When I wake up the next morning, Simon's cot lies cold in the corner of the room with his gray blanket crumpled into a mound of itchy poly-cotton blend on top. But I don't let that get to me.

This is my first morning as a free woman.

Uncontracted.

Liberated.

These words sound good as I say them to the mirror. The moment is glorious, and I can't wait to begin the first day of the rest of my new life.

But the day trudges on in vapid normalcy. I run boring laps. I sulk to the markets to purchase uninteresting food for our kitchenette. When I return home, no one is there to greet me. I make two slices of toast on the burner, nibble unenthusiastically on one and leave the other on a plate atop the blanket pile on my father's cot. I search for Simon, asking some of the regulars if they've seen him. By the end of the day, as I head to CR4, I realize that what I thought would be a new, illustrious beginning feels more like decomposing meat.

When I get to Combat Room 4, I'm hollow. I was ready to gleefully inform Hayomo about my new status as a barren woman. However, as she passes my table, my knees lock and my voice dies in my chest. I feel my failure wash over me as the old Maroon Coat's words come crawling forward.

You are one failure among three thousand and six successes.

I tried. Honestly, I did. I look around as the rest of the group take their seats. Six women pepper the room. Not one of them has been marked barren.

I'm excluding Hayomo, as I still have no idea what the hell she's been up to all these years.

For the rest of the night, I feel their eyes on me. They're watching me like an anomaly. Hot accusations bubble on my back.

How do they know? Is there a sign around my neck? Do I look different? Am I still human? Did I somehow transform into mayonnaise sometime between the HHP labs and now?

No one says anything all night, but my fingers twist. My hands sweat—how did they find out so fast? When Hayomo dismisses us, I rush to the door to grab Dean before he escapes.

"Did you tell them?" I whisper in passing, pulling him to the side with me in the shadows.

"Tell them what?"

"About our situation? You know—that I'm barren?" The words sting on their way out.

He frowns. "Why would I tell anyone anything about that? Not their business."

Maybe it was the HHP. Maybe they sent out an announcement to all citizens of the URE that there is a lifeless shell among them. Someone unpatriotic enough to let her body disappoint the world.

Dean must have seen something in my face that I didn't mean to show because his hand rests on my back, directing us from the combat room.

When we're out of earshot, he waits for me to spill it.

"I don't know why, but I feel different. Alien almost."

"That's ridiculous."

"Is it, though?" I ask with rising anxiety. "Is it really a ridiculous idea that a human is not actually considered a human until she can create more humans? How do aliens reproduce? Eggs? Energy? Clay? I bet if I tried any of those, I could do it. I won't be a failure."

Dean sighs above me. The anger from last night must be escaping in that expansive exhale. "You're not a failure."

"I had zero chance at failure, yet I somehow managed to do it anyway. I'm the biggest failure in the entirety of the UR-fucking-E."

Dean surprises me by pulling my body into his. He wraps his massive arms around me, crushing everything against his chest in an embrace as tight as an airlock.

Slowly, I reciprocate.

Being enveloped coaxes the turmoil to sleep as if turning off a burner under a boiling pot.

"You didn't fail anything. You fought so hard, you won."

I look up at him, my chin resting on his chest. I see him searching for the right words.

"You won, Nika. You never wanted this to happen in the first place. You fought the HHP for five years and then every step of this way, you've fought them without stopping once. In the war against the Human Hope Project, Janika Lorn came out victorious." He squeezes me tighter. "Of course, the opposing side will see it as failure, but it's theirs, not yours. The losers always try to push their defeat away."

The rest of the tension dissipates from my gut and the sickly, green feeling of my alien body fades back into that of a fleshy human. A new sensation tickles its way up my legs when Dean's hand pulls a stray hair away from my face.

"You never lost. You just need to remember what side you're on."

"Have you lost?"

He pauses and sighs again. "It feels like I have. But I need to remember whose side I'm on."

"Team Lorn?"

"Team Lorn."

That little tickling in my belly rushes up my neck and arms to make me feel hot by the pricks of a thousand scalding needles. My body moves faster than my mind can process. There's no time for doubt.

Hands rush to bring him to me.

Or maybe it's me who flies to meet him in the clouds. I can't tell who moved where, but the end result is the same. We collide. At first, it's a grateful peck, a sweet touchpoint to show him he's coming in loud and clear. That's when another rolling sensation becomes abundantly prominent somewhere in my core. Somewhere between our bodies, a match sparks to life.

My pod is empty—I'm pretty sure. I interrupt our kiss to tell him this because I don't want this time to be another dark alley. I want to see him, feel him with lights that don't have the same scrutiny as the fluorescents. For once, I want to feel that we are home, we aren't rushed, and we aren't the middle machines of an assembly line.

We fall into our natural beat. His long strides and my smaller ones syncopate to a punchy rhythm.

As I expected, the crumpled blanket is exactly as it was with the slice of untouched toast sunken into its folds.

Standing in front of him, I pull my shirt over my head. I meet his eyes, making sure that they're watching me. This is the slowest we've ever gone together, and I want to watch his face—to watch his eyes take this in on our time, on our schedule because we decided we want it for ourselves. He frowns at me in concentration, watching my hands intently.

His shirt still covers his skin. My fingers move to rectify that.

After it joins mine by the curtain, I fan out and touch every part of his chest, shoulders, arms, and hands that I've been familiar with for years. I've held theses parts before but not like this. I've seen everything here thousands of times but not in this light. In this new, slow dance, we memorize each other's contours.

His kisses graze against my face and neck. He brushes my hair away.

He lingers in previously neglected areas. The pad of his thumb traces lines over the sinews of my neck. He dips it into my collarbone and caresses the skin around my shoulders.

"I've come to the conclusion that you don't have to say it for me to know it's true," he says, running his thumb over my cheekbone.

My heart warms. After so many years of orbiting each other, I'm glad he knows my signals and mind. But now is not the time to acknowledge traitorous feelings that rose too late. Now I have to let him go.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Liar." His hands find their way to my back. They sink lower, lower grabbing handfuls of a brand new territory.

O Good Lady, is this what I've been missing?

He smiles and pulls me closer to him, diving into kisses I'm acclimating to. We shared kisses before when we were first contracted, but these new ones are full-grown, mature kisses that don't play games.

I'm twisting the strands of his hair when Dean tackles the buttons on my pants. My breath hitches every time his finger brushes bare skin. I'm sent into electric flurries.

"I don't want to let you go," he confesses between our kisses. He guides me to the cot. Supported by his strong arms, my back touches down softly.

I want to make him promises, tell him that I don't want to let him go either. But that's unfair. It's cruel to keep him here when I'm so happy to be free and he is stuck with another binding contract. Somewhere in the URE, there's another waiting woman. The thought of her, this hazy woman who exists only in the future, tightens my stomach.

You can't have it all, Lorn. You have to let this one go.

Later.

That night, after an explosive birth of stars, the soft thuds of Dean's heartbeat rest against my ear. We fall asleep on my cot with his body pressed against the wall.

I wonder if he can feel my lashes moving against the wide space of his bicep—the palest, softest part that hasn't been shot, or cut, or rubbed coarse. I've seen this part of him before. I've seen it when we played together as kids and he would pull me across the playground or lift me up into the higher reaches of the storage containments so I could see if the sky was visible from there.

I stare into the scars. I barely notice his other hand pulling away the strands of hair falling over my eyes.

In the light of the naked bulb, I search for things to say. But I don't want to bring up the contracts, the lack of contracts, the mission, or any of those other time bombs.

"Do you know where Simon is?" I whisper.

He doesn't stir, but says stoically, "Saw him yesterday."

"Seriously? Where?"

"In the chapel."

I melt back into his arms. "What were you doing there?"

"I go there to think."

"About what?"

"Usually about you. And me. And what was happening to us."

"Did you get any answers?"

"Never really asked any questions." His hand pushes the same hair behind my ear. His palm rests on my cheek. "I went mostly to sort things out."

My hands curl between us against his warm, hard, and scarred chest. "So is everything sorted out for you?"

"No."

We waft away into silence while looking at other parts of the room. One last time, he pulls himself up and over me, lowering his lips to mine, and lingering for all of time and space.

"I have to go."

I nod.

"You should go talk to your dad."

I nod again.

"We shouldn't do this again."

"Did you have to say it?"

He pauses once his shirt is over his head. "Yeah, I think I did. We can't do this again. My new contract is coming up. I don't want anything to happen to you."

"You think I can't control myself around you? Like I turn into some kind of sexual barbarian in your presence and I can't restrain myself?"

Dean smiles as he slips on his pants. "Your track record confirms it."

I snort.

He sits on the cot beside me again and pulls my face to his where we evaporate into steam.

"Well, you can't keep doing that," I say when my lips are my own again.

"It's hard to stop now that we've started."

Just like our old days, I shove him out of my pod, smiling, touching, and kissing. When he's finally out the door, and it smacks shut behind him. I fall to my knees.

I splash water on my face to bring color back to what has become pale and sick. I throw on my best "things are normal" face and head to the one place where almost no one ever expects me to go.