Noah walked down the corridor toward the storage room, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets and his eyes fixed on the metal seams of the floor plates. He was twenty-one, he had killed things that could swallow a city block whole, and he had survived a four horn in the middle of an evolution that would have turned a normal man's biological structure into a puddle of grey soup.
Yet, as he approached the door, his heart was doing a weird, rhythmic stutter that had absolutely nothing to do with him being in a bad situation as he was with Kruel.
'This is a bad idea,' he thought, his brain immediately offering up a highly vivid, entirely unprompted mental recap of the morning session. 'A thoroughly, spectacularly bad idea. She's a commander. She used to be my instructor. There's an entire hierarchy built precisely to stop people from doing whatever it is I'm doing right now.'
He paused five feet from the bulkhead, watching the little green indicator light pulse.
