30. Gnash #3
Of course.
The answer has been crawling around me, coughing smoke, asking for blankets, needing corridors, reading evidence on public feeds, telling me not to chase bait, telling me the living will know better.
Skahar continues, “Revenge is simple because the dead ask only memory. The living are greedy. They ask food, air, medicine, patience, law, compromise, safe corridors, repaired doors, and leaders who can swallow insults without making orphans of them. The living ask everything.”
My throat works.
“And if I fail them?”
“You will.”
I look at him.
He shrugs one old shoulder. “Everyone fails the living. The work is failing less tomorrow.”
I laugh then, not because anything is funny, but because the old bastard has found a way to make despair sound like policy.
“You are terrible at comfort.”
“I have many other virtues.”
“Name one.”
“I did not sedate you.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” he agrees.
For a moment, the weight in my chest loosens enough to let breath move through it.
My compad vibrates.
Ursa’s message appears, delayed but bright as a blade in a dark room.
Alliance intervention packet gaining traction. Treaty limits are helping, but the capital ship entry is feeding every hawk with a microphone. Send me whatever you have from Bravax and Dakkor. I’m sorry this is happening. I’m angry with you, and I love you, and both are making me insufferable.
I stare at the final line.
I am angry with you, and I love you.
A Reaper song begins somewhere below, low and ragged, joined by a second voice, then a third.
It is a shelter song, one sung aboard damaged ships and in caves during storms, meant to tell the frightened that the walls still stand.
The sound climbs through the market ring and fills the observation alcove with rough harmony.
Skahar looks down toward the singers. “She is honest.”
“She is furious.”
“Those are often related.”
I type slowly because I owe her care with every word.
Coalition fleets entered in force. Battles have spread farther than I expected. Bravax and Dakkor data attached. My revenge has failed me. I do not yet know how to stand without it, but I am learning where to put my hands.
I send the message before shame can make me revise it into something proud.
Skahar reads my face, not the screen. “Good.”
“You do not know what I wrote.”
“I know what it cost.”
I slip the compad away and look once more over the market.
My people have no homeworld. Their history is broken.
Their songs remember fragments of a gentler species most of us cannot imagine without mockery.
I cannot return what was taken. I cannot unmake what I became to survive.
I cannot pull my vengeance from the mouths of enemies who learned to speak it back at me.
But I can choose what happens next.
The command center calls before I am ready, because readiness is another luxury war does not provide.
Vakka reports new movements near the Trask Fold.
Krell needs authorization for another evacuation escort.
Theryki requests a strategy conference with three fleet commanders who have never had to smell the inside of my shelters.
Alliance white icons continue drifting toward the map like frost.
I turn from the alcove.
Skahar falls into step beside me, cane striking the deck in slow, stubborn rhythm.
“What will you do?” he asks.
I walk toward the command center through smoke, song, and the murmuring life of civilians who deserve more than my rage.
“I will stop chasing the Combine into every fire they light,” I say. “I will make them answer for the fires. There is a difference.”
Skahar grunts. “There may be hope for you yet.”
“Do not grow sentimental.”
“I would rather swallow my cane.”
We enter the command center as another wave of reports blooms red across the map.
Coalition blue surrounds Guyver like armor and threat.
Alliance white gathers beyond contested lines.
Combine gray threads through trade routes, colonies, and stations where ordinary people are still trying to survive the ambitions of monsters in clean rooms.
Once, I would have looked at that map and searched for where to strike hardest.
Now I look for where civilians can escape.
The change does not feel noble.
It feels like grief learning discipline.
I take my place at the table.
“Send Bravax and Dakkor packets to Ursa,” I say. “All raw feeds. No polish. No propaganda.”
Krell nods. “Yes, lord.”
“Vakka, defensive posture around civilian corridors remains absolute. No pursuit beyond evacuation cover without my direct command.”
“Understood.”
“Open a channel to Theryki and the fleet commanders,” I say. “If their capital ships are in my territory, then they can hear my terms from my mouth.”
Skahar’s cane taps once beside me.
The map glows, the station breathes, and the war continues spreading beyond every line the negotiations were supposed to protect.
I stand in the center of it with revenge turning to ash behind my teeth and the living demanding everything in front of me.
I let the ash stay ash.