Three heartbeats. Three shallow breaths. Three moments to decide whether she'll flee like prey or stand her ground like the woman I suspect she is beneath all that carefully constructed softness.
Then I'll make it for her.
Because I didn't come here to negotiate. I came here to claim what's mine, whether she understands that yet or not. Whether she wants it or not. The galaxy is burning, and she's the only thing that can help me save what's left, even if that means dragging her into the darkness with me.
3
Ksara
I run.
Not because I think I'll escape. The rational part of my brain, the part that passes tactical assessments and threat analysis exams with perfect scores, knows the odds. Knows that a man who can hack station security and drop the ambient temperature ten degrees just by existing isn't going to be outpaced by someone whose most strenuous activity is coaxing orchids to bloom.
I run because staying still means accepting what's about to happen, and I'm not ready. Not for this. Not for the way his unfiltered voice wrapped around those words like a promise and a threat braided together. Not for the ice spreading across the deck like corruption, like inevitability, like the slow creep of winter across a world that's forgotten what warmth feels like.
Not for the fact that some traitorous part of me wanted to stay.
My boots slam against metal grating, the sound swallowed by the ambient hum of life support systems and distant conversation from the levels below. The maintenance corridorstretches ahead, narrow and poorly lit, lined with conduits and access panels and all the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps the station's perfect facade functioning. Steam hisses from a dozen joints, condensation dripping from overhead pipes in a steady rhythm that sounds almost like rain.
Behind me, his footsteps are steady. Unhurried. He's not running. He doesn't need to.
That should terrify me more than it does.
I grab a valve as I pass, wrenching it counterclockwise with strength I didn't know I possessed. The pipe shrieks in protest, metal grinding against metal, and then ruptures in a violent explosion of superheated steam. White fog fills the corridor, scalding and dense, obscuring everything behind me in a wall of manufactured weather.
For three precious, desperate seconds, I can't see him through the churning white barrier I've created.
For three seconds that stretch like hours, like salvation, like the space between heartbeats when you think maybe you'll survive this after all, I let myself believe it actually worked.
Then the fog shifts. Moves wrong. The steam doesn't disperse naturally, doesn't follow the airflow patterns my botanical training taught me to recognize. It curves around something solid, something massive, something that shouldn't be able to move the way it's moving.
He's walking on the wall.
Not climbing. Not using handholds or magnetic grips. Walking. Perpendicular to gravity, his heavy boots finding purchase on vertical metal as if the laws of physics are suggestions he's chosen to politely decline. The motion is smooth, predatory, terrifyingly graceful for someone encased in armor that should weigh more than I do.
The red lights on his suit pulse in steady rhythm, visible through the thinning steam like demon eyes in fog.
I stumble, catch myself on a support beam, force my legs to keep moving. The corridor branches ahead. Left leads to the cargo bay, right to engineering. Both will have people. Witnesses. Security. Something.
I veer right.
The engineering bay opens before me, all exposed machinery and glowing readouts and the constant thrum of the station's power core resonating through the floor. A few technicians glance up from their work, curious, not yet alarmed. I must look insane, dress torn at the hem from running, hair plastered to my face with condensation, eyes wild.
"Help me." The word escapes my throat strangled and pathetic, barely audible over the mechanical symphony of the engineering bay. My hands clutch at empty air, grasping for words that might convey the impossible horror pursuing me. "There's someone, something, he's not normal, he's?—"
The sentence dies unfinished, strangled by the sudden shift in air pressure, the predatory silence that falls like a guillotine blade.
He drops from the ceiling directly above me, having somehow traversed the entire length of the bay along the overhead infrastructure while I was catching my breath, while I was foolishly thinking I'd gained any distance at all.
Just drops, as casually as stepping off a curb, and lands in a crouch that should shatter his knees. The impact sends a shock wave through the deck plating, rattling tools and making the nearest technician stumble backward with a curse.
Then he straightens, rising from that predatory crouch with the kind of deliberate slowness that speaks volumes, a hunter who knows his prey is cornered, who has all the time in the universe because there's nowhere left for me to go.
Slow. So agonizingly, terrifyingly slow. Each microsecond of movement calculated for maximum psychological impact, eachincrement of rising height designed to remind me exactly how much larger he is, how much more dangerous, how utterly outmatched I am in every conceivable way.
Deliberate. Nothing accidental, nothing wasted. Every muscle activation, every shift of weight, every breath of that armor-filtered air, all of it choreographed with the precision of someone who has turned intimidation into an art form, who understands on a fundamental level that the fear before violence is often more effective than violence itself.
Every movement is calculated for maximum intimidation, and I hate that I can recognize the technique even as it's being deployed against me. I hate that my brain is cataloging the mechanics of my own terrorization while my body locks up in primal response.
