She didn’t flinch. Didn’t qualify. “I know.”
He felt her meaning in the bond before her words caught up—felt that she understood exactly what she was asking, and that she was asking anyway, and that she would wait. As long as it took.
“Then I’ll wait,” she said, “until you’re ready. Until you can feel safe again in your true form, without having to worry aboutthe dangers of the universe. However long it takes. Just know that you’re mine no matter what form you take.”
He stared at the ceiling—the pale stone of the Destima villa, cool and distant and entirely unlike any ceiling he’d slept beneath in decades. He thought of the Rkekh form. The weight of it. The architecture of it, old enough to predate most of human’s recorded history. The form that was hunted. That he’d buried beneath first the Ezzaska and then this, layer after layer of survival, until he’d nearly forgotten that it existed as anything other than a liability.
He thought of Selena wanting to see it.
Not for research. Not for documentation. For the same reason she saw everything—because it was his, and what was his was worth seeing. Because he was hers and wanted him to feel safe with her.
The training whistle sounded again.
He sat up. Swung his legs over the edge. Two wrong, hinged, inferior legs that had spent all morning reminding him of what he wasn’t—and he set them on the floor and stood, and the vertigo was familiar now rather than alarming, and the wrongness was still there, and somehow it sat smaller in him than it had an hour ago.
Was this due to her acceptance of his demi-human form?
“Go,” Selena murmured. “Before Kaede has opinions.”
“Kaede always has opinions.”
“And you’ll know all of them before nightfall.”
He paused at the door. His hand on the frame—this flat, wrong hand, no claws worth mentioning. He looked back at her.
She was watching him the same way she’d watched him from the first—with that unguarded attention, that specific quality of I see you that no amount of studying had fully prepared him for.
“Selena.” He didn’t have better words. He’d never had better words. “Thank you.”
She smiled. “Go.”
He went.
Down the corridor toward the training yard, twelve steps measured with the same precision as before and an entirely different weight to them. The demi-human form still felt wrong. Still clawed at his insides. Still provided him with two legs and flat palms.
But it was his.
She’d made it his.
He was hers, whatever he looked like.
That was everything.
18
Kaede
The training yard baked under a high sun.
Kaede stood at one end, psydagger loose in his right hand. Five combat drones hovered in tight formation at his shoulders, calibrated to the micro-twitches of his will, their casings throwing back the light like pale mirrors. They tracked Ryzen with the same flat patience he demanded of every variable in his field.
Waiting.
Across the yard, Ryzen stood at the other end.
Still. Too still. The kind of stillness that cost something.
Eight spirit daggers orbited him in their loose, familiar spiral—emerald edges cycling in slow rotation, blades maintaining equidistance the way planets held their lines. They were calmer today than on the landing pad. Steadier. But Kaede had spent two decades reading combat stances the way other people read text, and calm daggers didn’t mean a calm wielder.
