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“Smugly better.”
“Good.”
I settle against him, my head on his uninjured shoulder, one hand resting over his hearts. The room is quiet. The shard is sealed. The fragment waits. The galaxy remains unready, and so do I.
But uncertainty no longer feels like failure.
It feels like the space where tomorrow can still be chosen.
Ghar’s hand moves over my hair. “Sleep now.”
“For real this time?”
“Yes.”
“What if I wake up with another moral crisis?”
“Wake me.”
I close my eyes. “You say that like you mean it.”
“I do.”
The warmth of him surrounds me, steady and chosen. I think of the line one last time before sleep reaches for me.
CHAPTER 38
GHAR
The launch bay smells of fuel, polished metal, fresh insulation, and too many nervous academics pretending they are not nervous.
I stand near the boarding ramp of the Wayward Thesis while station crews finish loading the last secured equipment crates into her belly. The ship is not large by military standards, but she has clean lines, new survey plating, and enough reinforced containment systems to satisfy three oversight boards, two insurance syndicates, and one extremely hostile mechanic. White-gold launch lights ripple across her hull, catching on the painted emblem near the forward hatch: a spiral of stars around an open doorway, with the initiative’s name curved beneath it in four languages. Beyond the transparent bay shields, real sunlight from the station’s primary reflector spills through the docking ring and glows across the ship’s nose like a promise trying not to look too dramatic.
Anita stands beneath that emblem, surrounded by young researchers.
For once, she does not look like she wants to escape admiration by climbing into a maintenance duct.
She wears field gear again, though this version is cleaner, better fitted, and far more official than the battered layers she wore on Nareth-Kul. Her curls are pinned up with two styluses and one clip that looks like it has already lost a battle. A new director’s credential hangs at her hip, and every time it catches the light, she glances down as if expecting someone to announce it was issued by mistake. Her face is animated as she speaks, one hand moving through the air while a cluster of junior scholars, systems analysts, and linguistic apprentices listen with open hunger.
Not fear.
Not dismissal.
Respect.
I stay where I am and watch.
That has become one of my quieter pleasures.
A young human researcher with bronze skin and bright copper braids lifts a compad. “Director Prentiss, is it true you reconstructed the first Nareth-Kul access grammar under active collapse conditions?”
Anita’s mouth twists. “That sentence makes me sound much calmer than I was.”
The researcher looks delighted anyway. “But you did it.”
“I did pieces of it while Specialist Sira-Vel kept the whole interface from turning my nervous system into decorative vapor. Good scholarship is usually collaborative, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to steal credit or sell a memoir.”
A skinny Alzhon student with violet cheek scales leans forward. “But the first paper says your field notes identified the non-Precursor symbolic compression before anyone else.”
