Bring Ksara to the rendezvous coordinates attached, or I activate the protocol. Your choice, warlord. Her life, or theirs.
You have until 0600 station time.
Consider this a courtesy warning. I could have simply taken her back.
Regards,
High Minister Demeter
The words blur. I have to read them twice, three times before the full scope of her cruelty sinks in.
She's holding an entire sector hostage. Thousands of people, miners, engineers, families, children with void-cough who are just starting to recover thanks to the oxygen-rich plants I grew, all of them will die if I don't go back.
And she knew. She planned this. Let Haid take me, let me start to hope, start to heal these people, make them depend on what I could give them. Let me fall for the warlord in his fortress made of spite and survival.
All so she could pull me back like a dog on a leash, proving once and for all that I never had a choice. That I was never free.
The rage comes first, hot and blinding. I want to scream. I want to tear the terminal off the wall and throw it through the viewport. I want to grow thorns thick as cables and strangle every oxygen scrubber she's corrupted, every piece of tech she's poisoned with her contingencies and kill-switches.
But the rage burns itself out fast, leaving nothing behind but cold, terrible clarity, the kind that settles in your bones like frost, sharp and unforgiving.
She wins. Again. Always. Every single time.
No matter how far I run, no matter where I hide or who stands beside me, she finds a way to wrap her fingers around my throat and pull me back into line. She doesn't even have to be here to do it. That's the genius of her cruelty, she's engineered the trap so perfectly that I'll walk into it myself, willingly, because the alternative is watching innocent people suffocate in the dark.
Because she knows I can't let them die. Can't stand by while children suffocate because I dared to want something for myself. Can't ask Haid to choose between me and his people when I already know which choice will destroy him.
I loved someone once who made impossible choices, and it hollowed him out from the inside. I won't do that to Haid. Won't make him carry that weight.
Which means I have to leave.
The thought opens up a hollow in my chest, vast and aching. I press my hand over my heart and feel it beating too fast, panicked and desperate. Every instinct screams at me to wake him. Find him. Tell him everything and let him help me find another way.
But there is no other way. Demeter doesn't bluff. She's too practical, too ruthless. If I don't show up at those coordinates, people die. And if Haid tries to stop her, more people die, and he becomes exactly the monster everyone already thinks he is.
I won't let her do that to him.
I won't let her take the fragile, careful hope I saw in his eyes last night that tentative softness when he looked at me like I was something precious instead of a weapon to be wielded, and crush it under the boot of her ambitions. I won't let her twist what we found together in the darkness into another reason for him to hate himself, another weight to add to the crushing burden he already carries.
I won't do that to him.
So I move.
Automatic. Numb. I find my boots, lace them with shaking hands. Grab a tactical jacket from his trunk because it's the only thing available and I can't walk through the station wearing just his shirt, no matter how much I want to keep that last piece of him against my skin.
There's a duffel bag shoved in the corner, empty except for a broken data-slate. I dump the slate and start filling the bag with things I'll need. A water canteen. Emergency rations. The small kit of seeds I've been cultivating, tucked into padded pouches so they don't crush.
My hands are steady. That's the worst part. My hands are steady while my heart is shattering, and I don't know which feeling is real anymore.
I pause at the desk. The terminal screen still glows with Demeter's ultimatum, clinical and efficient and utterly devoid of mercy.
I should leave it. Let Haid find the message on his own and make his choice without my interference.
But that feels like cowardice. Like I'm running away instead of making the hard call.
So I pull up a blank message window and stare at the cursor blinking on the empty screen. What do you say to the man who made you feel human again? Who saw past the asset designation and the bio-kinetic potential and just wantedyou, messy and stubborn and afraid?
How do you say goodbye to the first person who ever made you feel like you mattered for reasons that had nothing to do with what you could grow?
