Chapter 4
KAELION
I do not feel good about what happened today.
Unfortunately, I can’t stop thinking about Lyn Walker as I return to my apartment; cannot stop thinking about her as I set down food for Flicker, my pet draken; still cannot stop thinking about her as I sit down on the couch and as Flicker demands pets.
I give in, of course. Flicker has always known how to win an argument without words.
She hops lightly onto my lap, a fluid five pounds of shiny green scales and furry white legs.
draken were bred to hunt rust mites in zero-gravity, their paws padded with static-dampening fuzz so soft they make no sound when they move.
Now they exist mostly as spoiled domestic companions for engineers who work too much.
Like me.
Flicker settles against my thigh, kneading absently with all six paws, eyes narrowing to molten green slits. I scratch behind her ears until the faint hum in her chest starts up—the low, electric buzz that means she’s content—and I try, really try, to think about anything but Lyn Walker.
It does not work.
The images keep replaying: the wild brightness in her eyes when the sim first started; the split second of panic when it went wrong; the way she stood her ground when I should have reduced her to silence. I told myself I was furious because she endangered months of work. That part is true.
But beneath it is…something else.
Because the thing is—I see her genius. It would be difficult not to, given the way her mind works, how quickly she moves from thought to thought, how she picks up on alien technology and develops new theories like lightning strikes.
I underestimated her when I first met her; she’s proven herself again and again.
The problem is that the moment I tell her she’s a genius, she’ll go too far.
She’ll act too recklessly.
She could get hurt.
And that…that, I can’t tolerate.
Flicker shifts in my lap, nosing at my palm as if she senses the storm building behind my eyes.
Her whiskers catch the light again, faint little arcs skipping from tip to tip.
She hums louder—comfort through vibration, a trait engineered for long-haul voyagers.
She is one of the only species we were able to take from the Trinity before the collapse… countless flora and fauna gone.
Save for us and the draken.
A noble creature indeed.
I stare out through the apartment’s wide glass window. The city of Mythara glows below—streams of light threading between spires, gliders tracing smooth arcs through the violet dusk. It’s beautiful in the way machines can be: precise, ordered, alive through collective intention.
The opposite of Lyn Walker.
She is…entropy. She moves through equations like they’re puzzles meant for her alone, unafraid of failure because she doesn’t seem to believe in it. She infuriates me because she’s brilliant. She terrifies me because she doesn’t know when to stop.
If she’d run that sim live—if the translator had misread a sentient nervous system the way it did the phantom data—someone could’ve suffered permanent neural damage. I could’ve lost my position at the university. She could’ve lost everything she’s worked for.
And yet when I told her to go home, I wanted to take the words back.
Flicker butts her head against my wrist until I relent and scratch behind her ridiculously fluffy ears. She purrs, the sound lacking its usual effect of setting me at ease.
I sigh. “You don’t understand nuance,” I tell her quietly. “You just exist in a perfect loop of cause and effect.”
She blinks, unimpressed.
I lean back against the couch, forcing my shoulders to ease.
The holo-clock flickers across the far wall—late enough that the air traffic above the university has thinned to a few scattered gliders.
Solvi’s transport will arrive in the morning.
I should rest. She deserves a father who isn’t buried in work and worry.
But when I close my eyes, I see Lyn again—standing in front of the advisory board, defiant and furious, eyes red but dry. She refused to yield even as I pushed her to. Even as I used her name like a weapon.
Flicker stretches, tucking herself into the curve of my arm. Her hum fades to silence.
“I don’t feel good about it either,” I murmur.
I don't stand up until Flicker allows it—until she gets bored with me and wanders over to her bed in the corner. Then, I go to Solvi’s room.
I still need to make sure everything is in place, that her bed is made, everything tidy.
There's a brand new sketch book set on the chest at the foot of the bed, the chest itself an ancient locker that once belonged to my great-grandmother.
I need to buy pencils too, but it can wait until she arrives; I'll get her a gift. She’ll like that.
It will give me a few points, at least, against Wulfric.
The room is clean, orderly, the way I keep everything. Solvi likes it that way, even if she pretends not to. She’ll roll her eyes, say I make the place look like a laboratory, then rearrange her things until the chaos feels like hers again.
The window beside her bed looks out over the lower ring of the city, where the student quarter burns with neon. From here, you can almost see the shimmer of the University’s east dome. My lab is somewhere under that halo of light.
The holo-clock chimes once—an automatic reminder to dim the apartment lights. Flicker chirrups in protest from her perch by the window. I glance over; she’s watching the gliders drift past, tail curling lazily, as if nothing in the world could ever go wrong.
I envy that.
I tidy the corners of the room again—unnecessary, obsessive—and catch myself thinking that Lyn would mock me for it. Not cruelly, but with that tilt of her head and the half-smile that always looks like she’s about to ask if I’ve ever done something impulsive in my life.
The truth is, I haven’t. Not once.
Because I am Nyeri’i…and the Nyeri'i do not act impulsively. We must be strategic. We must be decisive. We cannot just…follow each and every whim. Maybe there was a time when my people acted on impulse, but that time is long past.
We learned the cost.
You do not grow up on half a flotilla and fail to understand that a single mistake can kill thousands. A miscalculated burn, a cracked seal, one failed line of code in an environmental system—that is all it takes. We do not get to have accidents. We get to have catastrophes.
So we do not have them.
I check the environmental panel on Solvi’s wall, even though I already checked it twice this week. The numbers are perfect—humidity, oxygen, particulate count. The air in here is cleaner than the University’s surgical bays.
She will tease me about that too.
“Baba, you know I actually like having lungs, right?” she’ll say, dramatic sigh and all. “You don’t have to bubble-wrap the air.”
And I will tell her that I do, because that is what Nyeri’i fathers are for: bubble-wrapping the universe and pretending it is a reasonable use of time.
My comm hums softly from my pocket—an automatic nightly digest from the lab. I ignore it at first. I am off duty; I am in my daughter’s room; I am supposed to be a person, not a supervisor.
Flicker chirps at the sound anyway, leaping down from the window ledge to chase the phantom notification across the floor. I rub the bridge of my nose and pull the comm free.
“Just status,” I tell myself as the screen widens in my palm. “Nothing dramatic. Nothing on fire.”
The top of the feed is exactly what I expect: power draw within norms, climate stable, security seals engaged at 21:03 when I locked the door.
The next line is not what I expect.
22:47—ACCESS GRANTED
Authorized ID: WALKER, LYN
A thin ribbon of ice slides under my skin.
“Of course,” I breathe.
Flicker pauses mid-pounce, ears pricked. She watches me as if she can tell that something has shifted, that the air around us has gone from soft to brittle.
I scroll.
22:49—Neural array boot sequence initialized.
22:50—Pain-translation sandbox loaded: REVISION 3.2 (UNAPPROVED)
22:51—Live-channel ports pinged for handshake.
Live-channel.
She would not dare.
Except Lyn Walker absolutely would dare. She would look at a locked door and see a puzzle. She would look at a warning label and assume it applies to other people.
I should have revoked her clearance…but even if I had, she'd have taken it as a challenge.
My tendrils flare, heat prickling along my scalp. For a moment I simply stand there, comm lighting my face, Solvi’s perfectly made bed at my side, the city beyond the window humming along as if nothing is wrong.
Then the lab icon on the comm blinks from blue to amber.
22:52—AUTOMATED FLAG: UNAUTHORIZED LIVE LINK ATTEMPT.
I do not remember deciding to move. One moment I am in my daughter’s room, the next I am in the hall, coat snatched from the peg by the door. Flicker darts after me, protesting with a crackling trill as I shut her inside.
“Stay,” I snap.
The comm pulses again in my hand.
22:53—NEURAL LOAD SPIKE: 140% OF SAFE THRESHOLD.
22:53—Biofeedback channel…connected.
My heart pounds.
“Walker,” I snarl to the empty corridor.
Then I head for the nearest transit station, every step ringing with the same thought, over and over:
If she has wired that device into her own nervous system, I am going to kill her.
After I make sure it does not kill her first.