"KSARA!"
Nothing. No response. Just the shriek of alarms and the distant sounds of battle and the pull toward her that's turned into a scream in my blood.
I run.
Through another checkpoint, past laboratories filled with equipment I don't recognize and don't care about, following the pull, following the need, following the certainty that if I'm too late, if Demeter has already wiped her memories, if I've lost the brilliant, defiant, impossible woman who looked at my scars and saw something worth touching?—
The thought makes my vision blur red at the edges.
I turn a corner and nearly collide with a scientist in a white lab coat. She takes one look at me, covered in blood, wreathed in void energy, every inch the monster the propaganda holos paint me as—and her scream dies in her throat as she scrambles backward, pressing herself against the wall.
"Where is she?" My voice is barely human, filtered through the helmet's speakers into something mechanical and terrible. "Demeter's daughter. Where?"
The scientist's eyes are wide, terrified. She points with a shaking hand toward a set of double doors at the end of thecorridor, reinforced and marked with biohazard warnings and security seals.
I leave her trembling against the wall and focus on the doors.
Through the viewport, I can see into the lab beyond. Equipment I recognize from medical vessels, restraint chairs designed for subjects who need to be kept immobile during procedures, monitoring systems tracking vital signs and neural activity.
And in the center of the room, strapped to one of those chairs, struggling against restraints that bite into her wrists and ankles, is Ksara.
My heart, which I thought had stopped beating the moment I found her note, lurches back to painful life.
She's alive. She's fighting. She's still herself.
But Demeter stands beside the chair, one hand resting on a control panel, the other holding something that makes my blood freeze in my veins, a slim plasma pistol, the barrel pressed against Ksara's temple with casual, terrible certainty.
Ksara's eyes widen when she spots me through the viewport. Her lips form my name, though I can't hear it through the reinforced door.
Demeter follows her daughter's gaze. Sees me standing in the corridor, wreathed in shadow and rage and void energy.
For a moment, we stare at each other through the glass. Minister and Warden. Life and Death. The woman who sees everything as an asset, a resource to be controlled and optimized, and the monster who would burn galaxies to ash for one person's smile.
Then Demeter's finger tightens on the pistol's trigger, just slightly, just enough to make her intent clear.
She mouths something. The threat needs no translation:Come any closer and I'll kill her.
Every tactical instinct I possess, every strategic calculation running through my enhanced systems, every lesson learned through decades of warfare and survival, they all scream the same thing. Stop, negotiate, de-escalate, find another angle of approach.
I reach for the door's access panel instead.
The lock is military-grade, designed to withstand everything from plasma torches to explosive charges. It lasts approximately three seconds against void energy channeled through pure, incandescent fury.
The doors explode inward in a shower of sparks and twisted metal.
I step through the smoking frame into the lab proper, and Demeter's carefully controlled mask finally cracks, her eyes widening as she realizes I'm not stopping, not hesitating, not giving her time to make demands or issue ultimatums.
"Stay back!" Her voice is sharp, commanding, the tone of someone used to being obeyed without question. The pistol presses harder against Ksara's temple, and I see my flower flinch, see her jaw clench with pain. "I will kill her. Don't think I won't. She's an asset that's been compromised, contaminated by your influence. Better dead than bonded to something like you."
I take another step forward, the void energy swirling around my form like a cloak of living darkness. My hands remain steady at my sides, deceptively relaxed, but crackling tendrils of pure void energy coil and writhe around my fingers like living shadow made manifest, casting dancing patterns of black light across the sterile white walls of the laboratory.
"Better dead," I repeat, and my voice comes out soft, almost conversational, deadly calm in a way that makes even hardened soldiers take an involuntary step backward. The words hang in the air between us, heavy with implications. "Than loved?"
The question lands extremely hard. I see it in the way Demeter's expression shifts, the way her carefully constructed facade of maternal concern and scientific detachment wavers for just a fraction of a second. Her finger trembles visibly on the trigger now, the weapon shaking in her grip as rage and fear and something that might be uncertainty war across her features.
And Ksara, my impossible flower, my brave, stubborn, magnificent flower who should be terrified, who has every reason to be paralyzed with fear, she looks directly at me with those eyes that have haunted my thoughts since the moment I first saw her. Despite the gun pressed to her temple, despite her mother's threats, despite the very real possibility that this could end with her blood on these pristine floors, she smiles.
19
