She approaches the sealed door and bypasses the breaching charge. She presses her bare lavender hand flat against the glossy wall, her dark, reflective eyes sliding shut. The implants at her temples flare. The script on the door in front of her flickers once, then twice.
"Rovik, there's a secondary pulse." Her voice comes through the feed, smooth, analytical, and terrifyingly calm. "The Warlord is awake, yes. But the ship... just as we thought, the ship is protecting a second biological rhythm. It's masking someone." She opens her dark eyes, looking at Rovik. "Find the second pulse. The ship is tethered to it."
Rovik smiles, an ugly movement of his lips. The script on the door turns a dull, lifeless gray under Selra's touch.
The footage cuts off into a swarm of static.
I look around the Sanctum, desperation in my throat. I want to stop them. Then clarity hits: I want him alive. I want the ship to stay alive with him. I refuse to hide while the only being who ever treated me like I mattered faces death.
"K-Seven, find me a back door," I command. "The ship is letting me in. It’s loosening the grip. Find me a way to reach the core systems without Draevik’s key."
"Accessing restricted neural nodes," the drone chirps.
The walls of the Sanctum begin to shimmer. A frantic, blaring purple radiance—a color I have never seen the ship produce before—replaces the dying amber. The ship is screaming for help, and I'm the only one listening. If we're going to survive this, I have to shed the role of shielded captive and become the Warlord's savior.
This is where the fear stops being about my own skin and starts being about his. I watch the empty air where the footage of Rovik just flickered out, my heartbeat hammering like a nonstop warning. Draevik embodies a god of war and a relic of a legion that turned stars to ash, though even gods shed blood if theysuffer from blindness. Selra is carving out the ship’s eyes while Rovik and his pack of butchers crawl through its veins.
The blaring indigo glow hammering from the walls mimics a heartbeat—erratic, terrified, and loud.
"K-Seven, I need a visual! Get me back into Sector Four!" I unleash the command, and the Sanctum catches it, amplifying the raw, jagged notes into booming thunder that prowls through the shadows of the arches.
"Internal sensors in Sector Four are offline, Nyra," K-Seven babbles, its little metal body whirring with the ship’s distress. "The invasive code has localized the blackout. Selra has effectively lobotomized the secondary surveillance nodes."
"Then find a primary one! Use the life-support sensors. They can't turn those off without killing the boarding party," I argue.
The drone chirps, a sharp, electronic sound of protest, before a new image flickers into existence in the open space. This one is thermal—blobs of hot, angry orange moving through a sea of deep, cold blue. I witness the boarding party. They clear the airlock and begin navigating the secondary maintenance shafts. Sharp obsidian and forgotten tech twistVirex Primeinto a labyrinth, a maze built to swallow intruders who nonetheless move with a terrifying purpose.
Then I see him.
Draevik’s silhouette towers on the bridge feed, a massive presence of pure white heat. He is miles away, separated from me by a mountain of fortified hull and sealed bulkheads. He stands perfectly still. Too still. He stares into the void through the viewport, his armored hands on the weapons interface. He knows the boarders are in the corridors—but Selra corrupts his targeting systems, scrambles the internal grid, and strips his control over the ship’s defenses. He’s a god of war fighting blind in his own house.
“Draevik, hold on,” I pray aloud, even as the thick walls of my cage swallow the sound.
The first breach is real now. I feel it in the way the air pressure in the Sanctum shifts—a subtle, nauseating tug at my eardrums. The ship is gasping. Those harpoons latched on like straws drinking from the ship’s lifeblood.
Fear spikes, hot and piercing. This new, overwhelming dread takes hold, bringing the stomach-turning realization of a universe without him. Life before Draevik amounted to nothing more than a haunting, a spectral drifting through the void. A forgotten orphan scrounging for scraps in the dirt who nobody bothered to look at twice. He is the anchor. He is the terrifying, ancient, surprisingly gentle monster who brought me stew and took care of me while I was injured. I want to hear the gravel in his voice.
I want him to survive. The thought hits me like a kinetic slug.
“K-Seven, I am leaving this box,” I bark, moving toward the shimmering violet console embedded in the dais. "The ship is letting me in because it's desperate. Use my biometric signature to bridge the gap to the core."
"Nyra, the Commander’s orders were absolute. Sector Nine is under total lockdown," the drone moans.
"The Commander knows they're inside, but Selra is shredding his internal sensors! He can't target them if the ship can't see them!" I yell, slamming my palm onto the console.
The onyx surface ripples under my touch. The amethyst radiance flares blindingly bright, and for a second, I feelVirex Prime’smind. Static, pain, and a deep, ancient hunger collide within its consciousness. It recognizes me, remembering the blood I gave it.
Help, the ship seems to whisper through the mark on my chest.
My priorities have shifted. Survival is about anchoring myself to him. I have to reach him. I need to be the eyes he lacks in this moment. I must stay close to these core systems, to the very brain of this beast, and fight Selra for every inch of code until I can break these doors and get to the bridge.
"Bridge the connection, K," I command quietly, my eyes on the heat signatures moving through the maze toward him. "We’re going to give the Warlord his sight back, and then I'm getting to that bridge."
The violet color on the console intensifies, bleeding into the air like an open wound. Desperation radiates from the ship, sinking through my feet and into my teeth. Those thermal ghosts of the boarding party are already navigating the heavy maintenance junction between Sector Four and the spine. They move with a precise, unerring flow that makes my stomach drop—each turn avoiding the active gravity-wells and stasis-field choke points Draevik layered between the bridge and the Sanctum.
"K-Seven, I need a direct link into the environmental control sub-layer," my hands hovering over the liquid stone of the interface. "If Selra is masking their heat, we find them by the pressure they're displacing. We track the air they're breathing."
"Nyra, the ship’s internal security is fighting the Unit! Selra’s ghost code is mimicking the Commander’s authorization," the drone shrieks, its sensors spinning in a frantic blur. "Access denied! Access denied!"
