The ramp closed with a hydraulic hiss. The morning light narrowed to a bright wedge, then a sliver, then nothing. The seal engaged and theAbyssswallowed us whole.
28
Zyxel
She hadn’t moved in three hours.
Zyxel catalogued it the way he did everything—with precision, because precision kept the fear manageable. Three hours, fourteen minutes. He’d tracked it against theAbyss’s internal chronometer since the last time Selena shifted her weight at the viewport, and that small adjustment had been unconscious. A sway corrected. Not a choice.
The observation lounge stretched wide around them—a vaulted space at the heart of theAbyss’sresidential deck, designed for comfort but carrying the sterile hum of a warship underneath its polished surfaces. Curved seating banked against the interior walls in dark leather, and a long table bolted to the floor held the remnants of a meal no one had finished. But the room’s real feature was the viewport.
Floor-to-ceiling, spanning the entire forward wall. Stars bled past in the elongated streaks of faster-than-light transit, smeared white and pale blue against the black, and Selena stoodat the center of all that moving light like a fixed point the galaxy bent around.
Her spots flickered. Muted yellows and dull oranges that pulsed without pattern—the bioluminescent equivalent of restless hands. She hadn’t spoken since boarding. Hadn’t eaten since the hasty meal Kaede had pressed on her before launch. Her arms were crossed over the slight swell of her belly, palms cupped beneath the curve as if holding the weight of it helped hold everything else together.
Through the crimson thread that bound them, Zyxel felt her exhaustion like sediment settling in his own chest. Heavy. Granular. The kind of fatigue that had stopped being physical hours ago and become something structural—load-bearing walls giving way one by one.
She was running on will and grief and the particular stubbornness that had kept her alive through things no one should survive. He recognized it. He’d built his own survival on the same scaffolding, back when the Verya had hunted his kind to the edge of extinction and he’d worn borrowed skins just to keep breathing.
But Selena’s scaffolding was different. His had been solitary—one male, one secret, one borrowed form. Hers was communal. She carried an entire constellation of bonds, each one a weight and a lifeline simultaneously, and the departure from Destima had stretched every thread to singing tension. Through the crimson connection they shared, he caught echoes of the others—faint, filtered through Selena’s awareness like light through water.
Xylo’s teal concern, steady and clinical. Odelm’s warm ache, threaded with music he could almost hear. V’dim and Z’fir somewhere between here and the Sol system, their deep-sea and earth-rich signatures dimmed by distance but holding. AndKaede neon-green thread burned the brightest because she refused to let it dim, let him lock himself away from her.
All of them pulsing through Selena like a network of open channels, and she was the relay station holding every signal steady, amplifying every connection, refusing to let a single thread drop into silence.
It was killing her. Slowly, quietly, with the particular cruelty of something that looked like love from the outside.
Eat,he wanted to say.Sit. Close your eyes for ten minutes. Let me carry something.
He didn’t. Because Selena didn’t respond to orders—not from Kaede, not from Zirene, not from anyone—and pushing her when she was raw only drove her deeper into the stubburn silence.
So he stayed. Coiled on one of the curved seats—notcoiled, he corrected. Seated. This body didn’t coil. He sat with his legs arranged in the configuration bipeds seemed to find comfortable—one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, arms draped along the seatback. The posture felt rehearsed. Everything in this form felt rehearsed.
But steadier now. Three days of constant practice on Destima had built something that resembled competence, if not comfort. His center of gravity had stopped betraying him during basic movement. The nausea had dulled to background noise. His hands—still tipped with vestigial talons, not the blunt human nails of a full shift—responded to his intentions with only a fraction of delay.
Kaede had told him:hold it until it stops feeling like holding.
He was beginning to suspect that threshold was theoretical.
Across the lounge, Ryzen sat in the far corner, a tactical display projected from his wrist device painting his angular features in cold blue light. His posture read casual—shoulders against the bulkhead, one long leg extended—but his spiritdaggers orbited in tight, restless patterns around his forearms, and every thirty seconds his gaze lifted from the data and tracked to Selena.
Checking.
Zyxel had counted those glances too. One every thirty-two seconds, on average. The Verya male was monitoring her with the same quiet vigilance that Zyxel employed, and the parallel should have rankled—another male watching hisenaxwith that particular intensity—but it didn’t. Not anymore.
Ryzen’s concern carried no possessiveness. No claim. Only the focused attention of a soldier who’d been given a person to protect and intended to do it properly. Whatever connection simmered between him and Selena—that thin emerald thread she’d woven during their training, fragile and undefined—it sat alongside Zyxel’s crimson bond without friction.
Both of them watching her. Neither of them able to help.
Zyxel shifted his weight—the demi-human body protesting the sustained position with a dull ache through his lower spine—and let his attention settle fully on the woman at the viewport.
She was beautiful in the way collapsing stars were beautiful. Incandescent and unsustainable.
Her silver hair caught the transit light, streaking pale and luminous against the dark skin of her shoulders. The living suit hugged the architecture of her pregnant frame without apology—the slight swell of her belly prominent, unyielding, a declaration of life continuing in spite of everything trying to end it. Kaede’s daughter, growing inside her while the galaxy cracked apart.
Hisenax.
The word still detonated something in his chest every time it surfaced. Too vast for the small, borrowed form he wore. Too sacred for a male who’d spent decades hiding in a form that wasn’t his, pretending to be something simpler than he was.
