27. Cassia #2
And in the quiet moments between treating his wounds, my mind keeps drifting back to the core chamber, specifically to the Hollow Signal’s revelation about Precursor genetics and offspring.
It finally hits me fully—the absolute medical certainty I relied on is a lie.
A sudden, dizzying wave of cold panic washes over me.
When was my last cycle? I’ve been running on so much adrenaline and exhaust fumes since the night he crashed through my ceiling that I haven't even tracked it.
I still don't know for sure if I'm pregnant—the sheer trauma and extreme exhaustion of these last weeks are more than enough to delay any cycle indefinitely—and without my period, it remains a terrifying, exhilarating question mark.
But looking down at Rhykor's resting face, realizing that the universe literally built our bloodlines to create a future together, the initial panic entirely melts away into something softer.
Whether it happens now or years from now, whatever life we are building, we will be ready for it.
He hasn't woken up.
His vitals hold with his respiratory function intact.
His pulse is arrhythmic but present while his temperature remains elevated but stable.
The internal vibration that binds us strains, a whisper of a frequency that I check with my hand on his sternum, searching for the strength of a heartbeat to prove he is still anchored here in the room with me. Every time, I find the same finding.
An elderly Kraaj woman arrives before nightfall, escorted by one of Varrik's crew who looks slightly unnerved by the experience of having been asked to guide her rather than the other way around.
Her skin is pale ash-gray and her milky, unfocused eyes pair with her enormous weathered wings that stay tight against her back.
Ancient ceremonial markings cover her in layered, faded ink accumulated across decades rather than earned in a single campaign.
Varrik appears in the doorway behind her, and the look on his face tells me this woman walked into the compound and requested Rhykor by name, and nobody thought to question it.
I hear her before she reaches the med bay, the unhurried shuffle of ancient feet on compound flooring and a stillness that seems to move with her, settling over everything within ten feet. She fills the doorway and looks at Rhykor on the table with an expression that carries centuries in it.
"Sit," she says, to me rather than to him.
"I'm working."
"You've done the work. Sit now, child. I’m Mother Serak."
The name clicks instantly—the Kraaj elder Rhykor told me about, the one who first identified the mate bond between us.
Judging by the commanding weight of her presence, she's every bit as formidable as he made her sound, so I do as she says and sit down.
The stool scrapes against the floor as I pull it close to the table, and the old woman travels across the space with an accuracy her milky eyes have no business providing and lowers herself onto the crate Varrik left against the far wall.
She studies Rhykor, or she does whatever the equivalent is when your eyes stop serving their original function, tilting her head at angles that seem to register details beyond the visible.
"He pushed past the thermal ceiling," I say.
"His cardiovascular system took the full load of the overload.
The arrhythmia suggests muscle damage at the cellular level—damage my medicine can address at the surface but is untouchable at its source.
" I force my tone to remain steady and objective, clinging to professionalism because the alternative is letting the terror in my chest finally take over.
"If a human patient presented with this profile, I'd be managing end-stage cardiac failure. His biology is different; his repair mechanisms are faster, but the data gap leaves uncertainty about how much faster or whether it’s sufficient. "
The old woman turns her milky eyes toward me. "You want to know if he survives."
"I want to know what I can do."
"You've already done it." She folds her hands in her lap, the faded marks on her knuckles shifting with the movement.
"The mate bond carries a restorative function that Kraaj medicine has known about for generations and avoided studying since studying it would require naming what it is.
" She pauses, letting it all settle. "When a bonded Kraaj sustains damage beyond the body's independent repair threshold, the bond draws on the mate's biological stability to supplement the process.
Your heartbeat has been steadying his for the last several hours, Cassia.
Your presence in this room is the mechanism of his recovery. "
I stare at her.
"You're telling me I'm the treatment."
"I'm telling you what you already suspected." The ancient mouth curves—barely enough. "You haven't left this room."
It has been fourteen hours since we came up from the tunnels.
I've eaten what Wen brought without tasting it while sleeping in the chair beside the table in twenty-minute fragments, keeping my hand continuously on his chest or his wrist. I told myself it was monitoring, just simple medical observation with vital sign checks at regular intervals.
The old woman watches me work through that and says nothing.
"How long?" I ask finally.
"Days, perhaps. The damage is deep." She rises from the crate with the slow, considered effort of great age. "Stay close to keep the bond active." She moves toward the doorway, pausing at the threshold. "The medicine is real. So is the rest of it."
She leaves, and the med bay settles back into its quiet hum of generator power and Rhykor's labored breathing and the distant sounds of a district processing its own history through an open broadcast frequency.
The days blur.