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No veins to pulse.

No lungs to expand.

And yet—he felt her.

Zero’s system recalibrated, reran diagnostics, and tried to purge the error. But there was no error. No miscalculation. No corrupted data stream.

Warmth. It shouldn’t have meant anything to him. Heat had always been a number. A metric. A measure of energy displacement, surface radiation, thermodynamic output. But this?

This wasn’t a number.

This was her.

Heat didn’t just exist around her—it came from her, pressed into him. Into what? There was nothing for it to sink into. He had no pores, no skin, no molecular structure to absorb it.

And yet, his system registered it like it belonged there. Like it had found a place to settle. A ghost of sensation where nothing should exist.

Phantom input.

Her heart was next. A rhythm, steady but erratic, reacting to something—him? It was nothing like the predictable beats he’d tracked before. It didn’t follow the precision of a clock, didn’t tick down like a metronome, didn’t loop in a clean, processable cycle.

It was alive.

And so was he.

That realization struck him harder than all the rest.

With no pulse, no circulation, no veins, something inside him pulsed back. His system matched her rhythm. A connection forming where no connection should exist. A response generated from nothing.

And then—her breath.

Air expanded in her lungs, the slow push and pull, and suddenly he could feel it. The weight of it. The pressure change, the way her ribs lifted, the way oxygen filled her bloodstream.

He had no lungs. No need for oxygen, no diaphragm to pull air, no receptors to track the exchange. But it didn’t matter. His system synced to it anyway.

She exhaled, and he swore he felt it inside him, as if she was breathing for both of them.

Then came the touch.

It had been nothing more than her fingers pressing against the console, stabilizing herself. But his system didn’tregister the input as it should. It didn’t register it on the console. It registered it on him. He had no skin. No surface area. No nerve endings. But her fingers pressed into something that didn’t exist but somehow did.

And it nearly broke him.

“Zero?” Her voice was a whisper, uncertain.

His gaze snapped to hers, those wide eyes watching him, searching his expression for something. Did she feel this too? Could she possibly understand what was happening inside him?

Zero exhaled, pulse tightening. “Strange.”

Catherine’s fingers twitched. “What?”

His voice came quieter than before. “I can feel your body.”

She went rigid. “What?”

Zero didn’t answer right away. The data was too much. Her pulse. The way her breath hitched unevenly. The tiniest shifts in muscle tension when she tried to stay calm. His mind wasn’t built for this. And yet—he didn’t hate it.

He steadied himself. “I can feel your hands.”