Scene One
The next morning cycle came too quickly. Artificial dawn seeped through the station's panels, bathing the laboratories in pale gold. Maya had not slept. She sat at her desk, eyes rimmed red, staring at streams of data she could barely focus on. Every time her thoughts brushed against the numbers, they veered back to the night before. His voice, his refusal, the silence that carved deeper than any answer could have.
She rubbed her temples, muttering to herself. "Focus, Maya. Focus on the science."
But science was slipping out of her control. The star's pulses were no longer random interference—they carried rhythm, almost deliberate, like the heartbeat of something vast and unseen. The thought chilled her.
The lab doors hissed open. Commander Rivan stormed in, followed by two security officers. His face was drawn tight, his usual calm cracked by strain. "Dr. Elara," he barked, "I need you in Command now. There's been an incident."
Her heart lurched. "What happened?"
"System breaches," Rivan said, his voice clipped. "Multiple. Someone tampered with the shielding arrays last night. Our diagnostics caught it just before a complete failure. If the surge had hit then—" He stopped, his jaw clenching. "We'd be drifting in pieces right now."
The words sank heavy into Maya's chest. Sabotage. Not cosmic chance. Not mechanical failure. Someone aboard the station wanted them destroyed.
She rose quickly, her lab coat fluttering behind her as she followed Rivan and his guards through the narrow corridors. The station buzzed with tense energy—crew moving in sharp, hurried strides, hushed voices carrying rumors like sparks through dry air. The walls themselves seemed to vibrate with unease.
In the Command deck, the air was thicker still. Officers hunched over consoles, eyes darting across glowing readouts. At the center stood Alexander, his tall frame rigid, arms folded as though bracing against invisible weight. He looked up the moment Maya entered, his gray eyes shadowed with exhaustion.
She ignored the sudden twist in her chest and focused on Rivan. "Show me the breach."
An officer brought up schematics of the station on the main display. Sections of the shielding arrays pulsed red, strands of corrupted code spiraling across the holographic overlay.
"This wasn't random error," Maya said, scanning the patterns. "Someone rewrote the calibration algorithms. Precise. Surgical. Whoever did this knew exactly where to strike."
"And they wanted us dead," Rivan muttered. He turned to the crew. "Tighten lockdown protocols. Every subsystem requires dual clearance now."
Alexander stepped forward then, his presence pulling the room taut. "We also need to consider the possibility that whoever tampered with the shields is still active. They could be watching us now." His voice was calm but carried a quiet authority that silenced the murmurs.
Rivan's eyes narrowed. "Do you have someone in mind, Commander?"
Alexander's gaze flicked briefly across the room, settling on no one, yet heavy with implication. "Not yet. But I've seen sabotage before. This has precision written all over it."
Maya forced her voice steady. "If someone's working against us, it's not just sabotage—it's coordinated with the interference. Look at this." She keyed in her console, overlaying the breach times with the star's pulse patterns. "The tampering aligned almost perfectly with the strongest waveforms. It's as if whoever did this knew when the surge would come."
The room fell silent. The implication hung like a blade.
"How could they know?" one officer whispered.
Rivan scowled. "Unless they're the ones sending the signal."
A chill swept through Maya. The idea was absurd—yet the synchronization was undeniable. She turned to Alexander despite herself, seeking some anchor. His jaw was tense, his eyes unreadable, but she sensed the same storm brewing inside him.
"Dr. Elara," Rivan said sharply, dragging her attention back. "I want you to work with Commander Kael on this. If these signals are being manipulated by someone aboard, we need answers fast."
Her pulse quickened. The last thing she wanted was to be tethered to Alexander again—not after last night, not after his silence—but she couldn't refuse. The colony's survival outweighed personal pain.
She nodded stiffly. "Understood."
Alexander gave the faintest nod in return, a soldier's acknowledgment, nothing more. Yet the space between them seemed to hum, heavy with unspoken words.
Rivan moved on, barking orders, dispersing the crew into teams. The Command deck thinned until only a few officers remained. Maya busied herself collecting the data streams, anything to avoid looking at him.
But Alexander's voice came low, quiet, meant only for her. "You're right. The timing isn't coincidence."
She stiffened. "Then you admit it. This isn't just a natural phenomenon."
"No," he said. "And that means we're dealing with more than sabotage. Someone knows what's out there, Maya. And they don't want you to discover it."
She turned to face him, her chest tight. "And do you? Do you know what's out there?"
His silence was answer enough. He didn't look away this time, but the weight in his gaze was unbearable.
Her hands curled into fists. "You're hiding something. Again."
"Maya—" He stopped, swallowed hard. "Some truths aren't safe yet."
Her heart hammered, anger and fear colliding. "Safe for who? For me? Or for you?"
The question hung sharp between them, unanswered.
Before either could speak again, alarms flared once more. The star had shifted, its pulse intensifying into violent flares. The deck shuddered under the force. Consoles screamed warnings.
Rivan's voice thundered over the chaos: "Brace for impact! Shields at maximum—now!"
Maya's console lit with frantic readings. The flare was unlike anything she had seen—its waveform jagged, erratic, almost like…language.
And beneath the chaos, one chilling thought sank its claws into her mind:
If the signals were a language, then someone—something—was trying to speak.
Scene Two
The lab was quieter than Command, but the silence was no relief. It pulsed between them, heavy and fragile, like glass stretched too thin. Maya sat at her console, data streams flickering across her screen. The station's systems had stabilized—for now. Outside the reinforced observation panels, the dying star burned with restless light, its flares licking the darkness like warning fires.
Alexander stood near the door, arms crossed, posture rigid. He hadn't removed his uniform jacket, and the faint glint of his rank insignia caught the sterile light. To anyone else, he looked like control incarnate: calm, disciplined, a commander forged from steel. But Maya saw the tension in the set of his shoulders, the faint crease between his brows.
She hated herself for noticing.
"You're just going to stand there?" she asked without looking up.
His voice was steady, measured. "I don't want to interfere with your process."
She snorted softly, fingers flying over her console. "You've interfered enough, Alexander. What's one more time?"
The silence that followed wasn't defensive. It was… wounded. She forced herself not to look at him, afraid of what she'd see in his eyes.
Instead, she projected the pulse data into the room. A holographic web of jagged waveforms unfolded, hovering between them like the ghost of the star itself. "Look at this," she said, her voice brisk, clinical. "These aren't random emissions. The rhythm, the modulation—it's structured. There's intent here."
Alexander stepped closer, his gaze scanning the holograms. "You think it's communication."
"I don't think," she said sharply. "I know. The problem is, I can't decipher it alone. The algorithm I built to detect linguistic patterns keeps collapsing under the complexity." She finally looked up at him, her frustration spilling over. "If you're going to lurk in my lab, you may as well make yourself useful."
He didn't flinch at the barb. Instead, he approached the console, his presence flooding the space beside her. He smelled faintly of metal and ozone, the scent of the docking bays he'd been commanding hours before. "Show me your algorithm," he said.
Maya hesitated, then handed him the tablet. She watched as his eyes scanned the code with surprising fluency. "You're familiar with computational linguistics now?"
"I've had to be," he murmured. "Where I've been… patterns meant survival."
The words stirred questions she wanted to fling at him, but she bit them back. Answers never came easily from Alexander Kael.
He adjusted the algorithm with deft fingers, tightening loops, adding layers of predictive analysis. "You're trying to force the data to conform to human syntax," he said. "But if this is nonhuman, it might not follow the same logic. You need a fractal model—one that adapts to self-similarity rather than linear progression."
Maya blinked at him, startled despite herself. "When did you become the scientist?"
A faint, humorless smile tugged at his mouth. "When I realized science was the only way to fight what I couldn't shoot."
Their eyes met briefly, and the air thickened. Memories pressed at her edges—the warmth of his hand at her back years ago, the way he used to bend close when she spoke, listening as if every word mattered. She tore her gaze away before those memories could betray her.
Together, they ran the modified algorithm. The holographic waves shimmered, restructured, and then—miraculously—patterns emerged. Not language as they knew it, but repeating clusters, fractal sequences that spiraled inward like galaxies.
"It's beautiful," Maya whispered despite herself.
Alexander's voice was low, reverent. "It's deliberate."
A chill skated down her spine. "Someone is speaking to us."
"Or warning us," he countered.
The console beeped—an alert. The algorithm had detected synchronization between the fractal sequences and the exact moments the shielding had been sabotaged.
Maya's throat tightened. "Whoever's behind this… they're not just listening to the star. They're working with it."
Alexander straightened, his jaw set. "Then we're not just up against an internal saboteur. We're caught in a war we don't understand."
The words should have been a soldier's blunt pragmatism, but she heard something else beneath them—weariness, almost grief.
She studied him carefully. "You speak like you've seen this before."
His silence was damning.
Her pulse raced. "Alexander. Where have you been these last six years?"
He didn't look at her. His gaze remained on the swirling patterns of alien light. "Places you can't imagine. Places I swore I'd keep you safe from."
Her voice cracked despite her effort to keep it steady. "Safe? You abandoned me without a word. Do you have any idea what that did to me?"
He turned to her then, and the mask slipped. For a heartbeat, the weight of his regret was raw and unguarded. "Every day, Maya. Every damn day, I knew what it did to you. And I still couldn't come back."
The admission left her breathless, torn between fury and longing. She wanted to scream at him, to strike him, to pull him into her arms until the universe itself dissolved.
But before she could speak, alarms shattered the air again. The lab lights flickered as the star outside convulsed in another violent flare.
Alexander cursed, rushing to the console. "It's stronger this time. Shielding won't hold."
Maya scanned the readings, her hands trembling. "No… no, this isn't just a flare. Look at the modulation—it's part of the same sequence. It's responding to us."
The thought landed like ice. The star, or whatever intelligence pulsed within it, knew they were listening.
And it was answering.
The station shuddered, gravity flickering in brief, nauseating lurches. Maya grabbed the edge of the console to steady herself. Alexander's hand shot out, gripping her arm, anchoring her against the violent tremor. For an instant, the years dissolved—the feel of his touch was the same as it had always been, firm, grounding, unbearably familiar.
Their eyes locked in the chaos, and the question burned between them unspoken: Were they working together to save the station, or were they standing on the edge of a revelation that would tear them apart even further?
Scene Three
The corridor outside the lab was a frenzy of motion. Engineers and medics rushed past with clipped voices and hurried strides, the distant thrum of emergency protocols echoing through the metal hull. Overhead, the station's AI repeated calm instructions, but the flicker of the lights betrayed the fear everyone was trying to mask.
"The shielding array's compromised," a technician reported, sweat streaking his brow. "If the next flare hits, we'll bleed atmosphere through half the docking ring."
"Then we fix it now," Alexander said, his voice like iron.
Maya froze. "You can't mean…"
He turned to her, already pulling on the base layer of an EVA suit. "We go outside."
Her stomach dropped. She'd worked in vacuum labs before, yes—but venturing outside, exposed to the raging light of a dying star, was something else entirely. "There are drones for this."
"The drones won't withstand the radiation long enough to patch the breach," he countered. "We will."
The unspoken if we're fast enough hung in the air.
Maya's hands tightened around her tablet, the instinctive refusal rising in her chest—but the console data left no room for argument. The breach was widening, its edges destabilized by the fractal resonance of the star's signal. If left unchecked, it would unravel the entire shielding lattice.
She forced her breath steady. "Fine. But I'm coming with you."
His eyes flickered with protest, then softened into something like reluctant acceptance. "I know."
Minutes later, they stood in the EVA chamber, sealed into white exosuits that clung like second skin. The helmets descended with a hiss, their visors flickering alive with telemetry. Through the glass, Maya caught Alexander's face—sharpened by the glow of readouts, his features both achingly familiar and painfully foreign.
The chamber air hissed away, and the hatch irised open to a sea of stars. The dying sun blazed before them, swollen and furious, its crimson flares rippling like wings across the void. Maya's breath hitched, awe and terror twining inside her.
"Stay tethered," Alexander's voice came through the comm, steady despite the turbulence around them.
She glanced at the magnetic line linking her suit to his—a thin lifeline coiled between their waists. Her heart thudded. No matter how far she drifted, he would be the one holding her tether.
They launched into the black. Micro-thrusters carried them in short, careful bursts across the curve of the station's hull. The vastness pressed in on Maya, the star's light scorching her visor, its heat a phantom against her skin even as the suit worked overtime to shield her.
"Focus on the breach," she told herself aloud.
The compromised array loomed ahead: a jagged tear in the shielding plates, pulsing with residual energy. Sparks arced across the gap, tiny suns being born and dying in an instant.
"Radiation's peaking," Alexander warned. "We don't have long."
Maya anchored herself with magnetic clamps, hands already unpacking the repair kit from her belt. "Stabilize the edges," she ordered, slipping back into the command of her science teams. "If the resonance spreads, the fracture multiplies."
Alexander moved without hesitation, securing panels with practiced efficiency. He wasn't just a soldier—he'd done this before. She wanted to ask when, where, how many times he had patched the skin of fragile human habitats against a hostile universe. But she bit her tongue, focusing on sealing the breach.
The hum of the star resonated through her bones, vibrating the very metal beneath her hands. Her instruments flickered erratically, as though the star itself were resisting their repairs.
"Maya," Alexander's voice cut through her concentration, urgent. "Look."
She lifted her gaze. The star's flare hadn't subsided. Instead, it had… shifted. Streams of plasma bent unnaturally, coiling like serpents, their arcs converging toward the station. Toward them.
"This isn't natural," Maya whispered. "It's directed."
A surge of static crackled in her comm, and beneath it—impossible—she heard tones. Not random noise. Not chaos. But fractured echoes of the same fractal pattern they'd analyzed in the lab.
"It's speaking," she breathed, awe and terror colliding. "It's speaking now."
Alexander cursed under his breath, tightening the last of the clamps. "Then tell it to shut up before it kills us."
Before she could respond, the flare struck. A wave of light and force slammed into them, rattling every bone in her body. The tether snapped taut, yanking her sideways into the void. Her clamps tore free, and the stars spun wildly around her.
"Maya!"
Her scream caught in her throat as she tumbled, untethered but for the thin magnetic line connecting her to him. Panic clawed at her chest. She clawed at the thrusters, trying to stabilize, but her gloves fumbled on the controls.
Then—sudden, fierce—Alexander's grip closed around her arm. His thrusters fired, dragging her back into his orbit. Their helmets collided, visors pressing together, their breaths fogging the glass between them.
"Stay with me," he growled, his voice rough in her ears. "Always stay with me."
Her pulse hammered. For one insane moment, suspended against the fire of a star, she believed him. Believed that no matter what had torn them apart, he would never let her drift away completely.
She forced her breathing steady, focusing on the breach. "Almost done," she said, her voice shaking. "Hold me steady."
He anchored them both, his body a shield between her and the roiling light. She worked quickly, sealing the last of the fractures, her hands moving with a precision born of desperation.
At last, the readouts flashed green. The breach was patched.
Relief crashed over her—but it was fleeting. The star pulsed again, its fractal tones reverberating through her bones, through the tether, through him.
And in that resonance, she felt something impossible. A presence. Watching. Waiting.
Her throat tightened. "Alexander… it knows us. Not just the station. Us."
His silence was longer this time, heavier. Finally, he whispered: "Then it knows too much."
Before she could press, the comms erupted with mission control ordering them back. They drifted toward the airlock, tether taut, the station looming closer.
But Maya's mind wasn't on the station anymore. It was on the warmth of his grip, the raw edge of his words, and the truth she felt pressing in from every direction: this was no accident of physics. The star wasn't just dying.
It was reaching for them.
Scene Four
The EVA chamber hissed as pressure returned, the silence of vacuum giving way to the hum of recycled air. Maya's knees buckled the moment her boots touched the deck. The weight of gravity—artificial though it was—felt foreign after the void. Her hands trembled as she disengaged her helmet, cool air rushing against sweat-dampened skin.
She barely registered the technicians swarming around them, checking suit diagnostics, running radiation scans. Her gaze was fixed on Alexander, who peeled off his helmet with unhurried precision. He stood steady, shoulders square, as if space itself had never dared to shake him.
That infuriated her.
"You almost got me killed out there," she snapped, her voice raw.
His eyes flicked toward her, unreadable. "I pulled you back."
The dismissiveness in his tone struck harder than the solar flare had. Maya ripped off her gloves, tossing them aside. "You think that erases the fact that you dragged me out there in the first place?"
"We didn't have a choice," he countered evenly, unclasping his chest harness. "If we hadn't patched that breach, the docking ring would already be gone."
"That's not the point!" Her voice rose, drawing stares from the nearby crew. She lowered it to a furious whisper. "You can't just walk back into my life after six years of silence and act like you get to hold the tether again—literally or otherwise."
The silence between them thickened. Alexander dismissed the technicians with a curt nod, waiting until the chamber cleared before answering.
"Maya…" His voice dropped, softer, almost pained. "I didn't want to leave."
Her heart clenched at the words she had longed for—and despised—for years. "Then why did you?" she demanded. "Why vanish without a word? No explanation, no goodbye—just empty space where you should have been."
He dragged a hand across his face, as if the weight of memory pressed too heavy. For the first time since his return, she saw cracks in the steel of his composure. "Because staying would have destroyed you."
Her laugh came out hollow, sharp as glass. "That's the best you have? After all this time?"
"You don't understand." His jaw tightened. He paced a step away, then back, like a man caught in orbit of his own guilt. "There were forces moving against us. Against me. If you'd been tied to me any longer—"
"Don't you dare make this about protecting me." Her chest ached with the fury she'd buried for so long. "You made that choice for me. You decided my heart, my life, wasn't mine to live."
He met her gaze then, and for an instant, the mask fell. His eyes burned with something fierce and broken. "Do you think I wanted to? Every day I stayed away, I wanted to come back. But if I had… you'd be dead now."
Her breath caught, the certainty in his voice chilling her more than the vacuum ever had. She searched his face for lies, excuses, but found none. Only the raw gravity of conviction.
"What are you saying?" she whispered.
He hesitated, as though the words themselves were dangerous. Finally, he leaned close, his voice low, deliberate. "There's a war, Maya. One you don't see in your labs and data streams. A war older than this colony, older than the Council. And I—" He broke off, shaking his head. "I was dragged into it long before we ever met."
Her pulse hammered. The memory of the fractal resonance on her instruments, the unnatural flare bending toward them, the presence she'd felt—it all twisted together, a puzzle missing its center piece. "The signals," she said slowly. "You knew what they meant. You knew before you ever set foot on this station."
He didn't answer.
That silence was confirmation enough.
"You knew," she repeated, voice trembling with fury. "And you let me go out there blind. You let me risk my life without telling me what we were really facing."
His hand twitched at his side, as if resisting the urge to reach for her. "Because once you know, you can't go back. The moment you understand what's behind those signals, you're part of it. And that's the last thing I wanted for you."
Her throat constricted. He had left to shield her. He had stayed silent to protect her. And yet—
"And yet here I am," she whispered bitterly. "Pulled back in the moment you walk through my door."
Neither spoke. The silence roared, filled with years of unspoken words, broken nights, and the ghost of what they might have been.
Finally, Alexander exhaled, the sound rough, as if scraped from his chest. "Maya, I don't have the luxury of keeping you safe anymore. The star isn't just dying—it's being used. The signals are a weapon, and whoever wields them already knows your name."
Her blood ran cold. The presence she had felt out there—the way it had recognized her—came rushing back like fire against her skin.
She swallowed hard, forcing herself to meet his eyes. "Then stop lying to me. If I'm already in this war, I deserve the truth."
His gaze softened, and for the briefest moment, his mask slipped again. "I don't lie to you. I never could."
The words lodged in her chest, tangled between longing and rage. She wanted to believe him. She hated that she still wanted to believe him.
Their helmets lay discarded on the deck between them, two fragile shells that had shielded their fragile bodies from the void. She stared at them, then back at him. "Next time you pull me into the dark, Alexander… you don't get to hold the tether alone. I decide whether I fall or not."
For the first time, something like a smile ghosted across his lips—not amused, not mocking, but almost reverent. "Then God help the void if it tries to take you."
Before she could answer, the chamber doors hissed open. A messenger from mission control stepped inside, stiff with urgency. "Doctor Elara, Commander Kael—command requests your presence immediately. There's been… another signal. Stronger this time. It's targeting the colony's central core."
The brief reprieve shattered. Duty surged back between them, harsh and unyielding. Yet as Maya fell into step beside him, she felt the tether still there—not the magnetic line of their EVA suits, but the invisible pull of unfinished truths and love never extinguished.
And this time, she swore, she would not let him cut it again.
Scene Five
The command deck of the orbital colony pulsed with urgency. Screens flickered with red warnings, voices overlapped in sharp bursts of panic, and the faint vibration of the core's stabilizers trembled through the floor. Maya pushed through the crowd, Alexander close behind, both still half-suited from their EVA.
"Report!" Alexander's voice cut across the chaos like a blade.
A young officer spun from his console, face pale. "Sir, the signal is back—amplitude triple the last burst. It's directed straight at the central fusion core. It's like… like it's locking on."
Maya leaned over the console, scanning the streams of data. The fractal resonance pattern was unmistakable, repeating across every channel, each iteration more precise than the last. Her pulse quickened. This wasn't random noise. This was targeting, deliberate and intelligent.
"Shut down the core's receivers," she ordered. "If the resonance matches the energy lattice, it could destabilize containment."
"We tried," the officer said, panic edging his voice. "The override isn't responding. It's as if the core itself is amplifying the signal."
Maya froze. That shouldn't be possible—unless the signal wasn't just interfering with the core, but communicating with it.
Behind her, Alexander's presence loomed, steady as ever, though she sensed the tightness in his posture. "Options?" he demanded.
Maya's mind raced. "If we can invert the resonance—generate a counter-frequency—we might disrupt the lock."
"You mean fight signal with signal."
"Yes. But I need access to the fusion lattice directly." She turned, meeting his gaze, sharp and unyielding. "And that means overriding Council protocols. You'll have to back me."
For a heartbeat, she feared he'd argue, that he'd retreat behind military protocol the way he'd once hidden behind silence. But Alexander only nodded, eyes hard. "Do it. I'll deal with the Council."
She swallowed the unexpected surge of relief and focused. "Then we'll need the core chamber cleared. Too much interference otherwise."
Within minutes, the chamber was evacuated, leaving only the two of them inside the vast heart of the station. The fusion lattice pulsed at the center, contained within shimmering fields of blue light. Energy arced across conduits, alive and restless, like a beast straining against its cage.
Maya slipped on the interface gloves, the neural mesh syncing to her bio-signature. The hum of the lattice thrummed through her bones as the resonance patterns unfolded across her display.
"Tell me what you see," Alexander said quietly, standing just within reach, his gaze locked on the core.
Maya's throat was dry. "It's… responding to us. Look at the pattern—it's adjusting every time I try to block it. Like it knows I'm here."
His voice dropped lower. "Because it does."
She shot him a look. "You said that outside too. That presence—it felt me. How, Alexander? What aren't you telling me?"
His eyes darkened. "Because the signals aren't just energy. They're intelligence. A will. And it's searching for someone who can answer."
Her chest tightened. "And you think that's me."
He didn't deny it.
Maya turned back to the display, her heart hammering. All her life, she had been drawn to patterns no one else saw—an instinct, her colleagues called it, a talent for resonance. But what if it wasn't just talent? What if this presence had been calling to her all along, across the void, waiting?
The thought chilled her. And yet… it burned with strange inevitability too.
The lattice pulsed harder, red lines cutting through the blue glow as the signal intensified. Warning alarms wailed, echoing through the chamber.
"Maya," Alexander said sharply, "we're running out of time."
"I know." Her fingers danced across the interface, weaving a counter-frequency. She matched pitch for pitch, building a mirror of the resonance—an echo strong enough to collide. "If I can hold it for ten seconds, the interference should break."
"Then I'll keep the stabilizers online," he said, moving to the auxiliary controls. "You focus on the signal. I'll handle the rest."
For a brief, piercing moment, it felt like the old days—before abandonment, before unanswered questions—when they had worked in tandem, seamless as twin stars in orbit. His steadiness balanced her fire, his precision sharpening her intuition.
The resonance built, pressure mounting, the lattice screaming with energy. Sweat slid down Maya's temple as the gloves vibrated with raw force. She gritted her teeth, holding the counter-pattern steady.
"Almost there," she gasped.
Alexander's voice cut through the din. "Five more seconds—hold!"
The presence pressed against her mind then, sudden and suffocating. A flood of alien thought—not words, but impressions. Hunger. Curiosity. Recognition.
Her breath hitched. It saw her. Not just her signature, not just her pattern—but her.
She faltered, the counter-frequency wavering.
"Maya!" Alexander's shout snapped her back. "Don't let it in!"
She clenched her fists, forcing focus. With a cry torn from her lungs, she drove the echo forward—resonance colliding with resonance, frequencies smashing together in a violent, blinding surge.
The chamber exploded with light.
Then silence.
The alarms went dead. The lattice pulsed steady and blue once more, as if nothing had happened.
Maya collapsed against the console, chest heaving. Her vision swam, her body trembling from the effort.
Alexander was at her side instantly, steadying her with hands firm on her shoulders. "Easy. You did it."
She shook her head, still reeling from the echo of that alien mind. "No. I stopped it—for now. But it knows me, Alexander. It won't stop until—" Her voice broke. "Why me?"
His gaze held hers, dark and unwavering. "Because you're the only one who can answer it."
Her stomach turned, fear and anger warring with something far more dangerous: the flicker of hope. Because if the universe itself had called her name—if this was the reason Alexander had left her behind—then maybe all the years of emptiness hadn't been meaningless.
And yet, the cost of knowing the truth pressed heavy on her chest.
She stepped back from his touch, forcing steel into her voice. "Then you'd better start explaining everything, Kael. Because I'm not fighting shadows in the dark anymore. Not with my life. And not with my heart."
His jaw tightened at the last words. For once, he didn't argue.
The intercom crackled overhead, summoning them back to the command deck. But as Maya followed Alexander out of the chamber, the weight of the unseen tether between them pulled harder than ever.
The presence had found her. The war he had hidden from her was already at her door.
And this time, there would be no walking away.