Chapter 36
Selena
Something was different.
I sat up slowly, sheets pooling at my waist, and reached inward before I reached for anything else. Habit. Instinct. The same way I’d taken stock of my bonds every morning since Xylo first wove his thread through my consciousness—check the web, feel for damage, count the lights.
All present. All steady. Neon-green for Kaede, bright and burning near. Crimson for Zyxel, warm and watchful somewhere deeper in the ship. The distant threads stretched thin across the galaxy—teal, pale green, jade, and turquoise—my Circuli mates, each one a faint pulse that said still alive.
And then the new one.
Emerald.
Ryzen’s thread wasn’t like the others. My mates’ bonds sat in my mental architecture like windows with doors—openings I could widen or narrow, shutters I could close when I needed quiet.
Manageable. Familiar. I’d learned to live with them the way you learn to live with extra rooms in a house you’re still furnishing.
His was a wall knocked out entirely.
Not a window. Not a door. A structural change—wider, thicker, reinforced at the edges with something that felt less like thread and more like root system.
Emerald light burned against my mental shields brighter than anything else in the web, and when I focused on it, the connection hummed with a depth that made my breath catch.
Soul-braid. That’s what he’d called it. I was starting to understand why his people feared it.
Through the bond, I felt him. Not his thoughts—not yet, not clearly—but his presence, dense and searching. He was poking at the connection the way someone prods a bruise to test the damage. Careful. Confused. Mapping the boundaries of something neither of us had a manual for.
I pulled back gently. Gave him room.
He’d spent three centuries behind walls that didn’t exist anymore. The least I could do was let him figure out where the new ones were.
Kaede sat in the chair across the room. Same chair he’d been in when I fell asleep. Same chair he’d probably occupied all night, because Kaede didn’t sleep when he was processing, and I’d given him a lot to process.
Ryzen stood at the far wall, dressed now—pants, vest, the long dark hair tied back with something that looked improvised.
He glanced at me when I shifted, and the bond pulsed.
Recognition. Uncertainty. The particular awkwardness of a male who’d shared his soul with someone almost eighteen hours ago and wasn’t sure what the morning-after protocol looked like.
Fair enough. I wasn’t entirely sure either.
My stomach settled the question for all of us.
The growl that ripped through the quiet was loud enough to echo off the sparse walls. Not a polite rumble. A demand—deep, angry, the kind of sound that belonged in a docking bay, not a bedroom.
Both males looked at me.
Kaede’s eyebrow lifted a fraction. Ryzen’s expression shifted into something that might have been alarm—hard to tell with a Verya, but the bond carried a spike of genuine concern, as if he thought the noise had come from something more dangerous than an empty stomach.
“It’s hunger,” I said flatly. “Not a hull breach.”
I reached for the living suit disk on the bedside surface—Kaede had placed it there, because of course he had, because even furious and processing and sitting vigil in a chair all night, he’d still made sure my things were within reach.
I pressed my thumb against the smooth center and felt the familiar hum as the biosuit activated, crawling up from the contact point in a wave of dark fabric that sealed around my body like a second skin.
I stretched. Rolled my shoulders. Tested the fit. My daughter shifted inside me—a flutter, faint but present—and I pressed a hand to my stomach.
Hungry. Both of us.
I turned to Ryzen. He was watching me with that careful, searching look he’d worn since the bond settled—like he was seeing a version of me he hadn’t had access to before and was still deciding how to catalogue it.
“We can figure out the details later.” I kept my voice steady. Warm, but not pushing. “Training. Instructions. How the spirit daggers work. All of it.” My stomach growled again—shorter this time, impatient. “For now, I need food.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—Ryzen didn’t smile easily—but the tension in his jaw loosened, and through the bond I felt a thread of relief so sharp it bordered on gratitude.
He’d been bracing for regret. For recrimination. For the morning-after conversation where the weight of what they’d done crashed down and someone started looking for an exit.
I wouldn’t give him that. What we’d built last night wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice—mine and his—and I’d carry it forward the way I carried every thread in my web.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For what you gave me.”
The emerald bond pulsed. Steady. Warm.
He inclined his head. Said nothing. But the bond said enough.
Kaede’s hand found the small of my back before I’d fully cleared the doorframe.
Not a request. Not a guide. A claim—firm, warm, deliberate—his fingers splayed wide against the base of my spine as he steered me into the corridor. Possessive in the quiet, practiced way that was so fundamentally Kaede I could have identified the touch blindfolded in a crowd of a thousand males.
I let him.
The Abyss hummed around us—engines, ventilation, the deep-space vibration that had become white noise over three days of travel.
The corridor was empty at this hour, grey walls and recessed lighting stretching ahead toward the mess hall, and our footsteps fell into a rhythm that should have felt comfortable.
It didn’t.
Kaede’s silence had texture. Weight. I’d spent enough years with this male to read the difference between his thinking-quiet and his processing-quiet, and this was the latter—the kind of silence that meant gears were turning behind those golden eyes, churning through something he hadn’t decided how to articulate yet.
He wasn’t angry. I’d felt his anger through the bond before, and it burned clean and sharp, a psyblade with a clear edge. This was murkier. Complicated. The particular turmoil of a male who understood the strategic logic of what I’d done and hated that the logic was necessary.
I didn’t push.
Kaede processed in his own time, at his own pace, and the worst thing I could do was force a conversation he wasn’t ready for. He’d come to me when he’d shaped his thoughts into something that wouldn’t cut us both. That was how he worked. That was how we worked.
Food first. Feelings later. His daughter was demanding tribute, and she had her father’s patience for delays—which was to say, none at all.
The mess hall was functional and sparse—long tables, integrated food stations, the kind of utilitarian design that prioritized efficiency over atmosphere. I didn’t care. I would have eaten off the floor at this point.
I loaded a tray with everything that looked edible and didn’t stop until the surface was full.
Protein. Grains. Something fruit-adjacent that smelled sweet enough to make my mouth water.
A second cup of the floral tea Zyxel had been pushing on me, because my body had apparently decided it was now a requirement rather than a suggestion.
Kaede sat across from me. Watched me eat the way he watched everything—cataloguing, assessing, calculating variables I probably didn’t want to know about.
I was halfway through my second plate when he spoke.
“We arrive at the CEG Space Station by dinner.”
My fork paused. Not quite a freeze—more a recalibration, the mental equivalent of slamming to a halt on a road I’d been coasting down.
“That soon?”
“That soon.” His voice was even. Controlled. The commander surfacing through the mate, the way it always did when the mission closed in. “You need to be ready. Rested. Dressed properly.” Those neon-green eyes pinned me—steady, unyielding, sharp enough to cut. “No more surprise bondings.”
I set my fork down.
There it was. Not the explosion I’d braced for—Kaede didn’t explode. He delivered. Precise, quiet, lethal with his aim, and that single sentence carried every ounce of what he’d been chewing on since last night.
I could have defended myself. Could have laid out the tactical reasoning—the spirit daggers, the gap between attack and aid, the weapon no one could strip from me. He already knew all of it. Vowels would have explained. Ryzen would have confirmed.
So instead I met his eyes and gave him the only thing he actually needed.
“I should have told you first.”
His jaw tightened. A muscle jumped beneath the sharp line of his cheekbone.
“Yes.” One word. Loaded with everything he wasn’t saying. “You should have.”
I held his gaze. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t excuse. “I’m sorry.”
The mess hall hummed around us—the ambient noise of a warship in transit, crew moving in distant corridors, the ventilation cycling recycled air that tasted faintly metallic. Between us, the golden-neon-green thread burned. Bright. Steady. Bruised at the edges, but not broken.
Never broken.
Kaede exhaled through his nose. Slow. Deliberate. Then he picked up his own cup and drank—a motion that looked casual and wasn’t.
“Eat,” he said. “You need your strength for what’s coming.”
Not forgiveness. Not yet. But the absence of escalation, which from Kaede was practically a peace offering.
I picked up my fork and finished my meal.
By the time I pushed my tray back, the restless edge in my chest had quieted.
Not gone. The worry was still there—the CEG, the Verya, the battle with the Quaww we were walking into with our eyes open. But underneath the worry, something new.
Steadiness.
I reached inward. Counted the threads. Distant but present, each one a star in the constellation I carried inside my chest. And now emerald, burning bright against my mental walls.
Larger than the others. Different. A bond forged in desperation and sealed in something that might, given time and survival, become more.
A new thread. A new weapon.
One more piece of my constellation had clicked into place.
Now I just had to figure out how to use it—before the Verya used me.