5. Garokk
GAROKK
S he talks.
Stars above, she talks.
At first it’s a low murmur, something about her arm, her blood, her hair—nonsense that fills the air like static. But soon the noise becomes constant. A flow of words that has no rhythm, no battle logic, no discipline. It’s maddening.
It should be maddening.
And yet… it isn’t.
Because it’s alive.
The sound of her voice pushes back against the dead hush that’s filled this ship for decades. It echoes down the corridors where I’ve heard only my own breath. It’s color in the dark. Heat against the cold. It is life, and I’ve forgotten how that sounded until now.
She’s small, this woman. Barely reaches my chest. A creature of soft edges and fast expressions.
Her hair’s tangled, black with streaks of purple that catch the dim lights like bruised twilight.
The scent of her hits first—sharp and bright, some kind of flower mixed with the metallic tang of fear and blood.
It doesn’t belong here. Nothing fragrant survives in this place. The Hulk eats everything pure.
But somehow, she’s still here. Still… her.
I don’t understand it.
I don’t understand her.
She sits on the old bench beside one of the auxiliary consoles, patching up her arm with my salvaged medkit.
Her lips keep moving. She’s talking to that hovering droid again—the small, fussy one with the trembling voice.
Reflector. I’ve seen it before on the monitors, shadowing her like a metallic parasite.
“Stop fussing,” she says, flicking at it. “I’m fine. It’s just a scratch. Okay, maybe not just, but I’m not dying, so let’s all take a deep breath and calm the hell down.”
The drone hums a worried little tune in response. “Your heart rate remains elevated. Minor blood loss, approximately?—”
“Reflector,” she interrupts, “if you finish that sentence, I’m uninstalling your drama module.”
I don’t know what half her words mean, but the tone—the tone —is the same one soldiers used when they were afraid and pretending they weren’t. And something about that makes my chest tighten.
I watch her from across the chamber, staying mostly in shadow. She doesn’t seem to mind. Or maybe she’s too busy filling the silence to notice me standing here.
Her eyes flick toward me once, quick as a pulse. I feel the weight of it. Her gaze doesn’t linger, but it hits hard. I’ve had weapons pointed at me that felt less piercing.
“Thanks, by the way,” she says suddenly.
It catches me off guard. “For what?”
Her head snaps up, startled. “Oh my gods—you talk. ”
I grunt. “Obviously.”
“I mean, yeah, but you didn’t before. You just—” she gestures vaguely with her hands, smearing a bit of dried blood on her sleeve—“you did the whole strong silent monster routine. Scary eyes, brooding, carrying me like a damsel from a pulp drama.”
“I carried you because you were bleeding.”
“Yeah,” she says, her mouth twitching. “That’s… technically true.”
She falls quiet for half a second. That’s all it takes for the silence to stretch again, long and deep and alive with the sound of distant ship metal shifting. Then she’s back at it, because of course she is.
“So what’s your deal, anyway?” she asks. “You some kind of war vet? Ship gremlin? Lonely guardian of the space tomb?”
I frown. “You talk too much.”
She grins. “You think too loud.”
The words shouldn’t sting. But they do.
Because she’s not wrong. My head hasn’t been quiet since she stumbled in here. My thoughts are crawling, restless. My pulse is hammering. Both hearts are beating faster the closer she comes.
I turn away. “You should rest.”
“Rest?” She snorts. “In this haunted scrapyard full of corpses? Hard pass.”
I let the corner of my mouth twitch, just once. I hope she doesn’t see it. “You’re alive because of me.”
“Oh, I know. Don’t think I’m not grateful, Mr. Dramatic Entrance. But gratitude doesn’t make this less terrifying.”
She waves her uninjured hand in the air, gesturing to the walls around us—the cracked plating, the dying consoles, the web of old wiring that snakes along the ceiling like veins. The Hulk hums low beneath our feet, alive in its own ancient, wounded way.
“This place,” she says softly, almost to herself, “it feels like it’s breathing.”
“It is,” I say.
She startles again. “Wait—you mean literally? ”
I shrug. “Partially. There are systems still active. Climate regulation. Gravity stabilizers. Organic power conduits. The ship was built with a nervous system. It remembers what it was.”
She stares at me. “And you know that because…?”
“I’ve been here fifty years.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Then opens again.
“Fifty. Five-zero. Years.”
“Yes.”
She just stares at me like she’s trying to compute that.
Finally, she mutters, “Okay. Wow. And here I was complaining about losing my luggage on Paraxis.”
I don’t understand half her references, but the way she says it makes me look at her again.
Fifty years alone. No voice but mine. No sound but the groan of the ship and the scrape of claws in corridors long empty. And now this—this flood of words, color, scent, and heat. This woman who refuses to be quiet even when she’s scared out of her mind.
The Hulk hums again. I can feel it in the soles of my feet, the way it used to hum during the War, when it was more alive than machine. I can feel it… responding.
Something’s shifting in the power grid. Conduits reactivating. Sensors blinking to life. Systems that haven’t breathed in decades stirring awake—because of her?
No. That’s impossible.
But I can’t shake the thought.
She looks at me again, eyes soft now. Curious. Not afraid anymore.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
I hesitate.
It’s been so long since anyone’s asked me that, I almost forget the sound of it.
“Garokk,” I say finally. My voice feels strange saying it aloud, like dust being shaken off an old blade.
“Garokk,” she repeats, rolling the syllables carefully, like she’s testing them for taste. “Kinda sounds like a curse word. I like it.”
“You shouldn’t,” I mutter.
“Why not?”
“Because most who say it are dead.”
She tilts her head. “Yeah, but I’m not. ”
That’s when it hits me.
This human—this ridiculous, fragile thing with purple streaks and more courage than sense— isn’t afraid of me.
Not really.
She should be. I’m a monster even my own people stopped naming. I’ve done things—terrible, bloody things—in the Centuries War that make lesser warriors break just hearing them described. But she doesn’t know any of that. Or maybe she doesn’t care.
She leans back, propping herself up on one elbow, studying me with those warm brown eyes. “You’ve got that whole tortured loner vibe,” she says. “Real broody. Real ‘I’ve seen things’ energy.”
I scowl. “I have seen things.”
She laughs. The sound bounces off the steel walls, bright and alive, too loud and too beautiful for this graveyard.
Something inside my chest—something long buried— moves.
I shift uncomfortably. My claws twitch against the floor. The sharp scrape of keratin on metal echoes faintly. My breath comes too fast, and my hearts pound hard enough to make my vision pulse.
This isn’t good.
I don’t do this. I don’t feel this. Not since before the War. Not since before everything burned.
I stand abruptly, turning away. “I’ll find you food.”
“Garokk—” she starts, but I cut her off with a low growl.
“Stay here.”
There’s more command in it than I intend, but she just raises an eyebrow. “You really think I’m gonna wander off after what just happened?”
“Humans do stupid things.”
She smirks. “Yeah, well. You’d know, wouldn’t you?”
That pulls a grunt out of me—half amusement, half irritation. I push open the access panel, letting the door groan shut behind me.
But even as I walk the dim corridors, scavenging old ration crates and listening to the Hulk murmur through the vents, I can’t stop hearing her voice. It follows me like a phantom in the metal.
She’s too bright for this place.
Too alive.
And yet… my instincts whisper something older. Deeper. A word in my native tongue that burns at the back of my mind.
Jalshagar.
The fated bond.
Impossible.
Vakutans don’t have fates. Not anymore. The war burned that superstition out of us.
But I can’t shake the feeling that something in the ship, in my blood, in the very marrow of this cursed metal, knows her.
And my hearts—both of them—won’t stop pounding.
The smell of her clings to everything now.
The air. The walls. Me.
It’s subtle at first—faint and floral, like the kind of thing soft-skinned people wear to disguise that they’re made of blood and salt. But here, in this stale metal tomb, it’s sharp enough to cut through recycled air and rust. I can taste it on the back of my tongue when I breathe.
And it does something to me I don’t like.
Not fear. Not quite anger, either. Something worse. Something alive.
I shouldn’t notice it. Shouldn’t care. I’ve lived surrounded by rot and machine oil for half a century. Nothing has smelled like her in decades. Maybe that’s why it gets to me. She doesn’t belong here. None of her does.
She laughs again—low, soft, alive—and I feel the sound in my chest before I hear it in my ears. I don’t even know what she’s laughing at. Probably that droid of hers, Reflector, the jittering idiot. Or maybe me.
Her laugh makes the ship sound less dead. That bothers me more than it should.
I’m standing a few corridors away from the safe zone, back turned to her, watching an old surveillance panel sputter to life.
I’ve rerouted what little power I can from the Hulk’s secondary grid, enough to get eyes on Meyer’s people.
The screens flicker in a patchwork of green and gray.
Static cuts through half the feed. I can still see movement—heat signatures crawling through the corridors like disease.
Meyer and his pack.
They’re hunting.
And they’re getting closer.