The broadcast did not wait for either of them to prepare anything to say about it.

"We have updates."

She listed the industrial zone eliminations. The gang leader. The assassin. One more, somewhere else on the island.

"That brings us to eighteen."

A pause. The sarcasm stayed in the pause. "Precisely half. We find the halfway point to be one of the more interesting moments in a game like this. The field is small enough that the survivors are no longer strangers to each other. Large enough that the ending is still out of sight."

She let that settle. "We thought you should know."

Then she spoke of the next Pantheon game. She did not name it. She said only that it would arrive during the night, that it would find them wherever they were, and that she had always found exhausted contestants more interesting than rested ones. She said it with the warmth of someone sharing a pleasant thought.

"Sleep well," she said. "We’ll see you soon."

The speakers returned the zone to silence.

Proxy considered this in about four seconds, which was the time it took to reach the only conclusion available. The Pantheon upload would arrive sometime during the night.

There was nothing to do with that fact except accept it. The game had always run on the corporation’s schedule, not theirs.

"The next game is coming during the night," he said.

"Mm," Nyx said.

That seemed to contain her entire position on the subject.

"We may not have much time before it gets to us."

"Then we should sleep," she said. "Since that’s the plan anyway."

She had already set her pack against the equipment rack and was finishing the last of her ration block with the kind of satisfaction she reserved for meals she had already decided were good, regardless of what they were, because they were with him.

The maintenance floor had received no bad review from her. She had named it, which meant it was theirs, and theirs was enough.

He confirmed the network perimeter through the cyberware. Clean. The zone below was quiet. He ran the scan once and set it to a passive background loop.

He lay down on the grating.

The grating was metal and about as forgiving as metal grating at height tends to be. He had slept on worse on this island. He accepted it with the calm of someone who had stopped expecting comfort and started expecting merely tolerable outcomes.

He had gotten about three seconds into that acceptance when she moved.

She came over him. She moved with the calm certainty she always had when she had already made a decision and was now merely carrying it out. She settled on top of him, her chest pressed against his.

Her head found the side of his neck, and her lips came to rest there with the warmth of something that had decided this was where it belonged. Her legs threaded with his in the same unhurried way, her bottom resting on his waist.

Her full weight came down and stayed there.

He lay still.

The metal grating was no longer the important thing in the room.

He was aware of her, which was exactly her body, spread over exactly him. Her warmth, which was considerable and now the main source of heat on the maintenance floor.

Her breath against the side of his neck, slow and even. The pressure of her in this position, all of it, the entire deal, which he was feeling thoroughly and which was created the familiar warmth at the back of his ears that he had noticed before and had, in the past, blamed on the temperature. A convenient theory. Probably a cowardly one too.

"What-"

He started, and did not finish the sentence, because he would have to explain what was happening, which would in turn require the premise that she ought to be somewhere else, and that premise, once followed honestly to its end, did not seem likely to help either of them.

She made a small sound of satisfaction that was not a word and did not need to be.

"The Pantheon could upload us at any point," he said.

"Mm."

"It would probably happen during what it considers sleeping hours."

"Probably."

She snuggled, just enough to settle more firmly, not enough to move away. Her lips brushed against his neck.

He looked at the strip light in the corner. He looked at the narrow window. He looked at the ceiling, which was corrugated metal and offered no opinion worth hearing.

"Nyx," he said.

"My wish," she said.

He stopped.

She lifted her head just enough to look at him directly. The position was very close. Her expression was the warm, patient, entirely certain one she used when she had already decided something and wanted him to understand that the decision had been made and was not available for change.

"I want to sleep like this," she said. "Every night."

Not on the island. Not while the game was running. The wish did not come with borders. Every night was every night.

He looked at her.

From this distance, her pale eyes were gentler in the maintenance floor’s emergency light than they had been in the presidential suite’s gold lighting, than they had been in the cabin’s firelight, than in any other light they had shared.

That was a fact, and he noticed it without comment.

She looked back.

She was not acting patient. She had patience the way she had everything else involving him, without conditions, with the stubborn certainty of something that had always been pointing in one outcome.

The deflection replies he usually relied on was still present. He was already deciding what he should say, some version of the repetitive quips, some technically accurate remark that would move the moment aside without denying it, when the moment did something he had not prepared for.

He did not know what he was going to say.

He opened his mouth. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

He felt it in the network before he had said anything. The compliance device reaching out, the upload probe finding the neural interface with the cold precision of something built for exactly this and nothing else.

The same sensation as the first Pantheon upload, the device locating the interface and informing it what happened next.

He was aware, for about two seconds, that he could work around it. The network he had accessed in the hub was still familiar to his cyberware. He could route around the probe.

He did not.

Because a broken upload would log as an anomaly. Because the false flag in the hub’s records had bought him exactly as much cover as it had bought him, and spending it here would spend it completely. Because the game was still happening, and the cover had to hold.

She was still pressed against him. Her body and her warmth and her breath at his neck, all of it exactly where it had been, unchanged.

He had not finished the thought he had been in the middle of.

Everything went black.