Page 23 of My Tiny Human Wife

I am. I feel myself pressed against the very end of her, and the tight grip of her around my cock is almost past what I can stand. I freeze, letting her adjust to the size of me, and I study her face in the low gray light. Her eyes are wide, dark with pleasure, and the grief still lingers, shadowing the edges, but it is not the whole of her. Not anymore.

Then she moves, and the world ends.

She takes me deep with a roll of her hips, and I answer with a thrust that drives every breath from her lungs. I settle into a rhythm then, deep and slow at first, the way I learned she likes it, the way I need it tonight, so that every slide of my cock inside her is a reminder that I am here, that she is here, that we are alive and we are real. She meets me stroke for stroke, her hands in my hair, her eyes locked onto mine, and the tenderness of it, even in the midst of this desperate coupling, is what undoes me.

“Faster,” she begs. My thrusts come harder and faster, the pace relentless, and the sounds we make—the wet slap of our bodies coming together, her broken moans, my ragged breathing—are obscene and perfect. I reach between us and find her clit with my thumb, circling in time with my rhythm, and she pulses there, swollen and slick against my touch, and it pushes her closer to the edge.

She shatters first, her body clenching tight around me, her back bowing off the floor as she cries out my name. The feel of her climax pulsing around me sends me over my own edge after her, and I bury myself as deep as I can, losing myself in her heat. I come in thick, hot spurts, my release flooding her, and her body clenches around me in waves, dragging every last pulse from me. I bury my face against the curve of her throat and I groan into her skin, sound and surrender, the whole war and the whole solitary life I have lived pouring out into her.

I collapse onto my forearms above her, my heart slamming hard behind my sternum, the sweat cooling on my skin. Neither of us says a word for a long spell. The loft is silent except for our torn breathing and the distant thunder of the battle we have momentarily forgotten. Her fingers trail through the sweat on my back, delicate and grounding. The grief has not left. But she is still here, still breathing, still warm and alive in my arms. The machine did not win. She won. We won.

When I withdraw from her, slowly, carefully, she makes a small sound of loss, and I gather her to me, pulling her up from the cold floor and into my lap. I wrap my coat around us both, and I hold her against my chest, my hand spread over the steady beat of her heart.

“Tell me we get the coast,” she says against my skin, her voice coming wrecked and quiet and no longer hollow. “The black shore. The house. Tell me there’s an after, and we’re in it.”

“There is an after.” I say it as a vow, because that is precisely what it is. “We walk out of this tower, and we take the ceasefire you built with your own two hands, and we go to the coast, and you learn to hate the quiet and then to love it. We grow old somewhere the war cannot reach, because you will have ended the war. There will be mornings, Avery—ordinary, unremarkable, unbearably precious mornings, more of them than we will ever manage to count between us—and I will spend the whole of every one grateful for the night you chose to keep me alive instead of letting the cold have me. I promise you the after. No promise of mine has ever once gone unkept, and I do not intend to begin with the only one that has ever truly mattered.”

She is quiet a moment. Then something settles in her, and settles in me, watching it happen—whatever remained of the girl who kept herself small finally putting the smallness down for good, and in its place someone who has grieved and chosen and refused to break, and who means to live long enough to collect the future she was promised.

“Then I’m holding you to it,” she says, and something in her that the war bent for two long years finally straightens the whole way. “The coast. The quiet. All of it.” She pushes herself up, and reaches for her clothes, and there is steel back in her spine that grief had bent but never once managed to snap. “Then let’s go end it. Properly. Together.”

“One life,” I tell her, and rise, and gather my weapon, and follow the only person in the galaxy I would follow anywhere down into the final stretch of the fighting—no longer a man emptied of anything worth keeping, but a man with the whole of a life to live for, which has made me, at the very end, unbeatable.

CHAPTER 35

AVERY

The war does not end in a single moment. It ends in a thousand small surrenders, and I get to hear each one of them come across my board.

By the time Torvak and I come back down to the fight, there is less and less of it left to fight. The broadcast has done to Rake’s last loyalists what no counterattack ever could: it has stripped away the one thing an army cannot fight without, which is the belief that it stands on the just side of things. Unit by unit, the men who came here to sterilize a refugee shelter set down their weapons, because it is one thing to follow a brutal order in the dark and another thing entirely to follow it while a whole planet watches and knows your name. The hard core around the admiral shrinks by the minute. And then it is not a battle at all. It is an arrest.

Okafor’s turned soldiers close the ring, and Dareth’s defectors draw it tighter, and in the end Admiral Rake—the man who murdered my brother and manufactured a decade of war and flew into the heart of a collapsing empire because he could not picture a version of events in which he lost—is taken alive, on his knees, in the wreckage of the tower he came to erase, by the very hands he built the whole machine to consume.

I make myself go and look at him. Torvak comes too, a silent wall at my shoulder, but he lets me do this part on my own.

Rake looks smaller on his knees. They always do, I think—the men who feel enormous while they are deciding who lives and who does not. His hands are bound and there is blood on his immaculate collar, and he looks up at me with an expression I have braced myself to find gloating, and instead it is something worse. Bewilderment. He honestly does not understand how a comms tech on a frozen outpost unmade him.

“You could have had me,” he says. “On the channel. I gave you every reason. Why did you not come for me?”

And this is the thing I understand, standing over the man I spent one white-hot minute wanting to kill with these two hands: he still does not get it. He believes the story was always about him. He believes grief only ever turns into more killing, because that is the only alchemy he has ever known.

“Because you’re not worth what it would have cost me,” I tell him, and I’m surprised how quietly it comes out, how final. “Eli spent his whole life trying to keep people from dying. You want me to spend his memory on revenge—so his death buys one more body, yours, and the machine gets to run one more day inside my chest. I won’t give you that. You don’t get to turn me into a smaller copy of you.” I crouch to his level, so he has no choice but to hear it. “You’re going to a cell, and a trial, and a long stretch of years being an ordinary criminal instead of a great man. And I’m going to go live the exact life you tried to take from my family. That’s the whole of your sentence, Admiral. You lost, and now you have to watch us be fine.”

They take him away, and I go back to my board, because there is still work—but it is a different kind of work now. The kind I have not done in three years. Across every channel, the war is coming apart into its pieces: local commanders reaching for the ceasefire, relief columns turning into aid columns, a planet’s worth of soldiers on both sides slowly understanding that they are allowed, at last, to stop. Somewhere in orbit, higher up the chain, I am sure the negotiations are already ugly with lawyers and blame. But down here on the frozen coast, where it was always realest, the guns are going quiet one by one, and the beacon that spent all those years counting the dead is carrying the terms of peace instead.

We count our own, after. It costs us. I make myself learn every name, the way I long ago memorized convoy markers, because the lost deserve it. The old man who spliced cable with shaking hands. The defector who crossed open ground for strangers and died holding a breach. And two more who had asked me for the dangerous work and been handed it. I will carry all of them. But when I find Jonah alive and swearing, and Kalen alive and shaking, and Mila leading the little ones back up out of the ice cavern into a morning with no artillery in it—when I count the living, there are far more than there had any right to be, and every single one is a person the machine had already crossed off.

Torvak finds me up on the roof array as the sun comes up on the first day of the rest of it. I am looking east, toward a horizon with no armies on it.

“He’s really gone,” I say. I don’t mean Rake. He knows I don’t.

“He is.” Torvak’s hand comes to rest, warm, at my nape. “And the whole planet knows now what was done to him, and why. He does not die for a lie any longer, Avery. You reached back ten years and turned his death into the very thing that ended the war which killed him. There is no truer way to honor the dead than that.”

And standing there in the cold clean light, with the guns silent and the truth loose and my brother’s name finally fastened to something true, I feel the grief change shape one final time. It does not leave. I don’t think it ever entirely leaves. But it stops being a wound and becomes something I can carry—a weight, and a warmth, and a reason. My brother spent himself trying to keep strangers safe. Today seventy-one of them woke up alive who would not have. I think, at last, he would call that square.

“Okay,” I whisper to the horizon, to him. “Okay, Eli. Rest now. I’ve got it from here.”

And for the first morning in longer than I can measure, I believe it.