Chapter 7
ELLA
We float in the wreckage of what used to be my life.
Everything’s wrong. The light, the air, the silence—it’s all wrong.
The Seeker isn’t a ship anymore. It’s a graveyard stitched together with flickering power conduits and dying breaths. The deck plates moan like a wounded animal every time the gravity field spasms.
My lungs burn. My ears are still ringing. There’s smoke thick enough to taste, bitter and metallic on my tongue. The emergency lights flicker a lazy crimson across the debris field—like a heartbeat fading out.
And then there’s him.
Takhiss.
He moves through the ruins like he belongs here, like the world bending around us is just another obstacle to crush. Every time he turns, the amber glow of his armor catches on the shattered bulkhead, and the air seems to hum around him.
I keep telling myself I should be afraid.
He’s one of them. A Coalition soldier. The kind who butchered my friends. The kind who turned our research ship into a massacre.
But I’m not. Not completely.
Fear’s there, sure—pulsing, coiled in my stomach. But there’s something else under it. Something heavier. Something… alive.
Every time he looks at me, I feel it—this low vibration in my chest, like my heart’s trying to remember a rhythm that isn’t mine.
I remember his eyes in that split second before the world came apart. The heat in them. The pull.
And now, here we are, side by side in the wreckage.
I suck in a breath through gritted teeth. “Oxygen levels are falling. You feel that?”
He glances up from the torn-open panel he’s been inspecting. “Air’s thin. Getting colder too.”
“No kidding,” I mutter. I check my suit’s integrity on reflex, but it’s half-fried. The gauge blinks low pressure. “We need to stabilize a heat source or we’re going to turn into popsicles before the CO? kills us.”
He watches me quietly for a moment, then says, “You know this ship better than I do. Tell me what to do.”
The simplicity of it catches me off guard. No dominance. No barking orders. Just—deference. Respect.
I kneel beside a cracked wall console, prying it open with my spanner. Sparks jump, kissing my knuckles. I wince but keep working. “Atmosphere control’s shot. We lost half the internal regulators when the hulls fused. But there’s still residual power in the grav-scrubbers.”
He frowns, those red eyes narrowing. “Grav-scrubbers?”
“Yeah,” I say, voice shaking slightly. “They stabilize localized gravity shifts. Small ones. They’re inefficient as hell for heating, but if I reroute the energy coils…”
“You can make fire.”
“Heat,” I correct automatically. “Contained heat.”
He studies me like I’m doing something sacred. It’s unnerving, the way he looks—like he’s memorizing every movement.
I pull a tangle of wires from a dead soldier’s compad nearby. I try not to look at his face as I do it. The guilt crawls up my throat like bile. Sorry.
I can’t afford to feel that right now. Not when my fingers are shaking and my vision keeps blurring at the edges.
He crouches beside me, silent, massive. His presence fills the corridor. I can feel his heat even through the armor. He hands me a broken relay without a word, as if he knows what I need before I ask.
“You fix things,” he murmurs, not a question.
“I try.”
“You do more than try. You fight with your hands.”
“Better than fighting with a blade,” I snap before I can stop myself.
He doesn’t react. Just watches. The silence between us stretches long and strange. I can hear the rasp of his breathing, steady and deep. The smell of smoke mixes with something musky, earthy—him.
The grav-scrubber sputters to life. A faint glow seeps from the coil, blue-white and weak but warm. I exhale a shaky laugh, leaning back against the wall. “There. We won’t die cold, at least.”
He tilts his head. “You make light out of ruin.”
“Don’t romanticize it, soldier,” I mutter. “I just don’t want to freeze to death.”
His gaze lingers on me for a beat too long, and something hot and sharp slides beneath my ribs. I look away fast, busying myself with my tools.
We settle into silence. The kind that hums rather than rests.
He sits near the makeshift heater, massive frame folding awkwardly against the wall.
His armor creaks when he shifts. I can see the faint shimmer of scale along his neck where the plating doesn’t quite cover.
The faint rise and fall of his chest. He’s not human, not by a long shot.
But there’s something oddly… familiar about him.
The heat trickles slowly through the compartment, taking the edge off the chill. I can almost pretend we’re not orbiting death itself. Almost.
“How long will that last?” he asks finally.
“Six hours if we’re lucky.”
“And then?”
I shrug. “Then we improvise.”
He grunts. “You’re stubborn.”
He leans his head back against the bulkhead. The motion’s oddly… weary. “Your kind calls us monsters.”
“Not inaccurate,” I mutter before I can stop myself.
He huffs a low sound that might be laughter—or maybe just breath. “We call your kind thieves.”
I look at him sharply. “You think we stole this technology? The singularity drive was built with Coalition specs, sure, but you people abandoned the joint research accords years ago. The Alliance just picked up where you left off.”
He turns his head, eyes glowing faintly in the half-light. “Picked up, or weaponized?”
I open my mouth, then close it. Because he’s not wrong.
The silence comes back, thick and awkward.
I finally say, “We didn’t mean for this.”
“No one ever does,” he answers quietly.
The sound of his voice surprises me. There’s no threat in it. Just truth.
I should be trying to get away. I should be scheming, planning, anything other than sitting here talking to the enemy. But I can’t seem to move. My head’s pounding. My muscles ache. My eyelids are getting heavy.
He doesn’t sleep.
He sits there like a statue carved from obsidian, eyes half-lidded but alert. Watching. Waiting.
I lie down near the bulkhead, pretending to sleep. I can feel him even with my eyes closed—the weight of him in space, the soft mechanical hum of his armor, the faint rattle of his breath.
I tell myself I’m not afraid.
But the truth is… I’m too tired to be afraid.
When I drift, I see flashes behind my eyes. My crew. The explosion. His eyes. Always his eyes.
I wake once—sometime later—to find him still there, unmoving, staring at the coil of light between us. The glow catches the edges of his scales and turns them to liquid fire.
He doesn’t look at me, but his voice breaks the quiet, low and rumbling. “You shouldn’t be alive.”
“Neither should you.”
He smiles then. Barely. Just a curl of lips sharp enough to glint. “Maybe that means something.”
“Maybe it means we’re lucky.”
He shakes his head slowly. “Luck doesn’t bind souls.”
I don’t know what that means, and I don’t ask. I just turn my face toward the warmth, close my eyes again, and pretend, for one fragile moment, that the war outside these walls doesn’t exist.
That the monster in the corner isn’t one at all.
And that maybe neither of us were supposed to die tonight.