“Look,” he said, drawing her farther into the room, for they had stood all this time not two inches from the door. “Look. Don’t you think this will work? I’ll turn on music, it will drown out any noise. Isn’t this clever? Say you’ll stay.”

And she had, perforce, to turn her head and discover what he was talking about. Even so, it took her a minute to assimilate the significance of the furniture pushed together in the center of the room, a bed quilt thrown over the sofa and the back of the chair to form a tent over a pile of rugs on the floor.

“No one will see us,” he said, his voice urgent, his hands upon her body more urgent still. “I’ll turn up the music. No one will hear us. Oh, Kit, I want you so much—I can’t put it in words—I need you—”

Lovers, here in Ariana Bayless’s prison, huddling under a makeshift shelter. She should be horrified, she should be offended, but she had missed his body more than she would miss sunlight if she were buried alive. She turned back to his embrace, strained upward to invite his kiss, and gave her silent consent to the seduction.

They kissed till their bodies were fused, then broke apart, breathless and laughing. Jex reached for the laces on her shirt, but she pushed him away. “No—the cameras—” she said, so he guided her toward the tented furniture and they crawled beneath the blanket. There was almost no room. Giggling and squirming, they kicked off their shoes, pulled off their own clothes, came together naked in the filtered light of the overhead canopy. She was shocked, as she was always shocked, by the gleaming incandescence of his body, almost phosphorescent against the rich, matte surfaces of her own. When he laid his hand against her cheek, she imagined the effect of a lamp held against her skin, lighting up the interior cavities of her skull, giving it an inky luminescence of its own.

“I love you,” she said, flinging herself against him, clinging to that golden body with the length of her own so that it passed its ardent light through every knot of muscle, every hollow bone. She could feel herself catch fire, feel her midnight colors pale and scatter before his blaze. “Oh, Jex, I love you, more than anything else in the world.”

*   *   *

An hour later, she left the Complex in a state of near-total disorientation. Part of it was the sheer dissolution of self she felt every time she made love to Jex. The first time it had happened, she had felt dazed for a week. She had been unable to tell how much of that was physical, how much emotional; he left her always feeling as if a cataclysm had erupted inside her head, disrupting her balance, changing the molecules of her skin.