Chapter 5 #2
Like he has any right to worry about my professionalism.
I leave without answering. The door seals behind me with a hiss that sounds like finality.
The training room is supposed to be empty.
It isn't.
I smell him before I see him. Gun oil and that antiseptic the military issues. Six years and he still uses the same brand. I should have checked the occupancy log before I came here.
I should leave.
I don't.
He's working through combat forms. Hand to hand, no weapons, just his body against imaginary opponents. His movements are precise, beautiful, controlled. Empri grace that looks like performance art. Every strike economical. Every block exactly where it needs to be.
The contrast to my raw human power is infuriating.
I stand in the doorway. Watch him move. His marks glow soft with the exertion, pulsing along his temples, down his spine. Sweat makes his turquoise skin shine.
I watch his shoulders tense, the slight shift of weight that means he's sensed me. Known I was there the whole time, probably felt the spike of my awareness the second I walked through the door.
"I can leave," he says without turning around. Still facing away, still moving through the forms like I haven't disrupted anything. Like my presence doesn't change the air in here.
The word is out before I can stop it. Before I can calculate what it costs to say.
"Don't."
My voice comes out rougher than I meant. More raw. The kind of honesty that draws blood.
He goes completely still. Not the freeze of someone caught off-guard—the stillness of a system cycling down before hard restart. Tension rippling through every muscle, his marks pulsing brighter for just a second before he controls them.
Then he turns.
Slow. Deliberate. Like he's giving me time to change my mind, to take it back, to run.
His electric blue eyes find me across the training room. Lock on. Hold.
The space between us feels charged. Dangerous. Like the air before a hull breach, that moment when pressure differentials are about to equalize violently.
Neither of us moves.
I should say something. Explain that I need the space, that I was here first, that he should go to one of the other training rooms scattered through the station.
Instead I walk to the center of the mat. Start wrapping my hands with deliberate slowness. The ritual of it, loop, pull, secure, gives me something to focus on that isn't him.
My knuckles are already bruised from yesterday's session. I don't care.
"You want to spar?" His voice is careful. The kind of careful that means he knows exactly what this is. What I'm asking for. What I need.
He's not stupid. Never has been.
"I want to hit something," I say, threading the wrap between my fingers. The fabric pulls tight, familiar, grounding.
What I mean: I want to hurt you. I want to make you bleed the way I've bled for six years. I want to see if you'll let me or if you'll fight back.
What I mean: I need to touch you in a way that makes sense. Violence is a language we both speak fluently.
"I'm aware." His response is flat. Accepting.
He doesn't ask if I'm sure. Doesn't offer alternatives. Doesn't try to gentle this into something safer.
Just stands there. Waiting. His marks pulsing steady along his temples, down his spine, reading me, probably. Feeling the rage and the need and the complicated tangle of want underneath both.
I hope he chokes on it.
I finish the wraps. Face him. He's six-eight, broader than his brother, muscle that serves purpose instead of display. I'm five-nine, scars and speed and six years of rage looking for an exit.
"No pulled punches," I say.
"I wasn't planning on it."
We circle.
The first exchange is testing. I feint left, strike right. He blocks, doesn't counter. Reading me. Calculating.
I press harder. Combination strikes, low to high, forcing him to move. He's faster than he looks. Empri reflexes compensating for the disadvantage of size. But I'm faster than I was six years ago.
Harder.
I've trained to handle Empri opponents. Studied their patterns, their tells, the way they rely on sensing emotions to predict movement. I've learned to give them nothing. To be a void in their awareness.
I land a hit. His ribs. Not full force, but enough to hurt.
He doesn't flinch.
The next exchange is faster. We're both moving now, really moving. No performance, no demonstration. Just two people who learned to fight in the same fires, testing whether they still know each other's rhythms.
I do. My body remembers his. The way he drops his left shoulder before a hook. The tell in his breathing before he commits to a strike. Three months of training together, six years ago, and the muscle memory is still there.
I use it.
Sweep his legs. He goes down. I'm on him before he can recover, knee on his chest, hand around his throat.
His pulse jumps under my palm. His marks are pulsing bright, visible even in the training room's harsh light.
"I could kill you right now," I say.
"I know."
His voice is calm. Steady. Like we're discussing tactical doctrine instead of murder.
My hand tightens. I feel his heartbeat. Fast, but not panicked. He's not afraid of me. He should be afraid of me.
"But you won't," he adds.
"Why not?"
His hand comes up. Wraps around my wrist. Not pulling me away. Not fighting. Just... holding.
"Because you need answers more than you need revenge." His electric blue eyes hold mine. "And because you want to know if I'd leave you again."
The truth lands like a blade between ribs.
I release him. Step back. Stand.
Everything in me is screaming. Kill him. Kiss him. Run. Stay. Choose something, anything, stop standing here with my heart trying to beat out of my chest and my hands shaking with adrenaline and want and rage.
He rises. Slow. Hands visible. Not threatening. Not yielding either.
The space between us is three feet. Might as well be three light-years.
"Webb has been spotted," I hear myself say. My voice sounds almost normal. "Station Gamma-7. Two jumps from here."
"Then we should go."
"We should."
I look at him. Really look at him. The man who left me. The man who came to my door last night. The man whose pulse I just felt under my hand, whose throat I could have crushed.
"But understand this." My voice is steady now. Cold. The voice I use when I'm about to do something that can't be undone. "If this is a trap, if Webb has help, if the situation goes sideways—I'm not leaving anyone behind. Even if the math says I should."
He goes very still.
His marks dim, not to darkness, but to something more dangerous. The low, steady glow of an Empri who's just shifted into tactical mode. Into the space where feeling stops and calculation begins. I've seen this before. On Sigma-9. Right before he made the choice that broke us both.
"That's not tactically sound," he says. His voice has flattened. Clinical. The tone he uses when he's assessing probabilities and outcomes and acceptable losses.
"No."
I smile. I feel my lips curve, feel the shape of it—all edges, no warmth, the expression that makes recruits check their weapons and take a step back. The smile I learned after Sigma-9. The one that says I've already calculated what I'm willing to lose.
"But it's who I am." Each word lands deliberately. A declaration of principle. A line in the fucking sand. "You left me once. I won't be the person who does that to someone else. Not ever."
The air between us crackles with something I can't name. Can't afford to name.
The line is drawn. Has been drawn. Six years of distance and damage and the fundamental difference in who we became after that mission.
Her morality against his.
One of us is going to break.
The question is which one, and what it'll cost when we do. What it'll cost the mission, the station, the fragile alliance we're supposed to be rebuilding. What it'll cost the people depending on us to not let this—us—get in the way of survival.
I walk past him.
Deliberately close. Close enough that I can smell him—gun oil and that fucking military-issue antiseptic he never stopped using and something underneath that's just him.
The scent I've tried to forget for six years.
The one I've never been able to scrub from my memory no matter how many showers I took, how many strangers I killed, how many nights I spent trying to replace the ghost of it with anything else.
My shoulder brushes his arm. Brief contact.
I tell myself it's accidental.
We both know it isn't.
His breath catches. I hear it. A sharp intake, involuntary, the sound of someone who just got hit somewhere vulnerable.
His bioluminescence flares against my peripheral vision—a spike of light visible even through his sleeve, bright enough that I know without looking that his marks just blazed with whatever he felt when we touched.
I keep walking.
Don't look back. Don't hesitate. Don't let him see that my hands are trembling, that my pulse is hammering in my throat, that every step away from him feels like walking through broken glass.
The door seals behind me with a pneumatic hiss.
I make it exactly seven steps into the corridor before my knees try to give out.
I lean against the bulkhead. Count my breaths. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. The pattern that kept me sane in the dark places after Sigma-9.
My wrist still feels warm where he touched it.
I'm so fucked.