The constellation was about to scatter.
V’dim exhaled and loosened his tentacles from the railing, spreading them wide against the warm stone. A habit from childhood—his mother had called it grounding, pressing againstsomething solid when the world felt like water underfoot. The Ulax court had not been a place that forgave visible feeling. He’d learned early to manage the shape anxiety took. The posture of it. The tightly wound coil of a Circuli prince who felt too much and had been told, in a hundred different ways, that too much was weakness.
He hadn’t believed it then. Didn’t believe it now.
But standing here, with forty-seven hours left before he and Z’fir boarded their ship and left Destima behind—left Selena behind—the old tension crept back regardless.
Below the deck, the villa grounds stretched quiet in the fading light. He could feel the household through the edges of his clanbrothers’ bonds, their amusement echoing to him: the cubs’ bright, combustible presence a few rooms away, Neazzos still vibrating from the guardian mission he’d been assigned earlier, Nocrez wound tight in a different way, clinging to anyone warm whenever he could find them. Meti was simply still. She had been still all day, in the particular way she went still when she was paying attention to things no one else could perceive.
And Xylo and Odelm—there. The soft twin threads of his nestbrothers, present but muted, dulled by healing and by the weight of Destima’s Circuli mental web pressing against Selena’s shields. V’dim felt the edge of it even now—even protected by her barriers, even standing up here in the salt-aired evening—like pressure behind his eyes. The collective hum of an entire population’s unease, filtering through her psychic buffers. Not quite touching him. But close enough to feel the shape of it.
Thousands of Circuli living on this moon. Thousands of minds feeling what he felt.
War coming.
He rolled his shoulders and stretched his tentacles again, slow and deliberate. Counted them, the way he’d learned to dowhen the pressure built. One. Two. Three. Four. Still attached. Still his.
He’d been managing it all day—the low, insistent hum of Destima’s population pushing against Selena’s mental shields, her buffers holding but not eliminating it entirely. Not for him. Not for Circuli who were wired to feel their nestqueen’s network as an extension of themselves. The fear that moved through those hundreds of minds was not abstract. It arrived with texture. With memory. He’d felt it this way once before, eight years of it, and he knew exactly where it led if nothing changed the current.
He rolled his shoulders and stretched his tentacles again, slow and deliberate. Counted them, the way he’d learned to do when the pressure built.
The door behind him opened.
She stepped through it backlit by the villa’s warm interior, the sunset catching her silver hair and turning it briefly, impossibly, to gold.
V’dim didn’t speak. Didn’t need to.
Selena crossed the deck without hesitation—no pause in her step, no question in her expression. She walked to him the way she always had, from almost the very beginning: like the distance between them was an inconvenience she intended to correct as quickly as possible.
He opened his arms. She stepped into them.
Two tentacles curved around her back, slow and careful. A third settled across her shoulders, broad and warm. She tipped her head back to look at him—just once, a quick upward glance, something checking his face the way she always did—and then she leaned her cheek against his chest and exhaled.
The bond settled.
That was the only way V’dim had ever found to describe it: settled. Like a cord pulled taut across too great a distancefinally given slack. Like a frequency that had been slightly off resolving into something true. In the Yarrkins War, when the fleet had been scattered across contested space and Z’fir was the only Circuli within range, he’d learned what the absence of that settling felt like. He hadn’t known it had a name until Selena.
They stood like that while the suns finished their descent. The copper light stretched long, then thinned, then went amber, and then the first thin thread of violet crept across the lower sky. Lunkai’s bulk caught the dying light from the far horizon—massive and marbled, its purple-black surface shot through with silver, hovering enormous in Destima’s sky. Not distant. Never distant. Orbiting close enough to make you feel the weight of it, as if it would crush into them with its brilliance.
Home. The Aldawi origin point. The place they were riding out to defend.
V’dim pressed his lips briefly to the top of Selena’s head.
She made no sound. Neither did he.
For a little while, it was enough.
Then she tilted her head and looked up at him again, and he felt it—through the bond, before she even spoke—her awareness of the tension he’d been carrying all day, like a stone beneath still water.
“Tell me,” she said.
V’dim exhaled. One tentacle slid from her shoulder to curl loosely at his side—not pulling away, just needing somewhere to go while he found the words.
“I’ve been carrying something all day,” he said. “I’d rather you hear it from me than feel it come through early in the morning.”
Selena turned in his arms to face him fully, her back to the darkening horizon now, watching him with those clear, patient eyes. She’d gotten better at this—at waiting him out, at notfilling his pauses with reassurances before he’d finished. He appreciated it more than he’d ever told her.
He’d tell her now.
