Chapter 4
KYLDAK
The dream comes like a blade.
Metal screams. Heat eats at my lungs as if the air itself is a weapon.
Faces flare in the smoke—terrified, grotesque, carved by fear—and for a second the world is nothing but that one face: wide-eyed, mouth open in a sound that is not a word, an animal pleading.
Then the boom lifts me out of sleep and I’m choking on the aftertaste of fire.
I bolt upright, muscles a coil. The room is still dark-blue from the emergency night strips, the medpanels blinking like small, indifferent stars.
Sweat tracks salty down my spine, slick against the edges of old scars.
My hand scrabbles for the rail and comes away wet.
The socket throbs under it—phantom pain a hot tooth—but there’s also a raw ache that isn’t in the body: an emptiness where certainty used to sit.
I try to stand.
My leg refuses the order on the first go. The balance matrix stutters, the servos whining like a wounded beast. I lurch and the world tilts. Metal and tile kiss my ribs hard. The breath rips out of me in a strangled sound and my vision goes stars for a second.
I don’t curse—not first. You save curses for the ones who deserve them. Instead I grunt, a low sound, and push up on my palms. My hands shake. The room smells like antiseptic and yesterday’s coffee and the faint mechanical oil that always seems to follow me like a bad omen.
I hear feet—soft, careful—and then Jaela is there.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says without preamble, voice flat as a scalpel but steadier than I feel.
I blink at her. She’s in the doorway in hospital scrubs, hair pulled into a messy knot—annoyingly human.
Up close, she smells like ozone and hot metal, like the lab, which reminds me of the bar from the morning.
Her eyes are bloodshot at the corners, but calm. That annoys me too, in a different way.
“You can crawl to the wall,” she says. “Or we can sit here and bemoan the state of prosthetics all night.”
I press off the tile again, using the bed as a fulcrum.
The first crawl is ugly—my palms scraping the floor, nails catching on grit I didn’t know was there.
I taste iron in my mouth and the old noise presses at my ears.
I feel ridiculous. I feel human. I feel small like a pup scuttling after bigger wolves.
She kneels beside me where I stop and breathe. She doesn’t make a show of help. She doesn’t hover. She looks at me like I’m a problem to be solved, not a spectacle. That’s the thing about Jaela—her compassion is a tool, not a sermon.
“You’re not the only one with ghosts,” she tells me. No pity. Just a fact.
“Good,” I mutter. “I prefer company.”
Her hand is warm on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do it alone.”
“What does that even mean?” The words come out rough. “Warrior? Criminal? Patient? Where do I fit, Jaela? In their files I’m an incident. On the street I’m a headline. In my head I’m a pile of parts.”
She exhales slow, like she’s measuring every syllable before she lets it loose. “You fit where you want to fit. Right now you fit on top of this patch of tile, putting one foot in front of the other. You can make a thousand other categories later. Or not. Right now we make progress.”
“Words,” I grumble. “Easy words.”
“You do the hard part,” she says. “I’ll do the mechanical advocacy.”
The room holds our small argument like a third party. The night light throws soft relief across the metallic sheen of my scales; Jaela’s face is a slit of pale in the dark. For a moment something unwinds in me—so small it could be a thread—and I let it.
She waits until I’m steady enough to stand without nauseous stumbles. She positions her hands at the small of my back, not enough assistance to be condescending, just to anchor.
“Okay,” she says. “Count with me.”
“One,” I breathe. “Two.”
Shit—my stomach flips. But my foot finds purchase. The servo in the prosthetic hums soft like a purr. I don’t collapse. I keep my jaw tight and I keep my eyes on the door because the night freaks always like to creep in from the corners.
“Three,” she says, and I take it. For the first time since the explosions, since the tribunal, since the dark, I wobble into a stance that is not surrender.
She releases her hands. “You want to try the stability bar tomorrow?” she asks.
I snort. “I’ll try anything that prevents me from faceplanting in front of the staff.”
She gives me that tiny half-grin she tries to hide—one that suggests victory or amusement or that she just enjoyed baiting me. “Good. Be ready, and sober.”
“Sober,” I echo. “Because I was drunk yesterday when I threw a tray at the wall?”
“You nearly broke the tray. That’s a wasted instrument.”
I bark a laugh. “You sound like Rolth.”
“Don’t mention Rolth,” she says sharply. “He’s not even worth your scorn.”
I want to tell her to leave it alone—to keep her voice away from the thing that burns in me—but instead the words that come out are small, the kind I never say aloud.
“Thanks.”
She rolls her eyes so hard it’s almost theatrical. “Don’t get soft on me, Vakutan. You’ll ruin your street cred.”
We move through the dawn in a messy tandem.
I don’t sleep again, not properly. The rehab wing fills with the smell of hot caf and disinfectant and the low hum of people pretending everything is normal.
When the staff start trickling in, some drop sideways glances at us—survivor and healer, literally.
They whisper. Humans always whisper. They don’t mean much compared to a Vakutan’s grunt, but the noise grates like sand in a wound.
“Look at him up,” a nurse says, too loud, like it’s a show for the morning shift.
“Yeah,” another responds. “He’s... different.”
I sharpen my gaze at anyone who dares mouth off. The nurse, a freckled kid named Horan, flushes and tries to smooth a chart. He hums a nervous, high-pitched sound and excuses himself. I almost admire the speed of his retreat.
“Stop glaring at staff,” Jaela says under her breath when she notices my stiff posture. “It makes them talk.”
“You should have told them to shut up,” I mutter.
“I did.” She smirks. “They listened to a woman in a lab coat—they always do.”
At breakfast someone pipes in a rumor about the tribunal—how the Alliance edited footage, how the casualty lists were curated. It’s thin gossip that grows teeth when you feed it. I feel my temper rise like an animal scenting blood.
“Kyldak,” a voice says, light and teasing.
I turn.
It’s Nurse Horan. He’s come back, carrying a tray of nutrient paste and the world’s worst attempt at a decent smile. He tries to act brave, which is half adorable and half stupid.
“You look good,” he says. “Um—do—do you need help with arm thing?”
I cock my head. The human can’t even form a sentence under pressure. I decide to have fun.
“Hey, Horan,” I say, my baritone a slow rumble. “If you keep making those faces, you’ll give my heart something to beat about. Name?”
The whole mess of staff freezes; the sound of it ricochets. Jaela snorts—trying and failing to hide it—and I see the gossip start to form like a storm cell. She slaps her palm to the table, a sharp, offended sound that is half warning and half amusement.
“Kyldak!” she snaps, loud enough to sting. “Not the time.”
Horan’s face combusts bright red. He stammers and apologizes. The others snicker, the rumor mill grinding faster. Jaela’s face—red and furious—turns on me.
“You are insufferable,” she says under her breath. Not loud. Not a reprimand that will echo in the hall. Just a private missile launched across the small room.
I laugh, a short bark that’s not entirely sarcastic. “You wound me.”
The nurse gets small, scurries off, and for a second the wing buzzes with gossip—something about Kyldak flirting at intake. Rolth’s corner of the room prickles, and a couple of the senior technicians exchange looks like they’re considering whether to write a memo.
Jaela grits her teeth and snaps at some idle gawker. “Focus on your tasks. Or I’ll schedule you extra calibration tests.”
Her anger is kinetic—sharp and hot. I like that she defends people like that. Not because it flatters me, but because it tells the truth of who she is. She’s not a spy. She’s not a bureaucrat. She’s a worker. She’s someone who fights with wrenches and words.
She stands, gathered and furious, and walks out.
I don’t think about thinking. Her shoulders are perturbed in that way I recognize—tense like a drawn bow. Her back moves like a wound closing. I shouldn’t follow. I have pride. I have things to hide.
I do anyway.
I’m halfway across the atrium before I notice the exchange of glances—human whispers making shapes in the air.
I catch up to her in the stairwell between therapy bays.
The lights are softer there, the breeze from the ventilation making her hair frizz a little.
She’s leaning on the railing, jaw clenched.
“You think that was funny?” she asks without turning.
“Yes,” I admit.
She spins on me, eyes flashing. “You think it’s funny to reduce people to gossip fodder? To become a punchline?”
“It was a line,” I say. “And Horan needed someone to laugh at—apparently.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I am who I am.”
Silence settles like a blanket, none of it comfortable. Eventually she says, softer, “You could have stopped it.”
I look at her. For once there is no guard in my voice. I say, “I didn’t want it to stop.”
That confession sits between us, loud as a brass horn. She inhales and then, after a single long heartbeat, she laughs—bitter, incredulous.
“You enjoy being a show,” she says. “You love the shock.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think I—”
“You enjoy chaos,” she finishes for me. “You think it proves something.”
“I thought it would burn it out,” I confess. “I thought if I let myself be the spectacle, the rest of it would leave me alone.”
She studies me. The stairwell hums, the ventilation like white noise. “It doesn’t help,” she says finally. “It just makes it louder.”