The gravity of that choice hangs heavy between us. I nod once, lock it in.
“We need to move in thirty minutes,” I say. “Window won’t stay open.”
“Then we better be ready to burn fast and loud.”
She doesn’t say it like a threat.
She says it like a promise.
And stars help the bastards who try to stand in her way.
The moment she says it—burn fast and loud—the room seems to tilt, not physically, but in the way gravity does when your life suddenly acquires a direction.
For a few seconds after that, neither of us moves.
The schematic still floats between us, antenna relays ghosting blue across the fractured wall, junction nine pulsing faintly like a heartbeat we’ve just decided to trust witheverything. The hum of the station slips back into my awareness, the low industrial breathing of something too large and too old to care whether we live through the night.
Mara finally exhales.
Not a relieved breath. A centering one.
“Well,” she says, rubbing her palms against her thighs like she’s trying to wipe off adrenaline, “if we’re going to set half the outer colonies on fire, I’d really prefer not to die in the first five minutes.”
I huff a quiet laugh. “That makes two of us.”
She shoots me a look. “You say that now. Ask you again after the first gunship shows up.”
“After the first gunship shows up, I’ll be too busy keeping you alive to complain.”
She tilts her head, studying me with that unnervingly direct gaze she’s perfected since we stopped pretending we weren’t already bound together. “You make it sound like that’s optional.”
“It’s not.”
That earns me the corner-smile. The one she tries not to let happen.
I shut down the broadcast schematic with a flick of my wrist and lean back against the cold wall, letting the metal seep through my spine. The moment after ignition is always the worst. Not fear—anticipation. Your body still thinks it’s allowed to hesitate.
I don’t let it.
“Alright,” I say, rolling my shoulders once. “If we’re doing this, we do it properly.”
“Define properly.”
“Define alive.”
She snorts despite herself. “Fair.”
I push off the wall and walk to the far end of the chamber, where the old maintenance lockers still hang crooked ontheir hinges. Inside, under coils of unused fiber and obsolete medpatches, I’ve stashed what’s left of my personal kit—training bands, field emitters, a pair of shock batons I rewired myself back when paranoia still felt like overkill.
I toss her one.
She fumbles it, catches it, scowls. “What is this, exactly?”
“Vakutan balance driver.”
“It looks like a murder flashlight.”
“That’s because it is.”
