He feeds me with a deliberateness that sends a jolt through me. He holds the bowl while I eat, adjusting the angle when I struggle to grip it with my healing wrist. When I protest that I can manage on my own, he ignores me with a calm, immovable patience that is somehow more infuriating than his earlier commands.
"You're hovering." The observation slips out with an unexpected heat, a sudden, glowing ember that ignites in the cold air surrounding us.
“I am monitoring," he corrects, though a twitch at the corner of his mouth threatens to betray his rigid composure.
He walks me to the reclamation alcove—the ship's version of a shower that uses sonic wavelengths and a fine mist to scour the grime away. He waits outside the archway, shadow draping the threshold, the bond shimmering through the steam. When I step out,Virex Primeis already waiting with a fresh flight suit, the fabric warm and smelling faintly of an unfamiliar spice.I wonder when the ship started learning my preferences or whether it has always known and is only now bothering to show it.
There are moments where the silence thickens into something physical. He sits on the command dais reviewing starcharts, and I sit on the sleeping dais pretending to read his poetry, and neither of us mentions the fact that we can feel each other's heartbeat through the connection. I catch him watching me—a quiet, careful attention that makes my skin prickle. Once, I look up from the book and find him standing at the viewport with his hands behind his back, and I realize he has been watching my reflection in the dark glass the entire time.
On the thirdmorning after the injury, he lets me walk.
As I move through the corridors a few days later, I notice the shift. The ship is anticipating me. The panels part before I reach the three-foot mark, as if they anticipate my approach. The moment my hand nears the storage compartment, it clicks open on its own, revealing precisely what I need. It is likeVirex Primeis reading my biometric intent, translating the signals my body puts out into action before my hands can catch up.
I find K-Seven hovering near the dispenser in the galley. The little drone's blue eye whirrs as it focuses on me, and I find myself genuinely happy to see the bucket of bolts. It has become the only familiar thing in this sea of alien technology.
"Hey, Seven," I greet it, a genuine smile tugging at my lips.
The drone spins its chassis in a frantic circle, its light flickering from blue to a rapid, flaring white. "Nyra! You are mobile! My sensors indicate your cellular integrity is within optimal parameters." It hovers closer, its lenses cycling over my wrist, my face, my posture. "Unit experienced a forty-seven-hour period of severely limited access to your biometric data.The Commander restricted my proximity protocols during your recovery. Unit has been cycling diagnostic requests every six minutes and receiving the same response: 'The human is resting. Stop asking.' Unit request it noted that Unit’s concern was consistent and well-documented."
I laugh—a real one, the kind that surprises me. "You missed me, Seven."
"Unit does not 'miss.' Unit experienced a statistically significant reduction in operational purpose." The drone pauses, its lenses narrowing. "Your heart rate is elevated but stable. Your endorphin levels are abnormally high. Also, the Commander has updated the vessel's internal security protocols. You are no longer classified as 'External Threat.' Your current status is 'Integrated Biological Variable.'"
"Variable?" I grab the warm bowl the machine dispenses. "Tell him I'm nobody's variable. I'm a guest. A very grumpy guest."
"ThePrimedisagrees," K-Seven chirps, following me closely. "The ship's internal sensors are tracking your heart rate and endorphin levels. Your signature is weaving into the command core."
I shake my head and keep walking, K-Seven zipping along at my heels like a loyal mechanical hound. After all this time I have been on this ship, I begin to notice things I missed before. The walls are alive with data streams that only appear when I walk past. The floor broadcasts a specific wavelength under my boots that feels less like surveillance and more like a welcome. In the galley, the dispenser already knows my preferred temperature for the stew. In the corridors, the bioluminescence brightens a half-second before I round each corner, as though the ship is lighting my path.
I pause at a junction where two corridors meet, and the floor beneath my feet shifts—a subtle change in the bio-mat texture,like the ship is nudging me left instead of right. I take the hint. The corridor opens into a small observation alcove I have never seen before, with a curved viewport that looks out onto a nebula so dense with color it hurts to stare at. The temperature in the alcove is exactly the way I like it—warm enough to take the chill off and cool enough to think. A built-in shelf produces a bowl of stew.
The ship made me a reading nook.
I linger there, my hand on the warm wall, feelingVirex Primerumble under my palm. This vessel tried to kill me days ago. It crushed my wrist in its jaws like I was vermin. And now it is building me furniture.
I head back toward the Sanctum, and when the doors cycle open, Draevik is standing by the primary command console. His focus is entirely on me. He stands with his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes shimmering with a relentless heat.
"TheWeavehas finished its integration," he informs me as I approach. "You are functioning at one hundred percent capacity."
"I told you I was fine." I hop up to sit on the secondary console’s edge. "So, now that I'm no longer a medical emergency, what's the plan? You going to tell me why you're so obsessed with my history?"
He moves into my space, his knees brushing against mine. He has a deliberate, secure intensity to him—a focused heat that makes proximity itself feel combustible.
"The sub-glyphs," he murmurs, his face inches from mine. "When you boardedVirex Prime, the ship logged every action you took at the command console. You navigated a Reaper interface in the dark, under duress, in a language you have never seen. You pressed sub-glyphs in sequences that took my navigation officers decades to memorize."
"I didn't know what I was pressing," I admit, leaning forward instead of pulling back. "I was panicking. You learn to read a panel by feel when you've been inside enough wrecks. The power always manifests a certain way near the active nodes. I just followed the hum."
His gaze lingers on my mouth, then shifts back to my eyes. "A survivor's intuition," he murmurs. "It is a skill my people often overlooked in favor of raw processing power. And in the Sanctum, you spotted a redundancy in the fuel-to-oxygen relay that my own engineers built into the ship intentionally. You saw it in minutes."
"Because it was wasteful," I state, shrugging. "When you grow up rationing every breath of oxygen, you notice when someone is burning through it for no reason."
“Tell me about that,” he prompts, and the question sheds its command, becoming curiosity—raw, careful, and genuine.
"An orphan on Halvek Four doesn't exactly produce well-adjusted adults," I mutter, and the old bitterness flares up before I can swallow it. "They spit me out at fifteen with a data chit and boots too small. Everything I know I learned in the guts of scrap freighters. Fix the conduits or lose your ration tokens. That’s how tech is learned—through starvation risk. They used to call me Nyx in the yards, mostly because I was always ghosting through the dark spaces where nobody else wanted to go."
Draevik stays silent for a time, internalizing the name. A gruff hammering rumbles in his chest, full of an anger we both recognize. He stays right there, his presence a heavy, comforting weight.
I decide to test him. I reach out, my fingers trailing over the bare skin of his forearm, tracing the line of one of the veins. His two hearts shudder in sync, their rhythm palpable through his skin. The bond surges, warm and insistent, and I lean into it this time instead of pulling away. I let it sit there. I let myself feel it.