RHEA
The shuttle door closes with a hiss and a lock-click that echoes louder than it should.
It sounds like the end of something.
Like a tomb sealing shut.
Like goodbye.
I stand in the observation corridor, hands trembling, watching the small craft disengage from the docking clamps. The beacon lights flash three times, and then it's just a shadow slipping into the dark beyond the viewport, swallowed by the silver-pink mist of Helix.
Valtron doesn’t look back.
He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I know that about him.
He walks toward death like it’s a lover who never broke his heart.
I press my palm flat to the glass, the cold leeching into my skin like a slow poison. I don't cry. I did that already. On the ship. In his arms. When he kissed me like I was something sacred and then tore my heart out by walking away.
He left the weight of the world in my hands and vanished into the black with nothing but a sliver of hope and a mission that smells like martyrdom.
Behind me, footsteps. Measured. Military.
Dowron.
He doesn’t speak at first. He’s good at that—letting the silence say the thing no one wants to.
“You did good,” he says finally. His voice is soft. Tired. “He’ll make it count.”
“He always does,” I murmur, not moving.
“He’s the best we ever had. That means we ask more of him than anyone.”
I finally turn.
Dowron looks older in the light. Frail, even. His hands tremble slightly, the skin around his eyes sallow and shadowed. He’s not the war giant the galaxy remembers. He’s a relic trying to hold together a firestorm with spit and threadbare loyalty.
“He left everything,” I say. “Everything we could’ve had.”
He doesn’t argue. Just nods.
“He’s not coming back, is he?”
Dowron’s jaw flexes. “We never expect return from missions like this.”
It should make me angry.
But all it makes me is hollow.
He offers me a small object—flat, thin, and encased in transparent polymer.
A new ID chip. Civilian registry. Embedded with a clean history, a new face, a false trail that could hide me for the rest of my life.
“Protection,” he says. “A way out. You earned it.”
I take it. Turn it over in my hands. The surface is smooth. Cold.
But it burns like shame.
