The speakers cut out with a pop like snapping bone. Silvan cursed, jamming his bypass key into the server door's manual release before the ventilation shafts could seal them in like rats. We ran through the south maintenance ducts, hit the freight elevator, and burst out into the damp, diesel-choked rain of the lower districts. Twenty minutes later, we collapsed into the underbelly of the city's old tram line: the Iron Lantern Night Market. It smelled of scorching lard, fermented scallions, and cheap kerosene. Neon paper lanterns buzzed pink and acid-green above our heads, humming against the persistent drizzle. Tansy never dropped her tongs. The second she saw our faces, she hopped atop an upturned pickle barrel, whistled through two grease-stained knuckles, and yelled across the crowded aisle. "Griddle up, boys! Code Blue on the perimeter! Apex suits are sniffing around the third tier!" Within ninety seconds, the alley vanished behind a barricade of wok burners, high-pressure butane tanks, and three hundred pounds of sizzling offal. Old Auntie Min slid two steel carts across the narrow brick entryway, effectively sealing the lane with a wall of spitting oil and furious grandma energy. Young couriers on motorized scooters parked wheel-to-wheel, arms crossed, glares fixed toward the street. Nobody crossed her suppliers without getting hot chili oil flicked into their corneas. Tansy shoved two aluminum bowls of dumplings into Silvan's hands and pushed him into a utility shed out back. "Eat. Don't touch the fuse box. If you sneeze on the pickled radish, I will turn your Italian leather loafers into stock pots." Silvan looked bewildered, but he sat on an inverted five-gallon bucket of soy sauce and began shoveling dumplings into his mouth with plastic chopsticks, thoroughly humbled by the food mafia. That left me and Marenka. She was tucked behind the canvas flap of the central supply tent, seated on a folding stool beside a sputtering space heater. Her hair was coming undone from that immaculate, terrifying bun she favored, damp strands sticking to the high curve of her cheekbone. She kept her head down when I stepped inside. She was smoothing out a crumpled piece of paper against her knee, running the flat of her thumb over the creases with rhythmic, clinical obsession. "You're shivering," I said, unzipping my fleece jacket and tossing it over her shoulders. She flinched as the fabric hit her skin, then froze. She left it in place, though her grip cinched tighter against the edge of the printed sheet. The heater rattled, throwing amber stripes across her pale throat. "I am not shivering," she said. Her voice had that brittle, synthetic edge she put on whenever her world was about to collapse. "My basal metabolic rate is fluctuating in response to rapid ambient temperature shifts. It is an involuntary physical response. Completely negligible." "Right. You're cold, Voss. Drink the broth Tansy left." "I don't require broth, Bram." She drew a tight, measured breath, straightened her spine, and held out the piece of paper. "I require you to read this." I looked down at the sheet. It had been run through an ink-ribbon receipt printer in the back of Tansy's truck, the grid lines sharp and uncompromising. Across the top, printed in bold, thirty-point sans-serif type, was a headline that made my teeth ache: *PROS AND CONS OF LOVING MARENKA VOSS (PREDICTIVE MATRIX)* I stared at it. Then I looked at her. Her face was locked in the dead-eyed mask of a chief risk officer giving a quarterly layoff report. "What the hell is this?" "A quantitative exit strategy," she said cleanly. Her chin tilted up, but her knuckles were white where she held the margins. "I have analyzed our interpersonal trajectories. The cost-benefit balance is fundamentally bankrupt. You are an asset in wilderness operations; I am an institutional target facing federal ruin. Item one under Pros: 'High baseline physical compatibility; mutual competence in crisis.' Item two: 'Occasional conversational stimulation.'" "Conversational stimulation?" I stepped closer, my shadow blocking out the heater's glow. "Is that what we're calling it?" "Look at column B, Kinsey." Her voice cracked on my surname, just a hairline fracture, but I heard it. She pointed a trembling finger at the thick, ink-heavy right side of the sheet. "Item one under Cons: 'Imminent loss of commercial wilderness guiding license due to regulatory retaliation.' Item two: 'Eighty-four percent likelihood of accessory charges.' Item three: 'Psychological damage caused by proximity to my emotional architecture.'" "Your what?" "I am broken, Bram!" The synthetic veneer peeled away, raw and ugly. She shoved the paper into my chest, standing so fast her stool tipped backward into the tarp wall. "I don't know how to feel things without auditing them! I see you, and my resting heart rate jumps by forty beats, and instead of kissing you, I wonder what the insurance liability is! I ruin everything I touch because I treat people like ledger entries! And now the board is going to take your license, crush Tansy's carts, and put me in an iron cage. So sign the termination clause at the bottom." She produced a black pen from her sleeve, offering it to me like a scalpel. "Sign it," she begged, her eyes dark, huge, and glassy with furious tears she refused to spill. "Execute the separation agreement. Let me walk upstairs at midnight and give Apex what it wants. It minimizes total casualty metrics." My chest burned. The smell of frying dumplings and rainy exhaust drifted through the tent flap, mingling with the scent of pine needle soap that still clung to my jacket on her shoulders. I reached out. I ignored her pen. Instead, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the thick, black industrial Sharpie I use for marking trail blazes and climbing ropes. I uncapped it with my teeth. I grabbed the paper from her hand, laid it flat against the aluminum top of a chest freezer, and drew a massive, thick black 'X' straight through Column A. Then I dragged the marker diagonally through Column B, pressing so hard the felt tip squeaked and shredded the cheap paper fibers. "Bram—" I struck through her title. I blacked out the termination clause. I dragged a thick, black line over every single clinical, cowardly excuse she had typed up to protect herself from being cared about. "Here's my audit, Voss," I muttered. I threw the ruined paper onto the gravel floor, dropped the marker, and grabbed the lapels of my jacket wrapped around her shoulders. I hauled her forward before she could run the numbers. Her mouth opened to argue, to cite a statute, to quote a risk percentile, but I caught her lips with mine and crushed the words back down her throat. She went rigid for half a second. Her hands came up, fists balled against my chest, ready to push me into the next district. But then a broken, shuddering sound tore out of her throat. Her palms flattened, burying deep into the wool of my shirt, twisting the fabric until her knuckles grazed my ribs. She kissed me back with an agonizing, starving desperation, tasting of rain, salt, and raw survival. All the clinical distance, all the spreadsheets, all the protective steel plating she had wrapped around her ribs for ten miserable years simply shattered under the heat of our mouths colliding. I backed her against the supply crate, my hand sliding up into the loose silk of her hair, tilting her head back. She leaned into me completely, breathing me in, trembling not from the cold but from the terrifying realization that she couldn't calculate her way out of this. "You don't get to fire me," I whispered against her lips, breathless, my forehead resting against hers. She swallowed hard, her chest heaving against mine, her eyes wide and dark in the amber light. For the first time since I hauled her off that mountain ridge, there was no spreadsheet in her eyes. Only me. Then, between our bodies, her mobile handset began to scream. It wasn't a standard ringtone. It was a rhythmic, high-pitched screech—the Apex emergency administrative tone. Marenka pulled back, her hand shaking as she yanked the handset from her pocket. The display flared crimson, flashing a countdown clock with bold white numerals: *APEX ENTERPRISE SERVER PURGE INITIATED: 19:59... 19:58...*

Pros and Cons of Loving Marenka Voss