Now we recalibrated.
He would never invade my mind again. If he did—there would be consequences. Real ones. I didn't know yet what thosewould look like in an alien starship billions of light-years from home. But I would find a way.
That wasn't negotiable.
My mind drifted—unhelpfully—to the kiss. Annoyingly unhelpfully.Earthshatteringwas a word I'd read a hundred times and dismissed as exaggeration. Dramatic shorthand for hormonal overload. It had not felt exaggerated when he kissed me. It had felt like structural failure. Like something in me had been misaligned for years and suddenly… clicked. That moment hadn't felt coerced. It hadn't felt manipulated. It had felt mutual, which was very inconvenient.
I rubbed my temples, feeling slightly tipsy. But there was no alcohol in the air. No pheromone trick. No external influence pressing at my thoughts. Which meant this shift—this attraction toward him—was mine.
That realization unsettled me more than I cared to admit. Because if that was true, then maybe… letting go of Earth assumptions was expansion, not betrayal. Different gravity. Different physics. Different biological structures. Different bonds.
Knots I hadn't known existed between my shoulder blades eased, tensions unwound. It was like I'd been bracing for impact my entire life and only now realizing it.
He'd said I brought balance to him. I'd seen the change in his aura. The gold bleeding through the shadow. If I allowed that premise—if I accepted that this bond stabilized him—then it stood to reason it worked in both directions. Maybe the part of me that dissected everything into cold equations had been compensating. Maybe I'd been imbalanced too. The thought irritated me.
But it also intrigued me.
Which made it a dangerous combination.
For now, the bond—the attraction—was… under review. Acknowledging chemistry did not equal surrender. Exploring connection did not equal submission. Working with him did not mean trusting him blindly. It meant strategy. It meant survival. And if I were being brutally honest—it also meant curiosity. As much as I hated to admit it, he fascinated me. Infuriatingly. Relentlessly. Like a theorem that refused to resolve.
I told my ovaries, which were on board solely based on the memory of the kiss and the promise of it, to shut up. I was making a choice based on the available data.
A provisional one. He was on probation. But in the interest of science—and perhaps something more complicated—I was willing to move forward. For now.
Feeling better and lighter, I turned away from the window and activated the palmtop Dravok had grudgingly allowed me to keep.
"Show me the last anomaly sweep," I murmured.
The device responded instantly, projecting layered data into the air in front of me. Gravitational fluctuations. Temporal shear. Background radiation spikes that shouldn't exist in the absence of massive stellar events. My eyes moved over the incidents.
There.
I leaned closer, my fingers moved instinctively through the display, isolating a repeating pattern I'd noticed before but hadn't had context for.
"This wasn't random. It's not noise." I mumbled into the empty room.
It was modulation. Something wastuningthe environment around the Dark Abyss. Not enough to be detected by standard scans. Just enough to destabilize perception, to make observers dismiss what they were seeing.
Clever. And familiar.
"Talk to me," I mumbled, half to the data, half to the universe. "What are you hiding?"
"You won't find it that way." Dravok's voice came from behind me, low and irritatingly composed.
I spun around. "Do you enjoy sneaking up on people, or is that just a professional hazard?"
"A necessity," he replied. "And you're wrong."
I crossed my arms. "About?"
"You're looking for a signature," he said. "There isn't one."
"That's impossible."
His mouth curved faintly. "So you keep telling me."
I stepped aside, gesturing sharply at the hovering data. "Look. These fluctuations, they are phased. Not chaotic. Someone is shaping the environment."
