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I eased away long enough to pull on my trousers, then wrapped her in the sheet and carried her to the med bay before the first fever spike. Tamsin met us at the hatch, wired the monitors, and pointed me toward the chair beside the bed. I ignored the chair and stayed with Lika’s hand in mine.

The next six hours passed in the med bay.

Waiting was harder than any watch I remembered. Tamsin read her vitals, called the pace fast but well inside the normal range, threatened me once about the shoulder, and posted herself at the far console pretending she had charting to do. The med bay lights ran their night cycle while my venom rewrote the woman I love.

“You know,” Tamsin said during the second hour, not looking up from her fictional charting, “Talon claimed me to save my life. I woke already changed, no vote taken. I forgave him before my eyes were fully open. I have still never once let him forget it.” A page turned.

“She got asked. She got the whole brief and a floor to answer from. You did the one part right that matters most.”

“I did the rest wrong first.”

“That’s the traditional method.”

During the third hour I caught myself running probabilities on every change in her vitals. Her last order came back to me: don’t turn me into a problem to solve. I stopped. I held her hand and waited.

That same hour, the first traceries appeared. Violet surfaced at the bite, then traveled down the side of her throat and across the brown of her shoulder, branching along her arms in fine lines. They did not glow or move. They simply remained.

By the fifth hour, with every reading stable, Tamsin retreated to the charting office three compartments down and left the monitors mirrored to her wrist slate.

At six hours, her senses woke before she did. A frown at the med bay noise. A flare of her nostrils. Then her eyes opened in the low light and found me instantly.

“Loud,” she said.

“It settles.”

“I can hear Tamsin three compartments over turning pages.”

“She has been pretending to chart for six hours.”

“I like her.”

She flexed one hand, listening to her own tendons, then stared at the violet running down her arm. “They’re beautiful.”

“They’re yours.”

“Ours.” She tested the ink with a fingertip and smiled when it stayed still. Then she looked at me, and the bond opened wider.

Her feeling reached me first: fierce, exhausted, hungry, home. Mine reached her. I felt her understand what I felt for her before either of us said anything.

“Oh,” she said, wrecked.

“Yes.”

“That’s what I am to you.”

“Yes.”

Tamsin entered with food, took one look at our faces, set the tray down, and pointed at it. “Eat first. Bond experiments after.”

Lika ate enough to satisfy her. Tamsin checked the final readings, cleared her to leave, and made us promise to call if anything changed.

We went back to my quarters. I closed the hatch. Lika let the sheet fall onto the bed and caught me by the waistband. I stepped out of my trousers before she pulled me down beside her.

“Experiments,” she said.

The second time was shorter and slower. She pushed me onto my back, climbed over me with violet on both arms, and lowered herself onto me while the bond carried the first shock both directions. We made the same broken sound.

“That,” she said, forehead to mine, “is profoundly unfair.”