Mira had turned Kavan's quarters into something that looked like a surgery performed on a computer.
Cables ran from her handheld to three auxiliary devices she'd pulled from her workshop, signal processors, frequency isolators, the kind of equipment that the Corps used for analyzing Abyssal material samples. Each device was connected to the next in a daisy chain that ended at a modified display screen propped against the wall, its surface dark, waiting.
The data stick sat in a custom cradle Mira had fabricated from spare parts in forty minutes. The cradle connected to the first signal processor through a cable she'd wrapped in deep-grade crystal fiber, the same material used in scanner masks, repurposed to channel rather than suppress.
"The cipher is frequency-locked," Mira said. She was on the floor, cross-legged, her jacket off, her sleeves pushed to her elbows, her hands moving between devices with the economy of someone who'd done precision technical work in uncomfortable positions so many times it had become default. "Elara Soren designed it to respond to a specific resonance band, the Abyssal signature frequency that corresponds to nursery-compatible integration. Below Surface rank, you don't generate that frequency. Above Shallow rank, the frequency changes. The cipher only opens for someone in the exact band she calibrated for."
"Which happens to be where I am."
"Which happens to be where you are. Coincidence or design, pick whichever lets you sleep at night." She plugged the last cable. The cradle hummed. The data stick's surface absorbed light the way Abyssal materials always did, a matte darkness that seemed to pull the room's color toward it. "I need you to channel into the cradle. Sustained output, low intensity. Think of it like, have you ever held a note? Singing?"
"I don't sing."
"Humming, then. I need the equivalent of a hum. Steady, consistent, no spikes. The cipher is sensitive, too much output overwhelms the frequency filter and the data corrupts. Too little and the cipher doesn't recognize the signal. You need to hit the sweet spot and hold it."
Cael looked at the cradle. At the cables. At the deep-grade crystal fiber that would carry his Abyssal output from his hands through the equipment chain into the data stick's encoded depths. "The scanner mask—"
"Off. The mask dampens your signature. The cipher needs the raw frequency." Mira's voice was matter-of-fact, the engineer addressing a technical requirement. "Which means for the duration of this process, your Abyssal output is unmasked. On a base with scanner equipment. While you're supposed to be confined to quarters with no unsupervised power use."
"How long?"
"Hours. Maybe three. Maybe six. Depends on how much data is encoded and how complex the cipher architecture is." She looked at him. Her expression was the calculating one, not cold, but clear, the face of a woman running numbers and finding them unfavorable. "Kavan's camera loop runs for another four hours before I need to refresh it. If we go past four hours, there's a ninety-second gap between loops where the live feed is active. Anyone watching sees an empty room become a room full of unauthorized equipment and an Abyssal-type channeling unmasked darkness."
"Then we finish in four hours."
"Then you hold the hum for four hours straight without spiking. Can you do that?"
He didn't know. The longest sustained channeling he'd done was the shadow field in the cathedral district, maybe forty minutes of controlled output, and that had left his hands shaking and the corruption meter pressing against its boundary. Four hours of sustained output without a mask, in a confined space, with his power feeding directly into equipment that would amplify and process the signal—
"I can do it."
"You hesitated."
"I calculated. Different thing."
Kavan was on his cot, pushed to the far wall to make room for Mira's equipment. The old man sat with his legs folded, his back against the wall, his milky eyes tracking the setup with the focused attention he gave to things that mattered. He hadn't spoken since Mira started assembling the equipment. He watched. His hands, trembling, rested on his knees.
"Begin when you're ready," Mira said. "I'll monitor the frequency output on my handheld. If you spike, I'll tell you. If the cipher starts responding, you'll see data on the screen. Questions?"
"What if the corruption ticks up?"
"Then we have a conversation about risk tolerance." Her eyes were on her handheld, not on him. The engineer, focused on her instruments. "But Kavan's going to watch for that. Aren't you."
"I will watch," Kavan said. His voice was quiet but present, the old man accepting a role that required the thing he did best: paying attention to Cael's Abyssal state with a precision that no instrument could match.
Cael sat in front of the cradle. Pulled the scanner mask over his head, set it aside. The immediate difference was subtle but real, the mask's dual counter-waveforms had been a constant pressure against his sternum, a containment he'd grown so used to that its absence registered as lightness. Like taking off a heavy coat in a warm room.
The Abyss stirred. Not aggressively, curiously. The suppression field was gone, and the power beneath his skin shifted, tested, expanded by increments into the space the mask had occupied. The shadows in the room deepened. Kavan's quarters, already dim, went darker at the edges, the ambient darkness thickening as Cael's unmasked signature radiated outward.
"I see the frequency," Mira said. "You're broadcasting at, hold on." She adjusted a dial on the first processor. "Okay. That's raw Abyssal, full spectrum. I need you to narrow it. Bring the output down to the resonance band. Think nursery. Think the frequency you felt in the central chamber."
Think nursery.
He closed his eyes. The central chamber. The pool. The echo. The way the air had vibrated at a frequency that was below sound and above thought, the resonance that had matched something inside him, that had found the Abyssal substrate in his cells and set it humming like a tuning fork held against a bell.
The output narrowed. He felt it, the broad-spectrum signature contracting, focusing, the full orchestra of his Abyssal power reducing to a single sustained note. The shadows stopped spreading and began pooling, concentrated, directional, flowing toward the cradle like water finding a drain.
"There." Mira's voice was sharp. Not alarmed, focused. "That's the band. Hold that. Exactly that. Don't shift."
He held it.
The cradle hummed louder. The data stick's surface changed, the matte darkness gaining texture, the Abyssal material responding to a signal it recognized. The deep-grade crystal fiber glowed faintly, the resonance frequency traveling along the cable in visible pulses of dark light, light that wasn't light, that was the absence of light made directional, the Abyssal energy paradox of darkness that illuminated.
The screen flickered.
Data. Fragments at first, text appearing and dissolving, images that materialized for a half-second before collapsing into static. The cipher was responding, but the decryption was incremental, the encoded information releasing in layers, each layer requiring sustained resonance to unlock the next.
"First layer is metadata," Mira said. She was reading her handheld and the screen simultaneously, her eyes flicking between them at a rate that made Cael's head hurt to watch. "File structure. Elara organized her research into, seventeen directories. That's not forty-seven symbols. That's—"
The screen stabilized. A directory tree, rendered in simple text, the architecture of a dead woman's life's work:
```
/SOREN_RESEARCH/
├── /GLYPH_TRANSLATIONS/ (312 entries)
├── /NURSERY_ARCHITECTURE/ (47 files)
├── /CCR_DESIGN/ (89 files)
├── /CCR_ANNOTATIONS/ (34 files)
├── /SURVEY_DATA/ (156 files)
├── /BIOLOGICAL_INTEGRATION/ (23 files)
├── /RESONANCE_MAPPING/ (67 files)
├── /PERSONAL_LOG/ (12 entries)
├── /THRESHOLD_ARCHITECTURE/ (8 files)
├── /ABYSS_COMMUNICATION/ (31 files)
├── /DEEP_FLOOR_PROJECTIONS/ (19 files)
├── /CHURCH_DEVIATIONS/ (41 files)
├── /CONSENT_ARCHITECTURE/ (15 files)
├── /FAILSAFE_DESIGNS/ (22 files)
├── /HISTORICAL_PRECEDENTS/ (9 files)
├── /COUNTER_PROTOCOL/ (6 files)
├── /FLOOR_100/ (3 files)
```
Mira's hands stopped moving. She stared at the screen with her mouth slightly open, the only time Cael had seen the engineer lose her verbal momentum to something as basic as surprise.
"Three hundred and twelve glyphs," she said. "Sera's transcriptions had forty-seven. The Church's official record of Soren's research, forty-seven symbols, partial translations, work terminated due to classification upgrade. But she mapped three hundred and twelve." Her voice picked up speed, the tech-burst mode engaging. "And look at the directory names. CCR Design. Church Deviations. Counter-Protocol. She didn't just study the nursery, she designed the Church's synthetic version, documented how they changed it, and then built a counter-protocol for her own design. She was working against her own creation."
"Can you open the files?"
"Not yet. The cipher decrypts layer by layer. Metadata first, then file headers, then content. Each layer needs sustained resonance. Keep holding."
He kept holding.
The hum was work. Not painful, yet, but demanding, the sustained effort of keeping a precise frequency without variation, the mental equivalent of holding a glass of water at arm's length. Easy for the first minute. Harder by the fifth. By the fifteenth, his arm, his internal arm, the metaphorical limb that extended into the Abyssal substrate, was beginning to ache.
The corruption meter sat at twenty-one percent. Holding. Kavan watched it the way surgeons watched heart monitors.
Twenty minutes. The second layer decrypted, file headers, abstracts, the summary descriptions of each directory's contents. Mira read them aloud, her voice rapid, compressing, the words coming faster than conversation speed because the information was arriving faster than conversation could carry.
"Glyph translations, three hundred twelve symbols with full contextual mapping, cross-referenced with nursery architecture and Abyss communication logs. She wasn't just translating symbols. She was building a dictionary. A functional, interactive dictionary of the Abyssal language." Mira scrolled. "Nursery architecture, structural analysis of the original nursery on, she labels it Floor 47, but there's a note: 'Primary nursery is a threshold structure. The true nursery exists below. See Floor 100 files.' Floor 100."
"Nobody's been to Floor 100," Cael said. The words came out tight, the effort of speaking while maintaining the resonance hum, like talking while carrying something heavy. "The deepest surveyed floor is 47."
"Elara's projections go to 100. And she didn't just project, she extrapolated. The deep floor projection files contain modeled environments based on patterns she identified in the upper floors. Each floor has a resonance signature that follows a mathematical progression. She mapped the progression, extended it, and predicted what the lower floors would look like based on the pattern." Mira paused on a file header. Read it twice. "CCR Design, the Cathedral Complex Restricted facility. Eight-nine design files. These are the actual blueprints, Cael. The engineering specifications for the Church's synthetic nursery. Elara drew them."
"Open the Church Deviations."
"Can't yet. Third layer. Keep going."
Thirty minutes. Forty. The resonance hum was a sustained burn now, not the sharp pain of exertion but the deep, grinding fatigue of a muscle held in position past its comfort threshold. The shadows in the room were dense, concentrated, pooling around the cradle and the cables and the screen in a nimbus of darkness that made the display's light struggle to reach the walls.
Kavan's hand found Cael's shoulder. The touch was steadying, not healing, not Lira's golden warmth, but the solid, anchoring pressure of a man who'd been around Abyssal energy for longer than most and knew how to ground someone through contact.
"Steady, child. You are doing well."
Forty-five minutes. Third layer. File content began to decrypt, not all at once, but in sequence, the cipher releasing data directory by directory. Mira had her handheld connected to the screen now, downloading as fast as the decryption allowed, saving every file to local storage because the data stick might not survive a second decryption attempt and they couldn't afford to repeat this process.
The Church Deviations directory opened.
Mira read the first file. Then the second. Then the third. By the fourth, her voice had changed, lower, tighter, the tech-burst gone and something harder in its place.
"Elara's original CCR design included twenty-two safeguard systems. The Church's modified version has three." She wasn't looking at Cael. She was looking at the screen, and her face was doing something he'd never seen on it before, the analytical composure cracking, the engineer encountering something that violated engineering principles so fundamentally that it bypassed her intellectual defenses and hit the part of her that was just a person. "She designed the consent architecture as an integral component. The transformation process, per her design, could not proceed past a series of threshold checkpoints without active participation from the subject. Seven checkpoints. Seven gates. Each one requiring a specific deliberate act of will."
"The Church removed them."
"The Church removed all seven. Replaced them with a single override mechanism, a radiant energy injector that mimics the consent frequency. Elara has a note here—" She scrolled. Read aloud: "'The override will produce a signal that the system reads as consent. It is not consent. It is a simulation of the resonance pattern that the nursery interprets as voluntary participation. The process will proceed as if the subject has chosen. The subject will not have chosen. The system cannot distinguish between genuine participation and the override. This is a critical design flaw that I reported to the oversight committee on [date redacted]. The committee's response was that the override represented an acceptable engineering solution to the consent requirement. I disagree. The consent architecture is not an engineering problem. It is a structural truth of the transformation process. Bypassing it does not solve it. Bypassing it creates a process that appears to function while operating outside the parameters for which it was designed. The result will not be a bridge. The result will be something else.'"
"Something else." Cael's arms were shaking. Not from the resonance, from the information. Or both. The line between physical strain and psychological shock was blurring, the body processing everything at once and running out of bandwidth. "She told them it wouldn't work as designed. They built it anyway."
"They built it anyway. Twenty years ago. With modifications that remove every safeguard the original designer considered essential." Mira's voice was tight. Controlled. The voice of someone who understood engineering and recognized what happened when you removed safety systems from a machine that was designed around them. "It's like removing the containment from a reactor and expecting the same energy output without the meltdown. The process will run. The transformation will occur. But without the consent checkpoints, without the choice-points, without the subject's active participation guiding the process, it runs blind. Uncontrolled. The output isn't a bridge between Abyss and surface. It's—"
"Something the Abyss would recognize as wrong," Kavan said. His voice was distant. The milky eyes were unfocused, looking at something that wasn't in the room. "A forced becoming. A merger without agreement. In the old language, the language Elara learned, there is a word for that. Symbol two hundred and nine, if her count is correct. I would translate it as 'abomination.' The nursery was built for willing transformation. Unwilling transformation produces something that neither side can claim. Neither human nor Abyssal. A wound given form."
The room was quiet except for the hum of equipment and the deeper hum of Cael's sustained resonance. The screen continued to display data, file after file, the layers peeling back, Elara Soren's hidden archive unfolding like a book that had been closed for twenty years.
One hour. One hour fifteen. The Personal Log directory decrypted.
Twelve entries. Dated. The last one was marked three days before Elara's transfer to the re-education facility.
Mira opened it. Not text, audio. An encoded sound file, the cipher protecting not just written data but a recorded voice.
The speakers on Mira's auxiliary device were small. The sound was thin, compressed, the quality of a recording made on personal equipment in a room that wasn't designed for acoustics. But the voice was clear.
A woman's voice. Mid-thirties. Educated, precise, with the slight breathlessness of someone speaking quickly because she knew she was running out of time.
*"— final entry. Today is the twelfth, and Marcus is coming tomorrow to say goodbye, and after that I don't know if I'll remember making this recording, so I need to say what I haven't been able to say in the formal reports because the formal reports are monitored and this, this isn't."*
A pause. The sound of breathing. The microphone picking up ambient noise, a clock ticking, fabric rustling, the faint hum of a building's ventilation system.
*"The nursery on Floor 47 isn't the nursery. It's an antechamber. A waiting room. The real nursery, the structure the Abyss built for the transformation, the original architecture that I've been translating for three years, it's deeper. My projections put it at Floor 100. The resonance patterns in the upper floors follow a logarithmic curve that peaks at approximately that depth. The carvings I've been studying, the three hundred and twelve symbols, they're directions. A map. They describe the path from the surface to the place where the becoming is supposed to happen."*
Another pause. When the voice returned, it was quieter.
*"The nursery on 47, the pool, the echo, the chamber with the spiral carvings, that's the preparation stage. The place where the subject is assessed. Where the process determines whether the subject is ready. It's a test. And the test has a purpose: to ensure that anyone who reaches Floor 100 has already begun to choose. Has already started the process of voluntary engagement. The seven checkpoints I designed into the CCR, they're replicas of seven threshold moments in the descent from 47 to 100. Seven places where the tunnels require a deliberate act of will to continue. Seven gates that only open from the inside."*
*"The Church removed the gates from the CCR. They think the gates are obstacles. They think consent is a barrier. They don't understand, the gates ARE the process. Without the gates, there is no becoming. There is only, forcing. And forcing produces—"*
Static. The recording cutting out, picking up again mid-sentence.
*"— can't let them use it. But I can't stop them either. I'm being transferred tomorrow. After the transfer, I won't remember any of this. I won't remember the three hundred and twelve symbols or the path to Floor 100 or the way the Abyss spoke to me in the central chamber when I touched the pool and it—"*
Her voice cracked. Not dramatically, a small break, the sound of a vocal cord giving way under pressure that wasn't volume but emotion.
*"It asked me to help. The Abyss. Not the whisper, the voice beneath the whisper. The one that isn't trying to consume or convert or corrupt. The one that's been building nurseries for millennia because it wants to make something that can exist in both worlds. A bridge. Not a weapon. The Church heard 'weapon' and started building. But the Abyss said 'bridge,' and it said it in a voice that sounded like, like something that's been alone for so long it's forgotten what company feels like, and it wants—"*
Static. Longer this time. The recording degrading, the cipher's protection wearing thin at the edges.
*"Floor 100. If someone reaches Floor 100, someone with nursery-compatible resonance, someone who's passed the seven gates, someone who's choosing, the original nursery will respond. It will complete the process the way it was designed to be completed. Not the Church's version. The real version. The one with the consent gates intact. The one that produces a bridge, not a weapon."*
*"Marcus, if you're hearing this, it means someone decoded the cipher. It means someone with the right resonance found this archive. It means the child the Abyss has been waiting for, it's real. And it needs to reach Floor 100 before the Church reaches it."*
*"Don't let them put someone on the table. Please. There's another way. Floor 100. The real nursery. Tell them—"*
The recording ended. Not fading out, cutting off. The abrupt termination of a file that wasn't finished, that was interrupted or abandoned or stopped by someone who ran out of time.
The room was silent.
Cael's hands were still on the cradle. The resonance hum was still active, still feeding the decryption, but his attention was somewhere else, in a room twenty years ago, listening to a woman speak her last clear thoughts into a microphone before the Church burned them out of her.
"Floor 100," Mira said. Her voice was stripped. No tech-burst. No engineering precision. Just the words, flat and heavy, the voice of someone who'd received information that changed the shape of everything she'd been building toward. "The real nursery is on Floor 100."
"Nobody has survived past Floor 47," Kavan said. "The survey teams turned back. The carvings warned of escalating danger. The Abyss's defenses intensify with depth, each floor more hostile, more alien, more incompatible with human biology."
"Not for him." Mira looked at Cael. "The nursery was built for an Abyssal child. The seven gates only open for someone with the right resonance. The path from 47 to 100 isn't designed for human survey teams. It's designed for—"
A knock on the door. Sharp. Three raps. Not Garrick's cadence. Garrick knocked twice or not at all.
Mira killed the screen. Hit a switch on the first processor that dropped the equipment into silent mode. The hum died. The shadows in the room contracted as Cael pulled the resonance back, the abrupt cessation of sustained output hitting him like stepping out of a hot shower into cold air, a shock, a contraction, every expanded sense snapping back to baseline.
He grabbed the scanner mask. Got it over his head. The counter-waveforms engaged, and the Abyssal signature that had been filling the room compressed back into the contained hum against his sternum.
Kavan sat on his cot. An old man in his room. Nothing else to see.
Mira was already at the door. She opened it six inches.
Lira. Her face was the urgent one, not panicked, but fast, the expression of someone delivering news on a deadline.
"Vasquez found out about the Soren meeting. She pulled the conference room B access log. Garrick didn't mask the entry. She's in Garrick's office right now. And Voss is with her."
---
Garrick's office was on the administrative corridor, third door from the north stairwell. Cael wasn't supposed to be in the corridor. Wasn't supposed to be out of his quarters. Wasn't supposed to be anywhere except sitting on his cot under the observation cameras, being confined and compliant and containable.
He went anyway. Lira led. Mira stayed with Kavan, guarding the equipment and the data stick and the half-decrypted archive that contained the location of a nursery nobody knew existed.
The door to Garrick's office was closed. Voices came through. Vasquez's controlled register, Garrick's lower tones, and a third voice that Cael recognized by its precision: Voss. The Major, building his case with every misstep Garrick made.
Lira stopped him outside the door. Her hand on his chest. The healer's touch, repurposed.
"Don't go in."
"If Vasquez is going to—"
"If Vasquez is going to discipline Garrick, your presence makes it worse. You're the reason he's in trouble. Walking in uninvited, out of quarters, violating your confinement, you hand Voss another item for his list." Her voice was low. Firm. The voice of someone who'd been thinking about this while he'd been sitting in Kavan's room listening to a dead woman's recording. "Garrick can handle Vasquez. He's been handling her for years. What he can't handle is you making his defense harder."
"What did she find?"
"The access log shows Garrick entering conference room B with a Church-affiliated visitor at 1100. No diplomatic notification to Vasquez's office. No assessment paperwork filed. No security escort for the visitor." Lira's jaw was set. "Voss pulled the log before Garrick could amend it. Brought it to Vasquez personally. At 1300, while we were in Kavan's room."
"Voss is monitoring Garrick's movements?"
"Voss is monitoring everything. He's been building a file since the cathedral district. Every deviation from protocol, every unauthorized action, every instance where Garrick's operational decisions bypassed Vasquez's authority." Her hand was still on his chest. Not pushing, holding. The physical reminder to stay where he was. "The Soren meeting is item six on Voss's list. Items one through five are: the cathedral operation, the failure to notify command, the possession of stolen Church documents, the concealment of said documents from the commanding officer, and Garrick's personal involvement in intelligence operations that should be delegated to the intelligence division."
Six items. Six formal violations, each one sufficient for disciplinary action, all six together painting a picture of a Commander who'd gone rogue in defense of an Abyssal-type operative the Church wanted surrendered.
The voices behind the door rose. Not shouting, the institutional equivalent, the controlled elevation of volume that meant someone had made a point that someone else couldn't deflect.
Vasquez: "—compromised the diplomatic position of this entire facility. Not once, Commander. Repeatedly. With a pattern that suggests either gross negligence or deliberate subversion of the chain of command."
Garrick: "Colonel, the intelligence obtained through these operations—"
Voss: "Is inadmissible. Tainted by provenance. Obtained through methods that constitute espionage against an allied institution during a period of active diplomatic engagement. Commander, you have not strengthened our position. You have handed the Church grounds for a formal complaint that goes beyond the inquiry, grounds for sanctions, personnel removal, and institutional censure."
A pause. The kind of pause that happened when someone who held authority was making a decision and the room was waiting to learn what it was.
Vasquez: "Commander Garrick, you are relieved of direct oversight of the Noctis case, effective immediately. All operational decisions regarding the Church inquiry, the diplomatic response, and the disposition of the Abyssal-type individual will be routed through my office. Major Voss will serve as interim liaison with the Church's assessment division."
The words arrived through the door and hit Cael in the sternum. Garrick, relieved. Voss, in charge of the Church liaison. The man who'd been building a case for surrender now controlled the diplomatic channel through which surrender would be negotiated.
Lira's hand pressed harder against his chest. Her eyes said *don't.*
He didn't.
The door opened. Voss came out first, his face carrying the carefully neutral expression of a man who'd gotten exactly what he wanted and was disciplined enough not to show satisfaction. He saw Cael in the corridor. Saw Lira. His neutral expression held, but his eyes registered the information, the confined operative, out of quarters, standing outside the office where his protector had just been removed from his case.
"Noctis. You're out of quarters."
"Medical appointment." Lira's voice was immediate, smooth, the lie arriving with the practiced speed of a healer who'd written excuse notes for patients who needed to be somewhere they weren't supposed to be. "I'm escorting him to the clinic for a scheduled monitoring session."
Voss looked at her. At Cael. At the corridor, empty in both directions.
"See that it's documented," he said. And walked away.
Garrick came out thirty seconds later. His face was the military blank — but the edges were ragged, the surface cracked in places it hadn't been cracked this morning. He looked at Cael. At Lira. At the corridor where Voss had been.
"You heard."
"I heard."
"Voss controls the Church channel now. He'll respond to the inquiry with cooperation language. Full transparency. Assessment access. And when the Church requests direct jurisdiction—"
"He'll recommend it."
"He'll recommend it as the prudent institutional response to a series of unauthorized operations conducted by a compromised commanding officer." Garrick's voice was flat. Not defeated, recalibrated. The voice of a man who'd lost a position and was already computing from the new one. "The timeline just shortened. Voss will fast-track the diplomatic response. The Church gets what it wants faster. And Luminara's parallel operation—"
"Has fewer obstacles."
They stood in the corridor. The fluorescent lights hummed. Somewhere on the base, boots moved and orders were given and the institution continued its institutional functions. Garrick had been removed. Voss was ascending. The Church's inquiry was about to become the Church's demand.
And in Kavan's quarters, a half-decrypted archive waited with the location of a nursery that the Church didn't know about, on a floor that no human had reached, in a depth that only one person on this base could survive.
"How much of the data did you get?" Garrick asked.
"Enough," Cael said. "Floor 100. Elara says the real nursery is on Floor 100."
Garrick's expression didn't change. But his eyes did the thing, the quick left-right of a man processing new tactical data and finding it both impossible and necessary.
"Then we need to get you to the Rift," he said. "Before Voss gets you to the Church."
Lira's hand dropped from Cael's chest. Not because the danger of him doing something stupid had passed. Because a new danger had arrived, and her hand on his chest wouldn't stop this one.
