Just keep staring at the stars.
“Because we don’t run alone anymore,” I say finally. “And I’m done being a ghost.”
I order them to paint the hull.
Bright crimson.
It starts with one of the girls—Fierra, ex-pirate, hands like silk and eyes that know too much. She scrawls a sigil onto the outer plating with melted insulation wire. A crest. A claim.
Crimson Rising.
The others follow suit. Spray tags. Symbols. Names of the dead.
Suddenly, the Hulk’s no longer a ruin.
She’s a message.
I don’t stop it.
They need this.
And maybe... so do I.
I still dream of her.
Of brown eyes full of fire and fury. Of the way she said my name like it meant something.
Garokk.
Not beast.
Not monster.
Just a man.
One who failed her.
One who didn’t die, no matter how hard the universe tried to make it so.
She’s out there.
And now?
So am I.
Not to conquer.
Toreturn.
There’sa sound that lives in the bones of the Hulk now?—
the hum of something alive and angry, half machine, half ghost.
That sound is me.
Reflector’s voice threads through the intercom again, tinny and warped, the static curling around the vowels like smoke.
“Garokk,” he says, the syllables clipped by feedback. “You are—again—ignoring mission protocol parameters.”
