Page 48 of Reaper Said Mine

"Do not push me, old one."

"Someone must."

For a moment, all the years between us stand in the room: the starving boy I was, the captain he had been, the ship we took, the dead we buried, the station we stole, the people looking to me now because I told them I could make a future out of wreckage. I trust him more than any living being, which is precisely why he is so damn irritating.

"She is a reporter," I say.

"Yes."

"She is brave."

"Yes."

"She is walking into my hall tomorrow because Theryki thinks she can use her."

"Yes."

"And if Theryki can use her, so can others."

Skahar’s expression softens into something worse than agreement. "Yes."

"Then I need to know what she sees before they do."

He studies me, then lowers his gaze first. "I will tell Vesk."

"And Rikka."

"And Rikka." He turns toward the door, pauses, and looks back. "Gnash."

"What?"

"When you watch her tomorrow, remember that everyone else will be watching you."

After he leaves, I stand alone in the cool chamber with the archive still waiting on my console, ready to play again if I am foolish enough to let it. I do not replay it. I do not need to. The images have already fixed themselves in places memory reserves for wounds, debts, and the rare forms of courage that make mockery feel obscene.

Outside my viewport, Guyver Station turns through the Badlands with its markets full, its shipyards burning bright, its enemies drawing closer, and its feast hall waiting below like a mouth full of knives.

Tomorrow, Ursa Ramone will enter that hall.

I find myself wondering whether the most dangerous thing at my table will be the questions rather than the blades.

CHAPTER 7

URSA

The lodging unit’s wall display casts the room in shifting bands of red, amber, and bone-white as another archived Blood Feast recording loops from the beginning.

I sit cross-legged on the narrow bed with my hair twisted into a knot, three compads open around me, and a half-eaten ration bowl cooling beside my knee. The room is barely large enough to deserve the word room, more a metal drawer with a mattress, a fold-down desk, a hygiene alcove, and one pressure-sealed viewport that looks toward an inner maintenance shaft instead of the stars. Pale utility lights flicker through the small window every few seconds as service drones pass outside, their shadows sliding across the walls like blunt little ghosts. The floor vibrates with the steady work of Guyver Station’s engines, a low mechanical pulse that travels through my bare feet and settles in my bones until it feels less like noise than weather.

My eyes burn from too many hours of reading, but I keep watching the feast footage anyway. On-screen, a younger Reaper captain tears the head from something eel-shaped while a line of guests from three species look as if they have discovered every bad decision they have ever made has led them to that table. The Reapers around them cheer, not because the act is elegant, but because the captain performs it without hesitation. The meaning matters more than the gore. That is the first rule I write down in my notes.

Blood Feast: not merely intimidation. Public demonstration of courage, appetite, status, hospitality, and willingness to meet Reaper culture without flinching.

I pause the recording and add another note beneath it.

Outsider mistake: treating the meal as barbarism rather than language.

The compad on my left chirps with an incoming response from Professor Yven Lorr, the Kiphian anthropologist who once published a nearly banned monograph titled Ishani Memory and Reaper Ritual Degradation: Violence as Archive. The title sounded pretentious enough that I almost skipped it, but Lorr’s work contains more useful insight than every glossy diplomatic briefing combined. She agreed to a call after I sent my credentials, my questions, and a promise not to reduce her life’s research to “spike pirates eat scary dinner.”