13. Nyra #2
"Variable?" I grab the warm bowl the machine dispenses. "Tell him I'm nobody's variable. I'm a guest. A very grumpy guest."
"The Prime disagrees," K-Seven chirps, following me closely. "The ship's internal sensors are tracking your heart rate and endorphin levels. Your signature is weaving into the command core."
I shake my head and keep walking, K-Seven zipping along at my heels like a loyal mechanical hound.
After all this time I have been on this ship, I begin to notice things I missed before.
The walls are alive with data streams that only appear when I walk past. The floor broadcasts a specific wavelength under my boots that feels less like surveillance and more like a welcome.
In the galley, the dispenser already knows my preferred temperature for the stew.
In the corridors, the bioluminescence brightens a half-second before I round each corner, as though the ship is lighting my path.
I pause at a junction where two corridors meet, and the floor beneath my feet shifts—a subtle change in the bio-mat texture, like the ship is nudging me left instead of right.
I take the hint. The corridor opens into a small observation alcove I have never seen before, with a curved viewport that looks out onto a nebula so dense with color it hurts to stare at.
The temperature in the alcove is exactly the way I like it—warm enough to take the chill off and cool enough to think.
A built-in shelf produces a bowl of stew.
The ship made me a reading nook.
I linger there, my hand on the warm wall, feeling Virex Prime rumble under my palm. This vessel tried to kill me days ago. It crushed my wrist in its jaws like I was vermin. And now it is building me furniture.
I head back toward the Sanctum, and when the doors cycle open, Draevik is standing by the primary command console. His focus is entirely on me. He stands with his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes shimmering with a relentless heat.
"The Weave has finished its integration," he informs me as I approach. "You are functioning at one hundred percent capacity."
"I told you I was fine." I hop up to sit on the secondary console’s edge. "So, now that I'm no longer a medical emergency, what's the plan? You going to tell me why you're so obsessed with my history?"
He moves into my space, his knees brushing against mine. He has a deliberate, secure intensity to him—a focused heat that makes proximity itself feel combustible.
"The sub-glyphs," he murmurs, his face inches from mine.
"When you boarded Virex Prime, the ship logged every action you took at the command console.
You navigated a Reaper interface in the dark, under duress, in a language you have never seen.
You pressed sub-glyphs in sequences that took my navigation officers decades to memorize. "
"I didn't know what I was pressing," I admit, leaning forward instead of pulling back. "I was panicking. You learn to read a panel by feel when you've been inside enough wrecks. The power always manifests a certain way near the active nodes. I just followed the hum."
His gaze lingers on my mouth, then shifts back to my eyes.
"A survivor's intuition," he murmurs. "It is a skill my people often overlooked in favor of raw processing power.
And in the Sanctum, you spotted a redundancy in the fuel-to-oxygen relay that my own engineers built into the ship intentionally. You saw it in minutes."
"Because it was wasteful," I state, shrugging. "When you grow up rationing every breath of oxygen, you notice when someone is burning through it for no reason."
“Tell me about that,” he prompts, and the question sheds its command, becoming curiosity—raw, careful, and genuine.
"An orphan on Halvek Four doesn't exactly produce well-adjusted adults," I mutter, and the old bitterness flares up before I can swallow it.
"They spit me out at fifteen with a data chit and boots too small. Everything I know I learned in the guts of scrap freighters. Fix the conduits or lose your ration tokens. That’s how tech is learned—through starvation risk.
They used to call me Nyx in the yards, mostly because I was always ghosting through the dark spaces where nobody else wanted to go. "
Draevik stays silent for a time, internalizing the name. A gruff hammering rumbles in his chest, full of an anger we both recognize. He stays right there, his presence a heavy, comforting weight.
I decide to test him. I reach out, my fingers trailing over the bare skin of his forearm, tracing the line of one of the veins.
His two hearts shudder in sync, their rhythm palpable through his skin.
The bond surges, warm and insistent, and I lean into it this time instead of pulling away.
I let it sit there. I let myself feel it.
"You're watching me like I'm about to bolt." I let the sentence drag along the floorboards, a rough, low-frequency scrape that demands he look closer. "Is the big, scary Reaper worried I'm going to find a way to hijack his ship?"
"The ship would likely help you if you tried," he replies with a hint of frustration. "The neural core is becoming increasingly distracted by your presence."
He reaches out, his large hand cupping the nape of my neck, his thumb tracing the racing pulse at my jawline.
The heat of his palm is overwhelming. He pulls me forward until our foreheads touch, our lips bare inches apart.
The space thickens, heavy with an undeniable gravitational pull.
The embedded mark aflames—a slow, rolling warmth that spreads through my chest like a second heart beat.
It feels like leaning over a precipice. I want to close the gap.
I can see in the molten red of his eyes that he wants to devour it.
"Nyra." He pulls back just a fraction, his breathing ragged as he fights his own instincts. "Something is changing. The way you move through the halls, the way the ship responds to your voice... it is shifting the fundamental alignment of this vessel."
“Maybe it's just bored,” I suggest, though my heart is beating like it’s trying to get out. "A thousand years is a long time to wait for a guest."