"Yes."
She took a step toward me. Then another. Close enough now that I had to look down to maintain eye contact. Close enough that the height difference between us, nearly two feet of vertical disparity, became viscerally apparent.
"I don't know how to do this," she said quietly. "Don't know how to let someone care about me without turning it into something broken and complicated."
"So we don't do it. Not yet. Not until you're ready." I resisted the urge to touch her—to offer comfort through physical contact the way I wanted to. "But when you are ready, if you are ready, I'll be here."
"Even if I'm never ready?"
"Then I'll still be here. As your colleague. As someone who respects your boundaries. As a friend, if you'll allow it."
Bea studied my face like she was looking for deception. Looking for hidden motives or unspoken expectations. She wouldn't find them. I meant every word.
Finally, she nodded. "I should go."
"You should."
But she didn't move. Just stood there, close enough to touch, looking at me with those gray-blue eyes that held entire oceans of unprocessed emotion.
Then her comm chimed. Emergency designation. Mine chimed simultaneously.
We both checked our displays.
"Cargo bay explosion," Bea read. "Multiple injuries reported. All medical personnel?—"
"Report immediately," I finished.
Our eyes met. All personal complications set aside instantly, replaced by professional urgency.
"Let's go," I said.
We moved.
Chapter
Seven
BEA
Dr. Senna's office had become the most terrifying place on Mothership.
Not because of what happened there, no scalpels, no emergency codes, no life-or-death decisions that could haunt me for years. Just conversation. Questions. Silence that stretched until I filled it with truths I'd been avoiding since before Earth disappeared in my rearview mirror.
Six weeks of therapy. Twelve sessions. Seven hundred and twenty minutes of systematically dismantling every defense mechanism I'd spent decades perfecting.
I was exhausted in ways that had nothing to do with shift work.
"Tell me about the cave," Dr. Senna said.
We were in our usual positions, her in the comfortable chair designed for human proportions, me on the couch where I could see both the door and the viewport showing starsbeyond. Escape routes and situational awareness. Some habits therapy couldn't break.
I didn't want to talk about the cave. We'd already discussed the Liberty disaster, the wormhole that tore our ship apart, the burning planet where we crashed. We'd excavated every traumatic moment like archaeologists sorting through ruins, cataloging damage with clinical precision.
But the cave was different. The cave was where I'd failed in ways that still made my hands shake.
"We had seventeen survivors initially," I heard myself say. My voice sounded distant, like someone else was speaking through my mouth. "Twenty-three people in the escape pod. Six died on impact or shortly after. The heat was—" I stopped, forced breath into lungs that wanted to seize. "During the day, the ground burned. We could only move at night when it rained and cooled enough to survive outside."
Dr. Senna made a small notation on her datapad. "You mentioned this before. But you haven't talked about what happened inside the cave. About the decisions you had to make."
