of the primary asset.

Primary asset. He used that term. For MC. The woman he loves — the woman he has loved across more lifetimes than his stolen memories can count — and he just classified her as a primary asset in the same language the commander used to classify him before they took his arm and his memories and gave him a prosthesis and a mission and told him it was for the greater good.

His right hand lies still in his lap. The hand that doesn't feel. The hand that never trembles.

He's becoming something. He can feel it — the descent, the slide toward a version of himself that he knows because he's been that version before. In other facilities. Under other commanders. The soldier who follows orders that he writes himself, who does the necessary thing, who tells himself it's protection because protection sounds better than control.

The car reaches the river. He stops. He sits in the dark with the engine off and the city reflected in the water and his left hand trembling and his right hand still and the classification running through his head like a briefing that won't end.

The girl must stay. The girl must stay near MC. The girl must stay near MC so MC remembers. So MC remembers him.

He doesn't ask himself what happens if the girl doesn't want to stay. He doesn't ask because the answer is already forming — not in words, not yet. In infrastructure. In the part of his brain that builds operational plans the way other people build sentences: automatically, fluently, without deciding to.

He drives home. He doesn't sleep.

---

Zayne's hands are steady when he opens the file.

Three in the morning. Akso Hospital. The night shift he volunteered for because night shifts don't ask questions about why a cardiologist is spending four hours reviewing data that has nothing to do with cardiology.

The file is the girl's. Not the official file — the official file doesn't exist, because the girl doesn't exist in any system the Association maintains. This file is his. Private. Encrypted. Maintained in the partition that contains two patient profiles: MC's and the anomaly's.

He doesn't call her the anomaly. He calls her by her name, in his head, because he heard MC say it and it stuck. But in the file, she's Subject A. Clinical distance. The protocol requires it.

He opens the cardiac data from the portal event. MC's Aether Core stress readings. The extraction curve — three percent output, four minutes sustained. Minor. Recoverable. He told the girl this. He told her the data.

He didn't tell her what he found underneath the data.

MC's Aether Core experienced a secondary event during the portal breach. Not the extraction — something else. A resonance cascade, triggered by the portal's interaction with the dimensional barrier. The cascade lasted eleven seconds. During those eleven seconds, MC's cardiac output spiked to levels consistent with a Foreseer-class precognitive event.

MC isn't a Foreseer. MC has never displayed precognitive abilities. But the Aether Core doesn't care about classifications — it responds to dimensional energy the way a tuning fork responds to sound, and the portal flooded it with dimensional energy that hasn't existed in this reality since the last natural rift closed eight hundred years ago.

Eleven seconds of precognitive spike. Zayne doesn't know what MC saw. He doesn't know if MC saw anything at all — the spike might have been purely physiological, a cardiac artefact with no cognitive component. But the possibility exists. The possibility that MC, during those eleven seconds, glimpsed something.

He files the data. He runs the projections again — the ones he showed the girl, the extraction curves, the half-life calculations. He runs them with the secondary event included. The results don't change. The conclusion doesn't change.

But a new variable appears.

If the girl attempts another portal — stronger, more sustained, with higher energy output — the resonance cascade could repeat. Stronger. Longer. The Aether Core might not just spike. It might destabilise permanently. Not the slow degradation of the half-life. A sudden, catastrophic failure.

The girl's next attempt could kill MC instantly.

Zayne stares at the projection. His hands are steady. They're always steady in the hospital, in front of data, when the work is clinical and the conclusions are clean.

He saves the projection. He opens a new file. He labels it "Containment Options."

He stares at the label for three minutes. Containment. The word he chose. Not treatment. Not prevention. Containment.

His hands begin to tremble.

He doesn't close the file. He doesn't delete the label. He minimises the window and opens MC's cardiac profile and he sits in the blue light of the monitor and he tells himself that this is medicine. That the tremor in his hands is fatigue. That the file labelled "Containment Options" is a precaution, not a plan.

He tells himself this until the sun comes up.

---

You don't know any of this.

You're at the desk. It's a Wednesday — or maybe a Thursday. You've stopped tracking days, which means you've stopped tracking the difference between them. The apartment has a rhythm that doesn't need a calendar: MC leaves for work, you write in the steno, you go to Kwon's, you come home, MC comes home, you eat, you work, you sleep. The rhythm has a shape and the shape has a weight and the weight is starting to feel less like an anchor and more like a heartbeat.

Your cells are at sixty percent. The shifts are coming back — small ones. You can extend your fingers an extra centimetre. You can feel the electromagnetic spectrum again, faintly, like hearing music through a wall. The furnace isn't lit but the pilot light is steady and the gas is flowing and your body is rebuilding itself the way it always does: stubbornly, slowly, without asking your permission.

You're working on a new problem. Not the portal — the portal is shelved, filed under not until I find a way that doesn't cost MC. The new problem is the stabilisation. Zayne said it was a resonance lock — proximity-dependent, degrading without you. You don't accept that. You built the stabilisation. You did it instinctively, without understanding, on day one. If you did it once, you can understand how you did it. And if you can understand how you did it, you can find a way to make it permanent. A way that doesn't require your presence. A way that sets MC free and sets you free and lets everyone stop orbiting each other like planets that can't escape a gravity well.

You write in the steno. You fill pages. The shorthand is back — your fine motor control has returned, and with it the dense, precise, unreadable notation that is yours and no one else's.

MC comes home at six. She brings food — leftovers from an Association function, better than anything Kwon sends home with you. She puts it on the counter. She looks at you at the desk.

"Progress?" she says.

"Maybe. I'm working on making the stabilisation independent. So it doesn't need me."

MC is quiet for a moment. Then: "So you can leave."

"So you can be free."

MC looks at you. The particular look she gives you when you say something that is technically correct and emotionally devastating.

"It might take years, MC." You put the pen down. "Maybe even another one of your — life cycles might-want-it kind of years. We don't know. I don't know." You look at the steno, at the equations that are barely equations yet, more like sketches of equations, outlines of something that might become a plan if you stare at it long enough. "Just in case, you know?"

Just in case. The words you use when you mean just in case you get tired of waiting. Just in case you want your heart back. Just in case you want to live a life where you don't need a woman from another dimension sleeping in your closet to keep your memories intact.

MC doesn't argue. She opens the containers and starts plating food.

You go back to the steno. You write equations. You don't know that three districts away, a man with a trembling left hand is redesigning his drone patrol routes to cover every exit from your building. You don't know that in Akso Hospital, a file labelled "Containment Options" sits minimised on a screen, waiting to be opened.

You don't know that two men who love the same woman are independently arriving at the same conclusion: that you are the variable that keeps MC alive, and variables that keep people alive must be controlled.

You eat dinner with MC. The food is good. The apartment is warm. The rhythm continues.

You have no idea what's coming.

"Maybe I should pick up a hobby," you say.