CHAPTER 6
TAKHISS
The singularity howls like a wounded god.
There’s no warning. Just fire, light, and pain.
I’m airborne before I even register the explosion—ripped from my stance, my claws skimming over melting floor plating, screaming steel grinding against itself as the very spine of the Seeker folds inwards.
We flew too close to the heart of the abyss. We tried to touch the jaws of the void, and it bit back.
The singularity drive, lit before its time, births a gravity well that wants to eat the universe. The core ruptures. I see black starfire stretch across the bulkhead windows. The light bends. Warps. Screams.
The pull rips the Vengeance apart mid-boarding. No orders or formations. Just soldiers scattered like sand in a cyclone.
I remember the moment the corridor twisted open like a wound, and I was thrown backward—weightless, voiceless. I remember trying to grab the edge of a doorway, but it melted under my claws.
And just before the darkness swallowed me whole.
Her face.
Her eyes wide, locked on mine. Her scent in my lungs. Fear. Blood. Fire. Her hand reaching out, even as the world folded in on itself.
Suddenly, nothing.
I wake inside a nightmare of metal.
Twisted beams arc overhead like the ribs of some enormous, dead beast. Sparks hiss. A coolant line gurgles somewhere. The air smells like burnt plastic, ozone, and scorched blood.
My body screams when I try to move. My armor’s fused in places. Bent. A shard of hull plating’s embedded in my thigh, but the bleeding’s stopped. Regeneration’s kicking in.
Barely.
I sit up.
I am surrounded by debris. Shattered tech. Fragments of the Seeker and Vengeance melded into one tortured corpse of a vessel. It’s not a ship. It’s a crypt.
I stretch out my senses.
No squad pings. No familiar presences.
They’re gone.
Graal.Murn.The ones I trained beside. Laughed with. Fought beside. I would mourn them later—if I live long enough.
But there’s a pulse.
A hum.
Not mechanical. Not structural.
Biological.
I taste it in the air. Something old and strange and specific to only one person in the whole damn universe.
Her.
She’s alive.
