20. Garokk
GAROKK
I don’t need to kick down the doors to make a point.
Brute force is for amateurs and braggarts, and I’ve been both. But this—this is something else. This is war by memory. And I want her to feel it. Not the steel, not the blast—just the presence.
I slip into the station’s outer ring like a ghost with a grudge.
One breath and I’m in.
The corridor lights stutter as I pass under them. Not from anything I’ve done—just old wiring and a ship that wasn’t meant for anything real. This whole mall is a shell, a glamour-fueled carcass floating in pretty orbit, polished like a coin in a beggar’s palm.
No alarms. No bodies. No mess.
Yet.
I slide through the docking port like I belong there. I’ve seen the blueprints. Memorized the shift rotations. The security cycles. I hacked the ventilation hours ago, opened the pressure valves slow so no one noticed the shift in equilibrium.
There’s a utility corridor five levels above the main promenade. It smells like oil and citrus disinfectant. There’s a drip from a busted coolant pipe somewhere behind me. It echoes.
Perfect.
I crouch in the maintenance crawl. Steel grating beneath my claws. A cut-out panel gives me a direct view of the stage below. The whole damn platform sits under me like a toy theater.
And there she is.
Isolde.
Isolde fucking Verrix.
Standing in light like it owes her something.
Hair coiled, dress blinding, voice smooth and practiced. But I see the tremble. I see it. In the way her fingers clutch the scissors like they’re made of teeth. In the way her eyes twitch just slightly at the edges.
She feels me.
Not sees.
Feels.
That’s the way it always was between us. Magnetic. Unstable. Like two storm fronts dragging themselves across the sky just to collide. We didn’t need words. We needed space to burn.
But gods, she’s even more radiant than I remember. Sharper, somehow. Like time honed her into a blade. I want to reach out—just one hand through the grate, just enough to trace the curve of her neck, the line of her jaw. She probably still smells like honeyroot and defiance.
I don’t move.
I don’t even breathe.
Not when the boy steps up beside her.
Small.
Bright.
Coiled energy.
He’s got a stupid glittery jacket on, like some holo-show extra. And I almost laugh. Until he looks up at her and smiles.
It hits me like gravity.
Like a punch to the lungs.
That smile—stars—it’s mine.
Not in the physical. Not the cheekbones or the eyes. No. Something deeper. The defiance. The edge. The way he plants his feet like the station spins around him.
I stare.
And something in my gut shifts.
“No,” I whisper to myself.
It can’t be.
She wouldn’t?—
Would she?
I track his movements. He’s fidgety. Curious. Clutching her hand like it’s both anchor and shield. She bends toward him. Whispers something. Her smile softens. Real for a second.
Too real.
“Reflector,” I mutter into my comm implant.
The bot crackles in my ear. “You shouldn’t be speaking, Captain. You ordered?—”
“Facial match. Cross-reference boy’s profile with Isolde’s timeline.”
There’s a pause.
“Request denied,” Reflector says flatly. “You locked that database for your own psychological protection.”
“Override it.”
“That would be unwise.”
“Do it anyway.”
Another pause.
Then: “Processing...”
Below, Isolde finishes the speech. She lifts the scissors.
The crowd leans in.
And my heart does something it hasn’t done in a decade.
It stutters.
The ribbon cuts.
Applause rains down like a thunderclap through glass. Isolde’s face twists for a second—something flickering behind the mask.
“Garokk,” Reflector whispers. “Estimated genetic match... eighty-seven point six percent.”
I freeze.
“You’re telling me?—?”
“I cannot confirm without direct bio scan. But... probability is high.”
I lean back from the grate.
The silence in this corridor wraps around my ribs like a vice. I rest my head against the metal wall and let my claws dig shallow lines into my thigh just to keep myself tethered to the now.
She didn’t tell me.
She didn’t even try.
All those nights—those messages that never came. I thought she was dead. I let myself believe she was dead.
But she was here.
With him.
With our son.
I should be angry. I want to be. I want to tear through this goddamn station and demand answers, tear down the banners and make her say it—to my face, in her voice, not behind a podium or a security wall.
But I don’t move.
Because I can’t.
Not yet.
I watch as she steps back, press smiling into her face again, hands gentle on the boy’s shoulders.
She’s protecting him.
Even now.
Even from me.
And it burns. It burns so sweet I could scream.
“Reflector,” I say quietly. “Run an exit trace.”
“You’re not confronting her yet?”
“No.”
“Captain...”
“Not yet.”
There’s a plan now. It’s not fully formed. It lives in the back of my throat and tastes like smoke and regret. But it’s there.
She doesn’t know I’m here.
Not really.
Not yet.
But she will.
We’re quiet. Surgical. I keep the crew tight to my back, boots muffled against the deck plating. No weapons drawn. Not even Crik’s twitchy fingers. But I feel the moment crack open before it actually happens.
A flicker of motion from an upper catwalk. A red light stuttering to amber. Somewhere, someone in a uniform sees too much and too little, all at once.
Then the station flinches.
The security team’s misread is total.
“Unregistered signatures near the stage,” someone barks over a tinny intercom. “Repeat: hostile presence—unknown operatives in motion!”
Blaster fire erupts like a question answered too fast.
A blue bolt scorches past my shoulder, harmless in its aimless panic—but the sound alone detonates the promenade’s calm.
Screams ricochet off polished tile.
Crowds erupt in a wave of motion, hands grabbing children, pushing strollers, stumbling over handbags and holo signs. A vendor’s cart explodes in a flash of glittering smoke. Hot oil. Burnt sugar. It all swirls with perfume and ozone and the metal-rot scent of fear.
“Hold your line!” I snap, voice cutting through the chaos like a whip. “Nobody fires back!”
Thresk stiffens beside me, mouth already forming a curse. “Boss?—”
“Not. One. Shot.” I shove him back behind a column. “They think we’re an op. We are not an op.”
“But they’ve got rifles aimed at our heads!”
“They shoot, we live. We shoot back, and it’s a war.” I jab a claw upward. “You want bodies hanging from mall rafters on the Holonet?”
Crik snarls under his breath. “You didn’t say anything about getting torched for optics.”
“You signed up to walk behind me. Stay there.”
The security units fan across the plaza like they trained for this exact mess. Formation drills, but sloppier—because real fear makes hands slippery and eyes twitch. I clock six rifles aimed in our direction. No one’s talking to each other. All instinct. All mistake.
And the mistake is us.
A bolt strikes the tile just behind my boot. The smell of seared ceramic flares in my nostrils.
Civilians drop. Not hit—yet. But close. A woman in heels tumbles. A man ducks behind a kiosk that detonates seconds later into plastifoam shrapnel.
“Reflector,” I hiss into my implant. “We got a broadcast loop? Something they’ll listen to?”
“Negative,” Reflector replies, voice thin with strain. “Local comms are jammed. Emergency lockdown protocol is partial. They’re not receiving external ID signatures. You’re—how do I put this?—a ghost in a knife fight.”
“Perfect,” I mutter. I shoulder past a crumbling food stall, motion the crew back toward the loading flank. “Fall into the ducts. Don’t break visibility, but do not return fire. We need to be seen without being a threat.”
“Captain,” Crik snaps, “we’re already getting painted like a target in a slaughterhouse.”
“Better a target than a murderer,” I bite. “Move.”
The chaos isn’t even symmetrical. One quadrant of the mall is full-on riot—screaming, bodies tripping over benches, kids crying, food carts ablaze. The other half is frozen in confusion, too shell-shocked to react.
Above the din, I hear something deeper.
A silence.
A held breath.
Then her voice, distant but clear, like memory through fog.
She’s shouting. Not at me. Not for me. At security, maybe. Her team. I can’t make out the words, but I know the cadence. Authority forged in grit and glamor. Still polished. Still commanding.
My gut knots.
She’s close.
And then I see her.
Stage-left, just behind a half-collapsed banner and a wobbling security barrier—Isolde. Hair tied like a crown, dress soot-smudged from a nearby blast. One heel snapped. Her arm is around the boy. Her boy.
She pulls him behind a plastisteel barricade, lips moving fast as she cradles his head into her side. He’s breathing hard. Not hurt—but terrified.
I can’t look away.
The space between us isn’t far. Fifty meters, maybe. A few overturned chairs and a war’s worth of misunderstanding. I don’t move toward her. She doesn’t move toward me.
But our eyes meet.
Across smoke. Across time.
Her stare is steel.
No smile.
No gasp of recognition.
No “I knew you’d come.”
Just cold, furious clarity.
She knows.
She knows it’s me.
And she looks like she wants to throw something.
I drop my gaze.
Not in shame—but because I can’t afford to stay in that moment. Not now. Not while people are still running, still screaming, still waiting for one twitch from me to justify every round they have chambered.
I duck behind the barricade, half-crouch, wave Thresk down beside me.
“Status?”
“Security’s overcompensating. Half their own drones are glitching from power feedback. Idiots lit up their own surveillance relays.”
I glance over the barricade again. She’s gone now—pulled deeper behind a security wall, out of sight. I feel the loss like a wound.
But she saw me.
And she didn’t look away.
“Reflector, give me an evac route.”
“Back service ladder to storage lift 9-B. I can disable the signal delay long enough to get you out clean.”
“Crew status?”
“All accounted for. Minor burns from secondary fire. One bruised ego. Crik walked into a dessert cart.”
I don’t laugh.
I can’t.
“Pull back,” I say. “No retaliation. No grand exit. We disappear.”
“You’re just going to leave? ” Crik’s voice is a snarl.
“I’m not walking into her life with a body count at my heels. You want her to think I’m still the bastard who left?”
“You are,” Crik mutters.
“Then let me prove otherwise.”
We move.
One by one, silent, covered by the smoke and confusion. No bullets. No heroics. No second chances.
As we vanish into the corridor, I let myself take one last glance over my shoulder.
No sign of her.
No words exchanged.
But the echo of her glare still burns behind my eyes.