The medbay hums with a low, sterile rhythm, the kind that makes your teeth itch and your nerves feel like wires stretched too tight. I’ve been here for hours. Days, maybe. Time’s gone slippery, like oil between my fingers.
Kallus lies beneath the biotube’s pale-blue glow, his skin a patchwork of burns, plasma scorches, and fresh-knit dermal gel. The Reaper tech fused to his body pulses faintly, blinking red with each slow, shuddering heartbeat. But he breathes. Stars, he breathes.
Chelsea curls against me, her tiny body trembling beneath my arm. I rock her gently on the edge of the bench, our movements synched with the subtle thrum of the ship’s life support. Her fingers twist into the fabric of my shirt, clinging tight.
“Is Daddy okay?” she whispers, voice fragile, almost broken.
I run my fingers through her wild, dark hair—thicker now, threaded with silver strands too early for a child so young. “He’s strong, baby. He’s just resting.”
“But he was bleeding,” she sniffles, “A lot. And he didn’t move after the bang?—”
“I know.” My throat tightens around the words. “But he came back to us. He fought the whole galaxy just to hold us again.”
Outside, beyond the reinforced port glass, Earth glows soft in the void—icy clouds swirling over the Greenland zone, the blue-and-white promise of home twisted now into something colder. Below, the Earth First facility we left in flames smolders. The blackened crater where the underground labs once squatted is visible even from orbit.
And still, Frederick’s voice rings in my ears—desperate, broken.Help me…
I smile bitterly, clutching Chelsea closer. “Let the bastard rot.”
The feeds spark to life on the central display. One of the Black Fang techs—Arix, I think—splices into Earth’s primary civilian datastream. “The darknets are lit, Ayla,” he says over comms. “Every channel. Someone leaked the footage. All of it.”
He doesn’t need to elaborate.
I see it on the feed: grainy security cam clips of children in glass tubes, of Frederick ranting about bloodlines and “purity,” of screaming test subjects shackled to tables. A reporter’s voice shakes as she translates a looped audio file: “Begin Phase Three. The child’s blood must be purged.”
Kallus’s daughter. My daughter.
Our daughter.
I hug Chelsea tighter, feeling the small rise and fall of her chest against mine. She’s so still now, watching the screens with wide, glowing eyes rimmed in soft red. She doesn’t ask what any of it means. She knows.
Chelsea reaches up and touches my cheek. “He’s not gone,” she says, her voice calm in a way that chills me. “He promised.”
I swallow hard. “Yes, baby. He did.”
She turns toward the biotube, laying her hand flat against the glass like she can pass her warmth through it. “Daddy’s fire is still in him. I can feel it. It talks to mine.”
And then she hums.
Low and soft, the way Kallus once did when I was bleeding and broken in his arms.
It’s a Reaper lullaby—unearthly in tone, sung in old Ishani dialect. I never taught it to her.
But she knows it.
Somewhere in the tube, Kallus stirs.
The medical sensors spike, one by one. Heart rate rising. Neural activity surging. The Reaper tech flares brighter, cradling his body like a second skin knitting itself into place.
I rise slowly, careful not to startle Chelsea. She follows me, her eyes never leaving him.
“Kallus?” I whisper.
No response.
Not yet.
But the song continues.
