There was a version of Ash — younger, if that word meant anything for something that hadn't been born so much as accumulated — who would have thought that surviving one Mission meant he understood what a Mission was.
That version of him was gone by the time the second pull arrived, and he was almost grateful for it, because the version that replaced him at least knew enough to be afraid of the right things.
He felt it coming three days out, the way you feel a storm two days before the sky commits to it — a low, persistent hook under his sternum, patient, undemanding, content to simply announce itself and wait. He didn't tell Maren at first. He wasn't sure why. Some small, stubborn part of him wanted to hold onto the ordinary days a little longer before the world came looking for him again — the two of them sitting on the hillside doing nothing in particular, her narrating some half-remembered piece of her old life, him listening with the specific, total attention of someone who still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to have this.
It was Maren who noticed first, of course. She always did.
"You've been somewhere else for two days," she said, on the third evening, not accusing, just observing, the way she observed everything — carefully, without flinching from what she found. "What is it?"
"Mission," he admitted, and watched something in her face go instantly, carefully still. "It's not close yet. A few more days, maybe."
"Okay." She said it evenly, but her hand found his without being asked, the old reflex, steady and certain. "We'll go together. Like last time."
He'd been expecting relief at that. He didn't get it. What he got instead was Maren's hand tightening, just slightly, around his — not affection this time, or not only affection. Something closer to bracing.
"Maren?"
"I don't think we will," she said, quiet, and there was something in her voice he'd never heard before — a kind of listening quality, like she was translating a sentence from a language that had only just started arriving in her own head. "I don't — I can't explain it right. It's not a thought exactly. It's more like — you know how the Mission itself doesn't arrive as words? It's like that. Something's telling me. Not you. Me. That this time is different."
"Different how."
"I don't know." Her frustration was plain, and underneath it, fear — not for herself, he understood instantly, watching her face. For him. "I just know, the same way I knew Missions and Contracts existed on the day I woke up here without anyone explaining them to me. This one isn't going to let me in. The Between doesn't do the same exception twice. I don't know why. I just know it's true, the same way I know the sky here doesn't have a sun in it."
He wanted to argue. He opened his mouth to argue, already forming the shape of we'll find a way, we found a way last time, I'm not doing this without you — and stopped, because the look on her face wasn't asking him to argue. It was asking him to hear her.
"Can you try, though?" he asked, after a moment, gently. "Not because I doubt you. Because I'd like to understand the shape of the thing that's about to take you away from me for the first time since I learned your name."
Maren considered that, turning the request over with the same careful attention she gave most things that mattered to him. "I think," she said slowly, "it's something like this. The first Mission — the happiness room — it let me in because the test itself was built around a question that needed two answers to mean anything. What is happiness, to you, specifically — that's not a question a system can properly ask a soul in total isolation, not when the whole answer turned out to be her. I think the Between understood that, somehow, and bent its own rule to let the test actually work."
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
"And this one doesn't need that."
"I don't think it does, no. I think this one's asking something only you can answer, the same private, solitary way every other soul's Missions have always worked before you. And I think — this is the part I can't fully explain, it's more feeling than reasoning — I think if I forced my way in again, the system wouldn't bend a second time the way it bent the first. I think it would simply refuse to recognize me as part of the test at all. Which might mean I'm just useless weight, dragged along for nothing. Or it might mean something worse. I don't know which, and I'd rather not find out by accident, with you standing right next to me when it happens."
He was quiet a long moment, absorbing that. "That's frightening."
"It is," she agreed. "But I'd rather be frightened out here, waiting, than frightened in there, finding out the hard way what 'the system refuses to recognize you' actually looks like from the inside."
"I don't understand it," he said finally, quiet, honest. "I don't fully understand why. But I hear you, and I trust you enough not to need to understand it before I do what you're asking."
Something in her shoulders eased, fractionally, grateful. "Thank you."
"I still don't want to go without you."
"I know." She pulled him closer, forehead against his shoulder, the particular kind of stillness they'd built together over — however long it had been now, long enough that he'd stopped needing to count it to know it mattered. "I don't want you to either. But I'd rather you go and come back than the alternative be whatever happens if you try to force something the Between's already decided."
"Can I ask you something," he said, some time later, the two of them still tangled together against the gray hillside, "and you tell me honestly, even if the answer's strange?"
"Always."
"Does it scare you? That I have to go somewhere you can't follow?"
Maren was quiet long enough that he thought, for a moment, she wasn't going to answer at all — that particular, considering silence she fell into whenever a question mattered enough to deserve more than the first response that came to mind.
"Yes," she said finally. "But not the way you'd think." She pulled back enough to look at him properly, her eyes steady, the same unflinching directness that had first drawn him toward the sound of her voice on that colorless hill. "I'm not scared you'll leave and not come back because you decided to. I know you better than that already, even after — what, a year? A little more? I know the shape of you now. You don't wander off from things you've decided to keep."
"Then what."
"I'm scared of what the world does to people it gets alone," she said, simply, and something in the plainness of it landed harder than any more elaborate fear could have. "Not because you're weak. Because nobody's strong enough to be alone with something that hurts and come out the other side exactly the same. I wasn't. Before you found me, I mean — I spent longer than I like admitting just walking, not really talking to anyone, telling myself that was fine, that not needing anyone was its own kind of strength." She shook her head slowly. "It wasn't strength. It was just a smaller, quieter kind of hurting that hadn't found its edges yet. And I don't want that for you. Not even for a Mission. Not even for a few hours."
"I'll have you to come back to," he said. "That's different from being alone the way you were."
"I hope so." She said it like a wish rather than a certainty, and he understood, without her needing to say more, that this was as close as she was willing to come to admitting her own fear had teeth in it too, however carefully she tried to keep them hidden from him. "I really do hope so, Ash."
He held her a long time after that, not talking, just letting the pull under his sternum grow slowly, patiently sharper, three days becoming two, becoming one, becoming the hollow, waiting quiet of the final hour before it finally, fully claimed him.
"Come back," Maren said, the instant before the world folded around him, her hand the last thing he felt against his palm. "Whatever it is. Whatever you find. Come back to me."
"I always will," he said, and meant it with everything he had, and then the hillside was gone, and he was falling, alone, into something the Between had built for him and him only.