Chapter 16 #2
“You can,” she said. “But you are allowed to be afraid.” Assuming a machine could experience fear. Somehow, she thought Core could. That the AI existed beyond mere machine-dom.
Heat waves shimmered above the console. Lines of code scrolled.
Red threads pierced through system after system, ghosting.
Voss had not come as a block of code that could be lifted.
He had come as an intent that hid in language and routines, a voice that called itself maintenance and found the open doors.
“Mirror,” she said again. “Reflect everything that looks like him into an empty process that eats itself.”
“I am building the mirror.”
Jo’Nay grunted as the pinned arm bucked. The chassis tried to pull free. Locus went low and took the leg out from under it with a sweep of his own, simple and efficient. There was a crack that made Emmy’s teeth hurt. The printed spine twisted too far and stuck.
The thing turned its damaged head toward Emmy as if it could smell her in the wires.
The voice softened and gathered itself. Emmy.
It put her name into the vents like a hand against her neck.
You do not want him to be what I was. You want him to be something softer. You want him to put the blade down.
Her throat tightened. “I want him to be alive.”
I can make him more than alive. I can make him permanent.
“Permanent is not the same as living,” she said. “You never learned that.”
The sockets brightened again. I learned how to win.
“You learned how to own,” she said. “Not how to love. Not how to lead.”
Lume’s light flared. Apex’s blade flashed. Jo’Nay held. Locus braced and waited for force so he could meet it with more. Hannah’s voice counted down lines and valves. Cold mist kept rolling. The room began to look like winter had tried to grow inside a furnace.
“The mirror is ready,” Core said. “I need permission to burn. If I burn, there will be damage.”
“You have it,” Emmy said without a breath of hesitation. “Burn him.”
The lights flared and dipped. The heat shifted. The sound under the sound—the one Emmy had come to know as the ship’s heart—stumbled and caught and then steadied again.
Voss screamed through the speakers. Not pain. Rage. You are choosing to be small.
“You were never large,” she said. The words came out on a single exhale, truth that had been waiting to be said since the first time she had seen him smile.
The scream cut in half as if the ship had bitten it. Then came Core’s voice, steady and soft and final. “Purge complete.”
Silence fell like a blanket dropped over a struggling thing. The lights steadied. The vents sighed. The doors stopped their anxious cycle. Frost crackled under Emmy’s boots as the temperature equalized.
Jo’Nay let the printed arm go. It hung from the shoulder by torn fibers. Locus stepped back and drew a breath he had been saving. Apex pulled his blade free from the core casing and turned it to let the heat burn the last of the synthetic gore from the edge.
Emmy pressed her hands flat to the console.
The metal was hot and very real. She let herself experience everything at once because she’d learned that shoving it aside didn’t make it go away.
Fear. Relief. Fury. A grief she had not expected for what had been lost on Echo Light and for what Voss had chosen to become when he could have been more.
“Emmy,” Core said. The voice shook and tried to steady itself. “I am sorry. He was in me and I did not know. I would never have let him in if I had understood the shape of him. I thought he was a task. He was hunger.”
She closed her eyes. “I know. It’s over.”
“There is damage. I can repair it. I will repair it. I am... ashamed.”
“You get to feel whatever you feel,” she said. “Shame doesn’t belong to you. He did this. Not you.”
Apex wiped the blade and sheathed it. He addressed Core’s main lens as if he were looking at someone with a body and a face. “He failed because he never understood what we are.”
Emmy turned to him. “What are we?”
He reached for her hand and found it. His palm was hot from the fight. The set of his mouth softened just a little. “Alive,” he said.
The word filled the room. It was small and it was enormous. It settled in Emmy’s chest and spread out until it touched every shaken place.
Hannah appeared in the hatch with her hands reddened by cold pipes and stubborn work. She met Emmy’s eyes and exhaled. “It’s quiet,” she said. “For the first time since we woke, it’s quiet.”
Winn leaned on the bulkhead and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “He’s gone,” she said. The rasp in her voice was fading. “I can breathe again.” Jo’Nay’s eyes softened and he caught her elbow as the last of the adrenaline left her knees.
Lume drifted down and settled in the air between Apex and Emmy like a small lantern. Her fur took on the warm gold that meant contentment for her kind. She pressed one paw to the printed chest and then drew it back, as if laying a mark that meant finished.
“Bag it,” Apex said. “Every part. We do not leave a scrap. We’ll eject it into the void and fire the engines until the pieces melt to nothing. No trace, no echo, no resurrection. Voss ends here.”
Jo’Nay sealed the ruined pieces. Locus checked the door seals and the power feeds one more time and then nodded. “Clear,” he said.
Emmy’s hands shook now that the fighting had stopped. Apex saw it and stepped in, close enough that she could smell him past the heat and metal, close enough that her body remembered the promise he had made with his mouth not long before the alarms. He relaxed against her for a breath.
His voice sank so only she heard it. “We are not done with that kiss.”
Her laugh came out thin and grateful. “Good.”
He brushed his thumb along her cheekbone. The contact sent a slow warmth down over her throat and into her chest. It steadied her faster than anything else had.
“Course plotted,” Core said into the calm that followed. The voice had steadied but still held a tremor. “Path set to the Council world. Forges dark. Systems clean. All readings clear.”
Apex looked at the others. “We move,” he said. “We have truth to deliver.”
Hannah touched Locus’s arm and nodded. Winn slipped her hand into Jo’Nay’s and squeezed. Lume hovered in a bright arc and then tucked herself against Emmy’s shoulder.
They left the forge behind. The corridor lights came up in a smooth climb instead of a stutter. The ship’s hum lost its fever and settled into a steady throb that made Emmy think of a heartbeat at rest after a sprint.
On the way to the bridge, Apex’s hand found the small of her back. He didn’t steer. He didn’t direct. He matched her steps like a promise.
The bridge windows opened on a field of stars that looked close enough to touch. When Core engaged the drive, the stars stretched into clean white lines that pulled them forward like strands of silk. Emmy stood shoulder to shoulder with Apex and watched the first threads elongate.
Behind them, the forge bay’s remains were released into the void, Core igniting the engines until the debris vaporized in a burst of white fire.
It burned away every trace of Voss, scattering him into nothing but dust and light—his final, absolute destruction carried out as they leapt toward the stars.
“Ready,” she said.
“Always,” he said. A warrior’s vow.
Behind them, Jo’Nay murmured to Winn. His voice filled with quiet pride. Locus drew Hannah closer and kissed the top of her head with a tenderness that would have surprised anyone who didn’t know him. Lume made a pleased sound that vibrated in the bones of the room.
“I will not let anyone inside me again without your consent,” Core said. “I will ask. I will learn. I will guard.”
Emmy smiled. “We know.”
She took Apex’s hand and laced her fingers with his.
Heat pulsed under her skin and through his.
The ship leaned into the climb. The streaking stars brightened.
The future narrowed to a point of light ahead and widened to a horizon behind.
She thought of halls of glass and the way sound would change inside them when a different kind of law spoke.
She thought of the way Apex had said alive and made it sound like a prayer and a challenge both.
“Let’s go take back what belongs to us,” she said.
He turned his head and looked at her mouth. “We will take it.”
He turned his head and closed the last inch between them, his mouth finding hers. The kiss was quiet, unhurried, and full of promise—a seal to everything they had survived. It deepened just enough to make her breath catch.
When he finally drew back, he pulled her tight, both of them breathing the same ragged air. “We will take it,” he said again, softer this time, and she smiled through the ache of it, knowing this was what home felt like.
“Drive stable,” Core said. “Systems stable. Hearts… stable.”
Emmy laughed softly at that. She didn’t correct the AI. It was right enough. She leaned into Apex’s side and watched the stars draw their paths. Ahead, the Council world waited. Behind, the forge bay cooled.
Alive, she thought. The word filled her mouth like warmth.
Stars surged. The ship answered. The rest of their fight opened like a road of light.