Chapter 16
ARIA
London greets me in half-tones—the hum of commuter trains, the distant roar of a shuttle overhead, the drumming of rain on pavement that still holds the memory of coal dust. I press the strap of Garma’s carrier tighter against my chest and step off the platform into the moist dusk-light.
The air smells like wet concrete and overcooked street food.
Steam curls from a hot dog stand and brushes the hem of my coat.
It’s a strange comfort after months of acid windstorms and mechs that groaned like wounded beasts.
Garma squirms. His small face, bronzed faintly—so subtly no one notices—nuzzles into the fabric of my shirt. I breathe in baby powder and warm skin and something else. Not fear. Not quite. Something heavier, threaded through me like filament.
I keep walking.
The quad at Oxford glistens under the drizzle, cobblestones catching the low sunlight like scattered glass. The gargoyles on the archway stare down, chipped and weathered, watching me pass like judgment. My boots echo.
“Careful, Mum,” a young man calls as he side-steps me, his backpack slapping against his coat.
“Thanks,” I reply, polite, practiced. I smile like I mean it.
Garma fusses. His fingers reach up toward my collar.
“What’s wrong, little warrior?” I whisper. “Storm dreams?”
He yawns, drools. I wipe his chin.
Then I hear it. Not loud, not even close—just the whisper of thrusters. A shuttle cutting across the clouds, far above the stone towers. I stiffen. My heart remembers. My body remembers.
A poster on a bulletin board catches my eye: bright neon, a silhouette of a pilot mid-leap from a mech. “Join the Next Age of Piloting” blares in crisp blue. I stare too long. My throat tightens.
“Mama?” Garma says, tilting his head, soft and curious.
“Just looking,” I murmur. “Come on.”
Inside, the warmth of the old building wraps around us like a faded blanket. The hallway smells like paper and radiator heat and lemon-scented floor polish. A receptionist smiles as we pass.
“Carrier here, Mum?” she asks.
“Yeah, thank you.”
“Good luck with term,” she adds with a nod toward Garma.
I nod, noncommittal. “You too.”
In the parent lounge, I buckle him into the high chair, my fingers fumbling on the straps. He babbles, grabbing at the dangling mobile toy above his head. I flick it once. He giggles. That sound—it knocks the breath out of me every time. So human. So loud in this quiet life I’m trying to build.
I sit across from him and exhale. My joints ache. Not from walking. From holding back.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I glance. A message from Earth Base. I don’t open it.
“First day,” I whisper, mostly to myself.
Garma reaches toward me, hands fluttering like wings. I lean in, kiss his forehead.
“You ready to pretend we’re normal?”
He blows a raspberry.
I laugh. It startles me. The sound feels foreign in my own throat.
We roll out of the lounge and into the drizzle. The city smells shift again—diesel, hot sugar, the damp musk of old stone. A tram squeals nearby. Garma babbles something unintelligible and points at a puddle.
“You like that one? Big splash, huh?”
He nods solemnly, as if I’ve said something important.
At the café down the street, I balance him in one arm and order a latte with the other. Foam clings to the lid. I sip. Too hot. Too bitter. Not bitter enough.
We sit by the window. The glass fogs. Garma slaps it with his palm, fascinated by the blur of the world outside.
Across from me, a woman coos at her toddler, who throws a spoon on the floor and laughs like it’s magic. I look at her—the woman. Her clean jeans. Her easy smile. I want that ease. I want that world.
But mine’s different. My hand tightens around the strap of Garma’s carrier. My eyes drift closed for a second, and in the darkness, I see Whiplash burning. Hear Naull scream. Feel the Meld tear.
“Don’t,” I whisper to myself.
I blink. I’m in London. I’m fine.
Garma reaches for me.
“Mama hold,” he says, and I oblige.
His little hands pat my cheeks like I’m the one who needs comforting. Maybe I do.
“Love you, storm baby,” I whisper.
A low thunder rumbles overhead. I look up, through the window, as another shuttle slices through the clouds.
I could almost pretend it’s just a flight to Spain. Not a mech convoy. Not a warbird.
I kiss Garma’s temple and whisper, “We’re safe now. Just us.”
But something inside me—deep, and coiled, and not ready to die—doesn’t believe it.
And part of me… doesn’t want to.
Garma sleeps through the first half of my Propulsion Dynamics lecture, bless him.
He’s wrapped against my chest in a sling, his breath warm and rhythmic against the dip of my collarbone. I take notes one-handed, stylus gliding across the tablet’s surface like second nature. My other hand curls instinctively over the curve of his back.
Dr. Kessler pauses mid-slide when I enter late, scanning the room from his perch at the lectern. His gaze lands on Garma. There’s a flicker—nostalgia, maybe—but no comment. Just a nod. He moves on.
Good.
I slide into the back row. The students around me part like I carry a radioactive isotope. Maybe I do. In this place of pristine ambition, a baby reads like a scarlet letter stitched to my chest.
“So brave,” I heard one of the girls say last week, half-whispered into a cappuccino.
“She was military, you know,” her friend answered. “Worked with some mech program. Then boom—baby. No father on record.”
The words had stung, but I didn’t flinch. Let them talk. They didn’t know.
They didn’t feel the sharp edge of air that day on Rhavadaz, when the Meld broke and the sky lit up with fire.
They didn’t watch a titan swallow the man who changed her from bones and blueprints into someone who could feel again.
They didn’t hear Garma cry his first breath like a war chant.
They just saw the carrier and the dark circles under my eyes and decided I was tragic.
I wasn’t. I’m surviving.
Barely.
Later, in the lab, the fluorescent lights cast long shadows over the old engine prototype I’m meant to be calibrating. The others have gone to lunch. It’s just me and Garma, who’s propped in a cushioned bassinet beside the console, gurgling at the light strips overhead.
He lets out a coo—then a hiccup—and I glance over.
“You think plasma intake ratios are funny?” I ask dryly.
He kicks his legs, delighted.
I set the spanner down and lean over him, fingers brushing the faint fuzz of hair on his head.
“You’re not supposed to be this happy. Not here.”
He blinks up at me with Naull’s eyes. That same storm-gray ringed with bronze. Eyes that held war, wonder, and a gentleness he tried to hide until it poured from him in the quiet hours before dawn.
My throat tightens. I turn back to the panel.
At night, the silence in the dorm flat is too loud.
Garma sleeps, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in fits of grunts and murmurs like he’s trying to communicate with someone I can’t see. On those nights—these nights—I sit beside his crib with my hand pressed to his chest, grounding him. Grounding me.
His skin is warmer than it should be. Not fevered, just… charged. Like he hums at a different frequency than the rest of the world.
Maybe that’s my fault. Or Naull’s. Or the Meld that fused our minds too many times to be undone.
Tonight, when he whimpers, I whisper back.
“He would’ve loved you,” I say into the dark. “He didn’t get the chance.”
The ceiling fan hums above me. A draft slips in through the window seam, raising goosebumps along my arms.
“People keep telling me I’m strong,” I murmur, “but I think I just forgot how to break.”
Garma stirs. I lower my voice to a thread.
“You have his breath, you know. He used to sleep like that, chest rising slow, like he didn’t want to disturb the air.”
A laugh snags in my throat and turns into something wetter. I wipe at my face but the tears come anyway, quiet and hot. I press my forehead against the crib’s edge and cry until the weight of it knots my spine.
When I finally crawl into bed, dawn’s only an hour away.
The next morning, the receptionist gives me a strange look when I sign in.
“There’s a… visitor,” she says cautiously, “in the quad. Military. He asked for you.”
My gut twists. My legs move before I tell them to. I half-jog across the quad, Garma tucked under my coat, heart slamming with every step.
A woman in a base-issued trench coat waits near the stone bench by the physics building. Her hair’s regulation-tight, her boots spotless. She doesn’t smile.
“Lieutenant Commander Sanchez,” she says, clipped.
“Not anymore,” I reply. “It’s just Aria now.”
She tilts her head, unreadable. Then hands me a tablet.
“There's a debriefing we think you should see.”
I don’t take it. “Why now?”
“There was movement. On the edge of Sector Twelve. Underground.”
I still don’t reach for it.
The woman’s voice softens slightly. “The energy signature matches Vakutan neural frequencies.”
My knees nearly buckle.
Garma gurgles, sensing something.
“I have a baby,” I whisper.
“I know.”
I stare at the tablet. The last time I held something like that, it buzzed with Naull’s voice, synced in my mind like music.
“I don’t want hope,” I say through gritted teeth.
The woman doesn’t flinch. “It’s not hope. It’s data.”
That makes me laugh—bitter and sharp. I take the tablet.
I open the file.
And I stop breathing.
A heartbeat. A pulse. Faint, intermittent. Embedded in the wreckage’s neural alloy. Trapped. Alive.
I don’t remember walking back inside. Or buckling Garma back into the stroller. Or dragging us to the flat.
All I remember is standing at the window, watching the rain fall, and whispering:
“You weren’t supposed to survive me.”