11. Cassia #2
The small maintenance room barely holds us, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, originally a crew break room, judging by the broken table in the corner and the row of deteriorating lockers against the far wall.
The emergency lighting, independent of the station's main grid, flickers from a single panel near the ceiling, casting everything in a dim amber wash.
Stale but breathable air filters through a ventilation system that still hums with faint residual power.
Leaning against the wall, I fight to drag air into my lungs.
Crimson from a forehead gash trickles a slow path down my temple, and my hands won't stop trembling.
The med-pack remains slung across my shoulder—a relic of muscle memory that I refuse to let go.
I clutch the strap like a lifeline, waiting for a pulse that is finally descending from the stratosphere.
Rhykor stands with his back against the door, wings flush against the steel, his entire body a barricade between me and whatever's out there.
His hands still glow faintly—residual heat bleeding in shimmering waves—and the light catches the planes and angles of his face, illuminating his horns as they scrape the ceiling.
His chest rises and falls with even breaths that I can hear the effort behind. The bandages showing through his vest have dark spots where old wounds have opened once again.
"Are you hurt?" He grinds it out, remaining motionless at the door; that searing attention scans me from head to toe with a fire that makes my skin prickle.
"Cut on my forehead, but it's minor, nothing structural." I hold my sleeve against the wound and wince. "You?"
"Everywhere on me is functional."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one that matters right now.
" Pulling his comm from his vest, he tries three frequencies.
There is static on all of them. The walls are too thick, or the relay infrastructure is too damaged, or both.
Attempting twice more before clipping the comm back to his vest, a heavy exhale escapes his nose.
"The collapse sealed the main corridors.
Varrik and Britt are out of range on all channels. "
"So we wait."
Pushing off the door, he crosses the room to check the ventilation shaft above us, the structural integrity of the walls, and the emergency power panel near the ceiling, running a compulsive strategic inventory that continues until he’s confirmed the variables in the room, including me.
"The vent system connects to the surface through three junction points.
When the machines clear the corridors, we can navigate out through the upper levels.
But only once we have light and comms, along with confirmation the route is passable. "
"So we stay here, together, in a fifteen-by-twenty maintenance closet."
His neck tendons stand out in sharp relief. The faint glow from his hands pulses once, then dims. "Yes."
The silence that follows demands an entity to fill it, so I do what I always do—I work.
Pulling the med-pack into my lap, I dig out antiseptic wipes and the small suture kit carried for emergencies.
The cut on my forehead is shallow but messy, and I clean it by touch, hissing through my teeth when the antiseptic bites into raw skin.
Rhykor watches me from across the room with an intensity that makes my fingers clumsy, so I deflect the only way I know how.
"Take your vest off. Let me see what reopened."
He stares at me, jaw grinding through some internal argument I'm clearly going to win, then strips the durable vest over his head with a grunt that tells me more about his pain than any answer would. Dark blood seeps from two spots along his right flank, old wounds from the Sector Six vault torn open again during the fight. I crouch beside him, pressing gauze against the worst of it while he holds still with that rigid tolerance I’ve come to recognize—warrior body language, patched together too many times to flinch anymore.
"You need to stop reopening these," I mutter, taping the gauze into place. My fingers brush the raised script near his ribs, and heat pulses against my knuckles—a reminder, sharp and immediate, of what happened the last time I touched these battle wounds.
I pull my hands back and settle against the opposite wall with my med-pack in my lap. The distance feels both necessary and insufficient.
We sit in the amber half-light and listen to the distant groan of settling concrete. Minutes pass, or maybe even an hour.
"I hate this." The confession escapes me, rough and quiet and aimed at the ceiling.
"The waiting, the silence—that whole stretch after the running where you’re trapped in one place, and all you can do is sit with your own head.
" I drag both hands down my face, fingers catching the tacky edge of dried blood at my temple and pulling it across my cheek in a rust-colored streak.
"I've spent three years in District Seventeen running from one emergency to the next, and somewhere along the way I forgot how to stop moving.
Because when I stop, I have to think. And when I think?—"
"The dead come back." He finishes it for me, and the quiet truth in those words tells me he carries the same ghosts.
"My father used to sing while he worked.
" The memory surfaces unbidden—Dad in the makeshift clinic on the frontier, his rumbling filling the walls while he assembled respirators from scrap.
"Off-key, as always. My mother used to throw things at him to make him stop, and he'd simply sing louder.
" A sound escapes me that's halfway between a laugh and a jagged choke.
"After he died, the silence was the worst part.
Worse than the grief, worse than the hunger.
Purely this enormous empty space where his voice used to be. "
Rhykor watches me from across the narrow room, and the look on his face, the guarded ferocity gone, reduced to raw, aching vulnerability, makes my throat constrict.
"Silence is a trait I had to learn," he murmurs.
"The pits were always loud—training drills, fighting, screaming.
You slept through it or you stayed awake until your body gave out.
" He rolls the shoulder I've stitched three times now.
"The first time I experienced real silence was after my first solo mission.
I sat in a transport bay for four hours waiting for extraction, and the quiet was so complete I thought I'd gone deaf.
Four hours of nothing, and I had no idea what to do with myself when nobody was telling me where to point my hands. "
"And now?"
The amber light shifts across his features.
"Now the silence is full of you. I hear the cadence of your voice, the rhythm of your breathing, and the heavy strike of your boots against the concrete.
Even your constant arguing with those who try to help you fills the air.
I used to patrol this district in silence, and now those quiet moments fill itself with you, and I have no idea how to make it stop.
" His hands curl against his thighs, the faint red distortion flickering and dying around his knuckles.
"I have never felt out of control around another living being, Cassia.
Through combat, under fire, and in the worst fights I've survived, nothing has shaken my discipline the way you do. "
My heart hammers so hard it beats through my wrists, my throat, and the wound on my forehead. The med-pack in my lap has become an anchor, solid to grip while the ground shifts.
Every syllable arrives bare, unarmored, impossible to unhear.
"You terrified me." The honesty scrapes on the way out.
"My mind had a pre-scripted narrative for you, born the second you shattered my ceiling. Watching you fight in the alley and finish those men on the rooftop confirmed every lesson I’d been taught about your kind.
To me, you were simply a volatile Kraaj weapon, a monster masquerading in skin.
" I press against the med-pack and hold that burning stare.
"A true monster would never hand food to starving children and walk away without a word.
Nor would he steal medicine for the clinic he once leveled.
Most importantly, a real predator would never stand on an observation platform and say please, paralyzed by the fear of crossing a boundary the person in front of him isn't prepared to cross.
" The admission cracks at the edges, and I let it.
"The ruthless enforcer driving fear into people was easier to handle.
But the man who holds himself back? The one who says please because he's terrified of crossing a line I'm unprepared for? That man undid me completely."
Air between us turns to pure, combustible heat. After weeks of shared glances, grazed knuckles, and stolen breaths, my restraint shatters against the absolute certainty in his eyes. Suddenly, the distance evaporates.
I lose track of who moves first. One moment we're on opposite sides of the maintenance room, and the next his hands are on my face, cupping my jaw, claws curling carefully away from my skin, palms radiating warmth that seeps through my cheekbones and into the center of my skull.
My med-pack hits the floor, and my fingers find the front of his vest and grip, pulling, and his mouth crashes into mine.
The kiss is savage.