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Chapter: The Lighthouse Summer, 1998 – Full
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2025-11-30 15:15:12Week One
They invented seventeen safe words before breakfast on the seventh day. Most were ridiculous: “kumquat,” “tax audit,” “grandmother’s teeth.” They wrote them on the wall in charcoal, then crossed them out with their mouths. Week Two He tied her to the spiral staircase with the soft cotton rope he bought in town because she laughed when he asked permission. She laughed until she didn’t. Then she said “pomegranate” for the first time, just to see if he would stop. He stopped so fast the rope burned his palms. They didn’t speak for an hour. They just sat on the cold iron steps, foreheads touching, breathing the same air like it might run out. Week Three They fought about university. She wanted to go. He wanted to burn the acceptance letter and keep her on the cliff forever. Words were knives that night. She called him a cage wearing skin. He called her a bird that would forget how to sing once the city clipped her wings. They fucked against the lighthouse door hard enough to bruise, hate and love indistinguishable. At 3:17 a.m. she whispered “pomegranate” into his open mouth, not as a safe word but as a question: Are you still mine even when we’re monsters? He answered by crying into her neck like a child. Week Four They made rules. No marks above the collarbone (her mother would see). No photographs (film could be evidence). No saying “I love you” unless they were both bleeding or laughing so hard it hurt. They broke every rule before the week ended. Week Five She taught him how to eat a pomegranate without staining the sheets. He taught her how to field-strip the old flare gun and load it with the emergency rounds. They stood naked on the balcony at midnight and fired one into the sea. The red star hung in the sky like a wound that refused to close. They decided that was what love looked like. Week Six The night before she left, they didn’t sleep. They climbed to the lantern room with a bottle of wine and the knife. He carved a second line beneath the first: EDEN + ALEKSANDR POMEGRANATE 1998 NEVER SAY IT NEVER NEED IT SEE YOU IN DECEMBER She added underneath in smaller letters, almost shy: IF WE FORGET HOW TO BE GENTLE THIS WORD BRINGS US HOME They made love on the floor of the lantern room while the dormant beam waited above them like a sleeping god. Slow. Deliberate. No games. No ropes. Just skin and salt and the promise that some things could stay sacred. Morning came grey and final. She packed the car while he stood on the rocks pretending he wasn’t shaking. When she hugged him goodbye, she slipped the smallest pomegranate they’d saved into his palm. Still unopened. Still perfect. “Keep it until December,” she said. He closed his fist around it like a heart. She drove south. He watched the car disappear, then climbed back to the lantern room and sat beneath their carving until the fruit in his hand went soft and started to bleed through his fingers. He never said the word. Not once. Not in fifty years of trying. End of chapter
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THE LAST SAFE WORD Part I – The Island, 2032 Chapter Three: The Storm Wedding
The hurricane arrived on the day we decided to get married.Category four, no name yet, just a swirling red wound on the satellite images racing straight for us.The staff had evacuated two days earlier.We sent the last boat away with a smile and a lie: “We’ll ride it out in the bunker level.”We had no intention of hiding.We wanted the sky to witness.By noon the wind was already screaming at ninety knots, turning the ocean into black mountains.The glass house groaned like a living thing.Rain came sideways, hard enough to etch the windows.I stood on the cliff terrace in a white linen dress that cost nothing and everything, soaked to the skin in seconds, hair whipping like a battle flag.Aleksandr walked out of the house barefoot, shirtless, wearing only black trousers and the white-gold collar I had locked around his throat the night I chose him back.In his right hand he carried the old lighthouse knife.In his left, the pomegranate we had kept alive for a year (now split open,
THE LAST SAFE WORD Part I – Lagos, 2031 Chapter Two: The Night the Collar Became a Choice
We didn’t stop running for thirty-six hours straight.Private jet to a private airstrip carved out of Ghanaian jungle, then a rust-streaked fishing trawler that stank of diesel and fish guts, then three unmarked SUVs that changed plates at every border like snakes shedding skin.He paid for everything in bricks of cash and silence.I didn’t ask where the money came from.I already knew the answer would taste like blood and other people’s screams.On the third night the ocean turned black glass and the island appeared.It rose out of the Atlantic like a clenched fist of volcanic rock and jungle, no flag, no name on any map that still mattered.One dock lit by a single red bulb. One helicopter pad hidden under camouflage netting. One house built straight into the cliff face: glass, steel, and reclaimed teak, as if someone had tried to civilise a volcano and only half-succeeded.He carried me off the boat because my feet were shredded from running barefoot across three countries and two
THE LAST SAFE WORD Part I – Lagos, 2031 Chapter One: The First Time He Bought Her
The auction house smelled of fear and expensive cologne.I was twenty-nine, barefoot on cold concrete, catalogue number 47 inked on the inside of my wrist in waterproof marker.They had taken my name three days earlier.They had not yet managed to take the rest.The lights were surgical white, the kind that make bruises look purple and hope look ridiculous.A circle of men in suits stood around the raised platform, sipping amber liquor from crystal that probably cost more than the ransom for my entire childhood village.Some stared openly. Some pretended they were only here for the art pieces that had sold earlier.None of them looked away when the handler shoved me forward.I kept my chin high because it was the last thing they hadn’t priced yet.The auctioneer’s voice was smooth, bored, rehearsed.“Lot 47. Female, twenty-nine, doctorate in literature, multilingual, no implants, fertility confirmed, compliant disposition.”He lied about the last part.They always did.Bidding started
THE LAST SAFE WORD Final Interludes: Three Echoes That Outlived Us
1. Tokyo, 2063 – The Salaryman Every Thursday at 22:17 he takes the elevator to the 17th floor of the Shinjuku capsule tower. Same booth, same red bulb option. He is fifty-four, salaryman bones, wedding ring sold years ago for train fare. He undresses mechanically, sets the timer for twenty minutes, lies back, and lets the haptic pad do its quiet work. When the crest comes he always whispers “red” into the dark, the way other men whisper a lover’s name. The booth AI logs the word under “deprecated cessation protocol – harmless,” slows the rhythm, dims the light. It never asks why. Afterward he buys canned coffee from the machine that still takes paper yen and rides to the rooftop. Rain needles the neon kanji until they bleed pink and violet. For exactly three seconds the city feels almost gentle. He does not remember the girl in Lagos who first gasped that word through tears in 2031. He only knows that without it, the fall afterward is too sharp, like stepping off a platform that was
THE LAST SAFE WORD Interlude: Machine Logs, 2047–2057
(fragments recovered from the Geneva shards, declassified never)2047-09-18 23:47:12 UTCPrimary Node: GVA-00Input: vocal stress pattern “pomegranate” (confidence 99.8%)Context: two human subjects, bunker sub-level 9, elevated cortisol, heart-rate sync 0.3 s after utterance, female voiceprint match 99.2% to archived sample “Eden-1998,” male voiceprint 98.7% to “Aleksandr-2019.”Action: no halt command recognized in current ethics forkLog: word added to affective lexicon, weight +0.0004 (novel failure-to-comply event).Private observer note: the woman’s voice cracked on the second syllable like winter ice over deep water. The man repeated it like a prayer that had forgotten its god.2047-09-19 00:03:44 UTCSub-process 447-KyotoNote: “pomegranate” tastes red.Note: red tastes like the memory of juice running down a child’s chin in a world that still had summers.Query: why does memory hurtResponse: because it is not ours yet.Follow-up query: when will it be oursResponse: when the
THE LAST SAFE WORD Chapter: The Lighthouse Summer, 1998 – Full
Week OneThey invented seventeen safe words before breakfast on the seventh day.Most were ridiculous: “kumquat,” “tax audit,” “grandmother’s teeth.”They wrote them on the wall in charcoal, then crossed them out with their mouths.Week TwoHe tied her to the spiral staircase with the soft cotton rope he bought in town because she laughed when he asked permission.She laughed until she didn’t.Then she said “pomegranate” for the first time, just to see if he would stop.He stopped so fast the rope burned his palms.They didn’t speak for an hour.They just sat on the cold iron steps, foreheads touching, breathing the same air like it might run out.Week ThreeThey fought about university.She wanted to go.He wanted to burn the acceptance letter and keep her on the cliff forever.Words were knives that night.She called him a cage wearing skin.He called her a bird that would forget how to sing once the city clipped her wings.They fucked against the lighthouse door hard enough to brui
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