28. Rhykor
RHYKOR
The first morning I wake without a mission briefing, I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling until the stillness becomes unbearable.
Keeping track of the time stems from an ingrained need for situational awareness alongside the automatic logging of the sounds filtering through the compound walls.
I hear boots on the walkway above, signaling that Britt's crew is running the dawn rotation.
The generator whirs from the east wing with a stable, consistent output, the result of a power system Elias has rebuilt three times and now treats like a personal project.
From the freight bay below come the voices of two, maybe three people, a low murmur of conversation as they share a meal before the work starts.
The work, on the other hand, is the part I'm still learning to name.
My purpose has been clear and unambiguous for over thirty years, dictating that I must contain threats before ultimately eliminating them.
The mission parameters arrived from above, and I executed them with a thoroughness that kept me alive while ensuring the machine kept running over a terrified district.
And now the machine is ash, and the man who ran it is ash, and I'm lying in a compound I built from salvage and stubbornness, listening to a district figure out what it wants to become, and I have no briefing to tell me where to point my hands.
Cassia would say that's the point. She’d say it while stitching someone’s arm, never looking up, delivering the observation with a precision that would make me want to argue with her; the argument would last until she had a dozen patients to see and I was somehow carrying supply crates, unprompted.
I get up.
The district looks different from the air.
It has been weeks since the reactor went.
Several days have passed since the last hostile relay node flickered out in Sector Eight, prompting Elias to declare the network clean with a whoop that rattled the windows in the signal tower.
The machines that went dark during the cascade stayed dark, their corrupted code stripped away by the same overload that stripped through me, and the maintenance units that survived reverted to basic operational protocols.
They began sweeping floors and moving crates from one place to another with the benign, purposeful calm of machines that have forgotten they were ever anything else.
However, the district remembers. The scars are everywhere, fallen corridors, ruined streets, burned-out sectors, and the gaps in the skyline where buildings that stood for fifty years came down in days of coordinated attacks.
Ash Alley still bears the char marks from the night everything started.
The hole in Cassia's clinic ceiling has been patched now, reinforced with structural plating I should have supplied months ago instead of crashing through it.
She gives me a look when I walk past the repair, and the look says she finds it funny rather than annoying, and I find I am deeply grateful for that decision.
I fly the district perimeter at dawn, as I've flown it for years, but the calculation underneath has changed.
I'm reading for threat estimates, yes—old habits shed slowly, and the southeastern region still carries political fractures that could tear open without warning.
But I'm also reading for something else.
In Sector Four, human and Kraaj vendors set up their stalls side by side with the uneasy, pragmatic cooperation of those who have decided commerce matters more than history.
Meanwhile, in Sector Nine, mixed repair crews patch the infrastructure with salvaged materials and a shared fluency in technical profanity that transcends species lines.
A couple of miles east, the sublevel bunker—once a secret shelter I stocked with stolen rations and portable heating units—stands empty, as those families finally boarded Nysera's extraction shuttles, ready to leave everything behind forever.
But when they heard Junia's broadcast exposing Daxos and the truth about our origins, they demanded the shuttles turn around.
They came back, and they resettled into the repaired housing blocks Garrow's volunteer crews opened last week.
The children—and there are children on the streets again, which felt impossible weeks ago—chase each other through the outer corridors with the complete indifference to danger that children maintain as a philosophical position.
I land on the roof above Cassia's clinic as the morning light strengthens.
Below, through the reinforced ceiling and the repaired walls, I can hear her.
She's been here since before dawn; her schedule expands along with the clinic itself, which now occupies the original space as well as the breached wing and three additional rooms she requisitioned from the building next door with the polite but absolute authority she applies to resource negotiations.
She refers to it as a medical center. Wen considers it a miracle, while Junia deems it an inevitability, and she's probably right.
Hunkering on the rooftop, I listen to Cassia work while letting myself feel the devotion I spent a long time refusing to name.
Varrik finds me at midday.
Materializing at junctions and doorways with slightly unsettling accuracy has become his new habit, as a man who has spent decades tracking his commander’s movements sees no reason to stop now.
Dropping onto the rooftop beside me in a careful, managed descent, his body clearly registering formal complaints about stairs and rooftops for years and still showing up to both anyway.
"Oversight committee wants another debrief," he announces, producing two canteens and handing me one. "Third this week. They've been very thorough."
"They want to make sure there's nothing left to use against us."
"Nysera says the authorization chain is airtight.
The documents are timestamped, the ciphers matched, and the supply route fully traced to its source.
Intelligence division tried to revoke her credentials last week—she filed the evidence with three independent oversight bodies before they finished the paperwork.
She's untouchable now, though I suspect she'd prefer 'inconvenient.
'" He drinks, squinting at the horizon with the evaluating focus he turns on everything he considers a long-term problem.
"Daxos's ashes are still cooling in that reactor pit, and High Command officially rescinded the orbital purge sequence in a frantic attempt to save their own skins.
Rexicon and the remaining officers who co-signed the transfer orders are being very cooperative with the investigation now that cooperation is the only thing keeping them out of an executioner's tribunal.
As for your local problems, my crew caught that shaved-headed militia leader from the water station trying to slip past the Sector Four checkpoint.
He and his cell are currently locked in our detention level, awaiting processing.
Amazing how incentive structures clarify thinking. "
"Amazing," I agree.
Varrik's mouth twitches in amusement. Humor surfaces in dry flashes more often, since the tunnels, cracking through that old, familiar severity. It’s as if surviving a battle he was certain would end us has finally loosened the knot in his chest. He is even sleeping better—a detail he actually shared with me, which is a departure from the Varrik of six months ago.
"The independence declaration," he says, after a stretch of comfortable quiet. "You're serious about it."
"Have I said anything I wasn't serious about?"
"You've said very little, which is its own answer.
" He turns to look at me directly, the old evaluation fully present.
"Removing District Seventeen from the southeastern command structure means losing military supply lines, losing the infrastructure contracts, losing whatever political protection the Kraaj flag provides.
You understand what you're asking these people to carry. "
"I understand what they've already been carrying.
" Looking out across the district, my gaze sweeps over the repaired rooftops and the new solar arrays Elias installed on south-facing structures once his leg cleared him for rooftop work. Plumes of smoke rise from the community ovens in Sector Four, where three families run communal meals in the evening since the week after the cascade. "It’s been carried under military governance and occupation alike. They’ve been shouldering that burden since before I arrived, yet the only thing our command structure ever offered in return was more weight.
" I wrap both hands around the canteen. "District Seventeen can carry its own weight.
With its own leadership. The kind that answers to the people living here rather than to officers who've never set foot in the outer corridors. "
Varrik is quiet for a long time. Then he nods once, the same nod he offered when I came up from the tunnels, heavy with everything left unspoken.
"I'll draft the formal documentation," he says. "You'll want Nysera's language review before you file it. She has opinions about the phrasing of sovereignty declarations."
"She has opinions about everything."
"Yes, and she's usually right, which is the inconvenient part." He pushes himself upright, the cane finding purchase on the rooftop surface. "Cassia knows you're going to do this?"
"She knows."
"She supports it?"