6. Draevik
DRAEVIK
Frustration evolves into a new and unwelcome sensation.
Resting my gauntlets on the cool surface of the primary nav-spire, I watch the tactical feeds scroll past. The mournful drone of stasis drops away, and a sharp, oscillating pounding takes its place, syncing with the marker etched into the girl’s skin.
The bond crackles like a live wire in my skull, twitching with every surge of her adrenaline.
I reach the central command dais and tap a series of runes on the console.
Suddenly, a micro-tremor violently seizes my left hand.
My forearm veins flicker erratically, my muscles locking in a painful spasm.
My vision fractures for a split second, the HUD flashing a blaring string of crimson warnings—CRITICAL SEPARATION / BIOLOGICAL TETHER UNSTABLE.
I clench my fist until the joints pop, forcing the tremor down and banishing the alert.
Isolation from her seems to be accelerating a stasis-decay in my neural pathways. I search my memory for the restricted files on the imprinting process, but I encounter the same cold, blank wall of corrupted data. A missing crystal of knowledge that infuriates my tactical mind.
"Virex," I command. The syllables emerge as a series of harsh, splintering rasps that cut through the silence. "Visual feed. Tactical ward."
The center holo clarifies, revealing the small, contained corridor of the holding wing.
I watch as Nyra paces the length of the room.
She embodies a flurry of frantic energy, though the bio-mat betrays no sound from the passing feet.
She remains defiant. Her composure locks into place, and her sun-kissed-brown eyes scan every seam of the wall with a focus that borders on lethal.
She stops at the door, slamming her palm against the thickened panel with a dull thud.
"I know you're listening!" she shrieks at the ceiling. "I can feel you, you giant metal freak! Open the door!"
Leaning back against the command chair to analyze the anomaly, I note that most beings secured by a Reaper Commander enter rapid physiological decline—catatonic shock or fatal adrenaline spikes.
She does neither. The tactical readout confirms her cortisol levels are stabilizing into an aggressive, problem-solving iteration.
She perceives the containment ward purely as a structural obstacle demanding a bypass.
Commander, the ship whispers through our neural link. The marker is attempting to bypass the tertiary environmental seal. She is prying at the seam of the panel with her fingernails. Two are scratched down to the quick. She has not stopped.
My combat matrix flags the self-inflicted damage as a sub-optimal biological state. "Let her exhaust the impulse. She has received the parameters of her containment. Her failure to comply indicates a need for secondary reinforcement."
Monitoring her activity grid for another cycle, I watch her move to the sleeping dais, then back to the door, then to the reclamation alcove.
She stares at the rising steam of the sterilization cycle with pure suspicion.
The ship provides her with sanitary garments—soft, charcoal-grey fibers woven with Reaper silk—and a basin of treated water.
As the door sealed, she drowns the first set in the reclamation cycle, resulting in a wasteful rejection of resources.
Virex Prime merely replicates the items, anticipating her eventual compliance. The second set she has ignored.
She stands defiant in the thin, sweat-damp underlayer she wore beneath her scavenger suit, a rough synthetic weave stained at the collar with the dust of a fringe world that has been living on her skin since before I woke.
Every fiber of it is an offense. It is the clothing of a species that bathes without intention, that wraps itself in whatever can be shed fastest, that treats its own flesh as an afterthought to be hidden rather than honored.
The smudge of carbon scoring, still dark along the curve of her cheek, is almost less of an insult than the tunic itself.
The bond gives a violent tug. It becomes a physical ache, a hollow space in my chest demanding she be filled with the ship's order.
Every minute she remains in that human weave turns into a minute she remains outside the pattern my kind lays over what belongs to us, and the Reaper in me snarls at the wrongness of it.
I warned her. I stood at the threshold of that ward and told her what would happen if she failed to clean herself, and she has failed. The delivery of the consequence begins now. This warning reflects the reality of a broken contract, where the failure to uphold one half triggers a penalty.
"Virex, hold the perimeter," I command, pushing off the dais. "I will handle the recalibration personally."
The walk back to the tactical ward is shorter than the one I made away from it.
Every step I take toward her causes the violet twinkle in my armor to brighten.
By the time I reach the door a second time, the air around my gauntlets is shimmering with heat.
Without actually signaling, I command the door to retract.
Nyra stands, the room stretching around her, two of her fingernails scratched down to the quick, thin, dark lines of blood drying along her fingertips.
She cradles one hand against her chest, her chin up, her chest heaving under the thin, sweat-damp tunic.
The panel along the bathroom archway, the tertiary environmental seal she spent the last stretch trying to defeat with her bare hands, sits behind her utterly unmarked.
"You're back," she snaps, the words sharp and unyielding. "Come to see if I've turned into a loyal little pet yet?"
I step into the room, and the door hisses shut behind me. The closeness strikes with force. The marker on her sternum flares, the geometric lines burning through the fabric of her shirt. I feel the spike of her heart rate—a wild, defiant heat that calls to the cold alloy of my bones.
"You are still wearing that." The warning strikes a low, tectonic chord that sets the reclamation basin into a shivering dance. "I warned you."
She points the metal scrap at my face. "I'm not putting on your cult clothes. And I'm not taking a bath while you're lurking in the walls."
I move toward her with the unhurried patience of an apex creature who has already won.
The prey has nowhere to run. She tries to dodge, her movements wiry and quick, and I catch her waist before she can clear the dais.
I hoist her off the deck, ignoring her shriek of outrage as I carry her toward the archway of the reclamation alcove.
She beats her fists against my shoulder guard.
A smear of her own blood from the torn fingernails marks my plating.
I catalog the injury as a biological failing on her part, an operational deficiency I must oversee and correct to preserve the marker.
Pale mist. Running water. Floral antiseptic.
The sunken chamber shimmers under the ceiling where gentle jets of warm water are already cycling in deliberate arcs across empty air.
I halt where the sunken floor begins, her small frame teetering with rage against my chest plates.
Her torn fingertips leave faint smudges against the obsidian of my shoulder as she twists.
Her chin tilts up, her eyes wide and wild as they lock onto mine.
"I told you I would return." I drag the sentiment up from my lungs, fighting the tether’s suffocating grip until the greeting scrapes raw against my teeth.
"I told you what would happen if I found you still dressed in the refuse of your species.
If I have to strip those rags from your body myself, I will.
The water is waiting. You will enter the cycle now, or I will ensure you are cleaned with my own hands. "
"Fine!" She hurls the word out like a shield, the syllable splintering at the edges as her resolve finally buckles under the pressure. "Fine, put me down! I'll do it! Just get out of here!"
I lower her to the bio-mat. The contact is electric.
The bond transcends mere shuddering; it roars.
Through the gaps in my armor, her warmth seeps into me, her throat pulsing frantically against my gauntlet.
My eyes catch on her hand. On the torn edges of her fingernails, on the thin dark lines of dried blood where she broke her own body against a seal, my ship would have broken her wrists before permitting her through.
A fierce, territorial anger violently wakes inside me at the sight.
She has hurt herself. She has hurt herself trying to leave me, which I will interrogate later and which is also no longer permissible in the architecture of what she is becoming to me.
The water vapor in the alcove will clean the wounds.
The ship will graft whatever needs grafting.
I will allow the reclamation cycle to do its work before I address her hands directly.
I want to reach for her. The instinct to claim, to sink my essence deeper into her until she forgets the name of her own ship, transforms into a predatory hunger. I could take more right now. I could force the synchronization to one hundred percent and end her resistance.
My fingers linger on her arms, and she lets out a sharp, indignant gasp. I force myself to loosen the grip. I back away, my bulk casting a long, shadow over her as she stands at the threshold of the water.
"The silk is on the dais." The instruction emerges heavy and slow, as if my throat fills with silt. "Dress yourself. If I return and find you still wearing the grime of the graveyard, there will be no third warning."