Chapter 9
NAULL
Ican’t sleep.
Not after what happened in the Meld.
Not after hearing her say “You don’t get to control everything.”
That voice—her voice—it’s still there, tucked into the folds of my brain like a splinter.
Not because it hurt.
Because it was true.
And gods, I hate how much truth can feel like betrayal when you’ve built your whole identity around being unshakable.
I throw on a thermal layer over my undersuit, tug on my boots. Don’t bother zipping the top half. My skin still feels like it’s sparking from the overload. From her. From everything I didn’t say because I was too busy reacting.
I walk.
Nowhere in particular.
Just let my boots echo through the corridors like a heartbeat, passing darkened labs and auto-sorting bays, the war room, the mech bays.
The base is half-lit, running on backup systems. The storm still growls above the surface, shaking dust loose from the beams. The air smells of coolant and dry metal, recycled a hundred times over. It tastes like confinement. Like guilt.
When I finally stop, it’s in front of the decompression chamber near the surface lock. The storm glass is polarized, but you can still see flickers of the windlights arcing through the Rhavadaz night beyond.
The planet is still screaming.
And for once, I don’t want to scream back.
I press my palm to the barrier, feeling the faint hum of static under the surface. Out there, the winds would skin you in seconds. Shred your lungs with shards of sand. Out there, death wears a thousand masks and dances barefoot across the dunes.
And yet, I envy it.
The simplicity of it.
Destruction with no pretense.
Me? I’ve spent most of my life pretending I don’t feel the cracks.
That I’m fine.
That I’m strong enough for both of us.
But the Meld tore something open. Showed her pieces of me I’d buried so deep I forgot they had names.
Grief.
Fear.
Want.
And gods, I want her. Not just her body, not just her voice in the tether—but her presence. That force she carries, stubborn and bright and breakable in all the best ways.
The door hisses open behind me. I don’t turn.
Her boots are softer than mine, but I’d know that footfall anywhere. Balanced. Cautious. Like she’s always halfway between staying and bolting.
I keep my eyes on the storm.
“You ever gonna stop doing that?” she asks.
I smirk. “Pacing the halls like a brooding brute or staring into the void hoping it answers back?”
“Both.”
I glance at her then. She’s still in her rig undersuit, sleeves pushed up, hair pulled into a knot that’s half fallen out. She looks tired. Real.
“You couldn’t sleep either,” I say.
She shrugs. “Didn’t try.”
She doesn’t ask what I’m doing out here. Doesn’t demand an explanation or throw my words from earlier back in my face.
She just steps up beside me. Close. Not touching. But near enough that her body heat reaches through the cold air between us like a lifeline.
The silence stretches again. But it’s not like in the cockpit. This one doesn’t weigh. It... breathes.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say, voice low.
“You didn’t scare me.”
I look at her. “The Meld—”
“I wasn’t scared, Naull,” she cuts in, gently. “I was... overwhelmed. There’s a difference.”
“Still my fault.”
She sighs and leans her shoulder against the glass. “It’s both of us. You react. I retreat. You push. I snap. We’re great at blowing things up, less great at figuring out what to do with the pieces.”
I chuckle. “That’s the most poetic thing you’ve ever said.”
She narrows her eyes. “Shut up.”
I hold up my hands. “Compliment, I swear.”
The wind shrieks on the other side of the barrier, a flash of pink lightning illuminating her face in sharp relief.
I study her profile—how her nose crinkles slightly when she thinks too hard, how her lips pull tight when she’s holding something back.
“You said once that you were tired of pretending you weren’t afraid of the dark,” I murmur.
She doesn’t look at me, but her jaw twitches. “Yeah.”
I step closer, turning toward her, fully now. “I am too.”
That gets her attention. Her eyes lift, meet mine. Searching.
And I let her look. Let her see.
I don’t hide behind my usual grin. I don’t flex or deflect or dodge.
I just stand there, stripped of armor, shirt open, chest bare not just to the air, but to her.
“I was trained to compartmentalize everything,” I say. “Pain. Fear. Emotion. Keep it out of the cockpit. Out of the mission. Out of the way.”
“You were trained wrong.”
I nod. “I know that now.”
A beat.
“I don’t want to be that guy with you. I don’t want to be the one who forgets how to feel because I’m too busy trying to protect you.”
“I don’t want to be protected,” she says, voice sharper than expected. “I want to be chosen.”
The words hit harder than any impact I’ve taken in combat.
“Then I choose you,” I say, quiet but certain. “Even when it’s messy. Even when I screw it up.”
She doesn’t answer.
Just steps closer.
Now we’re shoulder to shoulder. Closer than in the Meld. This is real skin. Real breath. Real stakes.
My fingers twitch at my sides.
She notices.
“Don’t,” she says softly.
I still. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t hold back.”
And that’s it. That’s all the permission I need.
I reach for her, slow, giving her time to step away.
She doesn’t.
Our hands meet first. Fingers interlocking with the kind of quiet desperation that says we’ve both waited too long for this and don’t know what the hell to do with it now that we’ve got it.
Then her other hand lifts to my chest, fingertips brushing the scar that runs over my clavicle.
She looks up.
“This was Rhavadaz, wasn’t it?” she asks.
I nod.
“Mine too,” she whispers, touching her rib cage. “First real damage.”
We stand there, matching wounds. Matching rhythms.
And then—
WRAAANK!
The alarm blares through the corridor, sharp and gut-punching. Emergency red lights flash across the walls, slicing through the intimacy like a blade.
She curses under her breath. “Every damn time.”
I grin, bitter. “Story of us.”
We don’t speak again.
We run.
Side by side.
Shoulder to shoulder.
The storm hasn’t passed after all.
But neither have we.
Crimson lights strobe through the corridor like heartbeat spikes. There’s no hesitation in my body anymore—not since the Meld, not since she touched me without flinching. I’m halfway to the launch bay before the second klaxon even finishes its cycle.
“Dropship crash,” the duty tech says as I pass, her voice tight over the comms. “One klick west of the ridge. Winds too unstable for drones. No confirmation on survivors. Whiplash is your only go.”
Copy.
That’s all I say.
Inside, I’m boiling. The way the comms officer delivered that news like a cold equation doesn’t sit right. A dropship. That’s not cargo. That’s people. People who probably had no idea what Rhavadaz was until they landed face-first in its fury.
The airlocks hiss as I hit the launch bay. Aria’s already there, sealing the last clasp on her interface suit, neural rig tucked under her arm. She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t ask questions or bark orders.
She just looks at me, nods once, and heads for the rig.
That’s new.
That’s trust.
I fall in behind her.
The Meld chamber in Whiplash flares to life the moment we board. The mech’s core thrums beneath our boots like it’s just as anxious to move as we are. As we lock into place, her voice comes through the internal line, low and steady:
“You good?”
“Never been worse,” I say.
“Perfect. Let’s go.”
We sync.
And this time, it’s different.
Not flawless.
Not frictionless.
But... right.
The tether connects like a groove in muscle memory. I feel her heartbeat sync with mine, our breath patterns aligning as we fall into that space between thoughts. It’s not soft. It’s not safe. But it’s ours now. A territory we’ve carved out of shared blood and stubbornness.
The launch clamps disengage. Whiplash shudders once and blasts forward into the mouth of the storm.
The Rhavadaz night has no business being this alive.
Lightning splits the sky in crooked veins—purple, orange, something sickly green. Dust claws at our sensors like wild animals. Every step forward is a grind against time, against friction, against the planet itself.
We’re moving fast, but not reckless. The mech’s joints hum with precision, servos compensating for the wind shear, gyros rebalancing every other second. I drive forward through the hellscape, Aria feeding me readouts, adjusting sync levels in microbursts.
She doesn’t try to override.
I don’t try to command.
We just move.
Together.
“Signal’s faint,” she says, scanning the ridge. “IFF tag’s active but fluctuating. Could be power drain, or something jamming the feed.”
“Could be someone alive,” I say, jaw tight. “That’s all I care about.”
Her response is a quiet click of confirmation. That’s it.
We crest the ridge and—there it is.
The dropship looks like a broken tooth jammed into the sand. One wing’s sheared clean off, half-buried under crushed dunes. The hull’s scorched and pockmarked with impact fractures, coolant bleeding into the soil in fluorescent streaks.
And that’s not the worst part.
There’s movement.
Not human.
Not anything good.
“Contact,” I mutter, eyes narrowing.
From under the sand, something massive shifts. The earth ripples, dunes sliding sideways like silk under tension. Then—BOOM—a shadow lunges.
It’s huge. More than huge.
Massive.
One of Rhavadaz’s apex predators, armored and coiled like a cross between a centipede and a kaiju nightmare. Chitin glints like obsidian under the lightning. Mandibles the size of mechs.
Aria barely breathes. “That’s not in the database.”
“Nope.”
“It’s headed for the wreckage.”
We both know what that means.
It’s not after us.
Not yet.
It’s after them.
“Engaging,” I growl.
“Do it.”
I drop Whiplash into assault posture, whips unfurling from their holsters with a satisfying snap of charge. The mech crouches, shifting weight. Aria reroutes energy from auxiliary systems into the forward drive and stabilizers. Her hands fly over the panel, even as I focus on the target.
We’re about to strike—
Then the first roar hits.
And it shatters our comms.
Not just scrambles. Shatters.
The entire internal link goes dead. Sound cuts out like someone yanked the power. No Aria. No telemetry. Just the thrum of raw noise and the echo of that monstrous voice vibrating through Whiplash’s frame.
I try to call out—nothing.
Try to signal her through the Meld—
It’s fuzzy. Disjointed.
Still there... but thinned. Like static over blood.
But I feel her panic spike. Just a flare—then control again. She’s still there. Still with me.
I shift into defensive stance, shielding the wreckage with Whiplash’s body as the megafauna circles, kicking up walls of sand and rage. The thing’s tail cracks the air like a thunderclap. The storm hurls itself at us with renewed fury.
We are alone again.
Just like always.
But this time, we’re not falling apart.
She routes emergency power to the rail spikes. I trigger the anchor launchers into the bedrock. We lock into the ridge with a jolt that shudders through the cockpit.
Then I hear her. Faint. Glitchy.
But her.
“...one shot... flank… stabilize…”
I nod, even though I know she can’t see it.
Doesn’t matter.
I know what she’s thinking. We’ve trained for worse.
I tighten my grip.
And we charge.