Hours—days—later, I sit in darkness after another failed attempt to sleep. My chest aches in rhythms that don’t match my own heartbeat. Hers, maybe. I feel her even here — the echo of the bond pulsing like heat beneath my skin.
She’s alive. I know it. I can taste her breath in my memory — warm, metallic, human. I can still smell her hair: static andozone. Every inhale feels like reaching for something already gone.
I press my claws to my sternum and whisper to the empty room, “I’m coming back, Ella.”
The walls don’t answer.
But the bond flares once — soft, faint, like a pulse under distant stars.
And I know she hears me.
CHAPTER 21
ELLA
Novaria stinks — of engine grease, plasma exhaust, and furtive deals made in side alleys. I used to despise that stench. Now it smells like survival.
Dad’s yard is a patchwork of hover taxi hulks, half-dismantled chassis, and engines that cough soot when they start. He’s gutted enough subsystems to run a small foundry in one corner. I get free rent in one of his lean sheds in exchange for doing maintenance—brakes, thrusters, gravplates. He grumbles but respects a daughter who can fix more than she complains.
I sweat oil like perfume. It’s stuck under my cuticles and in my hair, and every time I shift in public, someone stares. I don’t look. I pretend I’m just a scrapper. Questions come. Old coworkers, colleagues in the city grid, “Hey, aren’t you the tech from the Seeker?” I dodge them with mechanical aplomb.
Vex is asleep in the loft above. He smiles in his sleep, his lips curling just the same as Takhiss’s did. His eyes are wide when awake, shock-brown like mine. Sometimes, when he shifts, scales flickering beneath skin, I wrap him in thick synth-fleece and hold him until his breathing rounds out. He doesn’t ask why. I don’t volunteer. Not yet.
I stopped trying to track Takhiss after month three. After they dragged him away, the Alliance erased him. Officially a missing detainee. Someone who never existed. My internal radar frays now and then—news feed mentions of prisoner swaps, odd troop movements—but nothing concrete.
Still. I miss him. I hate him. I need him. But what scares me most… is what happens if he shows again. Because every time I feel that tremor of his presence—imagined or real—I’d want him to stay. And I don’t know if he can.
The street roars under a busted hovercab overhead. I glance up, hands greasy, breath jerking. Then I shake it off and turn a wrench. Dad leans in the doorway of his little office, squinting in the sputtering light.
“Ella, you okay?” he asks, voice gruff.
I give him a half-smile. “Better than fine.” It tastes like ash.
He nods but his eyes linger. “You’re pushing too hard.”
“Only enough,” I say, tightening a coupling on a grav thruster. Sparks flick. The smell of hot metal burns my nostrils.
“Don’t bury yourself under grief,” he says quietly. “It’ll crush you.”
I stop. Look at him. His face is more lined than I remember. But his eyes still hold that stubborn warmth. I want to tell him everything — about Takhiss, Vex, fear — but the words choke in my throat.
“I’ll be okay,” I mutter. He sighs and goes back inside, leaving me alone with grease and echo.
Night falls. The city lights are pinpricks on the horizon. I take the old service canter out front, engine sputtering but alive, and drive low roads to the city core. I want to see her. The skyline. The streets. Something that means we’re real, not ghosts.
I park in a shadowed lane behind a repair shop. Vex’s sleeper module hums gently beside me. I lift him out, bundle himtight. He frowns — small worry wrinkle on his forehead — then squishes himself closer.
“You okay, little spark?” I whisper. He nods, fuzzy with sleep.
I carry him up the fire escape to the rooftop above Dad’s yard. There — under the net of neon and smog — I sit and hold him against my chest. His breathing deepens. His limbs go slack. He drifts.
I talk to him then — stories about his father. “Your father was strong. Fierce. He carried me once while the ship cracked open. He said he’d never let me go.” My voice cracks. I take a breath, try again. “One day, he might come back.”
It’s past midnight. The rooftop hums. I smell ozone, old wiring, the distant hiss of grav lanes. My heart beats like a war drum in my chest.
In dreams, I see him. Takhiss. Pale cell walls. His eyes are burning bright even in the prison. He’s murmuring my name. He reaches through the bars. I stretch forward. The bars vanish. We embrace. The coil burns around us. His voice is silk. He says, “I’m coming.”
I wake, Vex stirring. My cheek pressed to his soft hair. My body aches with absence.
