CHAPTER 32
ROXY
The door seals behind me with a hydraulic sigh, quiet as a whisper, final as a slammed vault. Inside, the ship is hushed, save for the faint tremor of the thrusters and the low-frequency thrum of the power cores—nothing but the ambient sounds of machinery keeping us tethered to motion in an ocean of black. I stand for a moment in that stillness, palms flexing at my sides, the muscles in my neck wound tight from everything that conversation dug up. Something inside me still hums—not nervous, exactly, but alert in a way I can’t quite quiet.
I drop onto the edge of my bunk, boots still on, jacket half-unzipped, and lean forward with my elbows on my knees. My reflection stares back at me faintly from the darkened viewport—blurry, warped, silhouetted by a canvas of stars that drift past in slow procession. It’s quiet enough to feel like I’m the last person left alive. The last heartbeat in the galaxy.
Jalshagar.
The word lingers like smoke in my chest, not even fully understood and already shaping me.
I cross the room to the console and tap the screen awake. It flickers to life beneath my fingertips, cold blue glow brushing over my skin. I type in the search with no hesitation,no safeguards, no filters:Vakutan culture. Jalshagar bond. Biological, psychological, sociological records.
The results flood in faster than I expect—pages of entries, some scholarly, some abstract, some deeply clinical. I scroll past mytho-poetic interpretations and religious ceremony logs until I find the biological data. Real data. The kind that maps to skin and breath and heartbeat.
Neurological sync during shared high-stress stimuli. Mirrored cortisol patterns. Increased tactile sensitivity between paired individuals. Cross-linked emotional transference.
I skim further, noting chemical markers, phrases liketachycardic resonance,oxytocin elevation, andlimbic synchronization. It's all dressed in the cold, precise language of xenoscience, but it might as well be a catalog of my last few weeks.
That night in the ravine, when I couldn’t sleep, and Vrok paced outside like a caged animal. The rush that flooded me every time his hand brushed mine. The nausea and emptiness when he left for the compound without a word—like a piece of my ribcage had been carved out without anesthetic.
And worse—how none of it made sense until itdid.
I open a file titledPost-Bond Behavioral Trends (Vakutan Mates)and begin to read. Paragraph after paragraph, the data unfolds with uncomfortable clarity. It’s not just about physical proximity or sexual compatibility. Jalshagar is encoded in the entire nervous system, reshaping priority structures, alert triggers, even perception of time and threat. And then there's one phrase that stops me cold.
Consensual restraint.
Among bonded Vakutan males, there’s a near-universal behavioral adaptation: a deep-seated refusal to initiate dominance over the bonded partner unless explicitly invited. Not just sexual dominance. Emotional. Strategic. Relational. It’snot instinct to protect. It’s instinct todefer—to allow space, even when it kills them.
I sit back in the chair slowly, breath catching halfway in my throat.
He never touched me first. Not really. Not unless I bridged the gap. Not unless I let him. Even in the heat of chaos, when the bond must’ve been screaming in his head, he held himself back like he was afraid of breaking me.
God, I thought that was him being noble. Controlled. Caged by war and trauma. And maybe it was. But now I see the other half of it—that it wasn’t about fear of hurting me. It was aboutme choosing him.
The screen flickers slightly as I lean forward again and type a new query:Signs of early Jalshagar onset in non-Vakutan species.
What I get in return is less scientific. Sparse field observations. Anecdotal records from bonded cross-species cases, most of them dismissed by official channels.
One report describes humans experiencing hyper-vigilance and tactile recall—memories stored in skin instead of words.
Another describes a tendency toward instinctive mimicry of the bonded partner’s cadence and behavior patterns.
I close my eyes and think of how I’ve started matching his pacing when I’m angry. How I hear his voice in my head when I’m weighing risks. How I’ve memorized the precise pitch of his breath when he’s trying not to say what he’s thinking.
Every little choice, I start realizing, wasn’t the bond forcing my hand. It was me, already responding to it without knowing. Like my body made the decision before my mouth ever caught up.
I open the comms window and bring up Cynna’s name in the contacts list. I hover over it for too long.
She’d know what to say.
She always does.
Cynna would pull me back to Earth—remind me who I am when the world tries to twist me into something else. She’d tease me, drag the truth out, point at the mess I’m in and say:About time, bitch.
But… I don’t want someone else’s clarity right now. I don’t want someone to talk meintoorout ofanything.
This isn’t a puzzle to solve or a crisis to evacuate. It’s not an op. It’s not an emergency.
