12. Rhykor
RHYKOR
Eventually, the pounding on the maintenance room door ceases.
The machines lose interest or are redirected by their network, leaving us in the heavy, breathless silence of the underground.
We wait until the sun rises, then crawl out of Sector Ten's ruined transit station into the gray light of morning and make our way back to the compound.
Now, two days have passed.
I can scrub it from my hands, rinse the taste of her from my mouth, and seal the security vest she pressed her palms against in a storage bin behind the armory.
Doing all of that still leaves me catching myself frozen in a doorway because the ventilation system carries a trace of her shampoo from three corridors away, a floral and distinctly human chemical scent that has no business making my pulse hammer.
I’m a Kraaj commander who has survived things that would shatter lesser soldiers into dust and bone fragments. Walking past a closed door should be effortless; instead, the rhythm of her breathing on the other side pins me in place.
I simply cannot move.
With an absolute thoroughness, the mate bond has sunk its claws into me.
The instincts I spent decades training into obedience now answer to a secondary protocol: where is she, is she safe, who is near her, are they a threat.
On a constant loop, the questions cycle through my awareness, running underneath operational planning and threat assessments regarding supply logistics like a ticking clock.
My head turns the moment she walks through the compound.
Two floors down, the sound of her laughter at Elias’s muttered words reaches me, threading through the concrete and steel, reaching the careful compartments I built to keep my operational focus intact.
When she brushes past me in a corridor, the fleeting half-second of contact through our clothes leaves a patch of residual heat that lingers for an hour, drumming against my skin like a localized fever.
This morning I stood outside the med bay for eleven minutes because I could hear her humming while she sorted supplies. Britt found me there, took one look at my face, and had the good sense to walk away in silence. Cassia still fills my mind entirely until the summons arrives midday.
Dessik delivers it personally in the form of a coded frequency burst from Kraaj regional command, encrypted on a secure military channel. The message is brief and formal and carries linguistic markers that signal very senior authority exercising power they want me to remember they possess.
Commander Rhykor. Report to Forward Operations Post Kor-Viir for strategic review. Attendance is mandatory. Fourteen hundred hours.
Forward Ops Post Kor-Viir sits over ten miles northeast of the compound, inside a fortified bunker complex that serves as the regional staging point for Kraaj military operations across numerous districts.
I've been here dozens of times for standard regional debriefings, but being summoned now, after weeks of radio silence from command, carries heavy implications.
"Who sent it?" I demand, and Dessik shifts his weight in the doorway, his face carefully neutral.
"Channel signature traces to General Daxos's adjutant."
Daxos, of course.
General Daxos controls the logistics network that moves equipment across the southeastern region and personnel with the grinding inevitability of a geological event.
He despises me. This is worth noting because Daxos considers hatred an administrative burden, a waste of resources better allocated toward strategic objectives.
The fact that he has made an exception for me speaks to the depth of his disapproval regarding my management of District Seventeen.
“I’m going,” I announce, already shifting the internal perimeter assignments. Cassia remains under guard.
The compound is secure. Varrik holds the perimeter while Britt and Dessik can handle any defensive situation that arises during a half-day absence. The analysis makes it clear that Cassia will be fine.
My senses scream otherwise.
I find her in the aid station, of course, because this woman gravitates toward injured people and half-assembled medical equipment with the reliability of a compass pointing north.
She's bending over a workbench, deftly braiding surgical tubing into a new medical device, her dark hair pulled back in a knot that exposes the bend of her neck.
It is the curve that my mouth was against two days ago while she whispered keep going with her fingers coiling tight around my horns.
I grip the doorframe until the metal creaks.
"I've been summoned to a command briefing," I announce, and she turns, those dark eyes finding mine with an openness that still catches me off guard.
Before the transit station, she looked at me through filters of wariness and scrutiny, carefully examining an endangered soul and deciding how much trust to extend.
Now the filters are gone, and what's underneath them is warm and completely terrifying.
"At the regional headquarters. It is ten miles northeast."
"Okay," she says, setting down the surgical tubing. "How long will you be gone?"
"Several hours, or possibly longer." I stare at the doorframe, realizing I'm gripping it hard enough to leave claw indentations in the metal. "You should come with me."
Her eyebrows lift. "To a Kraaj military briefing?"
"You'll stay outside the briefing perimeter. Close enough to reach, but far enough to avoid direct engagement with command personnel." The explanation sounds perfectly logical and utterly insufficient, and the look she gives me confirms she can hear both layers.
"Rhykor, are you asking me because there's an operational reason, or because being miles away from me right now feels unbearable?"
The honesty costs me, but lying to her after what happened in that maintenance room feels like a desecration. "Both."
She studies me for a long stretch, accepting this vulnerability with a continuous grace that tells me more about who she is than any words could. Moving across the med bay, she touches my arm, her fingers resting against the inside of my wrist with a firm, grounding pressure.
"Then I'll come." The answer is simple and without any conditions.
Dessik has the ground transport prepped by the time we reach the eastern gate.
The armored vehicle idles in the cleared zone, engine rumbling through the floor plates.
I station Cassia in the rear compartment and take the seat beside her, close enough that her shoulder presses against my arm for the full forty-minute drive through debris-choked corridors.
I cover her hand with mine—carefully, claws tucked, the warmth of her skin pouring through my palm and into the marrow—and allow myself three seconds of contact before releasing her.
Forward Ops Post Kor-Viir is everything I remember and less.
It is a bunker complex carved into the bedrock deep in a fallen industrial park, fortified with Kraaj military-grade structural plating and staffed by soldiers who move through the alleyways with the grim determination born of fear rather than respect.
The lighting runs amber and red—the standard Kraaj military spectrum, optimized for our visual range—and the air carries the metallic tang of scrubbed atmosphere and weapons-grade thermal charge residue.
I station Cassia in an auxiliary monitoring room adjacent to the main briefing chamber, a small space with a single console and a robust door I can reach in under four seconds from the briefing table.
Dessik stays with her. The arrangement is imperfect, but imperfect is the ceiling when your options involve a mandatory military summons and a woman you physically cannot walk away from.
The briefing chamber is full.
Forty officers fill the tiered seating, including commanders, sub-commanders, logistics coordinators, and intelligence operatives from six districts.
The room functions for theater as much as strategy, with elevated observation tiers surrounding a central floor, featuring the commanding officer's position raised on a platform at the far end.
The lighting functions to make the central floor feel exposed and isolated, an arena turning the person standing in it completely visible from every angle and protected from none.
I enter, and forty pairs of eyes track my approach. The silence that rolls through the chamber has weight to it, the specific, hostile quiet of a room unified in discussing you extensively before your arrival.
Daxos stands on the command platform, and the sight of him drives a spike of adrenaline through my system that I channel into the muscles of my jaw and hold there.
The ceremonial armor shines as a masterpiece of dark steel, campaign insignias biting into the black plating over his chest and shoulders.
His horns are dull, polished iron, framing a face dominated by eyes of burning amber.
They hold me in a stare so coldly observant that it feels less like a conversation and more like the final, still moment before a predator strikes.
"Commander Rhykor," he speaks, and the sound fills the chamber like a subsonic pulse, carefully pitched to command the space.
The effect is instantaneous: the officers around him stiffen, their postures correcting involuntarily as if his voice exerts a physical force upon them.
"Thank you for finally honoring us with your presence.
We were beginning to wonder whether District Seventeen had seceded from Kraaj command entirely. "
Laughter ripples through the tiers. It is managed and calibrated to match the general's tone exactly.
I stop at the midpoint of the floor. My gut screams at the structural exposure—surrounded, elevated threats on all sides and a single exit behind me—but I hold position because showing discomfort in front of Daxos is blood in the water.
"General," I keep my tone level. "The summons specified fourteen hundred hours. I'm on time."