Chapter 3
RHEA
Glass shatters. Flames lick the curtains.
My ears ring so loud, it’s like someone shoved a horn in each one and let loose the entire Martian Philharmonic.
One second I’m arguing with a seven-foot slab of red scales and secrets, and the next—I’m airborne.
Valtron’s arm is clamped around my waist like a hydraulic brace, his body a wall of muscle and heat between me and whatever the hell just turned my apartment into a war zone.
“What the—?!”
“Grenade,” he barks, already pivoting.
The impact rattled the floor hard enough to flip my compad across the room. It’s somewhere in the fire now, melting into expensive slag. The whole place is screaming—alarms, fire-suppression trying to kick in, my own pulse thudding in my throat like a war drum.
Valtron doesn’t wait for me to find my feet. He bodily lifts me, charges through the wreckage like we’re doing a stunt reel, and shoulder-slams the already cracked window frame. We explode onto the fire escape, metal groaning under the sudden weight.
That’s when I see it.
Clinging to the outside of the building like some kind of horror-movie wet dream is a thing with four legs, acid-spitting mandibles, and too many damn eyes.
“Oh sweet baby Nebula—what is that?!?”
“Contract-grade xeno-hunter. Class three.” Valtron doesn’t sound impressed. He launches us down two flights, gravity barely keeping pace with his speed. “They spit acid, track via thermal pheromones. Smart enough to climb, dumb enough to fight me.”
“THAT is not comforting!”
The creature screeches, mandibles flaring. One of its legs claws at the railing—melting it. I smell the acid before it hits. The reek of burning metal and something like scorched rotten eggs fills the air.
Valtron doesn’t slow down.
At the third-floor landing, he shoves me hard behind him. “Duck!”
I barely make it down when he pivots, lobs a mini gravity mine underhand like it’s a toy, and it sticks to the creature’s chest. One pulse later—it implodes.
No boom. No mess. Just a sickening crunch and a collapse of limbs as the thing folds in on itself and craters the fire escape platform.
Valtron grabs my hand. “Jump.”
“You’re INSANE!”
“Trust me.”
There’s that word again.
We fall.
Four stories is a lot longer than it looks. Time slows. Wind roars past my ears. My breath gets stuck in my throat. And just before I scream, the gravity mine on his belt pulses, sending out a ripple that deadens the fall like slamming into jello.
We hit the ground rolling. I come up coughing and bruised, but alive.
Not for long, though—not if the whine of oncoming engines means what I think it does.
Alliance security skimmers zip past, blue lights flashing, sirens warbling like they’re allergic to subtlety. One slows—scans us—and turns red.
“Crap,” I breathe.
Valtron snarls something in Vakutan. It sounds like someone gargling nails. Then he grabs my wrist again and yanks us into the nearest alley.
“We need wheels.”
A grav-bike hums to a halt near a noodle cart. Its owner—a guy maybe five feet tall soaking wet—is slurping soup. He blinks up at us. Doesn’t even get a word out.
Valtron punches him. Down he goes.
“Valtron!”
“What?” He straddles the bike, shoving wires around like he’s played this game before. “He’s lucky I didn’t rip his arm off.”
“Maybe you could TRY not being a psycho for FIVE minutes?” I hiss, hopping onto the back. My arms go around his waist before I can think about it.
He smirks. “You used to like that part.”
That. That right there. That flicker of his mouth, the hint of smug memory—him pressed against me, teeth scraping my neck, hands mapping me like I was a system he was trained to infiltrate. Heat surges up my spine, and not from the explosions.
“I must’ve had a head injury,” I mutter.
But I don’t let go.
The grav-bike roars beneath us, slicing through the night like it’s got somewhere better to be. Valtron leans into the turns like a man born in motion, and I cling to him like he’s the only stable thing left in my world—which, right now, might actually be true.
The city blurs past in neon streaks and gutter steam.
We dart between old construction rigs, collapsed overpasses, and gutted retail blocks that haven’t seen a customer since the last economy crash.
He’s heading west—deep into the decommissioned zones, where the lights don’t shine and the cameras haven’t worked in a decade.
"Where the hell are we going?" I shout over the engine.
"Someplace forgotten."
"You mean like your manners?!"
He doesn't laugh. He just punches the throttle and we shoot through a checkpoint gate that hasn't been sealed in years.
It creaks behind us like a warning. The deeper we go, the less human everything feels—hollow-eyed mannequins still posed in shattered window displays, ash-scars on brick walls from riots no one ever admitted happened.
Then trouble finds us again.
Two bounty hunters leap down from a broken billboard like vultures with better fashion sense—tight combat gear, armored chests, glowing rifles.
Valtron doesn’t brake.
He stands on the bike mid-ride, steering with one foot, and launches a dagger—straight between the eyes of the first one.
I scream.
The second bounty shouts something in a language I don’t know and fires. The bolt zips past us, misses, and fries a street lamp.
And a kid—maybe nine?—bolts out from behind a cart of old vending cores, right into the crossfire.
"Valtron!"
He sees it.
Jumps.
He flips off the bike mid-motion, grabs the kid, rolls across the asphalt as the laser sizzles past his shoulder. The grav-bike eats a wall and detonates in a neat little fireball that roasts the first bounty’s corpse for good measure.
I scramble up from the cracked pavement where I landed, heart in my throat.
The second hunter charges—his skin glitching. Not skin. Chrome. A cybernetic. Modified deep. Maybe ex-military, maybe not even born human.
He swings a plasma blade at Valtron.
Valtron catches it—with his claws.
They screech and spark, metal on metal. The hunter grins—until Valtron growls, twists the blade aside, and drives a scaled fist straight through his chest.
Cybernetics and spine bits fly.
I want to gag.
I don’t.
Because that same arm—bloody and torn—is the one he uses to cradle the kid.
The child’s crying. Mute sobs, hiccups, eyes wild.
“You’re alright,” Valtron murmurs, setting him down. “Stay low. Run that way. Don’t stop.”
The kid bolts.
I stare at him. At Valtron.
“You’re a one-man apocalypse.”
He glances at the twitching remains of the chrome assassin and shrugs. “They started it.”
The safehouse is a bunker squatting under what used to be a surveillance hub. Abandoned now, probably on purpose. It smells like rust and silence. The air’s thick with history—old sweat, oil, data cables rotting under dust.
Valtron scans the entry pad with his wristband. It beeps once and opens with a sigh like it’s exhaling its last breath.
Inside, he moves with the ease of someone who’s been here before. I hover near the door, arms crossed, nerves twitching. The walls are lined with faded mission maps, shredded datapads, and a disarmed rail cannon bolted into the ceiling like an ugly chandelier.
He gets to work setting up a perimeter field—small discs, magnetic, each one sparking with blue static as he places them.
I pace.
"You want to tell me how you found me?"
No answer.
"Or why you didn’t send anything after that night?"
Still nothing.
I snap. "You don’t get to show up two years later, kill a hit squad, throw me on a stolen bike, and act like this is normal. You don’t get to play hero without explaining why you ghosted me like a coward."
He doesn’t stop working. But I see his jaw flex.
"I thought you were dead,” I say, quieter. “I cried for you.”
"I didn’t ask you to."
“Goddammit, Valtron!”
He straightens, turns, and faces me.
“I knew you were special,” he says. “The second you called me a glory-hound in front of a senator.”
I blink.
“You remember that?”
“You were wearing that terrible purple dress. The one with the sleeves that kept falling down.”
“It was vintage,” I snap.
“It was slipping.”
I hurl a pillow from the couch. He catches it with one hand.
“You ever get tired of being right all the time?” I snap.
He lifts one brow. “No.”
The tension should snap. It should boil over or blow out.
But it doesn’t.
It hums.
Familiar.
Hot.
Like gravity’s pulling us in again, just like that night. Just like that mistake.
And I hate how much I want it.