Chapter 4 NADINE
I didn't understand why I was walking toward the conference room. No one had summoned me. No alert had sounded on my palmtop. I had been perfectly content on the observation deck, recalibrating sensors and arguing silently with equations that refused to behave. And then… pressure. A pull.
Like gravity had decided my will was no longer optional. It started as a dull ache behind my sternum, low and insistent, the kind of sensation that made no sense unless something was very wrong, or very right. My feet moved before my brain finished protesting, my path unthinking, inevitable.
Ridiculous.
I told myself it was stress. Adrenaline.
Proximity to the Dark Abyss. There were a dozen rational explanations, and I recited them like a mantra.
I kept my eyes focused on the palmtop, reading some of what Ceceaux Seris—Ceceaux, I'd learned, is a title indicating a most learned specialist/teacher in a field, like a professor—had written about what he had called the Dark Reach, while the doors to the conference room slid open. When my head lifted, I saw him.
God help me.
I had thought I'd acclimated to alien beauty.
Pandraxians were all brutal symmetry and controlled power.
Space Guardians looked like violence carved into flesh.
In order to remain as unaffected as possible, because honestly, being surrounded by these men twenty-four seven would turn even a nun into a nymphomaniac, I had catalogued it all, filed it away as biological variance plus cultural aesthetics. This man obliterated every category.
He was… chiseled. From head to toe. Not just muscular: engineered.
As if anatomy itself had been optimized and then sharpened for war.
His shoulders were impossibly broad, his waist narrow, his movements economical in a way that suggested he never wasted effort because he never had to.
His muscles had muscles. There were muscles that no human had ever even dreamed of.
His skin wasn't gold, exactly. It was something warmer.
Deeper. Like light filtered through ancient metal.
My breath stalled. I was still registering that when I noticed the flicker.
Something moved around him, not light, not shadow.
It shimmered and folded in on itself, dark red threaded with black veins, pulsing faintly as if alive.
Aura, my soul supplied.
No. My brain answered. Absolutely not.
Auras didn't exist. That was mysticism, not physics.
This had to be some kind of secondary dermal layer, an electromagnetic sheath, maybe a defensive adaptation…
yet I wanted to touch it. The urge startled me so badly that I actually curled my fingers into my palm to stop myself.
Get it together, Nadine. I was barely holding on; thankfully, Emperor Daryus chose that moment to acknowledge me.
"Oh—Doctor Phillips? Did you need something?"
All I could do was shake my head. If the emperor had been intimidating to me before, the man next to him felt like gravity had recalibrated around him.
"Dravok. This is Doctor Phillips, from Earth. She is assisting me in gathering data on the Dark Abyss," the emperor continued. "She's quite the expert in her field."
His words of praise brought me back to myself. Yes, that's what I was, an expert in my field. A doctor. Not a starstruck girly girl.
"Doctor Phillips," Daryus went on, "this is Dravok, one of the Arkhevari I told you about."
I was glad for his presence and the reminder. It was hard to take my eyes away from the Arkhevari. Dravok? Even the name sounded hard. It suited him. We stared at each other. Too long. Too intensely.
Suddenly, words poured out of him, "…thirty-two over nine… curvature collapse… don't extract yet…" he shook himself and added, "Sorry. "Oracle nonsense. It happens."
Whatever fragile equilibrium I'd managed to maintain was shattered.
His voice was low, edged with irritation and authority, pulling me back under his spell.
Until he dismissed what he just said as nonsense, that's when something in me recoiled.
I corrected him before I consciously decided to.
Those were not nonsense words as he had implied.
I couldn't have said why it felt important for me to correct him.
Maybe I felt I needed to show him that I wasn't just another soft, breakable human orbiting his gravity.
Even though I didn't understand why that mattered.
I didn't understand why my heart was racing, why heat pooled low in my abdomen, sharp and distracting, or why my body reacted as if proximity alone was a stimulus.
This had never happened before. I'd seen attractive men.
Slept with a few, once upon a time. Sex had always been…
secondary. Interesting, but hardly urgent.
A biological footnote compared to discovery, understanding, and the rush of solving something impossible. This was different. This was visceral.
I was acutely aware of my body in a way I hadn't been in years.
I noted how my nipples tightened, how my breath shallowed, and how my blood pulsed loudly in my ears.
My brain scrambled to overcompensate, firing explanations, corrections, and facts like a shield.
Because if I didn't think, I might feel.
I was deeply, profoundly afraid that one touch—one—would reduce me to something unrecognizable. The fear didn't make me step back. That surprised me most of all. I straightened, lifted my chin, and met his gaze with deliberate calm. If my body wanted to betray me, fine. My mind would not.
Why am I even in this hallway? That was my first coherent thought once the words left my mouth and I realized I'd just corrected an Arkhevari—one who radiated enough lethal confidence to make seasoned Pandraxian commanders step carefully. Too late now.
Dravok stared at me like I'd just violated several laws of nature.
Possibly all of them. His eyes—a dark onyx, some might have called them black, sharp, unnervingly intelligent—cut over my face as if trying to decide whether I was a statistical anomaly or a direct threat.
I resisted the urge to fidget. Stay calm.
Stay factual. Facts don't get you killed.
"You can decipher that?" he asked, flat and incredulous.
"Yes."
"That is Arkhevari cognition," he snapped. "Fragments pulled from a damaged Oracle mind."
I shrugged. It didn't matter where it came from, although the word Oracle made my teeth hurt. "Math is math. Trauma just makes it messy."
He narrowed his eyes, testing me. "Try again."
My lips curled. Was he challenging my mind?
I had a nearly photographic memory; my IQ had been tested multiple times since I was in kindergarten.
A hundred and fifty-two had been the latest reading.
A bit down from grade school, but then again, NASA hadn't been that demanding, and I had had the flu at the time. "Gladly."
More words exited his mouth, his very sexy mouth. Focus Nadine. "…event horizon drift… memory behaves like mass… extraction destabilizes the anchor…"
Was he kidding me? That was child's play.
"Your Oracle," I shuddered at the word, but that's what he had implied he believed the person saying those words was, "is telling you not to remove him yet," I replied calmly.
"He's functioning as a stabilizing node.
Pull him too early, and whatever they're probing will respond violently. "
He glared at me as if I'd just declared war on him. "That's impossible."
I couldn't help it, "I'm always right." Then I corrected myself quickly, remembering that I had been told on more than one occasion that it was impolite to brag.
"Statistically speaking." I tried to backpaddle.
"I'm wrong often enough to stay humble." Still, my ego couldn't let it rest there, and I had to add, "This just… isn't one of those times."
Because I knew I was right.
Emperor Daryus cleared his throat. "After Ceceaux Seris's death, no one stepped into his role," he explained. "His later discoveries regarding the Dark Abyss were… controversial, at best. Most deemed them unreliable."
I nodded slowly, totally agreeing with him.
I hadn't studied with the Pandraxians. I hadn't even known they existed until recently.
Everything I knew—everything I was—came from Earth.
From human institutions. Human assumptions.
Human blind spots. I'd learned physics in lecture halls that still argued over dark matter and gravitational constants, never once suspecting that an entire interstellar civilization had already mapped the edges of reality I was only beginning to question.
Names like Ceceaux Seris were familiar to them in ways they weren't to me.
Among the Pandraxians—and other spacefaring species—he had been considered foundational.
A mind whose early work shaped how entire generations understood stellar dynamics and gravitational systems. On Earth, he had been invisible.
I'd discovered his works only after coming to Astrionis, buried deep in translated archives, part of a body of knowledge human science had never brushed against. At first, I respected what I saw.
His early work was elegant, rigorous, and expansive without being speculative.
It pushed beyond anything I knew, not through mysticism, but through access to data, to tools, and to perspectives humanity simply didn't have yet.
His later writings were another matter. Those I had dismissed.
They spoke of a pull emanating from the Dark Abyss, not gravity, not mass, but something subtler.
Directional. Intentional. Most of the scientific community had dismissed them.
I'd written them off as the intellectual erosion of a brilliant mind stretched too far for too long, cataloged the deviation, and moved on.
Now, standing here, listening to the Emperor of the Pandraxian Empire explain why he had brought me across the stars, I felt a hollow shift settle in my chest.
When Daryus had summoned me, I'd assumed he wanted me to continue Seris' earlier work, the respectable work.
Refine it. Reframe it. Strip away the speculation and leave the math intact.
Now I was beginning to realize that wasn't what he wanted at all.
He wanted me to investigate what I'd written off as rambling.
Not his polished theories. Not his respected work.
But his fractured, half-mythic attempts to describe something that didn't want to be described at all.
That realization unsettled me far more than the Dark Abyss ever had.
A laugh threatened to escape before I could stop it. Not because it was funny. Because it was deeply, profoundly unsettling.
The silence began to stretch too long. Dravok was no longer looking at Daryus.
He was looking at me. Not the way people usually did—not with curiosity or appraisal—but as if he were recalculating something he had believed immutable.
His gaze never left me, but the weight of it felt different now, less like suspicion, more like recognition.
As if I'd finally said something that aligned with what he already knew.
"You dismissed Seris' later work," he said. It wasn't accusatory. It was factual.
"Yes," I agreed. "So did most of the Pandraxian scholars. So would any Earth-based scientist working with the data available at the time."
"Yet you don't dismiss it now."
I hesitated. His question landed deeper than I liked. "I'm… reconsidering it," I finally admitted carefully. "His later theories don't read like conclusions. They read like someone struggling to describe a phenomenon without the language or tools to define it."
Dravok inclined his head slightly. Approval, perhaps.
Daryus shifted his stance, arms folding behind his back. "You believe Ceceaux Seris was correct?" he asked me.
"I believe he may not have been wrong," I replied. "That's not the same thing."
Dravok snorted softly. "He was closer than you think."
That snapped my attention back to him. "You believe the Abyss can do what he suggested."
"I know it can," Dravok replied.
The certainty in his voice sent a chill through me.
Not because it was dramatic, but because it was unembellished.
He wasn't theorizing. He was recalling an experience.
Raising my curiosity. About him. About the Dark Abyss.
He might know more about it than any other living being, and that alone made him irresistible to me—even without the strong sexual attraction I felt for him.
Daryus looked between us. "You speak as if this is a settled fact."
"For the Arkhevari, it is," Dravok nodded. "The Abyss does not merely consume. It influences. It remembers. It responds."
I shook my head slowly. "I wouldn't go that far. Not yet."
Dravok's eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in focus. "You don't have to. You only need to acknowledge that Seris was observing something real."
I swallowed.
"That's… possible." I could concede that much. "And if Nythor's fragments align with his later models, then Seris wasn't losing coherence. He was encountering data that didn't fit existing frameworks."
"Exactly," Dravok agreed. "And frameworks break before truth does."
Daryus remained silent, absorbing it all; his expression stayed unreadable.
"So, we have an Arkhevari who believes the Abyss is an active force, a human who believes an old scholar may have been ahead of his time, and a missing Oracle speaking in fragments that no one but Doctor Phillips can interpret.
" He looked at me. "You are claiming certainty? "
"No," I corrected quickly. "I'm claiming uncertainty that deserves investigation."
Dravok's mouth curved slightly. "That is more dangerous than belief."
My pulse kicked.
"Because uncertainty invites proximity," he continued. "And proximity invites consequence."
Daryus exhaled slowly. "Then we proceed carefully."
Dravok turned to him. "I proceed regardless."
Their eyes locked. I suddenly understood something that made my stomach tighten: Dravok wasn't trying to convince anyone. He never had been. He was warning us. And I was standing at the edge of the same precipice Ceceaux Seris had once stared into, only now, the Abyss was staring back.