Chapter 6 #3
She freezes mid-stretch. Catches my reflection in the small mirror bolted to the bulkhead.
Her walls slam up so hard I actually stagger.
It's not a metaphor. The psychic pressure of her locking down hits my awareness like a physical blow. My temples spike with sudden pain—the Empri equivalent of feedback, of trying to sense someone who's just become a blank wall of nothing.
"Don't."
One word. Cold. Final.
She lowers her arms. Pulls her shirt down. Turns to face me with an expression that could freeze stars.
"I shouldn't have looked."
The words taste like ash. Useless. We both know it.
"No." Her voice is flat. Dead. The tone that means she's already gone somewhere I can't follow. "You shouldn't have. But you did."
"I'll go."
I turn toward the door. Every instinct screaming at me to fix this, to stay, to make her understand—
"Wait."
I freeze. Don't turn back. Don't trust myself to look at her without my marks betraying everything I'm feeling.
The silence stretches. Long enough that I almost turn anyway. Almost ask what she wants, what she needs, what I can possibly give her that won't make this worse.
Then her voice, rough now. Raw in a way I've never heard from her:
"Did you feel it?"
The question lands like a blade between my ribs.
"When they took me. Could you sense what they were doing?"
My breath stops.
I could lie. Should lie.
Her hand moves to her hip. Where her knife usually sits. It's not there—she's in sleep clothes, unarmed—but the gesture is instinct. Reach for the weapon. Establish the threat.
I raise my hands. Non-threatening. Visible.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—"
"No." She cuts me off. "You shouldn't have. And you especially shouldn't be looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're cataloging damage." Her voice drops. Goes quiet. Dangerous quiet. "Like you're counting scars and calculating what they cost. Like you have any right to my pain."
She's right.
I have absolutely no right to her pain, not to witness it, not to calculate its shape, not to mentally catalog each scar as evidence of my failure. But I saw them anyway. Can't unsee them now. Each one is burned into my memory with the same precision they're burned into her skin.
The burn scar across her left shoulder blade, plasma scoring, the edges still angry after six years. The thin white lines from knife work along her ribs, interrogation marks, methodical and cruel. The twisted mass of tissue on her right thigh where something melted through flesh and kept going.
And the others. The ones she did to herself.
The cutting scars on her arms. Self-inflicted during the worst of her recovery, when pain was the only thing that felt real, when she needed to hurt something and her own body was the only target available.
The full accounting of what six years without me did to her.
What I did to her, by leaving.
My marks are pulsing, grief so profound it's nearly physical, guilt that tastes like copper on my tongue. I'm feeling everything I put into her body through absence. Every scar is a wound I dealt secondhand.
"I'll go," I say.
The words come out rougher than I intend. I need to leave. Need to get out of this room before I do something catastrophically stupid like apologize again, like try to touch her, like beg her to let me stay.
I turn toward the door. Every instinct screaming at me to fix this, to stay, to make her understand—
"Wait."
I freeze. Don't turn back. Don't trust myself to look at her without my marks betraying everything I'm feeling.
Silence. Long enough that I almost turn back. Almost ask what she wants, what she needs, what I can possibly give her that won't make this worse.
"Did you feel it?" Her voice is rough now. "When they took me. Could you sense what they were doing?"
The question lands like a blade between my ribs.
I could lie. Should lie. Tell her the distance was too great, the sensing cut off, I felt nothing after the first few hours.
"Yes."
The truth comes out flat. Clinical. The only way I can say it without breaking something.
"All of it?"
"Not... not everything. The connection faded as they took you further from the extraction point. But the first hours—" My throat closes. "Yes. I felt it."
Her emotional state spikes. Not anger this time.
Pain.
Raw, absolute, the kind that has no bottom. I taste copper and lightning and something that might be vindication. She wanted me to admit it. Needed to hear me say it out loud.
"And you still—"
"Yes."
I don't make her finish the sentence. Don't make her ask the question we both know the answer to.
Yes. I felt her terror. Felt her pain. Felt the moments when she thought I was coming back for her, felt the realization when she understood I wasn't.
And I still completed the mission.
I still left.
She hits me.
Not with her fist. With her whole body. Launches herself across the small space and slams into me hard enough that I stumble back against the bulkhead. Her hands fist in my shirt, her face inches from mine.
"I fucking hate you," she says.
Her voice is raw, stripped down to nothing but the truth of it. The hate is old, six years old, weathered smooth by constant handling. But underneath—fresh rage, new and sharp, the kind that comes from having old wounds reopened.
"I know."
It's all I have. The acknowledgment without defense. She deserves more, but I don't have more to give.
"You left me with them."
Her grip on my shirt tightens. Her knuckles are white against the dark fabric. I can feel the tremor in her hands, the physical manifestation of everything she's holding back.
"I know."
"They—" Her voice breaks. Actually breaks, splintering into something jagged. "They hurt me. For hours. And you felt it. You felt what they did."
The words hang between us. She's not asking a question. She's forcing me to confirm what we both already know.
"I know."
My marks are flickering erratically now.
The bioluminescence betraying what I'm feeling—guilt and grief and the memory of those first hours when the connection was still strong enough to sense her across kilometers.
The memory of her terror flooding through me while I completed the extraction. While I walked away.
"Say something else." She shakes me. Hard enough that my head hits the bulkhead with a dull thunk. "Say anything except 'I know.'"
What is there to say?
That I'm sorry? I am. Sorry in ways that have carved themselves into my bones, settled into the spaces between my ribs. But sorry doesn't change the math. Doesn't rewrite the ninety seconds. Doesn't bring back what was taken from her.
That I'd do it differently now? I wouldn't. That's the thing that makes this irredeemable.
The situation repeats itself in my nightmares with perfect clarity—the same odds, the same window, the same impossible choice.
And every time, I make the same decision.
The mission. The numbers. The cold calculation that says one life against the objective, one woman against the tactical success.
I choose correctly. Every time.
I hate myself for it. Every time.
But I still choose.
That I love her? She knows that already.
Felt it last night when I finally said the words I should have said six years ago, before Sigma-9, before everything broke.
Felt it through whatever connection exists between us now—thinner than it was when we served together, but still there, still enough for her to sense the weight of what I feel.
It didn't make her hate me less.
If anything, it made it worse. Because love that leaves you is more unforgivable than simple cruelty.
So I say the only truth left.
The one she needs to hear even if it destroys what little ground we're standing on.
"I wish I couldn't have felt it," I tell her. "I wish the connection had cut off immediately. I wish I'd just made the choice and walked away clean."
Her breath catches.
"But it didn't. I felt every second. Felt your terror. Felt your pain. Felt the moment you started thinking maybe I was coming back." My marks are blazing now. Bright enough that her face is lit blue in the dim gym. "Felt the moment you realized I wasn't."
"Stop—"
"You want me to say something else? That's all I have. I left you. I felt you suffer. And I've replayed those ninety seconds every day for six years, looking for a different answer."
"And?"
"And I don't have one. The math was clear. I chose correctly." I meet her eyes. "I've hated myself every day since. But I'd do it again."
She shoves me away.
Stumbles back. Her breathing is ragged, her walls fracturing, emotions bleeding through faster than she can lock them down.
Rage. Pain. And underneath it all—
That ghost of want. Stronger now. Close enough to the surface that she must feel it too.
"Get out," she says again. The words are cracked glass, fracturing on every syllable.
This time I go.
I make myself walk. Make myself put one foot in front of the other. Make myself not turn around when I hear the sound behind me—the soft thump of her body hitting the mat. The ragged intake of breath that's trying to be quiet and failing.
She's sinking to the floor.
I hear her trying not to cry. Hear the war she's fighting with her own throat, the way she's choking back sound like sound is surrender.
I keep walking.
Every step away from her feels like pulling against gravity. Like leaving the orbit of something that's already caught me.
My marks are still blazing. Still responding to everything I'm feeling from her through the connection I can't sever even when distance should deaden it. The rage bleeding into grief bleeding into something she won't name and I can't touch.
The gym door closes behind me.
I don't look back.
Because staying would mean reaching for her. And reaching for her would mean using my abilities to smooth this out, to calm her down, to make it easier.
I won't do that to her.
Not now. Not ever. Not when doing it would prove every terrible thing she believes about what I am.
Even if it means we both suffer through every second of this, her grief raw and unfiltered, my marks blazing with the echo of it, both of us drowning in what I can feel and can't fix.
Even if the restraint is killing me. Even if every instinct I have is screaming to reach back through our connection, to push calm into the storm, to make her stop hurting in ways I know exactly how to do.
I could. God, I could. My abilities are right there, waiting, eager. It would be so fucking easy.
I don't.
I make it back to my quarters on autopilot. Muscle memory carrying me through corridors I don't see, past personnel I don't acknowledge. My marks are still flaring—brilliant turquoise lighting my path like a beacon advertising exactly how fucked I am.
I reach my door. Seal it behind me.
Lean against it in the dark.
The metal is cold against my spine. The station hums around me—life support, artificial gravity, the mechanical heartbeat of Veridian-7 continuing like nothing's wrong.
Everything's wrong.
Through the wall, I can still feel her. The jagged, broken rhythm of someone who's crying and furious about it.
I close my eyes.
Count to ninety.
The same ninety seconds I had on Sigma-9. The window that closed. The choice that can't be unmade.
Somewhere on the other side of this wall, Astra is breaking.
And I'm doing the only thing I know how to do.
I'm letting her.