intimacy with the words taken out — "their breath became somehow coded…"

Orin's panel is the closed-loop seduction reduced to its essence: an embrace that is "not like a hug," no speech at all, the two of them sealed so close "no light shone between them" while their very breath goes "coded" — communication present only as a cipher neither is really decoding. It is the perfected one-way transmission, contact staged as total closeness with everything personal and sayable subtracted; the honeytrap closes wordlessly around him, and he calls the silence intimacy. [sweep · shared-ground surveillance-disguise]