I should say no.
"Yes."
His touch is featherlight. Fingertips on the burn scar, barely there, tracing the boundary between damaged and whole like he's learning a new language through his skin. His marks glow soft against me, blue-white light soaking into the ruined tissue, and the warmth of it is nothing like fire. It's closer to sunlight on water, if I still remembered what either of those things felt like outside of a viewport.
I don't flinch.
For the first time in six years, I don't flinch from contact. His fingers trace the scar and I stand still and breathe and let myself be touched by the man who taught me what breaking felt like, and I don't know if this is healing or just a new fracture forming along an old line.
His fingertips stop at the edge of the burn. Rest there. I can feel his pulse through them, steady and slow, slower than mine.
I'm letting him in.
The realization lands in my chest like something swallowed wrong, too large for the space it's trying to occupy. I'm letting him in, and I don't know if that means the walls are coming down because I'm ready, or because I'm too tired to keep holding them, or because some part of me thatI've been starving for six years has finally gotten hungry enough to eat from the hand of the thing that ruined it.
I don't pull away.
I don't know what that makes me. Healing, or just finding a new way to break.
His fingers rest on my scar, and his light soaks into my skin, and the ship carries us toward Haven's End where a monster waits for us, and I stand in the cold galley with my back exposed and my walls cracking and I let him touch me and I don't flinch and I don't flinch and I don't flinch.
Chapter 8
Dexter
Haven's Endlooks like a corpse held together by spite and failing life support.
I watch it grow in the viewport as we approach, half the station dark, entire sections gone cold and silent. The parts that still have power flicker like a dying heartbeat. This is where people come when they've run out of universe to hide in. The kind of place that doesn't ask questions because it can't afford the answers.
Webb is here. Deep in the station's guts, according to Torres's intel. Holed up in a research facility that officially doesn't exist, surrounded by enough firepower to make a direct assault suicide.
Good thing we're not planning a direct assault.
"Split approach." I pull up the station schematic on the holo-table. Kesh and Torres lean in, studying the layout. Astra stands apart, arms crossed, her eyes on the dark sections of the station like she can see through the hull to what's waiting inside. "Kesh, you and Torres take the main entrance. Make noise. Draw attention. Astra and I go through here." I highlight a route through the abandonedsections, a narrow path through corridors that haven't seen atmosphere in months.
"Tight quarters," Torres observes.
"That's why it'll work. They won't expect anyone to come through the dead zones." I glance at Astra. She's already suited up, checking her weapon with the methodical precision that means she's thinking about violence. "We suit up, use the emergency airlocks, breach from the lower levels."
"And if we run into trouble in those corridors?" Kesh's question is pointed. The abandoned sections aren't just tight. They're coffin-narrow in places, barely wide enough for one person, let alone two in EVA suits.
"Then we adapt." I shut down the holo-table. "We move in two hours. Get ready."
The airlock cyclesopen with a hiss of equalizing pressure, and I step into silence.
Not the clean silence of space. The sick silence of a place that used to be alive and isn't anymore. My suit lights cut through the darkness, illuminating corridors choked with frozen condensation and debris. The temperature readout on my HUD shows fifteen below zero. Cold enough to kill in minutes without protection.
Astra moves beside me, her suit lights painting shadows on the walls. We're tethered together by a safety line, standard procedure for EVA work in unstable environments. The line pulls taut between us as we navigate the narrow passage, her shoulder brushing mine when the corridor narrows to barely shoulder-width.
I can hear her breathing over the suit comm. Steady. Controlled. The rhythm of someone who's done this before,who knows how to keep panic at bay when the walls close in.
"Dexter." Her voice crackles in my ear. "Contact in thirty seconds."
I check my own scanner. She's right. Two heat signatures ahead, moving through what should be a sealed section. Guards, probably. Webb's people, checking the perimeter.
"Hold position." I press against the wall, feeling the cold through my suit. Astra does the same, close enough that I can see her eyes through her helmet visor. They're hard, focused, and something else. Something that looks like anticipation.
The guards pass below us, their lights sweeping the corridor we were about to enter. We wait, pressed together in the darkness, until their voices fade and the passage clears.
