She thinks I’m just a chef. Hell, most days I want to believe that too.
But a chef knows what makes people tick. What flavors open doors. What memories a single spice can evoke.
And what pressure makes something break.
Food teaches you patience. Teaches you how to wait for just the right moment before flipping the whole thing on its head.
But war?
War taught me how to finish what I start.
I sit at the table. Lay out my tools. One line for cooking. One line for combat. No difference anymore. Same hands. Same precision. Same purpose.
The whetstone hisses as I drag the first blade across it.
Shhhk.
A pause. A breath.
Shhhk.
I used to believe food could change hearts. That the right dish, the right story shared over a steaming plate, could bridge gaps carved by centuries of hate.
Now?
Now I know the truth.
Sometimes, survival isn’t about hearts. It’s about steel. About grit. About knowing when to set down the spoon and pick up the blade.
I sharpen both.
CHAPTER 21
KRISTI
The air inside the orbital stub is stale with recycled breath, burnt protein paste, and the faint metallic tang of radiation shielding gone cheap. There’s a constant hum beneath everything—like the whole place is remembering how to be a station but keeps glitching halfway through. I hear it even in my dreams.
They call it theTether, but it’s not tethered to anything anymore.
It used to be a refueling platform before it was deemed “non-essential” and sold to some shell corp that gutted it and dropped half its bulk into the superstructure of a half-finished skyscraper. It’s fused right into the building’s spine now, forty floors up, wrapped in steel girders like a tumor too expensive to cut out.
And inside?
Families. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds, depending on how many kids are hiding behind crates and under tarp partitions. Vakutan, Olari, Solenari—all of them displaced, undocumented, and now invisible. To the council. To the census. To the sky.
They let me in because I brought them things they needed.
And because I didn’t come in wearing a badge.
I trade them rations. Meds. Power cores I got from a junk runner who owed Kenron a favor. In return, they let me sleep on a padded bench and don’t ask why I flinch when I hear the crackle of a power conduit sparking near the ceiling.
“Montana,” an old Olari woman grunts as I pass her spot, her scaled fingers counting out ration cards with a math no human ever bothered to learn. “You got more of those electrolyte tabs?”
I hand her a packet without asking who she’s giving them to. Half this place is dehydrated from bad recycling and unbalanced diets.
“Thank you, child,” she mutters.
“Don’t thank me,” I say quietly. “I owe you more than you owe me.”
