Chapter 10 NADINE
I stayed angry on purpose. Anger kept me sharp. Kept me from spiraling back into the moment his hand had brushed my cheek, recalling the impossible electricity of it, the way my body had reacted before my mind could stop it. Anger was safer.
I paced the cabin once more before dropping onto the low seating and pulling the palmtop back into my hands. If I was going to be trapped here, then I was going to use the time. I resumed my research on the Arkhevari.
I filtered the archives, stripping away anything poetic, anything devotional, anything that smelled like reverence instead of data. What remained was… unsettling.
According to the archives, they were the oldest beings recorded.
The creators of life. Creators. The word alone made something behind my eyes tighten painfully.
That was theology. Myth. Origin-story propaganda civilizations told themselves when they lacked data.
Except this wasn't a myth. This was a cross-referenced, multi-civilizational record.
Converging accounts. Independent systems agreeing on the same impossible claim.
It made my head hurt. Not metaphorically. Physically. Like my brain was trying to compress incompatible datasets into the same storage space and overheating in the process.
Creators of life.
Which dragged me right back to the god problem. I didn't want to consider that. I didn't even want to use the word. God implied intent. Design. Omniscience. Moral architecture. Dravok was arrogant. Controlled. Dangerous. Yes. But he wasn't omniscient.
But he was in your head.
The memory hit hard enough that I had to brace myself against the console.
He hadn't just influenced me. He had overridden me.
My muscles had responded before I had agreed.
My thoughts had softened at his insistence.
He had wrapped calm around my anger as if it were something he was entitled to manage. My stomach twisted.
That wasn't divinity. That was power.
And power without consent was violation. Anger flared again, hot and stabilizing. He abducted me. He removed me from the emperor's ship. He decided what was too dangerous for me. He made me move. And if he could make me walk… what else could he make me do?
Speak secrets?
Trust him?
Stand down in the middle of a fight?
Agree to something I would never agree to under my own will?
The thought sent a cold ripple through me.
Because there had been a moment—a microscopic, traitorous second—where his presence hadn't felt entirely wrong. It had felt… steady. Like gravity. Predictable. Anchoring.
My pulse spiked.
No.
That was a stress response. Evolutionary wiring interpreting proximity to strength as safety.
Adrenaline seeking stabilization. It was not attraction.
It was not comfort. It was certainly not desire.
I swore under my breath, furious at myself.
He does not get to hijack my nervous system and then benefit from it.
He is not a god. He is not a cosmic inevitability.
He is an alien with abilities I do not yet understand.
That distinction mattered. Because if it was an ability…
it had mechanics. And if it had mechanics…
It could be studied. Disassembled. Explained.
Even if the explanation currently refused to fit into any category my brain recognized.
That was the part that hurt. It wasn't that it defied logic.
It was that it existed outside my framework.
Like discovering a new fundamental force that didn't slot into gravity, electromagnetism, or strong or weak interaction—it was just…
there. Operating. Measurable in effect but invisible in cause.
A thing that shouldn't exist. Yet did. If the archives were correct—if beings like him had shaped life itself—then maybe the god question wasn't about worship.
Maybe it was about scale. And scale did not equal divinity.
It meant older physics. Physics I didn't understand yet.
My head throbbed harder.
Because if he wasn't lying—if something about that black hole wasn't just a singularity—then I wasn't dealing with mythology.
I was dealing with incomplete cosmology.
And incomplete cosmology was far more terrifying.
Not because it meant gods were real. But because it meant my equations were missing something fundamental.
Which made Dravok's precision even more disturbing.
He wasn't powerful because he broke rules.
He was powerful because he understood where the rules thinned.
I set that aside and pulled up another folder, older, buried deeper.
Ceceaux Seris again. I brought up the files I had previously dismissed.
Wondering if they would look different this time.
Seris had started cataloguing anomalies near singularities, patterns that repeated when they shouldn't, fluctuations that aligned too neatly with external variables.
He'd proposed that black holes weren't merely endpoints, but accumulators.
That information—real information, not just energy—didn't vanish.
When I first read it, I rolled my eyes.
Now I pulled up my own data. Readings I'd taken before Dravok arrived. Spikes I'd flagged as noise. Rhythmic distortions I'd written off as instrumentation error because they violated too many known constraints.
I overlaid Seris' models on top of my scans. The alignment made my breath catch. Not perfect. But close enough to matter. Slowly, I leaned back, staring at the hovering projections as unease settled in my chest.
No. Not proof.
But… correlation.
I closed my eyes and exhaled through my nose.
If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains—however improbable—has to be the truth.
I'd always treated that line like a clever joke, something to toss out when logic cornered a problem.
This time, it felt less amusing. I didn't like what it implied.
Telepathy was impossible. Gods were impossible.
A conscious abyss was impossible. And yet—
I opened my eyes again.
If I dismissed the improbable simply because it made me uncomfortable, then I wasn't doing science.
I was protecting my assumptions. That realization irritated me almost as much as Dravok did.
I set the palmtop aside and stood, suddenly too restless to sit.
The cabin extended beyond the main room into a private bathing chamber, and I hadn't explored it yet.
Since I needed to stop thinking for a moment, I decided to check it out.
The bathroom was… ridiculous. Smooth stone-like surfaces that warmed under bare feet.
Water that fell in a perfectly calibrated sheet instead of droplets, adjusting temperature before it even touched skin.
Light that shifted subtly, based on posture and pulse, responding as if the room itself was paying attention.
I stripped and stepped into the water, letting it wash over me, grounding myself in sensation that was entirely, indisputably real.
Not myth.
Not manipulation.
Just heat. Pressure. Gravity.
Think, Nadine.
Dravok could be wrong.
Or—
He could be right.
I rested my forehead briefly against the cool stone wall, let the water cascade around me.
I didn't trust him. More to the point, I wasn't ready to believe him.
But for the first time since he'd dragged me onto this ship, I had to admit something that unsettled me deeply: I could no longer dismiss him outright.
Which meant the universe was about to get a lot more complicated.
Which, annoyingly, was exactly where I did my best work.
The water shut off with a soft sigh, leaving the room warm and faintly scented with something clean and unfamiliar. I stood there longer than necessary, letting the last of the heat bleed out of my skin. Until reality caught up. I had nothing.
No change of clothes. No soap of my own. No moisturizer. No toothbrush. Not even the emergency stash I always kept in my bag, a habit of mine that survived the fall of Earth.
Grinding my teeth, I reached for the pile of fabric I'd discarded earlier, then stopped. Why should I? Because he'd abducted me? Because he'd decided what was safe for me? Because he thought he could control everything—including me? No!
A thin, humorless smile pulled at my lips.
Let him deal with the consequences. I pushed the door open and stepped back into the main cabin.
And there he was. Sitting. Waiting. Leaning back with infuriating ease, one ankle resting on his knee, arms folded loosely as if this were his living room and not the site of my second kidnapping.
For half a second, his expression didn't change. Then it did. Subtle. Controlled. But I saw it. His gaze locked on me, then flicked away just a fraction too late. Heat crept up his neck, sharpening the line of his jaw. Good. That did it.
"I have nothing," I snapped, striding forward as if I were fully dressed.
"No clean clothes. No soap. No—anything.
" I spread my arms, deliberately, forcing him to either look or make it obvious he wasn't. "You dragged me onto this ship like a barbarian and didn't even give me five seconds to grab basic necessities. "
His brow furrowed. Just slightly. And there it was again, that flicker. Regret. As close to repentance as I suspected Dravok could manage.
"We'll remedy that," he promised.
I crossed my arms. He definitely looked away then. "You'll forgive me if I don't find your promises particularly reassuring right now."
"I know," he nodded. "But you have to trust me."
I let out a short, sharp laugh.
"The Abyss sensed me, didn't it?" I made exaggerated quotation marks in the air. "That's what you're saying. And it was just too dangerous for me back there."
"Yes."
"And I'm safe here with you?" I challenged.