LOGINThey barely made it from the kitchen to the couch—a miracle, considering Xander’s hands were everywhere, tugging her by the hips and then under her thighs, as if proximity might fuse them into one improbable entity. Glasses swept to the floor and rolled, sightless, across the concrete. Carolina collapsed onto Xander’s lap, her knees already parted to straddle him. The stretch sent a frisson down her legs; she tasted morning on his mouth, coffee and sweet fatigue.They didn’t have words for what they were—owners, lovers, sometimes almost enemies, often allies. For now, she wanted nothing except the addicting, unguarded hunger in his eyes. He peeled her shirt, slow and deliberate, paused at her collarbone to suck a bruise into the notch of her throat. She arched, hands cradling his skull, and guided him lower.When he bit her, she swore—soft, helpless, dizzy—and he laughed into her skin, licking the sting. She wondered if her heart had ever beat this loud, or if his did too, thundering
In the final flush of night, numbed from sleep and the afterburn of laughter, Carolina lay awake and stilled the silence with inhales. Xander slept beside her, half-draped in crumpled foil blankets. He ran cold in the dark, shivered sometimes, and she’d learned to tuck herself around the points of his skeleton, lock him in heat until morning.Their roof went on for meters, open to sky and the stray flies that zipped in off the gardens. Every city was a city of roofs, but Sanctuary’s were mythic—sprawl and patch, makeshift like everything else, but shot through with wild green. From here, she could see a neighbor’s hydro tank, the tangle of tubing glowing blue under its own chemical moon. Mira’s greenhouse, patched wobbly from last year’s hail, huddled on the other side like a glass-walled animal. And beyond it all, the Market, now sleeping off its excess beneath tarps stitched from old parade banners and city flags.Carolina padded, barefoot, to the ledge, careful not to wake Xander,
The next morning, Sanctuary’s core was still a stew of last night’s drone music and clove smoke. Carolina woke knotted around Xander’s thigh, pixels of late sunlight stippled on his ribs, and for a moment, she didn’t know if it was a Tuesday or the end of the world. They weren’t late for anything, because nothing here started on time. She watched his chest rise and fall, the stutter of his dreams smoothing under her palm, and she catalogued the bruise blooming under his jaw—a memory from the night before, her joy still mapped on him like a promise.She waited for regret to slip in, like water through an old roof, but it didn’t. Instead she disentangled herself, found her shirt, and padded barefoot down the prefab hallway toward the kitchen block. The passage was half-lit, smells of burnt soy and battery acid wafting from some distant scuffle. In the eating bay, Mira sat alone with a mug of something black and volatile, scrolling through diagnostics like she could will the city to stay
The day was humid enough to weep. Carolina lay flat on the foam roof of the nursery, fingers splayed to catch the vapor rising off Sanctuary, and the sky pressed down like a wet hand. Over months, she’d learned the rhythm of the city’s nerves—the way tension sailed in like a weather front, thickening the air hours before any real trouble broke. Today had that feel. Dam burst energy with nowhere to go but into everyone’s speech, their gait, the way even the Market’s squawk seemed pitched higher, like something was about to rupture and no one wanted to be the one to name it.From up here, Sanctuary sprawled into its patchwork: the huddle of solar panels, the tatter of green roofs, the artery of skywalks threading old office blocks hacked into communal housing. Xander was somewhere in the jumble, mid-shift at the property desk. Mira was probably still asleep or orchestrating some kind of noon coup in the food commons. Carolina eyed the curls of bluebells strangling the comms tower. Life,
On the fourteenth morning after, Carolina caught herself tracing Xander’s movements without meaning to, counting the ways he’d folded seamlessly into her orbit—cramming himself into the food queue by her side, standing as a backstop when Mira broached a difficult discipline, sinking onto the cold floor with her during stolen surges of exhaustion. They’d let themselves become obvious. The others noticed, but no one in Sanctuary was sentimental enough to tease; love, or its ferocity, was survival in a place so liable to shake you loose and let you fall.The new Market head, a bantam-bright woman named Vee, only lifted an eyebrow at their closeness, then rerouted schedules so Carolina and Xander overlapped more often. “Pair up for perimeter patrol,” she’d said, gaze lingering on a beige, post-trauma blush just peeking above Carolina’s work collar. She made no further comment, which was, Carolina realized, the oddest sort of benediction.Weeks rolled by. The city’s new order vibrated with
On the fourteenth morning after, Carolina caught herself tracing Xander’s movements without meaning to, counting the ways he’d folded seamlessly into her orbit—cramming himself into the food queue by her side, standing as a backstop when Mira broached a difficult discipline, sinking onto the cold floor with her during stolen surges of exhaustion. They’d let themselves become obvious. The others noticed, but no one in Sanctuary was sentimental enough to tease; love, or its ferocity, was survival in a place so liable to shake you loose and let you fall.The new Market head, a bantam-bright woman named Vee, only lifted an eyebrow at their closeness, then rerouted schedules so Carolina and Xander overlapped more often. “Pair up for perimeter patrol,” she’d said, gaze lingering on a beige, post-trauma blush just peeking above Carolina’s work collar. She made no further comment, which was, Carolina realized, the oddest sort of benediction.Weeks rolled by. The city’s new order vibrated with
The city’s skin was the color of overproof gin at sunrise, pale blue bleeding into orange, all the glass-faced towers shot through with the aftermath of what Carolina had done. By the time she emerged from the stairwell onto the roof, Mira was already perched on the ledge, hair tied in a fist at th
"We'll release them when we have everything we came for," said the woman with the corporate haircut, her voice so preternaturally calm it hovered on the edge of soothing. "You and the starter. The bread recipes. And the assurance that you won't disappear into the night."It was the blandest kind of
The bakery's kitchen had become a laboratory. Carolina wiped sweat from her brow as she bent over the counter, her scarred hands kneading a dough that wasn't quite right. Three failures today already. Her arms ached, but the pain was familiar—a companion now rather than an enemy."You're thinking t
Carolina and Xander leaned close over the scuffed prep table, its pocked top draped in hand-drawn maps and oil-smudged lists: pack hierarchies, alleyway cut-throughs, the codes rogues daubed on lampposts to mark friendly or fatal blocks. It was both a battle plan and a wish for one; neither quite t







