"The mushrooms." She changes tactic, lets me off the hook. "Did they hold? Are people still in danger?"
"They're stable. Structural engineers are reinforcing with standard materials, but your creations bought us time." I cross my arms. Armor creaks. "Time we didn't have before. You saved forty-three lives today. Twenty-seven children, sixteen adults."
Pride flashes across her face. Quick and bright and utterly unselfconscious. Like saving lives is reward enough, like she doesn't need my approval or anyone else's to validate her choices.
It makes something twist in my chest. Something uncomfortable and warm and completely inappropriate given our circumstances.
I shove it down. Lock it away with all the other inconvenient emotions I can't afford to indulge.
"Rest." The command comes out rougher than intended. I modulate my tone, try again. "You need to recover. We have work to do tomorrow."
"Work?"
"The agricultural domes. You agreed to help." I head for the door, put physical distance between us because staying in this room suddenly feels suffocating. "Get your strength back. I'll brief you on the situation when you're cleared for duty."
I don't wait for her response. Don't look back. Just key the door open and step through, let it hiss shut behind me with the finality of an airlock seal.
Outside, the corridor stretches empty in both directions. Emergency lighting casts everything in shades of red and shadow. I lean against the wall, let my head fall back against the bulkhead, and close my eyes.
My hands are shaking. Just slightly. Just enough to notice through the gauntlets' haptic feedback.
Unacceptable.
I flex my fingers, force them still through sheer will. Lock down the weakness. Bury it deep where it can't interfere with command decisions.
She saved them. Forty-three lives she had no obligation to protect. Threw herself into danger without hesitation, burned herself to ash and embers, nearly died in the process.
For strangers. For miners. For my people.
The implications of that terrify me more than any enemy I've ever faced.
11
Ksara
The days blur together in a rhythm I didn't expect to find here, in this dark fortress carved from necessity and spite.
Morning briefings in the agriculture control room, where holographic displays paint the domes in pale blue light. Haid's voice, always rough at this hour, walking me through nutrient distribution systems and atmospheric regulators. His hands moving through the projections, fingers tracing irrigation lines with the same care I've seen him use checking wounded miners for injuries.
Then the work itself. Hours spent in the domes with soil under my nails and sweat trickling down my spine. The first time I coaxed a crop of protein-grain from the grey Tartarus dirt, I cried. Not the pretty tears from vids, but the ugly, gasping kind that leave your face splotchy and raw.
Haid found me like that, kneeling in freshly turned earth, clutching stalks of golden grain to my chest like they were newborns.
He didn't say anything. Just stood there in the airlock door, backlit by corridor lighting, watching me fall apart. When Ifinally looked up, he held out a canteen without meeting my eyes.
The water tasted recycled and metallic, carrying that distinctive flatness that comes from being filtered and re-filtered through the fortress's aging purification systems. Chemical aftertaste, vaguely mineral. Not quite stale, but not quite fresh either, the flavor of a settlement where every molecule has been used before and will be used again. I drank it anyway, grateful for the coolness against my raw throat, the way it settled the trembling in my hands.
Now, three weeks into this strange partnership, if that's what we're calling this careful dance of proximity and purpose, I've learned things about Lord Haid that don't match the monster stories from Apex briefings. The classified reports mother made me memorize before every negotiation attempt, the intelligence dossiers that painted him as little more than a brutal warlord with delusions of independence. The propaganda vids showing him as a tyrant who'd seized control of Tartarus through violence and intimidation, keeping the mining colony under his iron fist.
None of them mentioned that he checks on the night-shift workers personally. That he knows their names, their families, which ones have chronic pain from old injuries. That he maintains the medical supplies himself because he doesn't trust anyone else to track the inventory properly, to ensure nothing runs short when it's needed most.
None of them mentioned the garden.
He takes his armor off when we work the soil together. Says the servo-motors compact the dirt wrong, interfering with proper aeration. But I think it's more than that. I think he wants to feel the earth the way I do, wants to connect to something living and growing instead of the endless machinery of survival.
Without the bulk of reinforced plating, he moves differently. Still controlled, still precise, but looser somehow. More human. The simple work clothes, dark and practical, reveal the reality of his frame, broad shoulders, yes, but leaner than the armor suggests. Built for endurance rather than intimidation.
The burn scar that crawls up the left side of his neck extends further than I first realized. I catch glimpses of it disappearing beneath his collar when he bends over seedling trays, checking moisture levels with instruments so delicate they look absurd in his scarred hands.
