UNCLAIMED

APPROVED

In the Republic of the Solace Compact, love is illegal. Marriage is mandatory.
I was twenty years old when the state paired me with the man whose signature stamped my father's death certificate.
I was twenty-one when I chose to burn his files instead.
The pairing notice came on plain grey paper, the kind rationed for state business only. No envelope. No warning. Just a courier at the door at six in the morning, holding out a clipboard like he was collecting a debt.

Sera Vane. Citizen Number 04-1187. Match assigned: Kael Vorren, Compact Enforcement Division, Rank Three.
I signed because refusing wasn't a real option - not one that ended in anything but the grey dress and the barcode they gave to the Unclaimed, the ones who ran out of time to disappear before the lottery caught them. I'd seen women wear that mark. I'd seen what happened to them after.

So I signed, and the courier nodded like I'd done something ordinary, and then he was gone, and I stood in my kitchen holding a piece of paper that had just decided the rest of my life.
I didn't cry. My mother used to say crying was for people who still believed something would change if they did it hard enough. I wasn't that anymore. I hadn't been that since the night two Enforcement officers stood in this same kitchen and told me my father had died resisting arrest, and one of them had signed the report before they'd even finished saying his name.
I still had that report. I'd kept it the way some people keep photographs - not because I wanted to remember, but because I refused to let anyone convince me I'd imagined it.
The signature at the bottom read K. Vorren.

The wedding was small, mandatory, and over in eleven minutes. A registrar with tired eyes read the Compact's marriage clause from a card he'd clearly read a thousand times that week alone. Kael Vorren stood beside me in his Enforcement blacks, tall and unreadable, and when the registrar asked if he accepted the pairing, he said yes in the flat, procedural voice of a man agreeing to a supply order.
He didn't look at me until it was over.
When he finally did, I expected contempt, or indifference, or the particular boredom of a man who'd done this before and would do it again if the state reassigned him. Instead there was something careful in his face - the look of someone deciding how much of himself to let show in a room with cameras in the corners.
"You'll have a room to yourself," he said, once we were in the car. "I don't expect anything from you that the Compact doesn't require on paper."
"How generous," I said, before I could stop myself.
Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "It's not generosity. It's practicality. We're both going to have to survive this."
I filed that away. Survive this. Not live through it. Not make the best of it. A man who chose that word wasn't entirely at peace with the system that had built his career.
I wondered if he knew I'd read his signature a hundred times before I ever saw his face.

His house - our house now - sat in the Third District, close enough to the Enforcement compound that the surveillance drones passed overhead on a schedule I could set a clock to. Grey walls, government-issue furniture, a kitchen too clean to have ever been cooked in with any joy. It looked like a place designed to be inspected, not lived in.
That night, after he'd shown me the room that was mine and retreated to whatever part of the house was his, I sat on the floor of my new closet with a single candle - real flame, not the regulation electric kind, which was itself a small violation - and I opened the box I'd carried in with everything else I owned.
My father's file was at the bottom, wrapped in a scarf that had been my mother's.
I didn't burn it that night. I wasn't ready yet, and some part of me - the part that was still my father's daughter - wanted to read it one more time before I decided what kind of woman I was going to become inside these grey walls.
I traced the signature at the bottom of the page.
K. Vorren.
Downstairs, I could hear him moving through the house, checking locks, the particular quiet of a man who trusted no one, not even the woman the state had just given him.
Good, I thought. Neither do I.
Whatever this marriage was going to be - leverage, cover, cage, or something I didn't have a name for yet - I intended to be the one who decided which.
I closed the box, blew out the candle, and let the dark settle around me like something I could finally use.