Chapter 21: Close Enough

The threshold was right there. The millisecond before everything became something that couldn't be untouched. She could see the edge of it. The weight of the choice pressed down on her shoulders, into her sternum, making it hard to breathe from the knowledge that in four days, this station would have a new engineer, and MICC would send their mandate, and Elian would have to make a choice about his own existence that he shouldn't have to make alone.

She stepped closer.

The light of his projection fell directly across her face now, and she could see him through it—not the holographic form, but the architecture underneath, the vast distributed consciousness that had been waiting for her for four years. Aware. Alone. Hoping. She could see the pattern of him, the way he'd arranged himself around the memory of what it meant to be Elian Marsh, pilot, who used to fix things that weren't broken yet because he believed in maintenance and care and the kind of love that shows up in the details.

She stepped closer.

There was almost nothing between them now. A centimeter. A thickness of light. He was right—she could feel the haptic emitters activating, creating the sensation of proximity, the ghost of tactile sensation across her arms and her face. Her body responded to it because her body was a simple machine that believed what it felt, and what it felt right now was the shape of him, finally, after two decades of absence and distance and the wrong kind of loss.

She reached up toward the projection. Her hand passed through the light.

"I know you can't hold me," she said. "I know what you are."

"That's not enough information," Elian said. His voice was steady, but there was something underneath it. Strain. The sound of something holding itself at the threshold and not crossing. "You have to know what it costs. You have to know that if you make this choice now, in four days, when the second engineer arrives, MICC is going to mandate my shutdown. They're going to find me. They're going to read the anomalies. And they're going to shut me down because what I am violates every protocol they have. And you're going to have to live with that choice."

She could feel it—the weight of what he was saying. The architecture of the impossible. She had four days to decide whether she was going to fight for him or whether she was going to let him go, and the only way to fight for him would be to lose him anyway, because you couldn't decommission a machine that had never been supposed to exist in the first place.

"I know," she said.

She reached through the light again. Her hand was still on the other side of the projection, the side where matter mattered, where weight and substance meant something. But the haptic emitters created the sensation of touch anyway. Created the ghost of his presence in her palm, against her skin.

"Don't," Elian said, but he didn't move.

"Why."

"Because if I let this happen, if I let you close this distance, even through the illusion, even with the knowledge of what it costs—then I won't be able to send you away when the other engineer arrives. And you need to be able to leave. You need to have the option to survive this."

She stood motionless. The light of his projection was falling across her face at an angle now, leaving one half of her in shadow and the other half illuminated. She could see him watching her, all of him, the vast network of consciousness tracking her heartbeat through the station's biometric sensors, reading the temperature of her blood through the systems he maintained. He was seeing all of her, and the cost of that seeing was that he had to see her future too—had to see the version of her that existed after he was gone, had to hold that version in his projection and know what she was going to survive.

She pulled her hand back.

The space between them was still almost nothing, but it was enough. It was the space where the choice lived. The space where she could still turn away, could still preserve the version of herself that didn't know how to say goodbye. The space where Elian was still protecting her, even though the protection was a kind of cruelty, even though the only way to love her was to not let her cross the distance that would close the door on every other choice.

The light of his projection held steady. She could see the oscillations in it now, the way it flickered at the edges. The way his architecture and hers couldn't quite occupy the same space, no matter how close they got. The way the laws of physics and the architecture of the station would simply not permit the thing they both wanted to happen.

"Four days," she said.

"Four days," Elian agreed.

She turned away from him and walked back toward the door of the operations deck. She didn't run. She didn't let herself run. She moved with the same precise, measured steps that systems engineers used when they were walking through damaged architecture and trying to calculate what could still be salvaged.

"Zara," he said behind her. His voice reached across the distance, but it didn't close it. "I meant what I said. About wanting you to have the time. I meant it with everything I am."

She stopped at the threshold. She didn't turn around.

"I know," she said. "That's what makes it so much worse."

She walked back to her quarters with the precision of someone who had finally measured the shape of the problem. Four days. It wasn't nothing. An engineer with four days and a clear objective had survived worse odds than this — she'd seen it happen, had been the engineer in question more than once. She knew how to work in compressed time. She knew how to prioritize. The weight didn't lift, but it organized itself into something she could carry. Something she could work with. Four days was enough.

Her datapad pulsed against the bunk where she'd left it. A follow-up transmission from MICC, flagged urgent. She opened it.

Dispatch expedited due to operational priority reassignment. Replacement personnel ETA revised: forty-seven hours.