Chapter 6
TAKHISS
The singularity howls like a wounded god.
There’s no warning. Just fire, light, and pain.
I’m airborne before I even register the explosion—ripped from my stance, my claws skimming over melting floor plating, screaming steel grinding against itself as the very spine of the Seeker folds inwards.
We flew too close to the heart of the abyss. We tried to touch the jaws of the void, and it bit back.
The singularity drive, lit before its time, births a gravity well that wants to eat the universe. The core ruptures. I see black starfire stretch across the bulkhead windows. The light bends. Warps. Screams.
The pull rips the Vengeance apart mid-boarding. No orders or formations. Just soldiers scattered like sand in a cyclone.
I remember the moment the corridor twisted open like a wound, and I was thrown backward—weightless, voiceless. I remember trying to grab the edge of a doorway, but it melted under my claws.
And just before the darkness swallowed me whole.
Her face.
Her eyes wide, locked on mine. Her scent in my lungs. Fear. Blood. Fire. Her hand reaching out, even as the world folded in on itself.
Suddenly, nothing.
I wake inside a nightmare of metal.
Twisted beams arc overhead like the ribs of some enormous, dead beast. Sparks hiss. A coolant line gurgles somewhere. The air smells like burnt plastic, ozone, and scorched blood.
My body screams when I try to move. My armor’s fused in places. Bent. A shard of hull plating’s embedded in my thigh, but the bleeding’s stopped. Regeneration’s kicking in.
Barely.
I sit up.
I am surrounded by debris. Shattered tech. Fragments of the Seeker and Vengeance melded into one tortured corpse of a vessel. It’s not a ship. It’s a crypt.
I stretch out my senses.
No squad pings. No familiar presences.
They’re gone.
Graal. Murn. The ones I trained beside. Laughed with. Fought beside. I would mourn them later—if I live long enough.
But there’s a pulse.
A hum.
Not mechanical. Not structural.
Biological.
I taste it in the air. Something old and strange and specific to only one person in the whole damn universe.
Her.
She’s alive.
I feel it before I see her. The bond doesn’t whisper. It screams.
Jalshagar.
The ancient tether between fated mates. Myth, they used to say. An ataxian trick, others claimed. But I feel it. Anchoring itself in the marrow of my bones. Vibrating through the steel beneath me.
She’s here.
And so am I.
We’re not dead.
I crawl through what used to be a corridor. The walls are unrecognizable. Melted. Fused into a jagged passage. Gravity is wonky here—pulling down at a weird angle, like the ship doesn’t know which way is down anymore.
Then I see her.
Her plate says Ella.
She’s crouched beside a ruptured console, pale and bleeding, her face streaked with soot. Her brown eyes are locked on mine the instant I turn the corner. No hesitation.
No scream.
Her chest rises, shaky. Her mouth parts. But she doesn’t run.
The moment stretches between us, taut and heavy.
I speak, voice gravel-thick.
“We’re not dead.”
She swallows. “Feels like hell.”
“It’s not.”
“How can you be sure?”
I look around. “Because hell would be cleaner.”
She huffs a breath that might be a laugh. Or a sob. “You’re bleeding.”
I glance down. My leg’s still leaking sluggishly. “So are you.”
Her lip is split. There’s a gash above her brow. Her suit’s half torn, held together with a melted patch job.
But she’s alive.
That’s all that matters.
“We need to move,” I say, carefully stepping forward, keeping my voice low, slow. The way you’d approach something fragile. Or dangerous. “This structure’s not going to hold long. We’re caught in a debris field.”
“I figured,” she mutters. “Gravity’s all jacked up. And I keep hearing something... humming.”
“That’s the singularity.”
Her eyes go wide. “It’s still active?”
I nod. “Some fragment of the core must’ve stabilized just enough to survive. We’re orbiting it. A tight loop. One wrong move and we’re vapor.”
She looks around with dawning horror. “Then we’re stuck.”
“No,” I say. “We survived. That’s more than most.”
A pause.
She stares at me.
“You were on the boarding team,” she says slowly. “I saw you. Before the rupture.”
“Yes.”
“You killed my commander.”
I hold her gaze. “Yes.”
Her jaw tightens. She doesn’t look away.
“But you didn’t kill me,” she says. “Why?”
I could lie.
But I don’t.
“Because you’re mine,” I say simply.
Her breath catches.
I see her hands tremble.
She doesn’t run.
“I don’t know what that means,” she says, voice sharp.
“It means what it feels like.”
She shakes her head. “No. No, I’m not some prize. I’m not—”
“I didn’t say you were.” I step closer, slow. “I’m saying we don’t have to understand it yet. But it’s there. You feel it. So do I.”
Her eyes burn. But she doesn’t deny it.
“I don’t trust you.”
“Good,” I say. “I don’t trust me either. But I’m not leaving you here to die. So get up. We’ve got work to do.”
A long beat.
Then she pushes to her feet, wobbling once before she steadies.
“You got a plan, lizard-man?”
I grin, teeth sharp. “Yeah. Don’t die.”
She snorts. “Real inspirational.”
Together, we start moving.
Side by side.
Through twisted corridors and failing lights. Toward whatever comes next.