“That’s not creepy at all.”
“It’s how I’m still alive.”
She doesn’t respond right away. Just stands there, chewing on her lip, eyes flicking between me and the glowing monitors. I can almost see her thoughts racing.
Finally, she says, “You could just… leave, you know. If it listens to you. Tell it to open a door. Let us go.”
I shake my head. “You don’t understand. It doesn’tobey.It reacts. It’s alive, but not sane.”
She crosses her arms. “Sounds like half the people I’ve dated.”
That pulls a sound from me that might be a laugh. Or maybe a growl. Hard to tell even to my own ears.
But she smiles, proud of herself.
And stars help me, I find myself smiling back.
It feels strange—like the muscles in my face have forgotten how. My scars tug wrong. But she doesn’t flinch from it. She doesn’t even notice the teeth.
She just looks… pleased.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s just—you look less terrifying when you do that.”
“I’ll stop.”
She chuckles. “You won’t.”
I should stop this. The banter. The glances. The way my gaze keeps drifting toward the hollow of her throat, the movement of her breathing, the way her voice warms the air.
She’s too much.
Too alive.
Toohuman.
And I haven’t thought about being human in a very, very long time.
I was made for war. Trained to fight, to kill, to follow orders. The Centuries War ended, but it left me like this—rusted, worn down, filled with ghosts. The word “human” used to meanweak.Now, when she laughs again and my chest tightens, it feels like something else entirely.
A curse. A gift. Both.
The monitor beeps. Meyer’s signal blips closer.
I move to the console, scanning the readouts. “They’re closing in.”
Her expression hardens. “So what do we do?”
We?The word catches me off guard. She says it like we’ve been allies for years.
I should correct her. Should tell her this isn’t her fight. That she’s nothing but cargo now. But the truth is, hearing her saywedoes something to me I don’t want to name.
“I’ll handle it,” I say instead.
“You’ll handle it? Alone? Against all of them?”
“Yes.”
