Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
ELAINA
She shifted closer and leaned against him when he put the sword aside and held the dataslate between their laps, opening up the livedoc he’d been given.
Elaina was impressed that he’d even gotten his hands on one of these. Logs like these were generally considered extremely privileged information. Then again, there wasn’t much on Earendel worth exploiting… Security tended to be lax.
“I swear there were seventeen arrivals when I first looked at this this morning,” Cyan explained, letting her scroll down the rows. “And then there were sixteen. I just can’t remember what disappeared, but something did.”
“Can I peek?” Elaina asked, and when he nodded she took the dataslate and reached over to the table beside the couch, where a small pile of personal equipment had collected. Elaina liked using her own tools.
She plugged in a keyboard and dug in.
The first place to check was the metadata, though of course that had been wiped. Couldn’t hide the trail from her, though. The main challenge was cleaning up her own trail afterward. Whoever—or whatever —had modified the doc, it was probably best they not notice her snooping around.
“You’re right.” Elaina nodded. “I see a modification at ten fourteen yesterday morning. Is that about the right time?”
I was awake by then. Waiting.
“Yes! That sounds right. Can you recover the data?”
“Not fully, it looks like… but I can see the deleted row was right next to other arrival vessels at Dock Three, so it must’ve come there…”
“Isn’t that the dock where we arrived?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t we have seen it?”
The dock was compact, and even a small craft would be hard to miss. Cyan was right. “Right. Unless it was moved. And… I have something to tell you too.”
Elaina explained what she’d found in the systems over the last couple of sols, including her tracking it down to the decommission dock. She hadn’t gotten much further on the off-axis code itself, and hadn’t really had time to go down and investigate the thing when another radiation shield busted the night before. She’d spent hours patching it up and reinforcing the rest of the shields.
As she gave him the rundown, Cyan looked at her with an intensity to which she was dangerously drawn. He was just as excited about this as she was. Genuinely, really excited.
He got up, slipping his sword over his shoulder and onto his back. “I have to go check it out.”
“I’m coming,” she said, and that momentary little smirk on his face made her want to punch him a little .
“Elaina…” He gave her a knowing look that she did not like one bit. “It could be dangerous.”
“No. You don’t get to do that. I’ve been here since before you came along and I knew something was wrong, and I was right. And I can help. I helped you now, didn’t I?”
She knew she was blabbing, speaking too fast and too much. She didn’t need a reason to go check out the craft she helped locate. All she had to do was go, with or without him. Yet for some reason she felt like she needed to convince Cyan to let her come along, as if his opinion on the matter… well, mattered.
What was it about him that invoked this weird instinct to ask for permission?
“All right,” Cyan said softly, brushing his knuckles across her cheek, and despite herself she was relieved. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
Cyan moved like he was already bracing for battle. Every time he slipped that sword over his shoulder, some of the warmth faded from his eyes. Was it his armor or his instinct to protect her that made him feel so untouchable?
The decom dock was down at the empty lower levels of the station. The door looked ancient—a round metal thing protected by an incongruently modern-looking access box. Elaina tested her access print at the lock.
Granted.
Too easy.
Being the patcher-upper had its perks. Cyan pushed the thick door open and they stepped into the dock’s black mouth.
It was large. Shadows filled the spaces between the hulls of scrapped vessels, and a faint smell of burnt metal lingered in the air. The metallic clang of Cyan’s boots against the grated floor echoed in the otherwise oppressive silence. Elaina’s own shoes were soft Earendel rubber, nearly silent as she stepped. It was like walking through a maze, following paths surrounded by old and broken machines. Essentially a big storage closet.
“Stay behind me,” Cyan muttered, a hand on her shoulder nudging her back. She smiled to herself, following his silhouette in the near darkness.
As they rounded a corner, Elaina slowed, then stuttered to a stop. She did a double take, certain she’d been seeing things out of the corner of her eye. But there it was again—in her peripheral vision, like a bad connection, patches of the shadowed scrapped vessels around them flickered in and out of existence. When squinted directly into the darkness, the world seemed to solidify again. Yet as soon as she turned away, in the side of her eye a pool of shadow flashed once more.
“Did you see that?” she whispered to Cyan.
He was scanning the darkness ahead. The shadows continued their impossible dance at the edges of her vision. His gaze flicked to her. “See what?”
The hairs on her neck prickled. Her fingertips itched, buzzing with the urge to dive into whatever was calling. She wasn’t just seeing broken systems anymore. She was seeing broken reality. That or going crazy…
Elaina shook her head a little. “Never mind.”
As they rounded a corner, the narrow walkway opened into the heart of the space. Ships were scattered in various states of disrepair. Some looked utterly ancient. Gaian tech even, maybe. Would Cyan recognize it? The air was colder here, heavy with rust and engine oil. Elaina tugged her jacket tighter, trying to shake the gnawing feeling creeping through her .
“There.” Cyan began to walk with a purpose.
He didn’t hesitate as he approached a hulking shape covered by a black tarp—he ripped the fabric off the bulk with a quick, sweeping motion, revealing the craft beneath.
It was sleek, unlike the other battered ships here. A nondescript model she did not recognize. Nearly triangular in shape, it had a pointed nose with three flat planes spreading into a tail. It looked modern, and unique, and definitely out of place.
Elaina frowned. “That’s not supposed to be here.”
“No,” Cyan muttered, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “It’s not.”
Elaina approached the vessel.
“Elaina—” Cyan stepped to her side, a staying hand wrapping around her bicep. “Something’s off here.”
She looked up at him. “I know.”
She let him tug her gently behind him, a little surprised at herself for appreciating the gesture. She usually didn’t seek protection from anyone but… she wanted it from him.
“It’s humming,” Cyan leaned closer to the hull.
She didn’t hear the hum so much as she felt it. It was in her fingers, calling out to her, asking to be touched. But she let Cyan go first, respecting—or maybe nurturing—the protective curiosity she’d grown so fond of. Instead, she walked around the ship, inspecting it from a distance.
The craft was fairly small, no larger than a transport shuttle, but its design was unlike anything Elaina had seen on Earendel. The dusky silver hull gleamed faintly in the darkness, its surface unmarred by the oil, grime, and decay that clung to everything else in the dock.
“Is this the craft you detected in your systems today?” Cyan asked when she came back around.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you need to check? For the tracker? ”
Elaina shook her head, her fingers twitching. “No. I know where it is.”
“You do?”
“Other side.” Elaina beckoned for him to follow. She walked to the other side of the craft and ducked down deftly, sinking to her knees and grabbing the magnetized tracker from an inlet in the ship’s belly.
“How did you possibly spot that?” Cyan stared as she crawled back out, remaining on the ground as she held the tracker up to him.
She hadn’t spotted it, but she didn’t exactly know how to explain it. She was about to try… she should try, and then she should continue to examine the mysterious craft that was somehow at the apex of their entire mess.
Only everything tilted when Cyan took the tracker she offered from her hand. The electric hum of the ship pulsing through her fingertips was suddenly mirrored by a different frequency altogether, like two waves canceling each other out. The magnetic field around them seemed to shift, creating an almost physical pressure pushing them apart.
Their hands flinched away in unison.
You’ll regret this , some part of her warned in a voice that didn’t even feel like her own. But another part—one that had been locked away for too long—whispered, But what if I don’t?
Elaina forced herself to rise from the floor, withering under Cyan’s tracking stare. Her mind raced through possibilities—some kind of electromagnetic defense system? A containment field? But nothing in her experience explained why it felt so specifically targeted at keeping her away from him .
“This craft is… reacting to something,” she muttered, mostly to herself. But as her gaze flicked back to Cyan, she saw the tightness in his jaw. He felt it too. The ship th rummed into her bones, a technology calling out to her with familiar hunger, and underneath was a crawling sensation like her very atoms were being repelled. Elaina moved to circle the craft again, pulled into its orbit despite every cell in her body screaming in protest. Cyan went the other way.
As they approached each other on the other side, the repulsion intensified exponentially. Every law of physics she knew suggested they should be able to move closer, yet something invisible and impossible fought against each step. She scrambled to explain it while her body warred between an instinctive need to back away and a defiant urge to push through.
The invisible force between them pulsed in warning, sharp enough to make her gasp. She saw him wince too, his hand tightening on the sword at his hip.
Yet he stepped closer.
“Can you feel it?” she whispered. “Like some kind of repulsion field?”
“Yes.” His voice was strained.
“Why is it trying to keep us apart?” She glanced at the ship, her mind still grasping for explanations.
“I don’t care.”
The first touch of his hand on her arm sent sparks through her nerves like crossing live wires. Every engineering instinct screamed that this connection was dangerous, unstable, wrong.
But Elaina grabbed him anyway. Whatever technology was trying to dictate their movements, she refused to let it control her. Her whole life had been about understanding systems, making them work how she wanted. They obeyed her, not the other way around. This would be no different.
His mouth crashed into hers and her body screamed in protest. She kissed him harder, savage satisfaction rising as the ship’s humming turned erratic. Barely-there holos flickered and died. The more they defied the repulsion, the more systems around them began to fail.
Cyan shoved her back against the craft's hull, and the metal felt fever-hot against her spine. Or maybe that was her own skin burning. His hands were everywhere, each touch sending cascading failures through nearby tech, each caress a rebellion against whatever force tried to separate them.
She clawed at his armor, desperate to get closer despite the increasing pressure between them. The more they came together, the more chaos erupted around them. Long-dead panels of derelict ships sparked and burst. A cacophony of alarms blared and died. But she couldn’t stop, didn't want to. The world was going haywire, yet she'd never wanted anything more.
"Look at me," Cyan commanded, and even as her body screamed against the wrongness, Elaina met his eyes. The silver in them had turned dark as the deepest oceans of Arzenon. His hands pinned her wrists to the hull, and she could feel the tremors running through him, fighting whatever impossible force wanted to tear him away.
Their bodies pressed together like opposing magnets finally forced to connect, each touch sending shockwaves. Elaina didn’t know what kind of technology could create this effect, or why. And for the first time in her life, she didn’t care about understanding the mechanism.
“It doesn’t get to decide this,” she gasped, the hull of the ship digging into her spine as if trying to punish her.
Cyan growled his agreement, crushing her mouth with his. She wrapped her legs around him as he lifted her, both of them shuddering at the contact even as the air around them crackled with resistance.
When he entered her, her body felt like fire. Each thrust was a victory. Each moan a battle cry. They moved together with desperate intensity, proving with their bodies that they were the ones in control here. They chose this—chose each other.
Her climax hit like a shockwave, and she felt more than heard every derelict system around them surge and die. Cyan followed moments later with a roar that echoed through the dead dock, his body shaking with the force of it.
They clung to each other in the aftermath, both trembling and spent.
“It didn’t want us to do that,” Elaina whispered against his neck. She didn’t know what it was, or why, or why now.
His arms tightened around her. “But we did.”
The ship was silent around them. They'd created this destruction together, this beautiful chaos. And despite the wrongness still singing in Elaina’s blood, despite knowing in her bones that whatever this was, there would be consequences…
She didn’t regret a thing.