Page 123 of Red Scale Daddy
“I heard you.”
“Then do it.”
Her fingers hover over the controls, and for a moment I can almost see the two futures in front of her: the fast line that feeds the hunger in her chest, and the safer line that feels like betrayal because grief has no patience for caution.
She chooses the wider path.
The ship’s vector shifts, subtle but real, and the proximity warnings soften from orange to yellow as the projected corridor opens by a few degrees.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Happy?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “But I’m less ready to throw you over my shoulder and fly this thing myself.”
“You do not know how to fly this thing.”
“Details.”
“You would kill us in under thirty seconds.”
“See? I’d still beat the corridor collapse.”
Her mouth moves despite herself, and this time the almost-smile lasts long enough to count. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t make the danger smaller or the signal less sharp in her blood. But it puts air back into the cockpit.
Then the signal spikes again.
The console emits a clean tone, and Roma’s face transforms with such naked hope that my chest aches.
“Triangulation lock,” she says. “The source is within one sector.”
The words should thrill me.
They don’t.
They make the cold thing inside me settle deeper.
Because I see her now. I see what she will do when the choice comes down to herself or him, to safety or proof, to living or reaching the thing she has built her entire life around. She will call it duty. She will call it love. She will make it sound noble enough that no one notices the blade is turned inward.
I notice.
I’m done pretending I don’t.
“Dux,” she says, turning toward me with her eyes wide and bright. “One sector.”
“I heard.”
“We are almost there.”
“Yeah,” I say.
She studies my face, and some of her elation falters. “You are worried.”
“Damn right I am.”
“He may be alive.”
“I hope he is.”
