He glances back, unbothered. “You brought a stick.”
“It’s a bar,” I correct. “To help you not eat the floor during lateral motion.”
“I don’t need it.”
I roll my eyes. “Okay, fine. I’ll use it.”
His smirk fades when I slide into stance. I grip the bar overhead and shift into a one-leg squat, slow and deliberate. The bar wobbles slightly—damn, Iamtired—but I hold.
He watches. No snark. Just quiet focus.
I finish and toss him the bar. He catches it.
“Your balance is shit,” I inform him.
“So fix it.”
And then we’re moving again. Together. Like yesterday but tighter. More fluid. He mirrors my stances, his bar never dropping. Our eyes meet often—not on purpose, not really—but each time it jolts something in my chest.
Eventually, we collapse on the side bench. Breathing heavy. Silent.
Softly, like it’s been scraped raw before reaching his throat—he asks, “Why do you do this?”
I look at him. Really look.
“My dad was a soldier,” I say. “Ground unit. Took shrapnel during recon. Got new legs but… no support. Nobody helped him adjust. Nobody cared. He… didn’t make it.”
Kyldak says nothing. Doesn’t move.
I shift. “So I do this. So no one else has to disappear the way he did.”
He still doesn’t speak. But when he sits, it’s slower. Calmer. Less fury in the movement.
Like he’s hearing me, even if he’s not ready to respond.
CHAPTER 4
KYLDAK
The dream comes like a blade.
Metal screams. Heat eats at my lungs as if the air itself is a weapon. Faces flare in the smoke—terrified, grotesque, carved by fear—and for a second the world is nothing but that one face: wide-eyed, mouth open in a sound that is not a word, an animal pleading. Then the boom lifts me out of sleep and I’m choking on the aftertaste of fire.
I bolt upright, muscles a coil. The room is still dark-blue from the emergency night strips, the medpanels blinking like small, indifferent stars. Sweat tracks salty down my spine, slick against the edges of old scars. My hand scrabbles for the rail and comes away wet. The socket throbs under it—phantom pain a hot tooth—but there’s also a raw ache that isn’t in the body: an emptiness where certainty used to sit.
I try to stand.
My leg refuses the order on the first go. The balance matrix stutters, the servos whining like a wounded beast. I lurch and the world tilts. Metal and tile kiss my ribs hard. The breath rips out of me in a strangled sound and my vision goes stars for a second.
I don’t curse—not first. You save curses for the ones who deserve them. Instead I grunt, a low sound, and push up onmy palms. My hands shake. The room smells like antiseptic and yesterday’s coffee and the faint mechanical oil that always seems to follow me like a bad omen.
I hear feet—soft, careful—and then Jaela is there.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says without preamble, voice flat as a scalpel but steadier than I feel.
I blink at her. She’s in the doorway in hospital scrubs, hair pulled into a messy knot—annoyingly human. Up close, she smells like ozone and hot metal, like the lab, which reminds me of the bar from the morning. Her eyes are bloodshot at the corners, but calm. That annoys me too, in a different way.
“You can crawl to the wall,” she says. “Or we can sit here and bemoan the state of prosthetics all night.”
