She finally looked at me again, one brow lifting. "Yes."
"That is Arkhevari cognition," I snapped. "Fragments pulled from a damaged Oracle mind."
She shrugged, utterly unimpressed. "Math is math. Trauma just makes it… messy."
That should not have been possible.Coincidence, I assured myself. It had to be a coincidence. I narrowed my eyes. "Try again."
Her lips curved. "Gladly."
I let another fragment slip, testing her. "…event horizon drift… memory behaves like mass… extraction destabilizes the anchor…"
She didn't even hesitate. "YourOracle," she pronounced oracle with such a level of distaste, as if the word were a slap in the face for her, "is telling you not to remove him yet," she elucidated calmly. "He appears to be acting as a stabilizing node. If something disturbs him too early, whatever's being examined could respond violently."
The room went very quiet. I stared at her as if she'd just rewritten reality in front of me. "That's impossible."
She smiled, infuriatingly pleased. "I'm always right." Then she winced as if thinking of something.
I tried to probe her again. Again: Nothing. Frustrated, I wanted to punch a wall.
"Statistically speaking," she added, "I'm wrong often enough to stay humble. This just… isn't one of those times."
Uppity. Confident. Brilliant.
And bonded to me.
No.
Absolutely not.
This wasnotfate.
This wasnotprophecy.
This wasnothappening.
And yet, the bond pulsed again, warm and unyielding.
Ashfall Prime, take me.
I didn't understandwhy I was walking toward the conference room. No one had summoned me. No alert had sounded on my palmtop. I had been perfectly content on the observation deck, recalibrating sensors and arguing silently with equations that refused to behave. And then… pressure. Apull.
Like gravity had decided my will was no longer optional. It started as a dull ache behind my sternum, low and insistent, the kind of sensation that made no sense unless something was very wrong, or very right. My feet moved before my brain finished protesting, my path unthinking, inevitable.
Ridiculous.
I told myself it was stress. Adrenaline. Proximity to the Dark Abyss. There were a dozen rational explanations, and I recited them like a mantra. I kept my eyes focused on the palmtop, reading some of what Ceceaux Seris—Ceceaux, I'd learned, is atitle indicating a most learned specialist/teacher in a field, like a professor—had written about what he had called theDark Reach, while the doors to the conference room slid open. When my head lifted, I sawhim.
God help me.
I had thought I'd acclimated to alien beauty. Pandraxians were all brutal symmetry and controlled power. Space Guardians looked like violence carved into flesh. In order to remain as unaffected as possible, because honestly, being surrounded by these men twenty-four seven would turn even a nun into a nymphomaniac, I had catalogued it all, filed it away as biological variance plus cultural aesthetics. This man obliterated every category.
He was… chiseled. From head to toe. Not just muscular:engineered. As if anatomy itself had been optimized and then sharpened for war. His shoulders were impossibly broad, his waist narrow, his movements economical in a way that suggested he never wasted effort because he never had to. His muscles had muscles. There were muscles that no human had ever even dreamed of.
His skin wasn't gold, exactly. It was something warmer. Deeper. Like light filtered through ancient metal. My breath stalled. I was still registering that when I noticed theflicker. Something movedaroundhim, not light, not shadow. It shimmered and folded in on itself, dark red threaded with black veins, pulsing faintly as if alive.
Aura, my soul supplied.
No. My brain answered.Absolutely not.
