Chapter 20
KELSEA
The moment my fingers hit the keys, the room shifts. Like the walls know what we’re doing. Like the floor itself might rat us out.
Ceera’s system is a cobbled mess of parts from at least three decades, all buzzing like hornets drunk on battery acid.
The terminal’s screen flickers with every pulse of the rig’s overheating coil.
My mouth’s dry. My heart hammers like a stim spike gone sideways.
I glance up and catch Roja watching me—his eyes burning red, calm like a storm’s eye.
“You got this?” Ceera asks around a half-smoked stim. She’s lounging like it’s nothing, but I see the tightness in her jaw, the way she taps her thigh too fast.
“No. But I’m doing it anyway.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel.
The files are ready. Thousands of lines of data—transaction logs, falsified records, forged identity backdoors, communication threads laced with Coalition clearance codes. Evidence of the bribe, the cover-up, the cleric’s Alliance whispers. My name, tied to it all like a noose.
I drag the packet into the broadcast queue. “We sure it hits everything?”
Ceera leans over my shoulder, taps a line of code. “Darknet nodes, embassy slush lines, even some dead AI archives that auto-dump into local feeds. This hits clean, dirty, and everything in between.”
Roja shifts behind me. “Do it.”
I press SEND.
The screen stalls—one frozen breath—and then lights erupt like fireworks across a void. Node after node unlocks. Transmission pathways light up. One feed, then ten, then fifty, then two hundred. My heart lurches.
Ceera lets out a slow whistle. “And boom goes the truth.”
Onscreen, info scrolls faster than I can track.
Bribery trails tying the Coalition cleric to a hidden Alliance account.
Message fragments showing my name flagged for ‘removal.’ Secret tribunal logs that never should’ve been recorded.
Ceera’s rig pings with mirror uploads from other terminals. People are already sharing it.
Roja comes up beside me, arms crossed, gaze locked on the cascade of data. “It’s done.”
I laugh—a raw, broken thing. “No. It’s just started.”
Ceera jerks her head toward her compad, which is vibrating like it’s gonna shake off the table. “Shit. That’s the node echo. We’re trending across twelve major sectors already. Somebody’s already slicing it into digestible soundbites. Look.”
She flips the screen—there it is. A holo of the Coalition cleric, frozen mid-smile, while text scrolls below him: ‘Jark Cleric Tied to Alliance Black Fund’.
I’m shaking. Every part of me is heat and adrenaline and cold, raw fear. “It’s working.”
Roja grunts. “It’ll make them desperate.”
“Let them come,” I snap. “They’ve already tried to destroy me once.”
I turn to Ceera. “Do we have eyes outside?”
She hits another key. A grainy security feed pops up. Outside, the front alley’s full—reporters, protestors, two Coalition guards standing there like their boots are glued to the concrete. They’re frozen, reading something on their units. A drone buzzes overhead.
“Looks like the world just woke up,” Ceera says.
I can’t feel my legs. I sit, hard, on the edge of the rig’s crate bench. My hands curl into fists in my lap. “I thought I’d be more scared.”
Roja places a hand on my shoulder. Heavy. Warm. Anchoring. “You did the right thing.”
I blink up at him. “Even if it gets me killed?”
He leans in, low voice rumbling near my ear. “Not on my watch.”
My throat tightens. I nod, once. He means it. Gods help anyone who tries me now.
Ceera throws up her hands. “Alright, lovebirds, before this turns into a touching death pact, we need to prep for backlash. You lit up half the sector. That means friends and enemies.”
“What do we do?” I ask, already pushing down panic.
“You stay put. I ghost this terminal, relocate the cache, bounce a few more pings off decoys so they don’t trace it back to here. Then we go dark. No comms. No feeds. Let the firestorm burn without giving them new fuel.”
“And us?” Roja asks.
She shrugs. “Depends. They might try to scrub you. Or flip it on you. But with this much light, someone up top’s gonna want a fall guy—and you’re not it.”
I wipe my palms on my thighs. They’re slick with sweat. “I just… I want to breathe without looking over my shoulder.”
“You will,” Roja says.
I look at him, and something in me steadies. Not all the way. But enough.
Ceera’s rig beeps again—hard. She jolts. “They’re trying to throttle the node feeds. Some Coalition netcrawlers just spiked the data walls.”
“Can you block them?” I ask.
“I already rerouted the backbone. They’ll waste hours chasing ghosts.”
Roja’s already moving. He snatches my coat from the hook. “We don’t wait. We move.”
I take it, fingers fumbling the zipper. “Where?”
“A friend. Off-grid. We’ll lay low while this burns hot. Let them choke on the truth.”
Ceera’s typing furiously. “Go. I’ll clean up. Meet me at fallback three tomorrow night.”
Roja nods. “Good work.”
Ceera grins around her stim. “Damn right it is. Now get your human out of my nest.”
I squeeze her arm as we pass. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. If they find this place, I’m joining you in exile.”
I don’t look back. Roja’s hand finds mine as we slip into the hallway, tension curling around us like a second skin. The night outside’s gone loud—sirens, shouting, the hum of surveillance drones cutting the air into electric threads.
But I’m walking free.
For the first time since I burned the man who bought me, I feel the weight shift. Not gone. But shared.
And gods help them all, because I’m not hiding anymore.
It starts with silence.
The kind that creeps into your bones and sits there, cold and mean. No club thump from the Coil. No screeching laughter echoing down the alley. Just a brittle, awful stillness like the city’s holding its breath, waiting to see which way the hammer falls.
I pace Ceera’s fallback safehouse—third-floor walkup over a noodle shop that smells like burnt garlic and desperation.
My boots creak against the warped floorboards.
Roja sits by the window, red eyes fixed on the street below, where protestors ripple like a tide outside the admin buildings. They’ve got signs. Fire. Rage.
But no one’s come to arrest us. Not yet.
“You see anything?” I ask.
Roja’s tail flicks once. “Three more drones since this morning. One circled twice.”
I stop, heart thudding. “Military?”
“Too shiny. Admin-grade. But they’re listening.”
He doesn’t turn his head when he says it. Doesn’t need to. His voice is gravel-wrapped steel—low, steady, the way only someone used to being hunted can manage.
I wrap my arms around myself, fingers digging into the edges of my scarf. I haven’t taken it off since we ran. It smells like him now—smoke and heat and something darker. Not blood. But close.
“They shut down the Coil,” I say, mostly to myself. “Said ‘structural code violations.’ Bullshit.”
“Standard tactic,” Roja murmurs. “Cut off the scene. Control the narrative.”
“Ceera’s pissed.”
“She’ll get over it. Or blow something up.”
I pace again. The apartment’s tiny—bare walls, two rooms, barely enough space for Roja’s frame. He sleeps sitting up, back against the wall, one claw always twitching like he’s dreaming of a blade. I don’t ask if he is.
Outside, the protest roars. Chants—fuzzy, indistinct, but angry. Signs flash across a rooftop feed: ‘No More Secrets.’ ‘Stop the Deportation Machine.’ ‘Coalition Lies.’
“Do you think they know it was me?” I whisper.
“They will.”
I spin on him. “That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
We stare at each other across the room. The air between us crackles with unsaid things—fear, fury, something that might be loyalty, but neither of us wants to name it yet.
Roja shifts, finally rising from his perch like a storm uncoiling. “They’ll wait to move until the fire burns low. Let the public lose focus. Then they’ll come.”
“So we just sit here? Like bait?”
“No,” he says, voice like thunder in a bottle. “We wait. We plan. And if they come—we don’t go quiet.”
My throat’s tight. I nod, but the fear doesn’t budge. It just digs in deeper, a stone lodged under my ribs.
Ceera bursts through the door like a thrown wrench. “They froze my accounts!” she snarls. “Those rat-licking bootlickers flagged every damn credline I got!”
Roja tilts his head. “Expected.”
“Oh, well that’s great. Maybe next you’ll tell me the sun’s hot and water’s wet.”
I sit on the cot, rubbing my temples. “How bad is it?”
Ceera paces, flinging her jacket down. “Bad. Half the feeds are calling me a terrorist sympathizer. The other half think I’m a hero. I got two dozen marriage proposals and a threat to skin my cat.”
“You don’t have a cat,” Roja says.
“Exactly!”
I laugh, sharp and surprised. It fades quick, though. The windows rattle with another overhead drone sweep. This one’s bigger. Louder. Ceera drops low without thinking. So do I.
Roja doesn’t move. Just watches.
“We can’t stay here,” I say, breath short.
“We don’t have a choice.”
“I feel like I’m gonna crawl out of my own skin.”
Ceera stands again, wiping her hands on her pants. “We need eyes on the building. You trust that guard friend of yours?”
Roja nods once. “He’s watching the back lot. No movements since sunrise.”
“And what if the admin dogs pull jurisdiction?”
“Then we burn that bridge,” Roja says. “And everything on the other side.”
The silence after that stretches too long.
I pull my legs up on the cot and stare at the ceiling. It’s stained and cracked, but it’s the only roof I’ve got.
“They’re gonna make me into a story,” I say.
“They already did,” Ceera replies.
Roja’s voice comes softer this time. “You flipped the script.”
I look at him. “For how long?”
No one answers. We lapse into silence. The lights outside flicker again, like the city’s nervous system is glitching.
Roja’s posted by the window, motionless except for the flick of his eyes tracking every shadow, every drone buzz, every face that doesn’t move like it belongs. His calm is unsettling. Not because it’s fake—but because it’s not.
I sit with my back against the peeling wall, knees pulled up, fingers fidgeting with the edge of my scarf like it’s some kind of anchor. The silence stretches too long. Ceera’s out. Roja made her take a burner route to check the fallback. It’s just us now.
“What happens,” I ask, “if we lose?”
Roja turns. Not fast. Just… deliberate. Like the question was expected. Like he’s already run the scenario in his head a hundred ways.
He studies me for a long beat. Then he says it, quiet but firm, like it’s carved in stone.
“Then we go down swinging. Together.”
Something in my chest tightens, but not the way it used to when I heard threats. It’s not fear. It’s… certainty. He’s not offering escape. Not pretending there’s some miracle fix. He’s just offering his presence. His fire. His fists.
And it’s enough.
I nod once. Slow. Then I push up from the floor and cross the tiny room. I kneel beside the crate in the corner—the one he never lets out of arm’s reach. He doesn’t stop me.
I flip the latch. Inside, steel gleams in the low light. Blades. Six of them, each with a name etched in a language I can’t read but somehow feel.
My hand hovers. I don’t know which one to pick. But one catches the light—sleek, curved, like it was made for a woman’s spine. I reach for it. Roja says nothing.
It’s heavier than I expect.
The moment my fingers close around the grip, my wrist dips under the weight. But it fits. Perfectly. Like it remembers me. Or wants to.
I hold it up. It smells like metal and oil and something older. Not blood. Not quite. Just… promise.
I don’t cry.
I don’t shake.
I just turn to Roja and say, “Teach me.”
His eyes flare, red catching in the dim light. Not surprised. Just… moved. In the way only a Grolgath can be—deep and slow, like tectonic plates shifting.
He walks over. Takes a knee beside me. Reaches out and curls my fingers tighter around the hilt.
“First rule,” he says. “It’s not about strength. It’s about will.”
I nod.
He adjusts my stance. My grip. My weight. He’s gentle, despite the bulk, the claws. Precise. He doesn’t touch more than needed, but every movement of his feels… reverent.
He steps back. “Now show me.”
I try. Swing. Awkward. Unbalanced.
He grunts. “Again.”
I do.
Again.
Again.
Until sweat beads under my collar and my arms ache and the blade doesn’t feel foreign anymore. It feels earned.
When I finally stop, he takes it from me, slides it back into its sheath with a soft shick.
“You’re not helpless,” he says.
“I know.”
He steps closer. Not looming—anchoring.
“We lose,” he says again, “we go down swinging.”
I look up at him. “Together.”
He nods.
And the word settles between us like a vow.