Chapter 27
KAZ
Space doesn’t hum the way they say in the stories.
It drones.
Low, constant, like the belly of a dying beast. You feel it in your teeth, in the back of your skull, in the soft meat behind your ribs. The Alliance transport is blacked out from all sides—no windows, no stars, just steel and silence and the whine of containment fields that never sleep.
I sleep, though. Sort of.
When they let me.
The bunk is narrow and bolted into the wall like an afterthought.
Every few hours, the lights flicker on. Wake cycle.
We file into mess. No one speaks. No one looks anyone in the eye.
We eat gray protein packs and hydrate with metal-tasting water.
Then it’s drills. Sim after sim. Hypoxia trials.
Pressure chamber tests. Then sleep again.
Rinse. Repeat. Fade.
They stripped my name when I boarded. I’m 2173 now. Serial-linked, face-scanned, flagged as “provisional test personnel.” No rank. No history. Just a warm body with enough reflexes to survive the next black-sector trial they haven’t publicly admitted exists.
I don’t ask questions. That version of me died somewhere over Barakkus.
Nova killed him.
Swan buried him.
It’s worse at night.
The hum gets inside you. Echoes in your spine. I lie awake staring at the curved ceiling, watching the faint red glow of the emergency panel pulse like a heartbeat. My hands curl around the edges of the locket I never gave back.
Swan’s crest.
The dumb thing we had made when we graduated cadet academy—back when we thought war would make us legends. When we thought we were fireproof.
It’s smooth from wear now. Cold. But it grounds me.
I remember him laughing that last night. Telling me to live something worth the trade.
And I wonder if I am.
Because if this is life, it’s not much of one.
No contact or windows. No word from the outside. Just a string of code names and deep-space waypoints so far off-grid they don’t show up on standard nav charts.
They say it’s wormhole navigation research. I think it’s just another kind of burial.
There’s a girl across the hall from me—Callix. At least, that’s what they call her. She doesn’t talk much, but she’s fast in zero-G drills. Lithe. Precise.
One night, during mess, she slides me an extra ration bar and says, “You got the stare.”
I blink at her. “What stare?”
“The kind ghosts have. The kind that says you’ve already left but your body’s too stubborn to quit.”
I want to laugh. I want to tell her she’s right.
But I just nod and chew the protein bar until it turns to paste in my mouth.
The worst part isn’t the silence.
It’s the memories.
They don’t fade. They loop.
Her porch light. The way her breath hitched when I touched her neck. The sound she made when she was half-asleep and still reached for me. The way she looked at me in the sim room before everything went to hell.
I hate her for what she did.
And I miss her with a hunger that borders on madness.
That’s the real curse of space. It isolates you so thoroughly that every thought gets amplified. No distractions. No voices. Just the same flash reel playing in your head until you can’t tell if it’s memory or hallucination.
She thought she was saving me.
But she didn’t ask if I wanted saving.
She didn’t trust me with the truth.
So now I’m out here. In the dark. Drifting through classified airlocks and blood-pressure trials.
And I don’t even know why.
New orders hit the bunk console.
We’re rerouting to Sector Theta-Four. No details. Just coordinates and an upload packet labeled Nav Drift Compensation Protocol 47.
Sounds like suicide.
I confirm receipt.
I don’t ask questions.
Just strap in.
Just fly.
After the jump, there’s a moment.
A half-breath where the fabric of space ripples wrong. Like something slithering behind your eyes. Every console flickers. My gut flips. The nav systems spit out five different trajectories and then go silent.
But we make it.
Somehow.
We coast in.
The black outside is darker than before. Like the stars forgot to come with us.
I’m floating in nothing.
I let myself feel it.
The loss.
The finality.
The fact that I will never see Nova again.
And she’ll never tell me why.
I press the locket to my lips. It smells like cold metal and old sweat. I whisper Swan’s name. Then hers.
Then nothing.
Because there’s nothing left to say.
I’m not Kaz anymore.
Not the one who painted porches and flirted with fire.
That version of me belonged to something. To someone.
This me’s just a ghost in training.
Flying deeper into black, hoping to outrun whatever still lives in my chest.
And maybe, someday, if the stars ever come back, I’ll remember what it felt like to burn.