But I'd almost died today, and she'd saved me. Had fought for me with the same fierce determination she brought to every electrical problem. Had stayed beside me while I was unconscious, holding my hand like it was the only thing keeping her grounded.
She'd chosen me. Despite my overprotectiveness, despite my brooding, despite being a warrior when she valued intelligence over violence. She'd looked at my darkness and decided it was worth navigating.
The least I could do was give her the same courtesy.
"Yes," I told Bea. "I'm ready."
"Good." She smiled. "Because that girl is going to be back here in exactly twelve hours, and she's going to want answers. Make sure they're good ones."
She left me then, returning to her monitoring stations and her other patients. Through the transparent partition, I could see Will and Lisa in their stasis pods, life signs stable but still critical. Two survivors pulled from wreckage, kept alive by jury-rigged systems and one engineer's desperate determination.
Elena had spent months searching for them. Had risked everything, including me, to bring them home. Had carried guilt for surviving when they didn't, never knowing they'd made it out too.
But now she knew. Now she could let go of at least some of that burden. Could start the process of forgiving herself for being the one who escaped.
Chapter
Nine
Elena
The electrical systems bay was a cathedral of chaos with conduits running like arterial pathways along every surface, junction boxes humming with barely contained power, diagnostic displays painting everything in shades of amber and blue. This was my sanctuary, my church, the place where nothing mattered except circuits and current and making broken things work again.
Except today, nothing was working the way it should.
I stared at the weapons array schematic floating in holographic projection before me, trying to focus on the power distribution problem I'd been solving for the past three hours. Trying to ignore the fact that Vaxon had been cleared for light duty two days ago and would probably show up here any minute to "celebrate" like he'd promised in medical.
The celebration he'd defined as dinner. In his quarters. Tonight.
My hands weren't entirely steady as I manipulated the holographic controls, highlighting the plasma conduit that kept overheating during sustained fire sequences. Simple problem. I'd solved variations of it a dozen times. Should take twenty minutes, maybe thirty.
I'd been at it for three hours and made exactly zero progress.
"Diagnostics show primary relay overcompensating," I muttered to myself, pulling up power flow data from the last weapons test. Numbers scrolled past, voltage spikes, thermal variance, efficiency percentages that should make sense but kept sliding around in my brain like mercury. "If I reroute through secondary junction, redistribute load across, no, wait, that'll create cascade failure in?—"
"Talking to yourself again."
I spun around so fast I nearly collided with the holographic display. Vaxon stood in the bay entrance, no longer in medical whites but back in his tactical blacks, electric-blue markings visible at his collar and wrists. He looked solid. Healthy. Like he hadn't been half-dead from plasma burns forty-eight hours ago.
Like he hadn't almost died because I'd been too reckless to properly protect myself.
"You're supposed to be on light duty," I said, because focusing on protocols was safer than focusing on the way my stomach had just executed a complicated acrobatic routine. "That means desk work. Administrative tasks. Not wandering around ship systems unsupervised."
His mouth twitched toward a smile. "I am supervised. You're here."
"I don't count as supervision. I'm working."
"On weapons arrays that have been functioning at optimal capacity for three months." He moved closer, those cobalt eyes tracking over the holographic display with the attention to detail that made him dangerous. "This is make-work. Busy work. The kind of task someone tackles when they're avoiding something more complicated."
Heat flooded my face. "I'm not avoiding anything. The plasma conduits show inefficiency during sustained?—"
"Elena." He said my name like a challenge. Like he knew exactly what I was doing and why, and found it either amusing or frustrating in equal measure. "We agreed to try. To face whatever comes next together. That includes having dinner."
"Dinner's not complicated."
"Dinner in my quarters. Tonight. After spending two days thinking about nothing except getting back to you." His voice dropped lower, intimate in a way that made every nerve ending pay attention. "That's definitely complicated."
I turned back to the holographic display because looking at him made thinking impossible. "The weapons array needs?—"
