Chapter 4
KRAJ
The stink of repurposed coolant and burnt circuitry clings to the inside of my nostrils like poison. I sit in what passes for a chair—half of a salvaged mech pilot’s cradle bolted into the dirt floor of my shack—watching the flicker of a dim console wired to stolen Helios undernet scraps.
The screen hums low, faint static curling along its edge like a warning whisper.
This is what exile looks like.
Not the screaming chaos of war. Not the steel-glint orders barked over comms. This. Silence. Dust. A slow crawl of ones and zeroes sliding back to Targen across a cobbled link wrapped in a thousand encryption layers.
The report is boring on purpose.
Location: Arkosh. Wildwood Outskirts.
Observations: Civilian activity at fabrication hubs within expected patterns.
Threat assessment: Low.
I tag it with the right signatures, let the encryption sweep finish, and hit send.
The moment the file vanishes into the void, I slam the console shut and grunt, cracking my neck with a tired twist. The silence that follows is worse than any battlefield.
I shift, stand, stretch until my joints creak. The air inside this dump is dense with old heat. I can smell the rust in the walls, the glue that’s starting to bubble off my patched-together insulation, the damn sweet rot of the ration paste I keep forgetting to throw out.
It’s hell.
And I deserve every second of it.
Because I betrayed her.
There’s a window—just a thin plastiglass slit that overlooks the Wildwood tram path, a narrow spine that snakes into the colony heart. And every day, like clockwork, she passes it.
Luna.
She walks like she’s holding up the sky by herself, chin high, shoulders tight. Her hair’s longer now—more sun-bleached than gold. The wind pulls at it, tangling it around her face, but she never stops to fix it.
She’s harder. Sharper.
Still beautiful enough to make my ribs ache.
And today, like yesterday, there’s a small hand wrapped in hers.
The kid’s a tiny wisp of movement—lively as a spark, darting and skipping, tugging at Luna’s hand like gravity’s optional. Her laugh pierces through the air when she runs too far and Luna gently reins her back.
She calls her Solie.
I heard it once. Caught on an open vendor comm as they passed a food stand.
Solie.
It hits the back of my throat like glass.
My claws dig into the edge of the window frame. I force them to retract.
She has a kid.
And I’m not part of it. Not that I should be.
Still. The thought of her with someone else. The thought of a man getting to touch her, to hold her when I wasn’t there to stop it.
It boils up inside me like rage and regret had a bastard child and set it loose in my chest.
I know it shouldn’t matter. She has her life. I gave her no reason to wait. Hell, I gave her every reason to run screaming from my name.
But watching her now—watching the way she pulls that little girl into her arms and kisses her forehead like it’s the only thing that matters—I realize something that makes me stagger back from the window.
It wasn’t just intel I gave up.
It wasn’t just Luna’s trust.
It was this.
That little girl.
That laugh.
That moment of a future that could’ve been mine if I hadn’t let the Coalition hollow me out and fill me with orders instead.
I pace my quarters, the walls closing in. My boots crunch over dirt and synthetic rubble. There's a photo of my old squad half-burned, tucked under a cracked comms relay—men and women who died screaming under my watch. I can still hear them sometimes, especially when I let my guard down.
But this silence is louder than their ghosts.
I push open the back hatch and step out into the night.
Arkosh’s twin moons are up—one bloodred, one silver pale, hanging like judgment eyes over the ridge. The Wildwood canopy creaks softly in the wind. Crickets—or something that pretends to be crickets—chirp deep in the brush.
I walk because if I don’t, I’ll rip something apart.
I walk past the market lanes where vendors huddle around solar lamps. Past the faded murals painted by colonists who thought this rock would be paradise. Past the fence line of the crèche where I sometimes hear her child playing, even when I swear I’m not listening.
I’m not supposed to care.
Targen didn’t say anything about Luna having a kid. He just dropped her name like bait and smiled when it hooked something in me.
“Might be useful,” he said.
Useful.
As if she was a tool. A data drive. A lever to be pulled.
But Luna is not a lever. She is a damn tectonic shift. And I knew that from the moment I first saw her standing in that IHC uniform, all fire and focus.
She changed me.
And I destroyed her.
I lean against a cracked comms post and let the wind hit my face. It tastes like dust and old engine fumes.
I should report the child. I should send a supplemental note about Luna’s “civilian entanglements.”
But I don’t.
I never will.
Instead, I reach for the small datapad I keep strapped to my thigh and pull up the old photo I still carry—a stolen moment on a quieter world, before all of it burned. She’s smiling in it. Laughing. Her hand in mine, sunlight in her hair.
She didn’t know I’d already filed my mission report that morning.
Didn’t know I was sent to use her.
Didn’t know that when they told me to clean up the asset—I said no.
That I killed the man they sent to make sure I followed orders.
That I disappeared into the war rather than let them touch her.
I stare at that photo for too long.
Then I thumb it away.
Tomorrow, I’ll see her again. And I’ll pretend I don’t care.
But the truth is—my soul's already hers. It always was.
The shack creaks as I step inside. Wind whips against the outer panels like impatient fingers trying to peel me apart. The temperature’s dropped—Arkoshan nights bite with a kind of chill that settles into your marrow, like the planet’s trying to whisper its secrets through your bones.
I like it.
Cold keeps me sharp.
I kick the door shut behind me, shake out the dust from my coat, and toss it onto the mech cradle that passes for a chair. My claws twitch involuntarily as I sit back down in front of the console. The screen buzzes awake with a sickly green glow, casting shadows across my scales.
I plug the uplink jack into the port behind my ear—standard Grolgath field implant, upgraded with Coalition tech I wasn't supposed to keep. Feeds stutter to life across the screen. Surveillance channels, audio intercepts, heartbeat monitors, and the grainy overhead view of Wildwood’s main square.
Most of it’s static and droid loops. Delivery schedules. A busted hoverlift engine whining into a hangar bay. A meat vendor arguing with an off-duty miner over the price of tuber spice.
And then I find her.
Luna’s shape is unmistakable—even in low-res grayscale. She walks with purpose, even when she’s dead on her feet. The girl—Solie—flits beside her, talking a mile a minute. I can’t hear it, but I see it in the way her lips move, her fingers gesture.
She’s animated. Smart. Bright.
Not mine.
That thought lands in my gut like a hammer. She can’t be. Luna would've told me. Right?
I rake a claw across the edge of the console, peeling up a curl of metal. It squeals in protest. The sharp edge bites the pad of my finger, and I watch a single drop of dark red blood gather, well, and fall.
I deserve worse.
The next file I pull up is encrypted, and marked with Targen’s clearance code. My jaw tightens as I decrypt it and the message unfolds in standard Coalition black-script:
STATUS: STAY INVISIBLE
PRIORITY: LOW
NEW DIRECTIVE: CONTINUE MONITORING
NOTE: WILDWOOD CIVILIAN FAB HUB MAY CONTAIN POTENTIAL ASSET OF INTEREST TO ALLIANCE
SURVEILLANCE MUST REMAIN COVERT.
ASSET CLASS: OMEGA-TIER, FORMER IHC ASSOCIATION.
TAG: DESMOND, L.
REDACTED ADDENDUM: OPERATIONAL AT HANDLER DISCRETION.
Asset.
They don’t even use her name.
Just a label.
A tool.
Rage blooms behind my ribs, sharp and sudden. My claws extend again—uncontrolled—and one of them rakes across the console casing with a screech. I have to consciously will them back.
They want to use her. Again.
First me. Then her. Now maybe Solie too, if the Alliance gets wind of what she is—or who she might become.
I’ve seen this playbook before. I’ve lived it.
Burn the edges, then exploit the center. Gut the life from someone and sell their skeleton to the highest bidder. Doesn’t matter how many lines you cross if the op gets results.
I flex my hands open and closed, muscles twitching with old instinct. I could crush this console. Smash it to scrap. But it wouldn’t matter.
What matters is Luna.
I don’t sleep. Haven’t really since the frontlines. But I sit for a while in the dark, watching her surveillance feed play on loop.
I’m not proud of it.
But it’s not lust or obsession.
It’s something worse. Something deeper.
Regret.
Her laughter—when it happens—is a rare, delicate thing.
Like glass in wind. I see her smile once, and I swear my heart actually stutters.
She looks down at Solie with something sacred in her face.
Something I never had growing up on Grolgar Prime.
Something I never saw in the eyes of anyone who raised me.
She protects that child like she’s guarding a universe.
And I realize, sitting there in the flickering shadows of my own self-destruction, that I don’t want her just safe.
I want to deserve her safety.
Even if she spits in my face every time we meet.
Even if Solie isn’t mine.
I want to be the man who stands between them and the next bullet, the next black-bag, the next war machine that rolls through Wildwood looking for a ghost from the past.
Because the real enemy isn’t me anymore.
It’s the system that made me.
I thumb my response into the pad with deliberate, sterile syntax. It’ll make Targen yawn.
Response: Civilian asset shows no signs of Alliance contact.
Localized traffic low. No external pings detected.
Surveillance ongoing. Will remain covert.
Awaiting further orders.
I don’t mention Luna’s kid.
I don’t mention that if they ever try to drag her back into this festering shadow war, I’ll burn every outpost on this moon just to keep her free.
I end the log and sit back, exhaling slow. The console goes dark.
And in the black mirror of its screen, I see my face—drawn, hard, and tired.
I’m not a spy anymore.
Not just a soldier.
Not even just a man.
I’m something else now.
I’m hers.
Whatever that means, whatever it costs, I’ll figure it out.