18. Gnash #3
Vakka studies the rumor map. “Security can control entry, sweep the gallery, and put plain-clothes watchers in the service corridor. No food unless Narra prepares it herself.”
Ursa looks at her. “Narra does diplomatic catering?”
“Narra does whatever she decides is necessary,” Vakka says. “We mostly try not to stand in the way.”
I turn to Skahar. “Your view?”
“My view is that you are both doomed to be difficult, and our enemies will underestimate how useful that is if we let them.” He steps closer, implant eye whirring softly.
“Go. Be seen. Let Theryki learn that the bond has made you more attentive, not less. Let the gossipers choke on a relationship that does not fit their little cages.”
Ursa looks up at me. “That’s actually good advice.”
“He has moments.”
“I have centuries,” Skahar says. “You have moments.”
Vakka closes the projection. “I will arrange security.”
“Quietly,” I say.
She snorts. “No, lord, I planned to announce every position through the market while juggling knives.”
“You have done stranger things.”
“For morale.”
When she leaves, Skahar follows more slowly. At the door, he pauses and looks back at me. The mockery fades from his face, and what remains is old, worn, and deeply serious.
“They will come for her,” he says. “Not all at once. Not always with blades. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“And they will come for the parts of you she has woken.”
“I know.”
“No,” he says softly. “You are beginning to know. That is different.”
The door closes behind him, leaving Ursa and me alone in the old signal room with the dead relay banks and the Badlands burning beyond the glass.
For a while, neither of us speaks.
Then Ursa exhales slowly. “This got complicated.”
“It was complicated when you boarded my station.”
“It was professionally complicated then. Now it’s professionally complicated, politically explosive, emotionally dangerous, and apparently stew-adjacent.”
“Narra will be pleased you include her.”
“She terrifies me more than Gobold.”
“She is more competent.”
Ursa laughs, and the sound loosens something in my chest that the rumor map had tightened.
I move closer, stopping before I crowd her.
She notices. She always notices. Instead of stepping back, she reaches for my hand.
Her fingers slide around two of mine, warm and impossibly small, and the bond between us settles like a flame cupped against wind.
“I’m not ashamed of this,” she says.
“No.”
“I’m afraid of what people will do with it.”
“Yes.”
“Those can both be true.”
“I am learning that many truths fit in the same room even when they hate one another.”
“That is either wisdom or exhaustion.”
“With you, often both.”
Her smile turns tender enough to hurt. “You said yes to that child.”
“I did.”
“You meant it.”
“Yes.”
She looks down at our joined hands. “I’m not ready to say it back like that.”
The confession enters quietly and cuts clean because she trusts me enough not to decorate it. I tighten my hand around hers only slightly, careful not to make a cage from comfort.
“I did not say it to demand echo.”
Her eyes lift. “I know.”
“Good.”
“But I feel…” She searches for the word and shakes her head once, frustrated. “A lot. I feel a lot, and I don’t have neat places to put it yet.”
“I have many ugly storage rooms.”
That surprises a laugh out of her. “Do not offer emotional storage rooms like that is romantic.”
“I am new to this.”
“You’re doing weirdly well.”
“I will inform the rumor network.”
“Please don’t.”
I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles.
The gesture is gentle, but the promise beneath it is not.
Her breath catches. I want to tell her every dangerous thing inside me.
I want to name love again, not for corridors or gossip or children, but for the woman standing in front of me with fear in her eyes and courage in her spine.
I do not. Love that demands an answer is only another kind of pressure, and the galaxy is already pressing on her from every side.
Instead, I lower her hand and keep holding it.
“Tomorrow,” I say, “we let them see enough to become confused.”
Her eyes brighten. “That may be our most useful strategy yet.”
“They expect weakness.”
“Let’s give them a problem.”
I smile then, slow and sharp. “That I can do.”
Outside the viewport, lightning splits the Badlands in silence.
Inside the room, the dead relay banks reflect our joined hands in cracked glass, making a dozen broken images of the same impossible truth.
The risks around us are multiplying. Theryki is recalculating.
Dawson is circling. Zune is hiding knives inside money.
Gobold is hoping for the kind of crisis soldiers can solve by aiming at it.
Every faction has learned my heart has a name now, and every one of them will try to turn that knowledge into leverage.
Let them try.
I am done mistaking love for weakness simply because cowards know how to threaten it.
Ursa squeezes my hand once, and together we stand in the old signal room while Guyver Station carries our rumor through its bones toward every enemy listening.