Her hands land on my arm — cool, clinical — but I flinch anyway.
The interface is new. Sleeker. Foreign. It responds, but sluggishly. The neural map isn’t synced yet. They did a rushed job. Which means they didn’t expect me to live long.
Which begs the question?—
“Who sent me here?”
She doesn’t answer. Just keeps working, scanning the joint for damage.
“Rynn.”
Still nothing.
“Look at me.”
Her eyes meet mine — and suddenly I remember everything.
The first time I kissed her in the ruins of Kalveris.
The way she laughed when I taught her Vakutan cursing.
The night she told me she loved me, voice shaking like it was a war declaration.
“I thought you were dead,” I say again. Quieter. No rage. Just ache.
She shakes her head, eyes glassy. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It does to me.”
She doesn’t respond.
Instead, she checks my vitals, records something in a datapad. Pretending I’m not here.
I let her.
For now.
But even as the sedative haze tugs at the edge of my mind, I catalog every twitch of her fingers. Every shift in her scent. The weight of her presence beside me.
She’s the same woman who broke me.
And the same woman I dreamed of every night for five years.
Something’s wrong here.
…
Sleep comes in fragments — jagged shards of nothing.
Every time I close my eyes, the same ghosts circle back.
Flames, smoke, the crush of collapsing metal.
And her voice — the one thing that ever made sense — calling my name through the static.
Then silence.
I wake to the sterile glow of medbay lights. Again.
