I reach for the terminal again. Open a new message. No header. No address.
Just the words.
I’m carrying your child. I did what I did to keep you alive. I don’t know if it was right. I only know it wasn’t goodbye.
I save the draft.
Then close the screen.
The sky outside shifts to dawn. Another day. Another fight.
And I swear, no matter what, this child will never feel abandoned.
Even if I have to do it all alone.
CHAPTER 27
KAZ
Space doesn’t hum the way they say in the stories.
It drones.
Low, constant, like the belly of a dying beast. You feel it in your teeth, in the back of your skull, in the soft meat behind your ribs. The Alliance transport is blacked out from all sides—no windows, no stars, just steel and silence and the whine of containment fields that never sleep.
I sleep, though. Sort of.
When they let me.
The bunk is narrow and bolted into the wall like an afterthought. Every few hours, the lights flicker on. Wake cycle. We file into mess. No one speaks. No one looks anyone in the eye. We eat gray protein packs and hydrate with metal-tasting water. Then it’s drills. Sim after sim. Hypoxia trials. Pressure chamber tests. Then sleep again.
Rinse. Repeat. Fade.
They stripped my name when I boarded. I’m 2173 now. Serial-linked, face-scanned, flagged as “provisional test personnel.” No rank. No history. Just a warm body with enough reflexes to survive the next black-sector trial they haven’t publicly admitted exists.
I don’t ask questions. That version of me died somewhere over Barakkus.
Nova killed him.
Swan buried him.
It’s worse at night.
The hum gets inside you. Echoes in your spine. I lie awake staring at the curved ceiling, watching the faint red glow of the emergency panel pulse like a heartbeat. My hands curl around the edges of the locket I never gave back.
Swan’s crest.
The dumb thing we had made when we graduated cadet academy—back when we thought war would make us legends. When we thought we were fireproof.
It’s smooth from wear now. Cold. But it grounds me.
I remember him laughing that last night. Telling me to live something worth the trade.
And I wonder if I am.
Because if this is life, it’s not much of one.
No contact or windows. No word from the outside. Just a string of code names and deep-space waypoints so far off-grid they don’t show up on standard nav charts.
