POWER VACUUM SPARKS INTERNAL COLLAPSE.
Otto is sentenced to exile.
No appeals. No deals. He’s escorted offworld under guard, stripped of influence and reduced to a cautionary tale whispered in bars.
I don’t celebrate.
I just… breathe easier.
Peace settles over Novaria like a cautious animal—present, but ready to bolt at the first loud noise. Patrols scale back. People linger longer in public spaces. The city feels less like it’s holding its breath.
At night, when Voltar’s asleep beside me, one arm heavy over my middle like a living barricade, I have strange dreams.
My mother is there.
Not as I remember her—not a shadow or a rumor—but whole. Solid. She looks tired. Older than I expect. She stands in doorways and kitchens and places that feel like memory more than reality.
She never speaks.
She just watches me with an expression that’s complicated and soft and full of things I don’t have words for yet.
Forgiveness, maybe.
I wake up with my heart pounding and my hand on my stomach, grounding myself in the here and now.
I don’t tell Voltar.
I don’t tell Jacey.
Not yet.
Some things need time.
For now, I sit on the couch, feet propped up, city lights flickering outside, and let the quiet settle.
CHAPTER 28
VOLTAR
Three years later, Novaria is quiet.
I don’t trust that sentence. Not emotionally. Not tactically. Quiet is a pause, not a state. Quiet is the inhale before something decides to scream.
But for now? For now it’s real enough.
Morning light spills through the windows of our apartment, warm and pale, catching on polished metal accents and the faint glitter embedded in the grout because someone—someone very small and very destructive—thought it would be festive to “improve” the bathroom last week.
I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, one arm flung out, the other pinned.
Pinned by six feet of toddler.
Roxy snores against my chest, red-scaled cheek mashed into my collarbone, one clawed hand fisted in my shirt like she’s worried I might escape. She weighs more than most grown humans and twice as much when she’s asleep. Her tail twitches occasionally, knocking against my thigh with a dullthump thump, and every time she exhales there’s a faint puff of heat that smells like warm copper and baby shampoo.
Under the bed, the minigun hums softly in standby mode.
Sable hates that it hums.
I’ve tried to explain that it’s acomfort hum. That it’s practically white noise. She has responded by throwing a pillow at my head and telling me if the toddler figures out how to turn it on, I’m the one explaining it to Alliance Child Services.
