Time slipped its gears. Rose didn't know how long she clung to him, long enough for the sobs to burn out and leave her breathing in short, dry hitches; long enough for the crowd's roar to fade into the hollow quiet that follows a verdict. The world narrowed to the damp patch on his shirt and the slow, disciplined pull of his breath.
Slowly, gently, he shifted. He didn't push her away. The movement was a signal: the world was coming back on.
"Rose," he said, voice rough, like it had been left out in the weather too long.
She kept her forehead against his chest, as if contact could be converted into strength.
"I have to go," he murmured. "There's… something I have to do."
Confusion cut through the numbness, then a flicker of anger. She lifted her head. Her eyes were swollen slits; her face felt raw. "Go where? You just got back."
His jaw set. The small opening in him closed; duty slid into place. He reached to the worn satchel at his hip, unbuckled the flap, and drew out two things.
A creased sheet, dense with tight, blocky script. Names. Addresses. Dozens.
A small cloth bag heavy enough to sing. He put it in her shaking hands.
The weight was wrong. Too light for what it meant. Too heavy for what a person should carry.
"I have to start," he said, each word ground thin.
Her fingers moved without permission, fumbling the drawstring. She didn't need to look. She looked anyway. The bag's mouth opened, and the metal inside cascaded with an almost cheerful clink that made her stomach turn.
Gunmetal tags. Stamped names. Stamped numbers. Miller, J.; Rodriguez, A.; Chen, L.
Too many.
Her gaze snapped to the sheet in his other hand. The list matched the tags. It clicked, brutal and clean.
Forty-eight names. Forty-eight tags. One survivor.
The bag became weight in her palm. She looked at him again and finally saw him whole. The silver at his temples wasn't vanity or age; it was fallout. The weight in his eyes had nowhere to go.
He took the bag back, careful, and the tags whispered shut against each other. It was a book closing.
"I have to go," he repeated, voice so devoid of emotion, it could ring. He turned, not squaring his shoulders with strength but with load.
Her feet followed on their own. Not a companion. A witness, pulled along in his wake. She kept distance, walking the shadow line.
The first door was modest, paint clean, a pot of red geraniums by the step. Third on the list: Rodriguez, A. He knocked.
A woman answered with morning still on her face. "Yes?"
"Mrs. Rodriguez?" His tone was flat, unbreakable by design.
"Yes? Do you have news? Is Alejandro—?"
He didn't soften it. He raised the tag between two fingers. "On behalf of Incubator Command, I regret to inform you your son, Trainee Alejandro Rodriguez, gave his life in service. He died with honor."
For one thin second her eyes shone with the surety that this was the beginning of a story. Then the sentence finished. The shine went out like a candle pinched with wet fingers.
The script was clean. The effect wasn't. Hope didn't fade. It crystallized, then shattered. Her mouth opened and found no sound. Her knees unlocked. He caught her with the same efficiency he'd used on Rose, a bar of iron under a falling weight. His face didn't move.
Inside the hallway, Rose saw too much ordinary life aligned against the news: a dish towel slung over the oven handle; a school photograph on a nail, Alejandro with a cowlick he hadn't grown into yet; a bowl of dough under a cloth dome, still rising as if time refused to learn anything. [cut: Somewhere a kettle ticked as it cooled.] The geraniums breathed their peppery sweetness into air that suddenly tasted like metal.
From the shade, Rose dug crescents into her palms until she felt skin give. Break, she begged him in silence. Just once. Let someone see it break you.
He didn't. He helped the woman upright, set the tag in her hand, closed her fingers over it. Her thumb rubbed the stamped letters as if a different name might come up warm. The husband came, drawn by the pause in ordinary sounds, his face folding in on itself as he took in the scene. The first raw cry tore out of him, ugly and human, a sound that didn't know where to live once it left his throat. A neighbor's door opened and then shut again with quiet guilt. The geranium pot rocked, settled.
Caellum stood through it, absorbing it. He said nothing. The room filled with the small noises the world was making anyway: the tick of pipes, the sigh of the building, the whisper of chain against tag as the woman's hand shook.
He walked to the next house. Then the next. The same pattern repeated like a rite stripped to function: knock, script, tag, collapse. He reset his stance to the same square each time, blinked to a count, and let grief spend itself against him without purchase.
With each delivery, something in Rose set and cracked. She wasn't only watching him report deaths; she was watching him process forty-eight impacts with no dispersal system. The lines on his face seemed to settle deeper. The gray in his hair caught the light like wire; he began to look carved.
At last, after an hour that felt like years, the final line on the list drew a pen across it. The last tag, Kael, was accepted by a grandfather who nodded once, shut the door, and left the street quiet.
Rose waited for the collapse. A wall leans too long, it falls.
He held.
He stood very still. Then his right hand trembled as it went to the pocket of his trousers, not the satchel. He drew out a single tag.
This one wasn't the same. It had been handled until the edges turned friendly under skin. He closed his fist around it until his knuckles went white.
Understanding arrived without mercy: this one wasn't duty.
He started walking again. The cadence changed, slower, heavier, as if the day's weight had chosen this moment to be felt. He wasn't heading into unknown streets now; his body knew the way.
Home.
Rose followed, breath tight and tasting of metal. The familiar door waited: chipped blue paint, the fake flowers Lena insisted on because they never died when the weather did. He stopped there for a full minute, just looking. She could see his shoulders lift and drop. One long inhale. One long exhale. As if he were trying to breathe the right words into existence before there were none left.
He wasn't a fortress delivering a script anymore. He was only a son, hers.
A small, treacherous part of her wanted him to crack, just once. She wanted Zack's face to show something human she could touch; another part knew the sound of that crack would live in her bones.
He raised his hand to knock. The worn tag cut a pale half-moon against his fist.
He knocked.