Serak
Aweek after the Consortium message, the mess hall smelled like Maris’s cooking.
She’d always cooked when the mood took her. Three days after Nexus, she’d stopped waiting for the mood.
Nobody had asked her to. She’d walked in, assessed the supplies, and put feeding this crew on a schedule.
Zevik said her curry was better than anything he’d eaten on six different stations. Solren said the nutritional profile was acceptable, which was Solren for delicious. Thoryn ate everything she put in front of him and didn’t say a word, which was how Thoryn said he loved her.
The Raptor was in open space.
No mission. No coordinates. No target.
Years of heading toward something or running from something or preparing for something. Now we were just flying.
The ship hummed and the stars moved and nobody was trying to kill us.
It was the strangest feeling I’d had in a decade.
The mess hall was nearly full. Eight people around the table, the same table where I’d spent the late watch for years, running assessments that never told me anything I didn’t already know.
One ship. Nine crew.
Not enough firepower. Not enough evidence. Not enough allies.
Turned out I’d been running the wrong assessment. It was never about enough. It was about the right people.
Ressh sat with Alix tucked against his side, his arm around her, her feet pulled up on the bench.
His traceries shifted in lazy patterns, bronze and gold, the settled glow of a bond that had nothing left to prove.
She was reading something on her datapad and occasionally showing him a line that made his mouth twitch.
They were building an intelligence network out of her old contacts and his charm. The galaxy’s most unlikely consulting firm.
Thoryn and Maris occupied the far end of the table. Maris talked supply routes, legitimate ones, and the trading network she was building from her old smuggling contacts.
She talked with her hands, gesturing at a datapad covered in route calculations and margin projections. Thoryn listened, nodded, occasionally pointed at a number that seemed wrong.
The gray still threaded through the emerald, permanent marks on permanent scales. He wore them without apology and without forgetting.
Zevik had his boots on the table. Solren pushed them off.
Zevik put them back. Solren pushed them off.
This had been happening every meal for as long as I could remember and neither of them showed any sign of resolution. It was, in its own way, the most stable relationship on the ship.
Deyric was in his corner with his console, running diagnostics on something. The engines, probably.
Or the sensor array. Or the entire ship’s operating system. He’d added three new monitoring protocols since Nexus and the Raptor had never run smoother.
His version of love was maintenance. The ship was the best-cared-for vessel in the sector because Deyric cared about it the way other people cared about partners.
I sat at the head of the table and watched them. My crew. My family.
The people who’d followed me through the obsession because they believed in what we were doing, or because they believed in me, or because they had nowhere else to go and that was the same thing, in the end, as choosing to stay.
Light pooled in the silver on my hands. I looked at them.
Light written into skin. The map of a bond I’d sworn I’d never have.
Jessa came in.
She’d been in the cargo bay, running an inventory of the supplies Maris had acquired at the last station.
She always ran inventories. Even when there was nothing urgent. Even when nobody asked.
Jessa’s knowing exactly what the ship had and what it needed was the foundation everything else was built on.
She went to the galley. Made two mugs.
She sat to my left. Set my mug in front of me.
I drank it without thanking her.
She opened her datapad. Fuel projections.
Same numbers as yesterday. She studied them like they’d say something new.
Then she looked at me.
“Still running assessments?” she asked.
“Different assessment.”
“What’s the conclusion?”
I looked at the crew around the table. At my hands. At her.
“The conclusion is that I don’t need to run it anymore.”
The corner of her mouth pulled. The same almost-smile from a hundred late watches, a thousand shared silences, all the late nights where we’d sat across from each other and pretended we didn’t know what was between us.
Except now I knew what that mouth tasted like and she knew what the light under my skin felt like beneath her fingers and the pretending was over.
She reached across the table and touched my hand. Her fingers on the traces, light and brief. I turned my hand over so our palms met.
She went back to her fuel projections. I went back to watching the crew.
We didn’t need to fill it. We never had.
My hands were steady on the table. Not dark. The silver traces caught the light when I reached for the mug.
She was not alone. Neither was I.