17. Althea
ALTHEA
We fly into the storm because the storm is the only thing in this region the hunters won't follow us into.
It's a stellar squall — a churn of charged gas and debris the size of a moon, throwing radiation that blinds sensors and lightning that can cook a hull from the outside in.
Saren takes us into it the way you'd walk into a burning building to lose someone chasing you through it: deliberately, and only because the alternative is worse.
Inside, the ship starts coming apart in small ways that add up. Lights stutter. A coolant main lets go two decks down. And then the reactor housing throws an alarm I've learned to dread, because I've heard Caelis swear at it for a month.
"Containment breach, aft seal," he shouts, already running. "If the seal goes we lose the whole drive section. Maybe the whole ship."
I run with him. Nobody tells me to. The breach is a hairline split in an ancient weld, venting something that makes the air taste like a struck match, and the manual clamp is a two-person job in a space built for one.
We wedge in together, shoulder to shoulder, and I hold the seal plate while he torques it, and the storm punches the hull and the lights die and we finish it in the dark by feel, my hands and his, until the alarm drops from a scream to a grumble and the air stops tasting like death.
"Got it," Caelis breathes. "Thea, we got it."
That's when the corridor floods with emergency foam from a burst line further up, and the comms cut, and for a span of minutes the rest of the ship has no idea whether the two people who went into the reactor space came back out of it.
When I climb out, coated in foam and shaking, Saren is in the corridor.
I have never seen his face do what it does.
The captain is simply gone. What's left is something raw and very young, a man who'd been told the thing he loves was dead and had started, in some interior room, to accept it.
He crosses the distance in two strides and pulls me off my feet and against him, and he doesn't care that the whole watch crew is standing right there, doesn't care that he's broadcasting the one weakness a Reaper captain can't afford, just holds me hard enough to bruise and presses his mouth to my hair and says my name into it like he's checking it still fits.
The crew sees all of it. There's no unseeing it.
Over Saren's shoulder I find Theryn at the end of the corridor, not moving, watching his captain come apart over a human, and I watch him do the math I've watched him do before — except this time something in his face finishes the sum and goes quiet and certain, and I do not like it at all.