“Travnyk… it has?—”
“I know,” he says.
I can’t finish the words. The look in his eyes tells me everything. He knows. He understands, but he’s right. That’s why I can’t argue with him. What good is it to learn all about the ecology of Tajss when the presence of the ship is destroying it?
“Right,” I whisper. Rakkh presses his hand to the small of my back. Silent support. “Right,” I repeat, louder, making this impossible decision because there really isn’t a choice when it all comes down.
“Then it can’t do it alone,” I say, and the words taste like surrender. “Not without me.”
The ship hums low and attentive.
I turn my head to look at Rakkh. His eyes meet mine, molten and searching, stripped bare of command or certainty.
“If I do this,” I say, voice unsteady, “I don’t know what happens next. To the ship. To me.”
His thumb presses gently into my side, grounding.
“Then whatever comes next,” he says quietly, “we face it together.”
The words aren’t dramatic; they’re simple and bare. They’re true.
The console waits. So does the ship. For the first time since we entered this place, I understand exactly what it’s asking of me—and exactly what it will cost.
I square my shoulders. My fingers hover—then settle.
The console accepts me like it has been waiting centuries to be touched.
26
LIA
The moment my fingers make contact with the console, the ship responds.
Not the way it did before. There is no pressure behind my eyes, no surge of borrowed memory. This is quieter. Deeper. Like a system reaching a part of itself that was never meant to operate without oversight.
The interface blooms under my touch.
Layers peel back, not visually dramatic, just revealed. Menus align. Pathways clarify. The ship isn’t flooding me with information anymore. It’s offering options.
“This is a control nexus,” Travnyk says slowly, awe threading his usually even tone. “Primary command authority. But modified.”
“Modified how?” Tomas asks.
I don’t answer right away. My attention locks on a section of the display that feels heavier than the rest—flagged, partitioned, deliberately isolated.
“Maddy didn’t let it make ethical calls on its own,” I say. “She locked judgment behind a human gate.”
Rakkh shifts, the claws of his hand pressing into the small of my back.
“She built this for a human?”
“She trusted that someone like me would come along,” I say, swallowing down the lump in my throat.
The Eye said the Devastation was coming—and the fact that he was right makes my skin go cold. Not prophecy. Not fate. Just someone with enough information to build a contingency out of hope.
It wasn’t destiny or prophecy that led Maddy to set this for me. She couldn’t have known humans would return to Tajss in her future. This is just contingency planning taken to its most extreme conclusion.
A failsafe built out of hope.
