Chapter 38
NOVA
The second I crack open the command records room, my stomach knots.
The lights hum low. Cold. Like everything in here is meant to feel sterile and precise. But the air is wrong. There’s a heaviness to it—like data that knows it’s hiding something.
I pull up the encrypted logs Stark thinks he buried deep enough no one would bother scratching past the surface.
But I scratch.
I always do.
And what I find curdles my blood.
The wormhole window isn’t stabilizing—it’s decaying. The success rates aren’t just exaggerated. They’re fabricated. Entire trials redacted. Risk models inverted. On paper, it looks brilliant. In practice, it’s a loaded gun aimed at everything we’ve built.
I back up the files. Again.
Hands shaking.
He’s going to launch this thing. And he knows it’s unstable.
I push back from the console, hard, my chair screeching against the tile.
I need to find Kaz.
I need to warn him—about Stark, about the wormhole, about everything.
Even the part I’ve been too scared to say out loud.
I sprint through the base, heart pounding like it’s trying to break free from my chest. The corridors blur past—steel and synth and recycled air pressing close around me like a warning. I check the hangar. Empty. Sim lab. Vacant.
Then I remember the override I gave him.
My quarters.
No. Not after what Verzius said. He wouldn’t be there.
Unless...
He’s in his.
I turn sharp on my heel and head for Kaz’s quarters.
The door’s unlocked.
I step inside without knocking.
He’s sitting on the edge of his bunk, back to me, staring at the wall like it might answer all the questions tearing him apart.
I take one step in, and he speaks without turning.
“You had years, Nova.”
His voice is low. Controlled.
Like ice under pressure.
“You had years,” he says again, standing now, turning slowly. “You let me hold him. You let me laugh with him. You let me look my own son in the face and not know.”
My mouth opens. Closes.
The words stick.
He takes a step closer. “Why?”
“Because you left,” I snap, louder than I mean to. “You disappeared. No comms. No trace. I was pregnant and alone and scared out of my damn mind, Kaz.”
“You think I abandoned you?” His eyes go wide. “I was shot out of orbit over a black zone! I almost died trying to get back to you!”
“You didn’t come back.”
“I tried!”
“You didn’t try hard enough!”
The words hit like gunfire. The kind that echoes long after the impact.
Kaz paces, fists clenched. “You should’ve told me the second I showed up.”
“I was going to!”
“When?”
I swallow hard.
“When he turned five? Ten? When he started asking why the man who teaches him to fly doesn’t tuck him in at night?”
“I didn’t know how—”
“You lied.”
“I protected him.”
“You protected yourself.”
Silence.
A terrible, deafening silence.
Then my voice breaks, brittle as glass. “You don’t understand what it’s like.
.. waking up in the middle of the night with no one.
Carrying a whole person inside you and feeling them kick and wondering if you’ll even survive giving birth on a base with a rusted medbay.
I had to be strong. I had to make choices.
And yeah—some of them were wrong. But I didn’t lie to hurt you. I lied to keep breathing.”
Kaz’s eyes are red now.
Not from rage.
From pain.
Real, raw pain.
He turns away.
“I can’t do this right now.”
“Kaz—”
He storms past me, knocking into my shoulder as he goes, every step a thunderclap of heartbreak against the floor.
The door slams.
And I break.
Right there, in the quiet, with nothing but the soft hum of the wall monitors and the fading echo of a man who used to be my whole world.
I sink to the floor.
My hand finds something on instinct—tiny, familiar.
Dar’s boot.
Left by the couch.
Worn at the toes, scuffed from a thousand adventures. He sleeps with the left one some nights, says it helps him “run in dreams.”
I hold it tight against my chest, curled into myself like maybe if I make my body small enough, the guilt will pass through me instead of cracking me in half.
It doesn’t.
It anchors me.
But I don’t know if that’s enough anymore.