Makrath went still. His claws locked against the console. His breath caught somewhere behind his ribs and refused to move.
What—
She was small and fragile and utterly unremarkable by any standard he knew. Soft where Hyrakki were armored. Weak where they were imposing. Her skin was bare and vulnerable, with no plates or dermal shielding, leaving flesh and muscle and bone nearly exposed.
He should look away. Queue up another section. Dismiss her as he had dismissed all the others.
He couldn't.
She moved through the combat drills like she had something to prove—not to the trainers, not to the program, but to herself. To whatever had driven her here in the first place. Every strike carried weight. Every failure was met with a hard exhale and a reset, never hesitation, never collapse.
He watched her take a hit that should have kept her down. Watched her stagger, spit blood onto the mat, and reset her stance.
She went again.
Heat stirred low in his belly, pooling where there should be nothing. His length grew sensitive beneath his armor, pressing against tissue that hadn't responded to anything in cycles.
His body knew before his mind caught up.
Her.
No. That was impossible. She was human—alien, incompatible, beneath him. A Kha'Ruun did not bond with lesser species. It wasn't done. It couldn't be done.
And yet his blood ran hot. His instincts sharpened to a point. Every cell in his body oriented toward the small figure on the screen like a blade toward a throat.
He told himself it was a malfunction. A biological misfire. Too many cycles without relief, and his body was grasping at anything.
He kept watching.
She fell. Rose. Fell again. Rose again. Her form was sloppy, her technique flawed, her body too soft and too slow.
But she didn't break.
The feed shifted to night. A different camera—external, the compound's perimeter.
She sat alone on a low wall outside the barracks, her face tilted up toward the sky. The stars were bright here, away from the light pollution of the cities, and she stared at them like she was seeing them for the first time.
Or like she was saying goodbye.
There was a quietness in her expression he didn't expect. A sadness held deep and sharp inside her chest, sealed away in a compartment of her own making. He recognized it the way onepredator recognizes another's wound—not by seeing it, but by the way she moved around it.
He knew that feeling. He'd lived with it so long he'd stopped recognizing it as anything other than normal.
She wrapped her arms around herself, and for a moment she looked small—truly small, not just physically but in a way that had nothing to do with size. A female carrying weight she hadn't put down in a long time.
Alone.She was alone.
Like him.
Then her jaw tightened. Her shoulders straightened. She dropped her arms and stood, walking back inside with the gait of someone who had decided that weakness was a luxury she couldn't afford.
Makrath's claws scored grooves into the console.
He had assessed candidates before. Hyrakki females, Sael females, even the tall fierce women of the Kel'voran—all of them had looked at his record and seen the blood. All of them had stepped back.
This one didn't know his record. Didn't know his face, his name, or what waited for her on that island.
She only knew how to get back up.
