There’s Grollo, the stitched-up stegasaur with the missing tail. He watches the door. Next to him, Minny the winged fox curls her velveteen paws under her chin. I sit cross-legged in front of them, tuck a blanket around my shoulders like a cape, and let my breath slow.
“Something’s coming,” I murmur.
I reach out, touching each plush in turn. A ritual. A comfort.
“Reapers. Not just any.Vokar.They’re inviting him here.”
My voice trembles despite myself.
“I’ve seen what they can do. The reports don’t lie. And if he’s half the monster they say…”
I trail off. Let silence take over. Let the hum of the life support systems wrap around me like a lullaby.
It’s strange — I’ve never felt safer anywhere than I do here, surrounded by pipes and steel and synthetic fur. Even when the ship groans from a stress fracture mid-jump, even when the shields sputter during solar storms, I feel more at home here than I ever did planetside.
Maybe because danger here has rules.
Back in the state care homes, danger had moods. Drunken rages. Locked doors. Fists that came out of nowhere. You couldn’t predict that. You couldn’t survive that with just silence and a mop.
But here? Here I’m invisible. And invisibility, it turns out, is a shield.
Until now.
“Why would they bring him aboard?” I ask quietly, running my fingers down Minny’s fraying tail. “What could we possibly gain that’s worth the risk?”
I already know the answer. It was in Kintar’s voice. In Rection’s disgust. Politics. Leverage. Power.
And I’m a speck of dust on the periphery. A silent speck. An obedient speck.
“Useful,” I say again, and this time it tastes like rust.
I stare up at the ceiling for a long while. The recycled air whooshes through the vent in soft bursts. Somewhere above, on Deck One, they’re setting the table for monsters.
And for some reason… I can’t stop thinking about the way one of those Vakutan officers moved. The slope of his shoulders. The way his laugh made the walls tremble.
I shouldn’t be thinking about that.
But I do.
Gods help me, I do.
CHAPTER 2
VOKAR
Istand on the rim of the basalt terrace, feeling the wind of Storder’s twin moons whipping across my black skin and rattling the tattered banner I raised weeks ago. The banner bears the mark of the Scarred Foot clan — a white skull over a pair of crossed bone-spurs. Below me the fields stretch: rows of sturdy dark-green foliage, sprouts of root-vegetables, and newly planted saplings that have yet to harden their bark against the chill nights. Back when I first claimed this moon, many sneered at the idea of crops instead of bones. Today ... today some of those skeptics study the leaves and nod. Maybe the future will not be only fire and carving scars in flesh. Maybe there will be soil, and seed, and shade.
I grip the pommel of my war-axe (resting angled against the stone wall near me) and inhale — the sharp scent of alien earth mixed with the tang of solder and new metal from the greenhouse frames, the low hum of generators. The air tastes raw, like possibilities still breathing in the dust.
Below, the Scarred Foot clan works. Human contractors labor at the edges — carrying water-cans, checking the irrigation nanofeeds. Reapers tend rows in silence, long bone-spursscratching the ground as they weed. Under the copper light of Storder’s closer moon, their shadows stretch long and lean across the soil. I watch. I wait.
“Boss,” a gravel voice murmurs behind me. My second — Yorta — steps out from the tunnel that leads underground; ribs of the cliff still scarred from the old mining operations. With him, a half-dozen of the clan’s young warriors. They leave their tools at the stone threshold. The smell of sweat and fresh metal — the standard scent of a working clan — drifts up.
Yorta’s gray-spurred scowl shifts like shifting bone. “The men ask what forgiveness tastes like. But I fear they are hungry for old flavor.”
I straighten my spine, letting the banner catch more wind. “Then we give them new flavor,” I say, voice low and booming — not a roar, but a promise. “Not blood. Bread. Not ashes. Shelter.”
One youth laughs, bitter and raw: “You feed us bread, warlord — and we become soft. Soft Reapers die like pups behind walls.”
