I turned toward her. "Explain."
She stepped closer to the console, her fingers flying as she isolated a secondary signal, thin, recursive, almost lost in the noise. "This looks like resonance bleed-through. They're routing somethingthroughhim."
My aura stirred again, darkening at the edges.
She swallowed. "They're using him as a conductor."
The word landed heavy.
"To reach the Abyss," I concluded, swallowing down the feeling of dread building inside my stomach. I exhaled slowly. "He won't survive that for long."
It wasn't like I felt any kind of sympathy for the bastard, as far as I was concerned, he was getting exactly what he deserved… but… There was no telling what kind of horror the Ohrur were unleashing. Nadine stared at the projection like it might blink first. "Now what?"
I didn't soften the truth. "Now we get Nythor out of there."
Her throat worked as she swallowed. "I'm an astrophysicist," she reminded me quietly. "Not a… double-oh-seven." I had no idea what that was, but the tension in her voice carried the meaning well enough. "I analyze data. I build models. I don't sneak into bunkers or extract ancient god-oracles from under a mountain." She finally looked at me then, blue eyes sharp with something dangerously close to doubt. "I don't know how much I can help," she went on, "versus how much I'm going to be a liability."
I studied her for a long moment. Not her posture. Not her fear. The way her mind kept moving even while she spoke, already testing contingencies, already adjusting assumptions.
"You won't be a burden," I asserted.
She let out a breath that was half laugh, half disbelief. "You don't know that."
"I do."
"How?"
"Because you're already doing what none of my kind has managed to do in eons," I replied evenly. "You're seeing the Abyss without worshiping it. Without fleeing it. Without trying to conquer it."
Her jaw tightened. "That doesn't make me combat-ready."
"No," I agreed. "It makes you dangerous."
That caught her off guard.
"You don't survive this by being armed," I continued. "You survive it by understanding what others mistake for power."
She looked away again, shaken, but not retreating.
I didn't knowhow to respond. The Dark Abyss still hung over us like… the proverbial elephant in the room. He accepted it as some kind of entity, while for me, it was nothing but lifeless dark matter. I wasn't sure I would be able to ever see it any other way. Belief isn't a switch. It's erosion. I had spent my life training my mind to reject the seductive pull of narrative, to strip wonder down to mechanism, to reduce awe to equations that behaved or failed honestly. Since leaving Earth, I'd already swallowed impossibilities: alien empires, technologies that laughed at human physics, beings who called themselves gods without irony.
And yet this—this—was different.
A black hole with intent.
An abyss that noticed.
A universe that didn't just unfold, butremembered.
My gaze slid back to the projection, to Nythor's fractured signature pulsing inside an Ohrur bunker. I'd seen enough data anomalies in my career to know when something didn't fit. Patterns repeating where randomness should reign. Resonance where entropy demanded decay. I didn't like what that implied. Worse, I didn't like that part of me that was starting to accept it. I looked at Dravok. Really looked at him.
He had kidnapped me, manipulated my mind, and kissed me like the universe itself had leaned in to watch. I should have been furious. I should have been terrified. Instead, there was that pull again, steady, infuriating, undeniable, opening my mind to something other than logic.
"Tell me again," I requested after a while, my voice quieter than I intended. "How you think the Abyss developed a… mind."
He didn't gloat. Didn't soften either. He just turned slightly, angling his body toward the stars beyond the viewport, as if the explanation belonged to them as much as to me.
"It wasn't born. It accreted."
