Auras didn't exist. That was mysticism, not physics. This had to be some kind of secondary dermal layer, an electromagnetic sheath, maybe a defensive adaptation… yet I wanted to touch it. The urge startled me so badly that I actually curled my fingers into my palm to stop myself.Get it together, Nadine. Iwas barely holding on; thankfully, Emperor Daryus chose that moment to acknowledge me.
"Oh—Doctor Phillips? Did you need something?"
All I could do was shake my head. If the emperor had been intimidating to me before, the man next to him felt like gravity had recalibrated around him.
"Dravok. This is Doctor Phillips, from Earth. She is assisting me in gathering data on the Dark Abyss," the emperor continued. "She's quite the expert in her field."
His words of praise brought me back to myself. Yes, that's what I was, an expert in my field. A doctor. Not a starstruck girly girl.
"Doctor Phillips," Daryus went on, "this is Dravok, one of the Arkhevari I told you about."
I was glad for his presence and the reminder. It was hard to take my eyes away from the Arkhevari. Dravok? Even the name sounded hard. It suited him. We stared at each other. Too long. Too intensely.
Suddenly, words poured out of him, "…thirty-two over nine… curvature collapse… don't extract yet…" he shook himself and added, "Sorry. "Oracle nonsense. It happens."
Whatever fragile equilibrium I'd managed to maintain was shattered. His voice was low, edged with irritation and authority, pulling me back under his spell. Until he dismissed what he just said asnonsense, that's when something in me recoiled. I corrected him before I consciously decided to. Those were not nonsense words as he had implied. I couldn't have said why it felt important for me to correct him. Maybe I felt I needed to show him that I wasn't just another soft, breakable human orbiting his gravity. Even though I didn't understand why that mattered.
I didn't understand why my heart was racing, why heat pooled low in my abdomen, sharp and distracting, or why mybody reacted as if proximity alone was a stimulus. This had never happened before. I'd seen attractive men. Slept with a few, once upon a time. Sex had always been… secondary. Interesting, but hardly urgent. A biological footnote compared to discovery, understanding, and the rush of solving something impossible. This was different. This was visceral.
I was acutely aware of my body in a way I hadn't been in years. I noted how my nipples tightened, how my breath shallowed, and how my blood pulsed loudly in my ears. My brain scrambled to overcompensate, firing explanations, corrections, and facts like a shield. Because if I didn't think, I might feel.
I was deeply, profoundly afraid that one touch—one—would reduce me to something unrecognizable. The fear didn't make me step back. That surprised me most of all. I straightened, lifted my chin, and met his gaze with deliberate calm. If my body wanted to betray me, fine. My mind would not.
Why am I even in this hallway? That was my first coherent thought once the words left my mouth and I realized I'd just corrected an Arkhevari—one who radiated enough lethal confidence to make seasoned Pandraxian commanders step carefully. Too late now.
Dravok stared at me like I'd just violated several laws of nature. Possibly all of them. His eyes—a dark onyx, some might have called them black, sharp, unnervingly intelligent—cut over my face as if trying to decide whether I was a statistical anomaly or a direct threat. I resisted the urge to fidget.Stay calm. Stay factual. Facts don't get you killed.
"You can decipher that?" he asked, flat and incredulous.
"Yes."
"That is Arkhevari cognition," he snapped. "Fragments pulled from a damaged Oracle mind."
I shrugged. It didn't matter where it came from, although the wordOraclemade my teeth hurt. "Math is math. Trauma just makes it messy."
He narrowed his eyes, testing me. "Try again."
My lips curled. Was he challenging my mind? I had a nearly photographic memory; my IQ had been tested multiple times since I was in kindergarten. A hundred and fifty-two had been the latest reading. A bit down from grade school, but then again, NASA hadn't been that demanding, and I had had the flu at the time. "Gladly."
More words exited his mouth, his very sexy mouth.Focus Nadine. "…event horizon drift… memory behaves like mass… extraction destabilizes the anchor…"
Was he kidding me? That was child's play. "YourOracle," I shuddered at the word, but that's what he had implied he believed the person saying those words was, "is telling you not to remove him yet," I replied calmly. "He's functioning as a stabilizing node. Pull him too early, and whatever they're probing will respond violently."
He glared at me as if I'd just declared war on him. "That's impossible."
I couldn't help it, "I'm always right." Then I corrected myself quickly, remembering that I had been told on more than one occasion that it was impolite to brag. "Statistically speaking." I tried to backpaddle. "I'm wrong often enough to stay humble." Still, my ego couldn't let it rest there, and I had to add, "This just… isn't one of those times."
Because I knew I was right.
Emperor Daryus cleared his throat. "After Ceceaux Seris's death, no one stepped into his role," he explained. "His later discoveries regarding the Dark Abyss were… controversial, at best. Most deemed them unreliable."
I nodded slowly, totally agreeing with him. I hadn't studied with the Pandraxians. I hadn't even known they existed until recently. Everything I knew—everything I was—came from Earth. From human institutions. Human assumptions. Human blind spots. I'd learned physics in lecture halls that still argued over dark matter and gravitational constants, never once suspecting that an entire interstellar civilization had already mapped the edges of reality I was only beginning to question.
Names like Ceceaux Seris were familiar to them in ways they weren't to me. Among the Pandraxians—and other spacefaring species—he had been considered foundational. A mind whose early work shaped how entire generations understood stellar dynamics and gravitational systems. On Earth, he had been invisible.
I'd discovered his works only after coming to Astrionis, buried deep in translated archives, part of a body of knowledge human science had never brushed against. At first, I respected what I saw. His early work was elegant, rigorous, and expansive without being speculative. It pushed beyond anything I knew, not through mysticism, but through access to data, to tools, and to perspectives humanity simply didn't have yet. His later writings were another matter. Those I had dismissed.
They spoke of a pull emanating from the Dark Abyss, not gravity, not mass, but something subtler. Directional. Intentional. Most of the scientific community had dismissed them. I'd written them off as the intellectual erosion of a brilliant mind stretched too far for too long, cataloged the deviation, and moved on. Now, standing here, listening to the Emperor of the Pandraxian Empire explainwhyhe had brought me across the stars, I felt a hollow shift settle in my chest.
