The guards stop. One of them keys the entry code, knuckles white on his rifle grip like he expects me to bolt.
I could. Theoretically. Grow something sharp and fast, create enough chaos to reach an escape pod, take my chances in the void between here and anywhere else.
But Tartarus would suffocate without the medicine we came here to secure. Children with void-cough would choke on poisoned air, their lungs filling with fluid as they gasped for breath that wouldn't come, while I ran like a coward to save my own skin.
The thought roots me to the spot more effectively than any restraints ever could.
So I don't move. I stand there, breathing slowly through my nose, feeling the weight of all those lives pressing down on my shoulders like a physical thing.
The door opens with a soft hydraulic hiss.
Mother stands at the window overlooking the blockade, hands clasped behind her back, spine perfectly straight. She's wearing her formal robes, deep green trimmed with gold, thefabric moving like living leaves with each breath. Her hair is swept up in the complex braids that mark high office, woven through with bio-luminescent thread that pulses in time with her heartbeat.
She looks exactly as I remember, polished to an impossible sheen, every detail of her appearance perfectly composed, utterly untouchable in the way only someone who's spent decades wielding absolute power can manage. Even from behind, she radiates authority like heat from a star.
"Leave us," she says without turning, her voice cutting through the silence with surgical precision.
The guards hesitate for a heartbeat. I can feel their uncertainty pressing against my back like a physical weight, their training warring with their instinct that leaving me alone with anyone, even the High Minister herself, might be a tactical error.
"She won't run." Mother's voice carries that absolute certainty that makes grown men obey without question, the kind of unwavering confidence that comes from knowing exactly how far her influence extends and how thoroughly she controls every variable in her perfectly ordered universe. "Will you, Ksara?"
My mouth has gone completely dry, tongue sticking to the roof of it. I have to swallow twice before I can force words past the tightness in my throat. "No."
"No, ma'am," she corrects, still without looking at me, and the automatic childhood conditioning makes me flinch.
The door closes behind me with a final-sounding click that echoes in the vast office like a cell door slamming shut.
Mother still doesn't turn. She stares out at her fleet, her empire of controlled growth and carefully managed resources, and I stand there breathing the floral-scented air and trying to remember why I ever thought this woman loved me.
"You smell different," she says finally, breaking the silence that stretches between us like a chasm neither of us knows how to cross.
Nothello. NotI was worried about you. Not evenI'm glad you're safe. Just clinical observation delivered in the same dispassionate tone she'd use to note a minor variance in crop yield during her morning briefings, as if I'm just another data point in her endless streams of agricultural metrics.
"I—" My voice cracks, splintering into something raw and desperate that I hate the sound of. I swallow hard, forcing down the emotion threatening to crawl up my throat, and try again, making my words as steady as I can manage. "The message said you'd deactivate the kill-switch if I came back. That you'd remove it completely."
"I will." She turns then, and her eyes move over me like I'm a specimen under glass. Cataloging. Assessing. Her gaze lingers on my neck, where Haid's mouth left marks I didn't bother hiding. "After we address the contamination."
Ice slides down my spine. "Contamination?"
She crosses to her desk in three measured steps, taps a command into her terminal. A holographic display blooms between us, showing my biometric data in excruciating detail. Heart rate. Hormone levels. Neural pathway activity.
And there, highlighted in red: an anomaly in my cellular structure. Something new. Something that wasn't there before.
"Bonding markers," Mother says, each word precise as a scalpel. "Neurochemical alterations consistent with deep attachment formation. You've imprinted on him, like some base creature." Her lip curls. "Disgusting."
The word hits like a slap.
"I didn't—" But I can't finish the lie. Didn't what? Didn't fall for the monster who looked at me like I hung the stars? Didn't let him inside my defenses until his absence felt like missing a limb?
Mother waves a dismissive hand, the gesture as elegant as it is callous. "Irrelevant. The bond will be severed during reset. It's a fortunate side effect of the procedure, eliminating all that messy emotional baggage in one clean sweep."
"Reset." I repeat the word carefully, slowly, tasting each syllable like poison on my tongue. The threat buried in those six letters unfurls in my mind, blooming into horrifying clarity. She's not talking about therapy or reconditioning. She's talking about wiping me. Turning me into a blank slate, erasing everything that makes meme, including every moment I spent in the Undercity, every conversation with Haid, every time his hands touched my skin with something closer to worship than possession.
"Standard protocol for compromised assets." She moves around the desk, circling me the way she used to circle failing experiments in the lab. "You were created for a purpose, Ksara. Bio-genesis architecture on a scale never before achieved. You're meant to terraform dead worlds, seed colonies across the galaxy, advance humanity's reach into uncharted space." She stops directly in front of me, close enough that I can see the flecks of gold in her irises. "Instead you've been playing gardener for a criminal warlord and letting him rut into you like an animal."
The words should hurt. They're designed to hurt. I can tell by the precision of her delivery, the surgical way she's chosen each syllable to slice into me, to reduce everything I felt in the Undercity, everything I stillfeeleven now standing in this sterile prison of a room, into something dirty and shameful and fundamentally wrong.
But they don't hurt the way she wants them to.
