Even if the stars swallowed Garokk whole...
They left methis.
“You’re enough,” I whisper to him.
“You’re everything.”
CHAPTER 16
GAROKK
The Hulk drifts like a corpse that refuses to rot.
A stitched-together beast limping across the void, blackened ribs bent around half-working systems and old vengeance. From the outside, she looks abandoned—scrap metal tangled with ghost circuitry, a grave for the bold and the stupid.
But inside?
She lives.
Screams sometimes, too.
She’s mine now. What’s left of her, anyway.
And now... so are they.
I didn’t plan this.
Didn’twantit.
But blood draws blood, and fire makes shadows dance.
First it was one: a miner lost in the ice belts of Tirros, gaunt and reeking of void-funk, with eyes too wide for a man who’d seen too much. He followed the signal, came knocking on the belly of the Hulk with a knife too dull to matter and desperation thick on his breath.
I didn’t kill him.
Don’t ask me why.
Next came two more. Then six. Then thirteen.
Now we’ve got twenty-seven souls packed into what used to be the medical wing and half the engineering deck.
Runaways. Exiles. Pirated ghosts from dead fleets. Women with nothing left but rage. Men who’ve forgotten how to kneel.
I didn’t call them.
Didn’t send out a banner or offer terms.
But they came.
And they stayed.
They call me Captain now.
I don’t stop them.
I never asked for the title. Never needed it.
But it spreads, fast and easy, like blood in zero-g. First in whispers, then in fists slammed to chests. Then in the way they stand when I enter a room.
