To spread it.
Tosing.
Not if I get there first.
The thrusters rumble.
I flip the launch sequence.
Outside, the cliffs tremble.
I don’t say goodbye.
The engines roar—and I launch.
Atmospheric drag grabsat the wings like claws. The old girl bucks hard—shudders under the strain of reentry through Purgonis’s dense cloud layers. Ash smears across the canopy, and for a second the sky vanishes.
But then the stars break open.
And I rise.
The weight shifts. The silence of orbit swallows me whole.
Jillian’s heartbeat echoes in the hollow of my chest—at least, it feels like it. The bond still holds, stilltugs. She’s not gone yet. Not fully.
I can still find her.
Iwill.
The nav screen flickers. A new ping—faint, moving.
They’ve launched.
The IHC ship’s on the move.
I throttle up.
The old scars on my back twinge as the g-force punches into me. Not from the burns. From thememory.
This cockpit once meant war.
Now?
Now it meanshome.
I chase the ping through orbit, heart hammering in time with the rising signal. I’m closing in.
And if they’ve touched a single hair on her head—if they’ve so much asbreathedwrong in her direction—I will peel the hull from their bones and watch the songburn.
CHAPTER 33
JILLIAN
Deep Space 12 looks normal.
That’s the first lie it tells me.
Through the reinforced viewport of the lab cell, I watch the station unfold in slow, silent grandeur—concentric rings of steel and glass turning with mechanical grace, docking arms flexing like the limbs of something alive. Cargo lights blink in orderly patterns. Traffic control beacons pulse green, then amber, then green again. It’s clean. Efficient.Sane.
