Page 237 of Every Almost

“You know,” Reyna started. “Sometimes it’s a real pain in the ass for you to see everything that goes on with me.”

Kess said nothing.

Yet one of the most wonderful things about Kess was, in moments like this, she knew the nothing was answer enough. She stayed exactly where she was, her silver-blue markings steady, and let the quiet stretch out between them without trying to fill it.

After a while, she stood.

"Your markers are within acceptable parameters," she said softly before walking to the door, stopping before heading through. "At least for now," she said without turning around.

And then she was gone.

Reyna stayed on the bench, watching the stars keep going by. Yet no matter how many times she attempted to press the memory flat, it rose again.

Her own hands, the weight of Charlie's waist beneath her fingers, warm and solid and real. And how she'd held Charlie through the catch and everything that came after, her hands holding on while everything else came undone.

Cael came to her office.She didn’t want an audience for this conversation.

"Captain," Cael said as he stepped through her office door.

"Sit," Reyna said. Cael walked toward her desk and sat in the chair opposite her. She pressed a button on her datapad that closed her door, then clasped her hands together on the surface of the tabletop.

Reyna looked at the man before her, his markings already moving, amber sliding toward violet and back, showcasing the control he had never fully mastered like the majority of his species, coming apart now that it mattered. Reyna watched it and began to steel herself for how this conversation was likely to go. She was prepared for Cael to give excuses, to reframe the entire event in Engineering, providing a version of events in which none of this was quite his fault. She had a decade of those from Cael Rask already, even in smaller forms. But here, she expected the largest one yet.

She laid the complete record out first. She mentioned the maintenance logs Torvax had kept for three years, the inspections signed off by him but never run, the tagged shortcuts. And then she mentioned the cascade that very morning, how he had triggered it alone, off-protocol, and pushed it past every threshold the system had asked him to hold.

She kept her voice level through it all, until she reached the one that required her to take a deep breath before she moved through it.

"You stood in front of a Fleet Admiral," she said, "and gave her Wickett's work as your own. And it seemed you had no remorse for it whatsoever. For lying to a Coalition leader. For putting the entire ship in jeopardy."

Her voice had an edge that the rest of her speech hadn’t carried. She heard it half-a-second after it landed. But she didn't take it back. Everything else had been data findings, evidential documented incidents.

But for Reyna, the truth was this one was personal, and she was long past pretending otherwise.

"The Emberkind is not just a ship, Cael. It is a family." She held his eyes. "And you put every person in that family at risk because your pride mattered more to you than their lives."

She stopped there and let it sit, braced for the argument, the fight and deflection.

But it didn't happen.

Cael was quiet for a moment. Reyna watched him sit there, his eyes not moving, his gaze fixated on the floor.

Then, he stood, and he reached into his jacket, took out his Emberkind-issued datapad, and set it down on her desk carefully, squared to the edge.

Reyna stared at the device, then looked back up at Cael, who was now looking at her.

"May I speak, Captain?"

She had not expected it to be a question. Truth was, she had expected him to speak without asking.

"Of course," she said softly.

He looked at the datapad instead of at her.

"I was proud," he began. "That is plain and simple. I ran that diagnostic to prove something to myself, mostly. I wanted to prove that I could still do the work required of this position, and at capacity, if not exceeding it." He paused, and Reyna watched his jaw tighten. "I wanted to prove that I didn't need Wickett to do it for me." His eyes closed and he took a deep breath before continuing. "I should have gone and gotten her, Captain. I know that now. When the second junction drifted, I should have gone and gotten her." He looked up at her. "But I didn't, because I could not stand the idea of needing a human to fix what I had broken."

Reyna bristled at the word 'human,' but she saw that Cael didn’t mean any harm by it. Not like he did with the Gliders. So, she said nothing. Part of her was still listening for an angle.She hadn't spent thirteen years learning where Cael Rask hid his angles for nothing.

"I do want to say that when it cascaded, I did run for help. That is the truth. I know the logs show I disappeared, but I swear I was not running away from the cascade." He shook his head slowly. "I didn't understand then how bad it truly was. I... I thought there was time. But by the time I understood there was not, I was already far from the corridor, and it was past anything I could have done." Cael's markings dimmed. "I did come back, Captain," he admitted, owning the mistake. "I stood at the junction and watched Wickett through the hatch with her hands in the manifold, and I could not make myself walk through that door." He drew a deep breath. "That is the part I am most ashamed of, Captain. Not the diagnostic. My pride."