Chapter 16 #2
“I have three options,” Jo’Nay said. “We will take the one that looks least obvious.”
Hannah pushed the blanket off her shoulders. “You should let me record a short statement to run with the vid. Survivors matter more than the dead. People listen to the living.”
Locus gave her a look. “You will rest first.”
“I will rest after I’m useful,” she said, and the flash in her eyes told Apex that a thousand small rebellions had kept her alive. He nodded once. Locus set his jaw, then nodded too.
Winn had woken while the vid played. She watched Apex with an intensity that struck him as older than her years.
Her voice rasped but held steady as she spoke, “They lie because they’re afraid.
They know what you saw.” She touched her throat, the motion now habit, then looked at him again. “We will make them speak the truth.”
Apex bowed his head to her. “Truth,” he said. “We will make them speak it.”
They worked until the map looked less like scattered stars and more like a plan. Routes braided and merged. Names of old allies floated beside sectors. They spoke in fragments because full sentences were not always needed in a room where everyone knew how the others thought.
“Council will try to bait you into a closed hall,” Jo’Nay warned. “They will set traps behind walls where their cameras can twist every word.”
“They will try,” Apex answered, his voice steady.
“They’ll broadcast new charges while we fly,” Hannah said quietly, the hand at her stomach tightening. “They’ll name you butcher and traitor before we arrive.”
“They will,” Apex said, calm but grim.
“They’ll expect you to defend,” Emmy added, eyes bright with fury. “They won’t expect you to claim. They’ll never believe you would walk into their chamber and take command back in front of them all.”
Apex lifted his head at that. His eyes hardened, the decision already written there. “Then we make them remember who leads. We take their chamber, their voices, their law—and we build something that will not break again.”
Emmy met his gaze. “Then claim it,” she said. “You don’t need permission to pick up what was always yours.”
Locus made a soft sound that counted as approval in the language of men who had bled together. “We follow, Sixth.” Then he corrected himself, straightening as if before a superior court. “Lord Kael Vettar of the House of Sovereigns, Chief Commander of the Intergalactic Warrior Council.”
The formal title hung heavy in the air, a reminder of what Apex had been born to lead and what the Council had stolen from him.
“You always have followed,” Apex said, his voice quiet but filled with gratitude.
Then he added, “And I will not forget it. Each of you has followed me through fire and silence, and when we walk into that chamber, it will be with your force at my back. You have been more than soldiers. You have been the heart that carried me here.”
They broke for rest when the ship’s internal clock marked a shift.
The corridors dimmed to amber and the hum settled like a deep tide in the hull.
Most of them slept. Apex walked the spine of the ship to learn its speech.
He listened to the engines. He listened to the small moving parts.
He listened to the way the hull carried vibration to his palm and back to his chest as if returning a heartbeat it had borrowed.
An access panel on the port wall pulsed once with light. He stopped and laid his fingers to the seam. The panel was warm. The warmth fell away as if it’d realized it had been sensed. He filed that detail and moved on.
He found Emmy in the observation bay with her knees tucked up and her cheek against the view glass. Stars ran like rivers. A pale nebula crossed the dark like a bruise. The color of it reflected in her eyes, turning the hazel to shadow.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“So should you.” She smiled without hiding her fatigue. “You make rounds like Locus.”
“Locus makes rounds like me.” He stepped behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “You are warm.”
“It seems wrong to sleep when everyone else is hurting,” she said. “But I am tired.”
“Then rest now. Fight after.” He could hear the way command wanted to sit in his voice. He let it, because sometimes it helped.
She leaned back into him. “Do you think they’ll come at us on open channels or in the dark?”
“In the dark. They would rather claim they did not come at all.”
Her hand covered one of his. “We will turn on the lights.”
“Affirmative.” He said it the way he had promised her they would make it off Keth-9. He said it like a thing already done.
They were quiet for a long time. The bay made a sound like breathing, the soft rise and fall of the atmospheric regulator that brought warmth back into the room with each cycle. His hands slid down the line of her arms and back up, fingers tracing her wrists and the pulse beneath them.
She turned within his hold, her body aligning with his, and the heat that lived just under their skin answered.
The first kiss came soft, slow, but deepened fast, her lips parting as if she’d been holding back for far too long.
He tasted the fatigue of battle, the relief of survival, the faint sweetness that belonged only to her.
She reached for him, unfastening the top of his uniform with careful fingers, the sound of each clasp releasing small and sharp in the quiet.
He caught her waist and drew her close, the contact electric.
The air around them thickened, every heartbeat beating in unison with the low hum of the ship.
When he lifted his head, breath rough, she met his eyes with that same wordless question that had followed them from planet to planet.
He answered with a kiss harder than the first, his hand sliding up her spine to the nape of her neck, his other curling at her hip.
She responded in kind, her touch firm, assured.
The heat between them built until thought dissolved and only instinct remained.
She reached for his belt. He caught her wrist gently and brought her hand to his chest instead, covering it with his own.
He bent again, mouth to her throat, the taste of her skin grounding him, reminding him what he fought for.
Her fingers slipped into his hair. He picked her up easily, her legs coming around his hips as if they had always known the shape of this.
The motion drew a low sound from her throat, part sigh, part need.
He turned toward the doorway leading to their quarters, intent only on the distance between here and there.
That was when the lights along the floor flickered once.
They drew apart ever so slightly. The lights steadied and then pulsed again, twice, and went out. Darkness took the bay. The viewport held the stars bright enough to paint them in silver.
“Core,” Apex said. “Report.”
Silence pressed back. It had weight.
A low creak rolled through the deck, like a pressure shift moving through metal. The vents hissed open and shut, open and shut. Down the corridor, doors cycled one by one with a hollow clanging that set teeth on edge.
Apex set Emmy gently back on her feet, his hands lingering at her waist for a moment before she steadied herself.
She pulled back and frowned. “That’s not calibration.”
Lume shot into the bay in a streak of white. She circled both of them with frantic beating wings, chirping in a tight high register that sounded like the warning of a small alarm bell. She darted to the console and tapped the surface with both paws. Her eyes went wide and bright.
“Core,” Apex said, louder. “Status.”
Static scratched across the overhead speakers. A thin voice cut in and out, then steadied. “Diagnostics... corrupted...”
Every muscle in his body went still. “Say that again.”
The voice came again, clearer and unmistakably afraid. “He is in me—”
The bay lights blazed to white, hard enough to blind. The sound that followed rode on top of Core’s voice and under it at the same time, a colder tone, an iron face put over a familiar one. It spoke into every speaker on the ship.
“I am here.”
The words cut the air. They cut right through bone.