She also wants to kill me.
The fact that both things can be true simultaneously is the thing that's going to destroy us both.
The coffee in my cup tastes like ship's rations—recycled water, synthetic caffeine, the metallic tang that comes from being filtered through life support seventeen times before it reaches your mouth. Tastes like bad decisions and worse timing and the particular flavor of regret that comes from knowing you're about to do something inadvisable and doing it anyway.
I drink it anyway.
All of it.
Because if I'm going to survive two days on this ship with a woman who hates me and wants me and might kill me in my sleep, I'm going to need to be awake for every second of it.
Ship's night cycle.
The lights dim to emergency blue. The temperature drops two degrees—energy conservation protocols. The corridor outside my quarters is empty, silent except for the ever-present hum of systems.
I'm not sleeping.
Can't.
Astra's quarters are directly adjacent to mine. Close enough that I can hear when she shifts in her bunk, when her breathing changes rhythm, when she gets up and paces.
She's pacing now.
I lie in the dark and track her movement through the wall. Three steps one direction. Turn. Three steps back. The pattern of someone trying to wear out their own thoughts.
I could reach out. Just far enough to sense her emotional state, to know if she's okay.
I don't.
Sheasked me not to. On the ship, during the briefing before launch, when Torres and Kesh were still loading gear and we had a moment alone in the corridor.
"I know you can feel me,"she'd said. Her voice low, controlled."I know I can't stop that. But don't... don't reach for me. Don't try to read deeper than what I'm leaking. Give me that much."
I'd agreed. Because she asked. Because respecting her boundaries is the only thing I can give her that means anything.
But listening to her pace, knowing she's awake and restless and probably thinking about Sigma-9, about Webb, about the ninety seconds that destroyed us?—
It takes everything I have not to reach out.
Her pacing stops.
I hear the muffled sound of her door opening. Footsteps in the corridor. Retreating toward the ship's small gym.
Training. At—I check the chrono—0300 hours.
Of course.
I should stay here. Should respect her space, her need to work through whatever's driving her at this hour.
I pull on pants and a shirt anyway.
The gym is barely worthy of the name. A converted storage compartment with resistance bands, a pull-up bar welded to the ceiling, and floor mats that have seen better decades.
She's there when I step through the hatch. Back to the door, facing the mirrored bulkhead, her body caught mid-stretch with both arms raised above her head in some flexibility sequence Astra Venn probably drilled into her.
The ship's emergency lighting casts everything in blue-grey shadows. Her red hair is tied back severely.Sweat already darkens the fabric between her shoulder blades.
Her shirt rides up.
