Chapter 13
RHEA
The shuttle door closes with a hiss and a lock-click that echoes louder than it should.
It sounds like the end of something.
Like a tomb sealing shut.
Like goodbye.
I stand in the observation corridor, hands trembling, watching the small craft disengage from the docking clamps. The beacon lights flash three times, and then it's just a shadow slipping into the dark beyond the viewport, swallowed by the silver-pink mist of Helix.
Valtron doesn’t look back.
He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I know that about him.
He walks toward death like it’s a lover who never broke his heart.
I press my palm flat to the glass, the cold leeching into my skin like a slow poison. I don't cry. I did that already. On the ship. In his arms. When he kissed me like I was something sacred and then tore my heart out by walking away.
He left the weight of the world in my hands and vanished into the black with nothing but a sliver of hope and a mission that smells like martyrdom.
Behind me, footsteps. Measured. Military.
Dowron.
He doesn’t speak at first. He’s good at that—letting the silence say the thing no one wants to.
“You did good,” he says finally. His voice is soft. Tired. “He’ll make it count.”
“He always does,” I murmur, not moving.
“He’s the best we ever had. That means we ask more of him than anyone.”
I finally turn.
Dowron looks older in the light. Frail, even. His hands tremble slightly, the skin around his eyes sallow and shadowed. He’s not the war giant the galaxy remembers. He’s a relic trying to hold together a firestorm with spit and threadbare loyalty.
“He left everything,” I say. “Everything we could’ve had.”
He doesn’t argue. Just nods.
“He’s not coming back, is he?”
Dowron’s jaw flexes. “We never expect return from missions like this.”
It should make me angry.
But all it makes me is hollow.
He offers me a small object—flat, thin, and encased in transparent polymer.
A new ID chip. Civilian registry. Embedded with a clean history, a new face, a false trail that could hide me for the rest of my life.
“Protection,” he says. “A way out. You earned it.”
I take it. Turn it over in my hands. The surface is smooth. Cold.
But it burns like shame.
I could run. Take the safe exit. Vanish into some corner of the galaxy where the Combine doesn’t reach, where I could live out a quiet, invisible life with a new name and old memories.
But that’s not who I am anymore.
Valtron didn’t bleed for me so I could hide.
“You owe me one more thing,” I say, meeting Dowron’s gaze.
He raises an eyebrow. “I’ve given you everything I have.”
“Then give me your platform.”
He frowns. “What?”
“Your access,” I say. “You’re about to drop this data crystal into the council’s lap and start a war. I want to do it my way.”
He hesitates. “Broadcasting puts a target on your back.”
“Then let them aim.”
The transmission room is smaller than I imagined. Tucked in the belly of Dowron’s ship, it’s shielded six layers deep from external scans, full of tech older than I am. Outdated, analog-supplemented, but impossible to trace.
Perfect.
I sit in the cracked leather chair. The console’s surface is scratched with the names of operators long since buried. I run my fingers across the etchings like they’re prayers.
Dowron stands beside the door, arms crossed, watching like he’s preparing for an execution.
Leena’s voice pings in through the console once I activate it. “Feed’s ready. Ghost protocol engaged. Your signal’ll bounce through six dead satellites and a pirate relay on Ragged’s Edge. No one’ll trace it back. Not in time.”
“Thanks,” I murmur.
I tug the hood over my head. Not for disguise. For armor.
The mic crackles when I engage it.
A green light pulses.
I exhale.
Then speak.
“This is a voice the Combine didn’t want you to hear.”
The room goes still.
“I’m not going to tell you my name. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what I’ve seen. What I’ve lived. What I’ve survived.”
The console vibrates faintly beneath my hand. I keep going.
“For years, the Helios Combine has operated under the guise of corporate peacekeeping, of civic order. But I’m here to tell you they are liars.
Murderers. Puppeteers pulling the strings of our supposed freedom while staging assassinations, executing whistleblowers, and burying truths beneath a mountain of polished propaganda. ”
I slide the crystal into the port.
“Contained in this file is evidence. Documents. Voice logs. Names. Dates. Proof that the Combine orchestrated the deaths of civilians, scientists, journalists—anyone who dared to expose them.”
My voice cracks, but I don’t stop.
“One of those names was Quinn Eltar. My friend. My colleague. Murdered for trying to show you the truth.”
Dowron says nothing. But I can feel his breath tighten across the room.
I lean in closer to the mic.
“They will call this a hoax. They will threaten to scrub it. To silence it. But the truth is already out. This feed has been copied. It has been shared. This isn’t a message. It’s a reckoning.”
I pause. Let that sink in.
“I don’t care if you believe me. I care that you listen. And if you’re brave enough—if you’re angry enough—I care that you act.”
The transmission light flickers.
And I finish.
“We aren’t safe. We never were. But maybe—just maybe—we still have time to be free.”
I kill the feed.
The console goes dark.
Dowron lets out a slow breath. “You’re braver than I gave you credit for.”
“I’m angrier than you thought,” I say, standing.
“You just lit a powder keg.”
“Good.”
Within hours, it begins.
Protests on Lusan Prime. Explosions in the Combine’s data banks on Orellis. Lawmakers demanding hearings. Civilians pouring into streets with signs and fire and purpose.
They call it the Broadcast Burn.
One feed turns into hundreds. The file spreads like blood in water. Anonymous nodes keep it alive even as the Combine scrambles to cut the signal.
They can’t.
It’s too late.
The fracture’s started.
I stand in the command deck, Dowron beside me, and watch a hundred holos of a galaxy waking up. Screaming. Fighting back.
But even in that chaos, even in the righteous noise…
There’s silence where Valtron should be.
No contact.
No updates.
No pings from the Fold.
No body.
Just black.
Just the space where he used to be.
And I hate how part of me still believes.
Still waits.
Still looks up every time a ship jumps in from deep space hoping maybe, he’ll walk through the door again.
I don’t need a test to tell me.
I already know.
It’s in the way my body moves differently now, like it’s no longer mine alone.
The way I can’t smell burnt synthoil without gagging.
The way I get winded climbing the narrow stairs in the safehouse, even though I used to sprint across rooftops with a camera rig on my back and a death warrant on my head.
It’s in the stillness. The aching, heavy stillness that’s settled in my bones like gravity doubled overnight.
It’s in the dreams.
Not the violent ones—I still get those, of course. Valtron’s blood on cold alloy floors. Quinn’s empty eyes. The Combine exec’s smile as he offered me freedom in exchange for silence.
No, these are different.
Softer.
It’s been a month since Valtron left.
Some nights I dream of a tiny hand curling around my finger. Of a warm weight against my chest, rising and falling with each impossible breath. Of laughter—my laugh—but higher, smaller, like it’s been fractured and put back together with joy.
I wake up and know.
I’m pregnant.
Since I set the galaxy on fire and vanished before the flames could touch me.
I don’t tell anyone.
Not Dowron. Not Leena. Not the kind-eyed doctor who patches me up in a side wing of the floating medical barge where I make the mistake of asking for anti-nausea meds.
No one.
Because this… this is mine.
And if I say it out loud, if I speak it into the world, it becomes real.
And once it’s real, the Combine can take it.
I won’t let them.
So I disappear.
Completely.
Dowron sends me a secure comm ping a few days after the protests on Threx Prime end in riots and the Combine’s stock collapses twelve percent overnight.
He offers protection. A secure outpost. A place on his advisory council once things “settle.”
I send one sentence back.
“I will never stop fighting, but I cannot raise a child in a war.”
He never replies.
He doesn’t need to.
Changing my name is easier than it should be.
There are systems on the edge of the border clusters where identity is a luxury, not a requirement. I pay in creds, encrypted with an old-fashioned chip from a Blackhall ghost bank Valtron once mocked for being “too paranoid to ever fail.”
Paranoia, it turns out, is exactly what I need.
Rhea dies quietly.
A woman named Sera Tallen takes her place.
She’s nobody. Just a quiet ex-tech who used to run ship repairs for a backwater station near the Sable Rift. Lost her husband in a freighter collapse. Doesn’t like crowds. Pays her rent on time.
The story is dull.
Unimpressive.
Perfect.
The house I find is small.
A low structure tucked into the hills of a planet no one ever remembers the name of. Green air. Orange sky. Wind that smells like salt and old trees. The roof leaks a little when the rain comes sideways, and there’s a drip in the kitchen sink that clicks like a metronome during the night.
But the walls are thick. The neighbors mind their business. And the view of the stars is wide and clear.
It’s the first time in years I’ve lived somewhere without reinforced windows or emergency go-bags in every room.
Though I keep one hidden in the closet anyway.
Just in case.
The days settle.
Slow.
I plant herbs in the crooked window box. Fix the fencing with rusted tools I barter for in town. Sit on the porch with a cup of thick, bitter tea and watch the storms roll in across the plains.
It’s peaceful.
Almost unbearably so.
At night, I lie in bed with one hand on my stomach and wonder if the baby can feel how hard I’m holding on. If they know how terrified I am. How fiercely I want them. How deeply I miss the man whose blood they carry.
I whisper stories into the dark. About who we were. Who he was. How he smiled when he wasn’t trying to hide it. How he moved like something forged in fire and held together by sheer stubbornness. How he looked at me like I was the first thing in the galaxy that ever made him feel human.
I whisper his name.
Valtron.
And some nights, when the wind is loud enough, I swear I hear it whispered back.
Far away—further than even hope can track—a man moves through a pit made of metal and blood.
There’s no sky here. No sun.
Only firelight and the iron scent of violence.
They call him The Red Ghost.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't sleep. Doesn’t stop.
Just fights.
And wins.
Every match.
Every opponent.
He moves like something with nothing left to lose.
Like a myth made flesh, forged in vengeance and sharpened on grief.
He crushes another challenger to the dust—bigger, louder, cocky—and when the crowd screams, he doesn't bow.
He kneels.
Brushes the sand with his fingers.
And whispers one word.
Soft.
Like a prayer.
Like a promise.
“Rhea.”