Heir to the Stars

Chapter 1

ARIA

Iduck as another arc of sparks flies from the conduit panel, singeing the air just inches from my head.

“Son of a broken capacitor,” I hiss, wrenching my toolkit closer with my foot.

My fingers are already raw, gloves half-melted, the skin beneath clammy with sweat and metal dust. Rhavadaz’s surface winds howl like some ancient beast above the bunker, making the concrete quake and the overhead lights flicker just enough to screw with my focus. Again.

I smack the side of the diagnostic AI for the fourth time. It whines, flashes red, and promptly dies. Wonderful.

Behind me, the ground shakes—again. Not seismic.

That’s megafauna movement. You get used to the rhythm after a while, like background music with too much bass.

I don’t flinch. Not anymore. The first week I was here, I nearly pissed myself every time the floor rumbled.

Now I just pray nothing breaches the surface and decides it wants a tech snack.

I’ve got Whiplash’s belly opened up like a cracked rib cage, relay wires spilling out like intestines.

The Meld sync core’s fried. Again. A Trimantium capacitor blew mid-run yesterday, cooked the stabilizers, and nearly shorted half the subcortex.

Not that anyone seemed worried about it—not the brass, not the engineers.

Just me. The neurotech junior with three commendations and the absolute dumbass idea of trying to impress the IHC with a volunteer stint on a war planet.

Because apparently, I thought the Machine God Corps would look good on a resume.

I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand, only to smear a streak of grime into my hairline. It’s humid in here—warm, oily, and full of static. My uniform clings to me in all the wrong ways, my boots feel three sizes too small, and I haven’t had real caffeine in forty-two hours.

“Why are you like this?” I mutter to the mech, not expecting an answer. Of course, that’s when the vent overhead hisses and dumps a plume of freezing air down the back of my neck. I flinch hard enough to jab my knuckles on the relay bracket. “Ow—dammit!”

Footsteps. Heavy. Rhythmic. Impossible to miss even over the wind howling through the ventilation system.

“Oh no,” I mutter. “Not now.”

The shadows shift near the access bay, and there he is.

Naull. In all his towering, red-scaled, gold-eyed, shirtless glory.

“Need help, little star?” he calls out, voice rolling over the machinery like warm thunder.

I groan. Loudly. “Naull, for the love of synaptic integrity, put on a shirt.”

He just grins, all fangs and smugness, and leans against Whiplash’s knee like it’s his personal throne.

Which, to be fair, it sort of is. The mech was designed to mimic Vakutan musculature—broad, armored, predatory.

His image, scaled and steel-clad. He’s so proud of that fact he never shuts up about it.

“Shirts are for weaklings and diplomats,” he says, crossing his arms. “You’re clearly neither.”

“I’m clearly busy.” I return to the relay board, pretending his presence doesn’t make the space feel ten degrees warmer. “And I don’t need another pilot treating my tech like it’s a goddamn juice box.”

“You wound me,” he purrs. “I was simply optimizing the combat neural response loop.”

“You stuck a paperclip in the emotional calibration port.”

He snorts. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“No, Naull. It very much did not. You fried the entire second-tier processing ring and triggered a feedback loop that almost microwaved your partner’s frontal cortex.”

He shrugs. “She’s fine. Her hair was smoking, but she’s fine.”

I resist the urge to throw my wrench at him. Instead, I carefully rethread the filament cables with a pair of forceps, heart hammering from more than just irritation. I hate how aware I am of him when he’s in the room—how his heat seems to radiate out, how the space seems smaller, tighter.

He saunters closer, which does nothing to help.

“You work too hard,” he says, voice dropping just a notch lower. “That brain of yours must burn hotter than a plasma coil.”

I give him a withering glare. “Stop flirting while I’m elbow-deep in an electrical panel.”

“Why? It’s your best angle.”

I drop the forceps with a loud clatter and whip around. “Do you want me to reroute all Whiplash’s weapon control functions to your eject seat?”

He looks… delighted. “Wouldn’t be the worst place I’ve landed.”

I groan again. “You’re unbearable.”

“I’m bored,” he says, suddenly serious. “We’ve been grounded for three days. Cowley’s withholding deployment orders until the seismic pattern stabilizes. That means I have nothing to do but walk around shirtless and annoy you.”

“You could always read a manual.”

“I’d rather be electrocuted.”

“That could also be arranged.”

A silence falls between us—not awkward, just full of all the things we don’t say.

The mech hums around us, half alive, half asleep.

The kind of lull that happens when you’ve been around death so much it starts to feel like background noise.

Outside, something screeches—deep and long and wrong. Megafauna call. Closer than before.

Naull’s jaw tightens.

I see the tension ripple across his shoulders, the twitch in his tail as he listens. His body’s always on alert, even when he pretends it isn’t. I used to think he was just cocky. Now I know better. It’s armor. Just like the mech.

“Do you think it’s getting worse?” I ask quietly.

He glances at me. “The fauna? The weather? The Nexxus? Or the fact that our mechs are being held together with duct tape and resentment?”

“Yes.”

He sighs. “Yeah. It’s getting worse.”

My fingers ache. My head throbs. I want sleep and silence and something that doesn’t need patching. But instead, I sit cross-legged on the grated floor and reattach the power couplings with tweezers while Naull watches me like he’s memorizing the movement of my hands.

“Why do you do it?” he asks, breaking the quiet again. “This? The Corps?”

I don’t look up. “I told you. Resume building.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not.”

“It is.”

My shoulders sag. I press the tweezers down harder than I should. “Because I didn’t know how else to matter. Because I wanted to build something that couldn’t be taken apart by someone else’s ego. Because I thought... maybe here, I’d finally be needed. Not just tolerated.”

The silence stretches.

When I look up, his expression has changed. No teasing. No smirk.

Just a look. One that sees too much.

“You are needed,” he says softly. “More than you know.”

Something cracks inside me, quick and unsteady. I turn back to the mech, heart thudding too hard in my chest. “Well then,” I murmur, voice shaky, “maybe stop electrocuting the damn relay.”

His laugh is low, reverent. “No promises.”

…

Naull is the worst.

Not in a ha-ha-he’s-annoying way. Not even in a brooding antihero kind of way.

No, he’s a one-man cataclysm wearing tactical boots and a perpetual grin, and he’s been my assigned pilot partner for a month and a half of mechanical hell.

Partner. Hah. Like that means anything when he treats every order like a suggestion and every safety protocol like a dare.

The man makes wind vortexes into roller coasters.

I patch the final neural coupling, double-check the anchor clamps, and signal the AI for a cold sync. The system hums, power finally cycling without spitting out error codes. Progress. A miracle, honestly.

My arms ache as I slide out from Whiplash’s guts.

The mech’s interior always smells like burnt ozone and coolant, like a heavy thunderstorm inside a submarine.

Every surface is warm to the touch—residual kinetic bleed—and my fingers are black with carbon scoring.

I swipe soot from my thighs as I straighten, shoulders stiff from crouching for two hours without a break.

And there he is.

Naull. Shirtless. Again.

Because of course he is.

He’s standing in the middle of Hangar Bay 3, arms crossed, arguing with a tech who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.

His scaled torso gleams under the fluorescents, red-gold like burnished armor, and his tail flicks in frustration with every word.

I don’t know what’s worse—his lack of a shirt or the fact that he’s probably right about whatever nonsense he’s spewing.

“You can’t override the thruster delay dampeners just because they annoy you,” the tech pleads.

“Why not?” Naull asks, deadpan. “They’re slow. I’m fast. Let me win.”

“Let me not rebuild this engine from ash again,” the tech groans, backing away with the weary resignation of someone who’s clearly survived one too many Naull-based explosions.

I cross the floor toward them, boots clanging against the grates, voice sharp.

“Maybe if you stopped punching buttons with your fists, the interface wouldn’t melt.”

Naull turns, slow as a sunrise, and hits me with that smile.

That smile.

The one that says he knows exactly how irritating he is and enjoys every second of it. His fangs glint. His eyes spark with that molten gold mischief. If I didn’t hate him so thoroughly, I might even call him handsome.

(But only during blackouts. With a bag over his smug face.)

“Ah, my favorite nerd,” he says, spreading his arms as if I should be honored. “Tell them the calibration delay is trash.”

“I will do no such thing,” I reply, planting my hands on my hips. “You’re not supposed to override safety measures just because they hurt your feelings.”

“They don’t hurt my feelings.” He puffs out his chest. “They insult my honor.”

“You’re flying a glorified blender, Naull, not challenging a god to single combat.”

“Same difference,” he says with a wink. “Besides, the blender’s faster.”

The tech disappears mid-argument, clearly done with both of us.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and exhale through my teeth. “You know the mechs cost more than a year of oxygen rations for the entire base, right? You crash one, and they won’t give you another. They’ll give you a shovel.”

He smirks. “You saying you don’t believe in me?”

“I know better,” I snap, jabbing a finger into his chest. “You’ve singlehandedly tripped seven red alerts in the last two weeks. You managed to decouple the left stabilizer because, and I quote, you ‘wanted to see if it could flap like a bird.’”

“It almost did,” he says, proud.

“It almost killed us.”

He steps closer. Just enough that I have to tilt my chin to keep glaring at him properly.

I hate when he does this—uses his ridiculous height like a weapon.

I can practically feel the heat rolling off him, his skin warm and faintly metallic, like sun-baked copper.

His scent is sharper up close, a mix of scorched spice and ozone, and it’s unfair how aware I am of it.

“You were watching,” he murmurs.

I blink. “What?”

“You watched the maneuver. The roll.”

“It was idiotic,” I say, voice rising.

“But smooth.”

I scoff. “You spun the mech like a carnival ride and screamed the entire time.”

“Victory screech,” he corrects.

“I have the audio logs, Naull. You yelled ‘hell yeah’ for fourteen seconds straight.”

He leans in, fangs just visible. “And yet... you’re still here. Still patching Whiplash’s guts. Still talking to me instead of filing for reassignment.”

I grit my teeth. “I haven’t ruled it out.”

“Liar.”

“Arrogant ass.”

His smile widens. “Flatterer.”

We’re standing too close. Way too close. I can see the tiny scar along his cheekbone, the flecks of darker red along his collarbone, the way his pupils dilate when he stares at my mouth.

I should step back.

I don’t.

Instead, I grab a rag from my belt and slap it hard against his chest. “Here. Wipe the soot off. You’re making the place look unprofessional.”

He snorts, but takes it. His fingers brush mine. Just for a second. Just long enough.

The moment hangs between us, suspended like static right before a lightning strike.

Then a distant alarm chimes—low, pulsing.

Status check warning.

My comm flickers to life on my wrist. "Gustfront forming. Surface storms intensifying. Secure all gear and personnel."

I exhale, stepping away before I can talk myself out of it. “Stormfront’s early. Again.”

“Perfect timing,” Naull says, stretching. “Just got bored.”

I roll my eyes so hard it’s a miracle I don’t pull something. “Let’s just get Whiplash into lockdown before the winds peel the roof off.”

He follows me back to the mech, a silent sentinel at my six. It’s unsettling how good we are at moving together in moments like this. No words needed. Just motion, sync, unspoken queues. Even when we’re not Melded, our rhythms match.

Too well.

I secure the exterior panels while he fastens the restraint clamps. The whole bay groans around us, the air pressure already thickening as the storm sweeps closer. Whiplash hums beneath my fingertips, familiar and alive.

“She responds to you,” Naull says quietly, without looking up.

I freeze.

“What?”

“Whiplash. She listens to you.”

I swallow. “That’s... she listens to you, Naull. She’s coded to your biometrics.”

“She’s more than code,” he says, glancing at me. “You know that.”

My throat tightens.

I nod once. Then again.

We finish in silence.

Once the mech is fully sealed, we retreat to the maintenance vestibule—a narrow hall where you can still feel the pulse of the machines beneath the floor. Naull leans against the wall, arms crossed. I collapse onto the bench and unclip my gloves with shaking fingers.

“You good?” he asks.

“Peachy.”

“You’re lying again.”

“You’re still shirtless.”

He chuckles. “Just keeping things interesting.”

I stare at him.

At the scars.

At the too-easy confidence that masks something quieter, something old.

“You ever think about leaving?” I ask before I can stop myself.

His brow furrows. “The Corps?”

“The war. The planet. This whole mess.”

He exhales through his nose, a slow sound.

“Sometimes,” he admits. “But then I think—where would I go? Who’d want a half-cooked alien with poor impulse control and a heroic amount of trauma?”

I look up. “I would.”

The words slip out before I realize they’ve formed.

His head jerks toward me, startled.

I clear my throat. “I mean... I get it. I understand. The not-knowing. The fight-or-flight. I think about leaving all the time. But I don’t.”

“Because of Whiplash?”

“No,” I say softly. “Because of you.”

The silence that follows is sharp and strange and full of weight.

He moves before I can second-guess myself—sitting next to me, close but not touching.

“Aria,” he says, voice low. “What are we doing?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

But I want to.

God help me, I want to.