Flicker shifts in my lap, nosing at my palm as if she senses the storm building behind my eyes. Her whiskers catch the light again, faint little arcs skipping from tip to tip. She hums louder—comfort through vibration, a trait engineered for long-haul voyagers. She is one of the only species we were able to take from the Trinity before the collapse…countless flora and fauna gone.
Save for us and thedraken.
A noble creature indeed.
I stare out through the apartment’s wide glass window. The city of Mythara glows below—streams of light threading between spires, gliders tracing smooth arcs through the violet dusk. It’s beautiful in the way machines can be: precise, ordered, alive through collective intention.
The opposite of Lyn Walker.
She is…entropy. She moves through equations like they’re puzzles meant for her alone, unafraid of failure because shedoesn’t seem to believe in it. She infuriates me because she’s brilliant. She terrifies me because she doesn’t know when to stop.
If she’d run that sim live—if the translator had misread a sentient nervous system the way it did the phantom data—someone could’ve suffered permanent neural damage. I could’ve lost my position at the university. She could’ve lost everything she’s worked for.
And yet when I told her to go home, I wanted to take the words back.
Flicker butts her head against my wrist until I relent and scratch behind her ridiculously fluffy ears. She purrs, the sound lacking its usual effect of setting me at ease.
I sigh. “You don’t understand nuance,” I tell her quietly. “You just exist in a perfect loop of cause and effect.”
She blinks, unimpressed.
I lean back against the couch, forcing my shoulders to ease. The holo-clock flickers across the far wall—late enough that the air traffic above the university has thinned to a few scattered gliders. Solvi’s transport will arrive in the morning. I should rest. She deserves a father who isn’t buried in work and worry.
But when I close my eyes, I see Lyn again—standing in front of the advisory board, defiant and furious, eyes red but dry. She refused to yield even as I pushed her to. Even as I used her name like a weapon.
Flicker stretches, tucking herself into the curve of my arm. Her hum fades to silence.
“I don’t feel good about it either,” I murmur.
I don't stand up until Flicker allows it—until she gets bored with me and wanders over to her bed in the corner. Then, I go to Solvi’s room.
I still need to make sure everything is in place, that her bed is made, everything tidy. There's a brand new sketch book seton the chest at the foot of the bed, the chest itself an ancient locker that once belonged to my great-grandmother. I need to buy pencils too, but it can wait until she arrives; I'll get her a gift. She’ll like that.
It will give me a few points, at least, against Wulfric.
The room is clean, orderly, the way I keep everything. Solvi likes it that way, even if she pretends not to. She’ll roll her eyes, say I make the place look like a laboratory, then rearrange her things until the chaos feels like hers again.
The window beside her bed looks out over the lower ring of the city, where the student quarter burns with neon. From here, you can almost see the shimmer of the University’s east dome. My lab is somewhere under that halo of light.
The holo-clock chimes once—an automatic reminder to dim the apartment lights. Flicker chirrups in protest from her perch by the window. I glance over; she’s watching the gliders drift past, tail curling lazily, as if nothing in the world could ever go wrong.
I envy that.
I tidy the corners of the room again—unnecessary, obsessive—and catch myself thinking that Lyn would mock me for it. Not cruelly, but with that tilt of her head and the half-smile that always looks like she’s about to ask if I’ve ever done something impulsive in my life.
The truth is, I haven’t. Not once.
Because I am Nyeri’i…and the Nyeri'i do not act impulsively. We must be strategic. Wemustbe decisive. We cannot just…follow each and every whim. Maybe there was a time when my people acted on impulse, but that time is long past.
We learned the cost.
You do not grow up on half a flotilla and fail to understand that a single mistake can kill thousands. A miscalculated burn, a cracked seal, one failed line of code in an environmental system—that is all it takes. We do not get to have accidents. We get to have catastrophes.
So we do not have them.
I check the environmental panel on Solvi’s wall, even though I already checked it twice this week. The numbers are perfect—humidity, oxygen, particulate count. The air in here is cleaner than the University’s surgical bays.
She will tease me about that too.
