I groan again. “You’re unbearable.”
“I’m bored,” he says, suddenly serious. “We’ve been grounded for three days. Cowley’s withholding deployment orders until the seismic pattern stabilizes. That means I have nothing to do but walk around shirtless and annoy you.”
“You could always read a manual.”
“I’d rather be electrocuted.”
“That couldalsobe arranged.”
A silence falls between us—not awkward, just full of all the things we don’t say. The mech hums around us, half alive, half asleep. The kind of lull that happens when you’ve been around death so much it starts to feel like background noise. Outside, something screeches—deep and long and wrong. Megafauna call. Closer than before.
Naull’s jaw tightens.
I see the tension ripple across his shoulders, the twitch in his tail as he listens. His body’s always on alert, even when he pretends it isn’t. I used to think he was just cocky. Now I know better. It’s armor. Just like the mech.
“Do you think it’s getting worse?” I ask quietly.
He glances at me. “The fauna? The weather? The Nexxus? Or the fact that our mechs are being held together with duct tape and resentment?”
“Yes.”
He sighs. “Yeah. It’s getting worse.”
My fingers ache. My head throbs. I want sleep and silence and something that doesn’t need patching. But instead, I sit cross-legged on the grated floor and reattach the power couplings with tweezers while Naull watches me like he’s memorizing the movement of my hands.
“Why do you do it?” he asks, breaking the quiet again. “This? The Corps?”
I don’t look up. “I told you. Resume building.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.”
My shoulders sag. I press the tweezers down harder than I should. “Because I didn’t know how else to matter. BecauseI wanted to build something that couldn’t be taken apart by someone else’s ego. Because I thought... maybe here, I’d finally beneeded.Not just tolerated.”
The silence stretches.
When I look up, his expression has changed. No teasing. No smirk.
Just a look. One that sees too much.
“Youareneeded,” he says softly. “More than you know.”
Something cracks inside me, quick and unsteady. I turn back to the mech, heart thudding too hard in my chest. “Well then,” I murmur, voice shaky, “maybe stop electrocuting the damn relay.”
His laugh is low, reverent. “No promises.”
…
Naull is the worst.
Not in a ha-ha-he’s-annoying way. Not even in a brooding antihero kind of way. No, he’s a one-man cataclysm wearing tactical boots and a perpetual grin, and he’s been my assigned pilot partner for a month and a half of mechanical hell. Partner.Hah. Like that means anything when he treats every order like a suggestion and every safety protocol like a dare.
The man makeswind vortexesinto roller coasters.
I patch the final neural coupling, double-check the anchor clamps, and signal the AI for a cold sync. The system hums, power finally cycling without spitting out error codes. Progress. A miracle, honestly.
