“You know what I am,” he said. “What we are. What the Circuli feel.”
“Empaths.”
“Yes.” His tentacles shifted, an unconscious ripple. “We feel what our people feel. Our clan—you, the cubs, our nestbrothers and sometimes his clanbrothers through their shared nestqueen—that’s intimate. Filtered. I’ve had years to learn the texture of each bond and what it means when something changes. But Destima’s web—” He paused. “Selena, you carry an entire moon’s worth of Circuli in your psychic field. Hundreds of them. And even behind your shields, even this high up, even standing here with you—I can feel the shape of what they’re feeling.”
She didn’t look away. “What shape is it?”
“Fear.” No use softening it. “They trust you. They trust the clan and the Beacon. But they remember the Yarrkins War the same way we do. They remember what eight years of conflict cost—the cohorts it hollowed out, the families that never reconvened, the ones who came back wrong. And they can feel that something like it is coming again, and their Queen is about to leave, and the two Circuli who have held this world’s mental web together for years are about to leave too.”
Her expression shifted. Something complicated moved through it—grief, and the particular resolve she wore when something hurt and she was determined not to let it stop her.
“You and Z’fir aren’t leaving them unprotected,” she said quietly. “Xylo and Odelm hold the web—”
“I know.” Gentle, not dismissive. “And so do they, on some rational level. But feelings aren’t rational, Selena. That’s rather the point.”
She absorbed that. Gave him the silence instead of filling it.
V’dim moved to the railing. His tentacles spread wide across the stone—grounding again, pressing against something solid. The Yarrkins War. He’d been freshly matured and out of the academy when it started. A bonded Ulax prince reporting to Prince Zirene for his first active duty posting, with his bondbrother Z’fir at his side, young enough to think he understood what war meant. He hadn’t. No one did before it. You learned the shape of it only from inside, and by then it was too late to be afraid of it properly.
They’d held the mental web for their entire ship crew. Felt every mission as it unfolded—every injury, every death that thinned another thread from the fabric until it frayed and had to be rewoven with whoever remained. They’d fought. Made themselves dangerous in ways the most underestimate, because the Circuli’s predator reputation did not precede them the way an Aldawi’s did. The venom in V’dim’s tentacle tips had saved Z’fir’s life three times before the first year of the war was finished. He’d stopped counting after that.
That had been an advantage, once. The enemy underestimating them.
He and Z’fir were warriors. Veterans. That was not in question.
The question was what they’d learned about time.
“We both know how to fight,” he said. “Z’fir and I both understand fleet tactics, unit coordination, what it means to hold a position while everything tries to move around you. The Yarrkins War taught us that much.” He turned to look at her. “What I’m afraid of is that it also taught us how long these things last. How much they take. How quickly eight years can pass when you’re watching from inside. How many things can go irreparably wrong in eight years.”
“V’dim…”
“And while that happens,” he continued, his voice dropping lower, “you’ll be at the CEG Space Station. Walking into a room full of people who want to use you, with the Quaww on one side and their supporters on the other and Kaede at your back because I can’t be there.” His tentacle tightened against the railing. “That is what keeps me awake at night. Not whether Z’fir and I can hold Lunkai’s system—we can. Not whether the fleet will follow orders—they will. You. Alone at that Station with our daughter in your belly and a target drawn on you since the day you first were introduced to the galaxy, and light-years of void between us with no guarantee the bond doesn’t thin to something I can’t trust.”
The admission stripped something bare in the air between them.
He hadn’t planned to say all of it. But she deserved the whole truth, not the edited version. That was the Ulax prince in him—the one who had spent his entire career managing other people’s feelings—setting something down. She’d earned that much.
Selena crossed to him.
He felt her hands before he processed the movement—both palms flat against his chest, warm and grounding and unmistakably present. She looked up at him with that expression he’d catalogued in a hundred different contexts by now, the one that meant she was about to say something she needed him to actually hear.
“Kaede won’t be alone at my back,” she said. “Ryzen will be there. Zyxel. Eshe and the Royal Guard. You know what that team looks like when it moves together. You’ve watched them train.”
“I know.”
“And I won’t be passive at the Chamber. This isn’t the Beacon walking into a room to be delivered—it’s the Beacon walking in with her eyes open, knowing the terrain, knowing the trap. Everymove planned. Every contingency mapped.” Her hands pressed a little harder. “I’m not walking in blind.”
He covered her hands with his own. “I know that too.”
“Then what do you need from me?”
The question hit him somewhere unguarded.
What did he need? He’d spent two days cataloguing his fears and not enough time thinking about that specific question.
“Your voice,” he said, finally. “If something goes wrong—if the bond goes thin, if the distance does something to the connection—I need to know you’ll push through. That you’ll reach, even when it’s hard.”
“I reached Zirene,” she said. “While awake. Across active space lanes.”
