Chapter 6 #2
Not a question. She knows the answer. I can feel that she knows, that somewhere in the six years since she's run every scenario, every variable, and come to the same conclusion I have.
Given the same situation, the same math, I would make the same choice.
"If the math demanded it," I say quietly. "Yes. I would."
Something crosses her face. Pain. Acceptance. Neither quite complete.
"At least you're honest." She releases me. Steps back. Her walls snap up so hard I actually feel it as pressure against my senses. "That's more than most people manage."
She walks past me, each step deliberate and measured, her boots striking the deck plating with military precision. The sound echoes in the empty armory, sharp and final.
At the door, she stops. Her shoulders are rigid beneath her tactical gear, every line of her body screaming controlled tension. Her hand rests on the frame, not quite bracing, not quite hesitating. Just... there.
She doesn't turn around. Doesn't look at me. She knows what she'll see if she does—my marks still glowing with everything I just confessed, with the truth we both have to live with now.
"Two days," she says, her voice flat and professional in that way that means she's feeling too much and locking it down. "Gamma-7 and back. We can be professional for two days."
The implication is clear: after that, all bets are off. After that, we'll have to figure out what the hell this is, this thing where she hates me and wants me and refuses to let either feeling win.
"Astra—"
"Get some rest, Commander." The title is a wall between us, deliberate and cold. "We launch in twenty-eight minutes. I need you sharp for this."
I need you.
The words she didn't say hang in the air between us, louder than what she actually spoke. I feel them anyway, not through sensing, just through knowing her. Through six years of carrying the weight of what I did and what she became because of it.
She's gone before I can find anything to say that wouldn't make this worse.
The door closes behind her with a soft pneumatic hiss.
I stand in the empty armory, surrounded by weapons that won't help, and feel her emotional signature retreating down the corridor. The steady, controlled frequency of someone who's rebuilt their walls and is determined not to let them crack again.
My marks are still glowing. Pulsing with what I felt when she touched me.
Want. Grief. The terrible, consuming need to reach back, to smooth her out, to make this easier for both of us.
I don't.
That restraint is the only proof I have that I'm not my father.
It's going to have to be enough.
The Whisper launches on schedule.
Kesh handles the navigation. Torres manages systems. Astra stations herself in the small tactical hub, running surveillance on our route.
I find myself in the galley, staring at coffee I don't want.
The ship settles into cruise velocity. The subtle vibration of engines running clean. The barely perceptible hum of the gravity generators maintaining the comfortable fiction that we're not hurtling through vacuum at speeds that would liquify an unprotected human body.
I've spent years on ships like this. Smaller, sometimes. Transports crammed with soldiers, the emotional cacophony of fear and adrenaline and boredom pressing against my awareness until I wanted to claw my way out of my own skull.
This is worse.
Because this ship only has four people. And one of them is Astra, and her emotional signature is loud enough to drown out the other two.
I try to focus on Torres. Her frequency is muted, controlled, almost as locked down as Astra's. Professional. Competent. She's running a diagnostic on our weapons systems, and the satisfaction she takes in clean maintenance reads as a low, steady hum.
Kesh is easier. Young Empri don't have the same control.
His nervousness bleeds through—the awareness that he's on a ship with Dexter Torrence, legendary combat operative, about to hunt a traitor who's been hiding for six years.
His bioluminescence keeps flickering along his temples.
Excitement. Fear. The strange pride of being chosen for something dangerous.
And Astra.
She's in the hub. Ten meters away through two bulkheads. I shouldn't be able to feel her this clearly.
I do.
Anger. Always the anger, my constant companion from her. But underneath—something else. Something she's trying to bury but can't quite lock down completely.
Fear.
Not of Webb, I'd recognize that frequency anywhere, sharp and immediate like static across sensors. Not of the mission either, she's done worse, and the steady determination underneath her surface thoughts tells me she's already calculating extraction points and fallback positions.
No.
This fear is different. Slower. More insidious.
Fear of being trapped on this ship. In these cramped quarters where you can't walk ten meters without running into someone. With me. For two full days of transit with nowhere to hide and emotions that bleed through bulkheads whether she wants them to or not.
I taste it on the back of my tongue, copper and ice and the particular bitterness of dread that's been marinading for six years.
She's been afraid of this exact scenario since I walked back into her life.
Close quarters. Forced proximity. The inability to maintain distance when the ship itself won't allow it.
And underneath all that fear, buried so deep she probably doesn't even know it's there—probably doesn't want to know, would deny it if I told her, would absolutely put a knife in me if I dared to name it out loud, there's something else.
Want.
The ghost of it. The echo. A frequency so faint I almost miss it in the noise of everything else she's feeling. But it's there. Has been there since the docking bay, since the training room, since every moment we've spent trying not to look at each other directly.
She wants me.
She also wants to kill me.
The fact that both things can be true simultaneously is the thing that's going to destroy us both.
The coffee in my cup tastes like ship's rations—recycled water, synthetic caffeine, the metallic tang that comes from being filtered through life support seventeen times before it reaches your mouth.
Tastes like bad decisions and worse timing and the particular flavor of regret that comes from knowing you're about to do something inadvisable and doing it anyway.
I drink it anyway.
All of it.
Because if I'm going to survive two days on this ship with a woman who hates me and wants me and might kill me in my sleep, I'm going to need to be awake for every second of it.
Ship's night cycle.
The lights dim to emergency blue. The temperature drops two degrees—energy conservation protocols. The corridor outside my quarters is empty, silent except for the ever-present hum of systems.
I'm not sleeping.
Can't.
Astra's quarters are directly adjacent to mine. Close enough that I can hear when she shifts in her bunk, when her breathing changes rhythm, when she gets up and paces.
She's pacing now.
I lie in the dark and track her movement through the wall. Three steps one direction. Turn. Three steps back. The pattern of someone trying to wear out their own thoughts.
I could reach out. Just far enough to sense her emotional state, to know if she's okay.
I don't.
She asked me not to. On the ship, during the briefing before launch, when Torres and Kesh were still loading gear and we had a moment alone in the corridor.
"I know you can feel me," she'd said. Her voice low, controlled. "I know I can't stop that. But don't... don't reach for me. Don't try to read deeper than what I'm leaking. Give me that much."
I'd agreed. Because she asked. Because respecting her boundaries is the only thing I can give her that means anything.
But listening to her pace, knowing she's awake and restless and probably thinking about Sigma-9, about Webb, about the ninety seconds that destroyed us—
It takes everything I have not to reach out.
Her pacing stops.
I hear the muffled sound of her door opening. Footsteps in the corridor. Retreating toward the ship's small gym.
Training. At—I check the chrono—0300 hours.
Of course.
I should stay here. Should respect her space, her need to work through whatever's driving her at this hour.
I pull on pants and a shirt anyway.
The gym is barely worthy of the name. A converted storage compartment with resistance bands, a pull-up bar welded to the ceiling, and floor mats that have seen better decades.
She's there when I step through the hatch. Back to the door, facing the mirrored bulkhead, her body caught mid-stretch with both arms raised above her head in some flexibility sequence Astra Venn probably drilled into her.
The ship's emergency lighting casts everything in blue-grey shadows. Her red hair is tied back severely. Sweat already darkens the fabric between her shoulder blades.
Her shirt rides up.
I see them.
The scars.
I've known about them in the abstract. Knew they existed—felt the echoes of her pain through our empathic connection during the chaos of Sigma-9, felt every brutal moment of her captivity before the distance grew too great and the sensing finally cut off, leaving me with nothing but the ghost-memory of her screaming.
I knew they existed. Knew she'd been damaged. I felt the echoes of her pain through our connection during Sigma-9, felt every moment of her captivity before the distance grew too great and the sensing cut off.
Knowing is different from seeing.
Her back is a map of damage. Burn scars across her left shoulder blade—the worst of them, puckered and twisted, the kind that came from prolonged contact with something hot.
Thin white lines from knife work tracing her ribs.
A latticework of old wounds, layered over each other, six years of damage inscribed in flesh.
Some of them are straight. Too straight. Too deliberate.
She did those herself.
My marks flare bright enough to cast shadows.