Before the silence, there was a spark.
Kirion still remembered the first time he met Jena. It was in the lower wards of Sector Nine, where streetlights flickered and the ground hummed with underground powerlines. He had been stitching up a wounded smuggler in a backroom clinic when she walked in—silent, bleeding, eyes sharp as scalpels.
She didn't flinch when he pulled shrapnel from her shoulder. Didn't speak unless necessary. But she watched him work with the kind of focus that made him uneasy.
"I've seen cleaner blades," she'd muttered after he cauterized her wound.
He raised an eyebrow. "I've seen quieter patients."
That made her smirk. It was the beginning.
Their time together was chaotic, passionate, and brief—like a lightning strike. She never talked about her past, and he didn't press. She was a puzzle he didn't try to solve, a presence that came and went like a shadow. But when she stayed, the world felt quieter.
Still, something always felt temporary. She lived like someone who didn't plan for tomorrow.
It was a week after the comm-call when Kirion found the letter. Folded neatly and left behind in a hidden compartment in his med-kit—something only she would have thought to touch. No signature. Just her handwriting, fierce and sharp like her.
"You're not the problem. The world is. I don't want to bring a child into this slaughterhouse. You've always believed in fixing things. I believe in escaping them. Maybe that makes me weak. Or maybe it makes me honest. You'll be a better parent without me. I'd only poison her."
He read it twice. Then a third time.
He didn't cry. Didn't shout. He just folded it and slid it into a compartment of his jacket. Close to his heart, but out of sight.
He thought about her every day after that, especially when he passed the old protest murals near the overpass—faded spray paint that once screamed "No More Shadows!" but now barely whispered. Jena had been like that: a flare in the dark, burning fast and fading before it was fully understood.
Kirion couldn't hate her. Not really. She had been fighting her own war long before they met. He just wished she had stayed long enough to believe in something else.
In them.
In her.
Later that night, he sat on the rooftop, staring at the skyline. His hand rested on the med-kit where the letter had been hidden. Below, the city breathed like a beast, belching smoke and flickering with artificial stars.
Somewhere out there, Jena was running—from the regime, from herself, from motherhood.
But Kirion wouldn't run. He'd already made the choice.
He'd stay. He'd fight.
And he'd raise his daughter in the light, no matter how much darkness it took to get there.