Her eyes flash. “You keep saying that.”
Later, we’re tucked into a temporary staging room—a reinforced box the size of a janitor’s closet. There’s one cot. Rhea’s on it, sitting cross-legged, tapping on her compad. Her lips are tight. Her shoulders tense.
I sit across from her on the floor, feeling the heat of her frustration like a solar flare.
“Say it,” I tell her.
She looks up. “Say what?”
“Whatever’s boiling in that head of yours. Get it out.”
She slams the compad onto the cot. “You act like this is just another mission. Like you’re fine with throwing your life into a meat grinder because that’s what you’re built for. But I’m not. I’m not fine. I’m terrified, Valtron. Not just of dying. Of this being meaningless.”
“It’s not meaningless.”
“If we screw this up,” she whispers, “no one ever knows. The Combine buries it. The truth dies with us. All the people who’ve already died… they stay erased.”
I cross the room slowly. Sit beside her. “Then we don’t screw it up.”
She turns her head away. “You always say that. And you never explain how.”
I reach for her hand. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t squeeze back either.
“I don’t have a guarantee,” I admit. “I’m not pretending I do. But I’ll get you through this, Rhea. Even if I don’t come out the other side.”
“That’s not comforting,” she says, voice thick.
“I’m not trying to be comforting. I’m trying to be honest.”
She exhales, a sharp shudder of breath.
“We leave in six hours,” she says finally.
“Six hours,” I repeat.
And I sit there in silence beside her, memorizing the shape of her fingers in mine, the scent of her skin, the heat of her doubt. Because if this is the last night I get to be close to her… I want to burn it into memory.
The second night on this frozen moon is colder, somehow. Not temperature-wise—no, the heaters wheeze and hiss just as pathetically as the night before. But the silence between us thickens. Not angry. Not hostile. Just… full. Packed with everything we’re not saying. I can feel it pressing against my ribs like a loaded pulse rifle.
Rhea’s asleep now, her body curled beneath layers of synth-fiber blankets, one arm tucked under her cheek like a child. The line of her spine is outlined by the curve of the cot’s edge, and her breath fogs in tiny wisps. It’s the only thing soft in this entire rust-box relay station.
I sit on the floor again. Just like last night. Back to the wall, knees up, rifle laid across my thighs. Eyes on the ceiling. Listening. Breathing.
The terminal beside me blinks.
Blue.
Blue.
Red.
A pulse of black.
My eyes narrow.
That color sequence doesn’t belong on this system. Doesn’t belong anywhere but one place.
Black-code.
