Chapter 10
RAYEK
Iwake to warmth, weight, and the softest sound in the universe: her breath catching and smoothing again against my chest. The cabin is dim, emergency strips a low hush along the floor, the air perfumed with leather, ion, and the citrus cleaner this ridiculous ceremonial bird insists on exhaling.
Star is tangled in the sheets like the aftermath of a good storm, hair a red spill over my shoulder, lips parted, bruises already changing color at the edges.
I count the rise and fall once, twice, until the part of me built for war starts to relax into a shape that feels almost like sleep.
Almost.
Reality sits down at the edge of the bed and taps my horn with a finger.
I ease my arm out from under her with the kind of care I have only ever used for explosives and small animals, tuck the sheet higher over her shoulder, and stand.
My body inventories itself automatically: ribs sore, forearm scored where bone spurs tried to write their names on me, a new bruise under the left clavicle shaped like the Bloodseeker’s temper.
All acceptable. I dress without noise, check the knife by habit, and palm the cabin door open.
CynJyn is where I expect her: barefoot in the cockpit with her boots abandoned under the copilot’s chair, one knee up, hair in a mess that looks deliberate, sipping something rude out of a metal mug while the stars smear into thin threads around us.
“You look different,” she says without turning. “Taller. Shinier. Like somebody polished your soul.”
“Good morning,” I answer, deadpan.
“It is, isn’t it?” She swivels, grins, and aims the mug at me. “Want a sip? It tastes like a battery fell in love with coffee.”
“I have survived worse,” I say, taking it. The drink bites. I let it. “Status.”
“Don’t you want to talk about your feelings first?” she asks, shameless. “We can braid each other’s hair.”
“Status,” I repeat, and hand the mug back.
She sighs theatrically and spins to the console.
“Okay, Commander Romance. Shields are behaving like they weren’t just smacked with a crowbar.
I had to baby the port relay with a prayer and a slap, but it decided to live.
Engines want to be dramatic, so I told them the alternative is drifting and dying.
They’re purring now. The bow camera is sulking; I’m letting it.
Fuel at sixty-eight percent if we don’t do anything outrageous, forty-nine if we do. And congrats: we’re not exploding.”
“Any friends,” I ask. “Any angry family.”
“I turned off our tendency to broadcast our sins,” she says, fingers flicking across a series of toggles with affectionate contempt.
“No transponder. No house crest. Our ceremonial identity is in a box under the bed where it belongs. I’ve got us skirting the ice fringe of the next system and then we’re hopping a dirty corridor I stole off a salvage guild.
It gets us into Alliance lanes without giving anyone who loves paperwork an aneurysm. ”
“Comms?”
“Radio silence,” she sings. “But I built us a nicer lie. When we hit the first beacon that isn’t owned by a pirate with a hobby, I can throw a burst packet at an IHC patrol with our ‘help we are small and polite’ face on it, plus a copy of the Bloodseeker’s heat signature, partial engine telemetry, and Kren’s bead chatter. You like bounties, Daddy War.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Fine. Daddy Knife.”
“CynJyn.”
She wiggles her eyebrows and then sobers. “Seriously—there’s a bounty on Stormhammer hull IDs and telemetry, right? Alliance pays better if you show work and don’t just point at a fire and say ‘We did that with our minds.’”
“There is,” I say. “They like proof. Timelines. Names.”
“You got names?”
“I have a dead man’s,” I say, tapping my jaw where the bead sits. “I have his supervisor’s voice. I have a hull that screamed when it died. It will do.”
“And you have a girl sleeping in the other room,” she says, voice dipped softer, “so let’s maybe stack as many shields between us and Brozen’s bad mood as possible.”
“Agreed.”
She pulls up a map and the cockpit floods with a ghost grid: lanes like threads, beacons blinking steady as old saints, warning halos around the places where physics gets drunk.
She points with the edge of her mug. “Option one: we cut straight across the polite part and hope no one notices a shiny bird with a guilty conscience. I don’t like it. ”
“No.”
“Option two: we skim this belt, eat a little rock dust, pop out near the Sparrow Lane and aim to intersect the IHC patrol that misses dinner twice a week.”
“When?” I ask.
“Two hours if we stay loud,” she says. “Three if we dead-stick and kiss the ice. I can make it two and a half if I flirt.”
“Do not flirt with space,” I tell her. “Space does not flirt back.”
“Space absolutely flirts,” she says. “It’s just subtle. Option three: we bounce through the Athena subcorridor and pray no one on shift remembers what a ceremonial cruiser silhouette looks like when it’s pretending to be cargo.”
“Athena’s crowded,” I say. “Too many eyes.”
She nods. “Sparrow it is. You in the mood to time a chaperone?”
“Yes,” I say, and slide into the navigator’s seat because I will not let my hands be idle while there are still teeth behind us. “Queue the patrol schedules. Show me their laziness.”
She pulls up patrol arcs, blue cones sweeping in tidy discipline. “This is today’s lie,” she says. “They’re never where the map says they’ll be. But they are creatures of habit.”
“They cut the corner here,” I say, pointing at an overlap where economics beat doctrine every time.
“And they run wide here when the beacons glitch for a fraction. If we drop into the lane at this time stamp”—I mark a spot with a claw tip—“we will slide directly into a picket’s blind shoulder. We will call it a mercy meeting.”
“Hot,” she says. “I love when you and geometry flirt.”
“I do not flirt with geometry.”
“Sure,” she says. “Tell that to the angle you just made me.”
“CynJyn.”
“What? It’s a nice angle.”
I let the banter sit because it calms us both.
My hands move across the board, spooling a course that leaves as little scent as a ship this silly can.
Pulse, coast, mask. Pulse, coast, breathe.
She hums a song under her breath that keeps time with the nav ticks.
The stars smear and reassemble, ghosting into different constellations that don’t care about our small concerns.
“You didn’t deny it,” she says after a quiet minute.
“Deny what.”
“The very obvious, glaring, heroic, can-be-seen-from-orbit chemistry,” she says, turning the mug in her hands so the metal catches the dim. “And the part where you’re different now. Less… sharp around the edges.”
I check a burn time because I am a coward in matters of the heart and a professional in matters of everything else. “She is sleeping,” I say finally. “I am not going to discuss private things while she is sleeping.”
“That’s not a denial,” she sings.
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
She beams. “Good. I’m sick of being the only house heathen who believes in love.”
“You are not a heathen,” I tell her, because accuracy matters even when the world is unkind. “You are a useful heretic.”
“Frame it,” she says, pleased. “So. You’re in charge of telling her parents she is coming home with teeth and choices and an attitude.”
“I am in charge of getting her to where telling anyone anything becomes a question,” I counter. “Then we can write our corrections.”
“You really think the Alliance patrol will play nice?” she asks, squinting at the next set of beacons. “Half the time they act like bounties are a tacky rumor.”
“They like Khong even less than I do,” I say. “And we have something they want. Proof. Survivors. A hull signature. If we arrive under their umbrella, anyone who wishes us harm will have to write a letter first.”
“Ooh. Paperwork. The true deterrent.”
“Exactly.”
She leans back, puts her feet up on a console that doesn’t deserve them, and watches me watch the map.
“You know,” she says, “when we’re old and you’ve lost every hair and I’m a saint in a scandal, I’m going to tell the children about how you crawled into a murder ship and pulled us out with your teeth. ”
“Don’t,” I say.
“I absolutely will,” she says. “Right after I tell them about how you look when she falls asleep on your chest.”
“CynJyn.”
“You were purring,” she says, delighted. “Like a very large, very murderous cat.”
“I do not purr.”
“You rumble,” she concedes. “It’s hot.”
“Plot the intercept,” I say, and she laughs and plots the intercept.
We work in the comfortable silence of people who have bled together and know when to use words like tools and when to file them away.
She feeds the engines the right kind of flattery; I teach the nav how to lie with its mouth closed.
Once, a ghost ping brushes the edge of our sensor lid and both our spines lift; then it slides away—a drunk courier cutting through a lane he didn’t pay for.
I let my shoulders settle only when the scope says its polite goodbyes.
“Question,” CynJyn says, softer now. “Are you going to tell her about the reassignment?”
“Yes,” I say. “It belongs to her to know.”
“She’s going to be mad.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to kiss you anyway.”
I breathe, measure, and let the admission come out like it’s part of the ship’s hum. “I hope so.”
She grins into her mug. “Good answer.”
I stand, stretch until my ribs complain, and glance back down the short corridor toward the sleeping cabin.
The door is closed. The light under it is a thin seam.
I can hear nothing and I can hear her anyway because something in me turned itself to her frequency the first time she put a Bishop in my hand and said check in a voice that could have meant anything.
“I’ll watch,” CynJyn says, reading me the way all good thieves read a room. “Go breathe like a person for five minutes. I can handle space not flirting with me.”