Chapter 22
KELSEA
The warehouse is colder than I expected.
It creaks when the wind cuts through the metal slats—long, high groans that echo like ghosts caught in rust. Every time I try to shut my eyes, that sound creeps under my skin, makes my heart skip like it’s waiting for footsteps behind it.
But there’s nothing. Just wind. Just silence.
Just the hollow cough of a building that forgot how to be lived in.
Roja’s across the room, near the freight doors. He hasn’t spoken in a while, just paces like he’s counting something invisible. Every so often, I see him glance toward the exit, eyes sharp, body wired like he’s already halfway to bolting.
I wish I had that kind of stillness. But my mind’s on a loop.
The projection feed flickers on my wristpad. No matter how many times I scroll, it keeps snapping back to the same headlines. Same shaky footage. Same Coalition news faces plastered across every sector net.
“Cleric Vasso denies charges amid mounting evidence.”
“Anonymous sources reveal fugitive human’s past…”
And there it is. My name. My real name. Broadcast in every language across ten systems. I hear it in my head now, not in Roja’s voice, not in Ceera’s, but in the cold clipped tone of a news anchor reading it off a script like I’m a case file.
I pull my knees up tighter and try to focus on the dust drifting through the shafts of pale light overhead. Tiny motes floating in silence. They move like time is syrup. Like the world’s still turning out there, but we’re paused. Waiting to see which door gets kicked in first.
“You’re not sleeping.”
Roja’s voice cuts through the static in my head. Low. Careful.
“No shit.”
He doesn’t laugh. Just crosses the space and crouches beside me, his frame casting a long shadow over my legs. He smells like old metal and ozone and the faint bite of whatever blade polish he uses. Sharp. Grounded.
“They're not looking here,” he says.
“Not yet.”
He watches me a second. Doesn’t press. Doesn’t feed me hollow comfort.
Then he shifts, pulls a threadbare blanket from the pile and hands it over. “Floor’s gonna eat your warmth. Use it.”
I hesitate. Then take it. My fingers graze his. He doesn’t pull away.
“You saw it?” I ask, voice thin.
He nods.
“They’re twisting everything. Like it’s all some political stunt.”
He doesn’t correct me.
“They’re saying the data is fake,” I whisper, reading the scrolling text. “Because we sent it anonymously. They’re claiming I fabricated the logs to cover my tracks.”
His eyes flick, hard.
“It’s a stall tactic.”
“It’s working, Roja. They’re making me the villain so they can ignore the evidence. Without a verified witness, the tribunal is going to toss the whole file.”
I look up at him.
“We stayed in the shadows to stay safe, but the shadows are killing the truth.”
Roja doesn’t answer immediately, but his jaw tightens. He looks at the screen, then at me, a heavy calculation shifting behind his eyes.
“Truth needs a face,” he murmurs, more to himself than me.
I want to believe him. I want to. But my stomach’s tight. My mouth tastes like rust.
“Do you think it was someone from the camp?” I ask.
He looks away. “Could be anyone. Anyone who ever saw you as leverage.”
I nod, slow. Then add, quieter, “You ever think we should’ve just run?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Then he looks back, and his voice is like gravel soaked in regret. “We did run. This is what running looks like when you stop turning your back.”
I don’t cry. I’m done crying. But my chest aches like I have.
I pull the blanket tighter. The warehouse hums as the wind picks up again, moaning through cracked vents. I shut my eyes and try to count my breaths.
One.
Two.
But the screen keeps flickering behind my lids. My name. My face. My mother’s case number in the corner of a leaked document, redacted and stamped with a file number I thought no one remembered.
Anonymous insiders.
Cowards.
Or people I trusted.
I curl tighter, and this time when Roja moves, he sits beside me fully, back against the wall, shoulder brushing mine.
“We’re not done,” he says.
“No. We’re just getting started.”
Bravado is easy to give lip service to. But the grim reality of my situation soon presses in. My face is everywhere now.
I don’t mean that in the poetic sense—I mean literally.
On every screen, every corner vid-loop, every damn projection billboard that hasn’t been bricked by protestors or blacked out by the grid riots.
It's my face. My eyes. That clip from two weeks ago, walking out of the casino, caught on a grainy aerial shot with Roja close behind.
Paused. Enlarged. Repeated like a war chant.
The headlines are worse.
“Companion-Turned-Assassin Linked to High-Profile Leak”
“Fugitive Human Identified in Cleric Scandal Fallout”
“Terrorist? Or Symbol of Resistance?”
They can’t agree on what I am. Some want me buried. Some want me canonized. Most want me gone.
Roja thinks it’s strategic. “They don’t know how to spin you, so they’re throwing every angle at the wall. One’ll stick eventually.”
But what happens when they all stick?
I pace the length of the warehouse, boots thudding against cracked cement, my own breath sounding too loud in the wide-open air. The cold bites my arms, even through my sleeves. The metal beams overhead groan again, like the building’s tired of holding itself up.
I glance at the wristpad I’ve shut off five times already. Turn it back on. Bad habit. Same result.
My face.
The old registry photo. Straight hair, stiff shoulders, dead eyes. Taken the first day I was tagged as a “low-utility ward.” Back when I thought they were just words. Designations. Not sentences.
Now it’s being used like evidence. Like prophecy.
“You good?” Roja asks from the far corner. He’s kneeling by the emergency rations, checking packs with methodical fingers.
I snort. “Define good.”
“Not twitching.”
“Then yeah. Golden.”
He nods, doesn’t push. That’s one of the things I’ve learned about him—he only asks what he’s ready to hear.
I stop by the rusted bay door. There’s a crack near the top that lets in a spear of light. Dust dances in it, lazy and soft. The kind of light that would’ve been pretty if I wasn’t stuck here like a ghost in someone else’s story.
“I used to think if I got my name back, it’d mean something,” I say quietly. “That reclaiming it would make me real again.”
He looks up. Waits.
“But now they’ve got it. All of it. My history, my face, my voice. And I feel less real than I ever did.”
He stands, walks toward me slow. “You’re real to me.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It has to be.”
I laugh, and it breaks something loose in my chest. “They called me an assassin, Roja. Do you know what that word means in their language?”
He’s quiet.
“It means tool. Used and discarded. No face. No will.”
“Then they’re wrong.”
“Are they?” My voice climbs. I hate it, but I can’t stop. “They’re saying I used you. That I turned you. That I seduced you and planted everything.”
“I know what you did.”
“Do you?”
He steps in close, eyes dark. “Yeah. I do.”
And just like that, I’m quiet again. My throat closes. There’s nothing else to say, because I know he means it. But the rest of me—whatever’s left of me—can’t accept that so easy.
I turn away, staring at the wall, fingers curling into fists.
“I’m not a Companion anymore,” I murmur. “I’m not a rebel. I’m not a ghost. I’m not anything.”
Roja doesn’t speak. Just steps behind me, close enough I can feel his heat in the cold.
“You’re Kelsea,” he says finally. “And they’re terrified of what that means.”
I shut my eyes. Try to hold onto that.
Try to believe it matters.
Roja tells me we’ve got maybe a day.
“Maybe less,” he mutters, spoon halfway to his mouth, not looking up from the data he’s scrolling through with his other hand. His voice is low, almost flat, but the undertone—the tight edge in his throat—gives it away. He’s not guessing. He’s planning for the worst. He always is.
The food is tasteless. Dry ration paste, barely rehydrated, clings to the roof of my mouth like chalk and regret.
I chew slowly, forcing it down, more out of discipline than hunger.
Neither of us has much of an appetite, but we eat because we have to.
Because not eating is another way to give up, and we’re not there yet. Not quite.
The silence between us stretches. Not cold. Just full. Full of what we’ve seen, what we know, what’s coming.
I want to say something that matters. Something big. Something that’ll cut through the fog and stick in the air between us like a flag we can hold onto when everything goes to shit.
But I don’t.
Instead, I move. Quiet. Smooth. I cross the cracked warehouse floor and sit beside him. Shoulder to shoulder.
Roja doesn’t shift. Doesn’t flinch. He just lets the screen light flicker across both our faces. The vid feed still runs, sputtering through the news cycles like they’re trying to fill every second with noise so no one has to think too long.
The cleric’s face flashes on screen—gray and sweaty, defiant under pressure. Denying. Evading. Failing.
Then the footage flips to another angle. Protesters flooding the outer zones. Alliance officials making tight-lipped statements. Coalition press trying to spin it all like it’s a one-off breach instead of a systemic rot.
And me.
Always me.
My face, my name, my voice stripped into a soundbite, a symbol. They don’t care who I am. Just what I represent.
The screen buzzes faintly. Hums like a dying breath. I can feel the tension in Roja’s body beside me—coiled like a spring, waiting for something to snap.
He’s always waiting.
I glance over. “Think they’ll hit us tonight?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His eyes stay fixed on the scrolling news feed.
“If I were them,” he finally says, “I’d come in right before dawn. Just enough time to catch us between sleep and instinct.”
My stomach tightens.
“So we don’t sleep,” I murmur.
Roja shakes his head, slow. “We’ll sleep. Just not deep.”
I nod, not because I agree, but because there’s nothing left to argue. My throat’s tight again. Too many words stuck in there, clogging up whatever I should be saying.
Instead, I reach forward, turn the screen down a few notches. The colors dim. The voices quiet. The light softens to something almost tolerable.
He looks at me. Finally. Long enough that I see the edges of tired pulling at the corners of his eyes.
“Don’t disappear on me,” I say.
His brow furrows. “I’m right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
Another silence. This one heavier.
He leans back against the wall, shoulders sagging just enough to show me the weight he’s carrying too.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
And then—just like that—the power cuts.
Not dramatic. No sparks. Just a soft flicker and then black.
The hum dies.
The screen fades.
The world goes still.
And in that stillness, with the dark closing in and his warmth next to mine, I finally breathe.