The silence between us stretches until it starts to feel like a third person standing there.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  I glance down—half naked, caked in blood and mud and guts, my tunic in tatters like something tried to peel me out of it.

  Shit. Val—clean me.

  I almost do it.

  Then I remember what it looks like.

  Practical magic—silver dust lifting the blood off me in a blink.

  Alkek can barely look at my eyes.

  Fuck. Never mind, Val.

  Cinder wants to bolt—ears pinned, whites showing, stamping like the ground is trying to kill him.

  Alkek swings down hard.

  “Easy,” he mutters, voice shredded. One hand on the reins, the other up—open palm, steady. “Easy… easy—”

  He walks Cinder in a tight circle until the horse stops trying to climb out of its own skin, keeps his face turned away from the clearing, then knots the reins around a split tree.

  Cinder jerks once, testing it.

  “Stay,” Alkek says, and it comes out more plea than order.

  Then he turns back.

  His gaze snags on my hair—white at the roots, filthy everywhere else—then slides to my ear.

  The points.

  He unclasps his cloak and closes the distance fast, like if he hesitates he won’t do it.

  The wool lands over my shoulders—warm, smoke-sweet, smelling of horse and him.

  I clutch it closed like it can hold me together.

  “You hurt?” he asks.

  “No,” I rasp. “Not anymore.”

  He nods once, like that’s something he can hold.

  “Good.” His voice breaks on it. He swallows. “Tell me… tell me the truth—who is the mother of my child?”

  The truth, huh. Do I even know what that is anymore?

  Damn.

  “Okay,” I manage. “Okay. Fuck it.”

  If I say it, I can’t take it back.

  “I’ll tell you everything,” I say. “Even if you don’t understand.”

  I blink hard.

  “I’m a monster.” The words come out like a curse.

  “My real name,” I say, forcing the words through, “is Sol Voss.”

  He blinks once.

  Then again, slower.

  “Voss,” he repeats, like the sound is too big for his mouth. “Like… the name on Angel. Like the folk in the Keeper stories.”

  He looks up through the branches, then back at me.

  “You’re from the sky,” he says, quiet. Not a question. “Ain’t you.”

  I hold still.

  “How did you—” I swallow. “How’d you figure it out that fast?”

  He lets out a small breath that almost turns into a laugh and dies halfway.

  “Because your story was always bullshit,” he says, not unkind. A tired little truth. “And because when we’d sit out at night… you looked up like it was still new.”

  He drags a hand across his mouth, then looks at me like he’s keeping himself in one piece.

  “How is the rest of humanity?” he asks. His voice goes careful. “Is there another ship about to land here? Finally?”

  “No,” I say. “Nothing’s coming down out of the sky for you. Not now. Not ever.”

  “My dad—Julian Voss—fixed the shield,” I say, after a second. “That should keep the worst out.”

  He goes still.

  “Your da?” His eyes flick up, then back to me. “What shield?”

  “What’s it keeping out?”

  Don’t. Not yet.

  I shake my head once. Hard. Like I’m slamming a door before something gets out.

  Silence swells.

  “Keeper Garos,” Alkek says finally, quieter, “let it slip once when we were drinking. Said more humans would come one day.” His mouth tightens around the next part. “Said Voss would return.”

  He watches me.

  “My da used to tell me stories,” Alkek says, voice rough, “from his nana, from her granddad. About a yellow sun we left behind.”

  He tries to smile. It doesn’t make it all the way.

  “A yellow sun,” he repeats, like it’s the strangest kind of hope.

  Something in me cracks open—soft, ugly, human—it hurts.

  “Most of the original humanity is dead.”

  I don’t let myself stop there.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Not all. There are millions. Maybe billions. Spread among the stars.”

  His face shifts—shock, disbelief, hunger.

  “Humanity colonized other worlds?” he whispers. “Most folk think we’re all that’s left.”

  “Kinda.” My throat feels tight. “Not the way you picture.”

  “The ships sent out weren’t arks. They were plague ships—meant to spread his work ahead of us.”

  “What work—” he starts.

  “I’ll get to that in a second,” I cut in, voice rough. “He didn’t send salvation. He sent a sickness that could rival the greatest forces in the galaxy… even the old ones—so when humans arrived later, everything was already softened up for his endgame.”

  “But the last ark…” I tip my chin, just a fraction—up, toward the black between branches. “Jericho. That’s what I came on.”

  “That’s where I learned how to live on a ship,” I say. “Metal halls. Lights that don’t dim. A world that never stops humming. The last colony ship with the last of humanity on it—what was left after my father finished poisoning our world and then cleansed it with nuclear fire.”

  “But most of the humans out there aren’t from the colony ships,” I continue. “They’re descended from people stolen off Earth back when we were still in the Bronze Age—ripped out of history and scattered so far they don’t even remember where they started.”

  His brow tightens.

  “Stolen,” he repeats.

  “By aliens. A long time ago. Thousands of years.”

  His eyes go wide.

  “So aliens are real,” he breathes. “Smart ones. Not just the things out here they say ain’t from Earth.”

  “They’re real.”

  “And they won’t be around for long.”

  He flinches. “What do you mean by that?”

  I keep my voice level.

  “Like I said—my father built a lot. But this…”

  I breathe out slow. “This was a biological, self-replicating superweapon. The Hive.”

  “It’s organic. A bio-weapon that doesn’t just consume bodies.”

  “It takes everything. Knowledge. Tech. Traits.” I swallow.

  “It repurposes the biomass and evolves into whatever niche it needs next.”

  My jaw locks. “It takes the best DNA from what it eats. It keeps improving.” Something low in my gut pulls tight—hungry.

  “It doesn’t invade,” I get it out. “It harvests.”

  “It’s smart enough to steal the tech of what it eats,” I add. “It spreads drones and organs the size of cities. Sometimes it doesn’t even need ships at all.” I wet my lips. “Sometimes it grows its own.”

  “It’s spreading across the galaxy right now—like rot you can’t cut out once it’s in the root,” I tell him. “It’s already… everywhere.”

  “And it’s in me.”

  Alkek’s breath catches.

  “It’s a virus in my blood. It’s called Phoenix. That’s what gives me… this.”

  “It’s why I look wrong. Why I heal wrong.”

  “I’m immortal. I can heal from any wound.”

  “And so will our daughter.” The word turns my stomach.

  His head jerks. “Daughter… you know it’s a girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  He makes himself look at me this time. Really look.

  “How,” he asks, and the word comes out like a challenge.

  I can’t help it—my mouth twitches, sharp and tired. “Just trust me.”

  He stares at my stomach.

  “My father wanted human supremacy—” My tongue sticks. “Not by building a better world. Not by winning a cleaner war. By turning humanity into one organism—with only a few minds steering it.”

  “She’ll be born into the ruling class he designed,” I continue. “Homo Immortalis. The immortal queen-mothers of humanity—carriers. Nodes. The ones Phoenix can build from without killing.”

  “And the end goal,” my voice goes low, “is a single-minded biomass. A hive with an elite few at the top… until even that becomes one mind. One will.”

  “A mind that can survive the trip to godhood,” I say. “By fusing with an AI and not breaking apart when it steps into something bigger than flesh.”

  Alkek goes still.

  “I’m… lost,” he says. “How can a human become a god?”

  “By sacrificing everything that isn’t us,” I let it land. “Trillions. Maybe quadrillions.”

  “Life forms. Not just people. Everything. Grass. Herd animals. Forests. The things under the soil. Alien monsters on worlds I’ll never see with my own eyes.”

  My mouth waters and I hate it.

  “The Hive eats all of it,” my throat tightens. “Whole systems—enough biomass to take worlds, enough minds braided together until it’s one thing.”

  I pause. “And what’s left is big enough to pretend it’s a god.”

  “But that’s not the worst part.”

  “The worst part is I’m the Queen Node.”

  “I’m meant to be my father’s control over the Hive. A leash. A crown. A command.”

  The words scrape out.

  “But it turned into a wildfire,” I murmur. “It escaped even his control.”

  “And the only one who can bring it to heel is me.”

  “But if I try,” I whisper, “if I connect with it… I might lose myself.”

  “I might become the monster it already makes me. I’m always hungry. Always.”

  “And I will kill for food,” I admit. “Not because I want to be evil. Because my body—Phoenix—doesn’t care about good. It cares about survival. It cares about feeding.”

  The clearing tightens, as if the trees themselves have leaned in to listen.

  [VALICAR: HEART RATE — ELEVATED]

  [VALICAR: HUNGER RESPONSE — SPIKING]

  [VALICAR: THREAT RISK — MODERATE (PROXIMITY: HUMAN)]

  Shut up.

  I keep my hands visible. I keep my teeth behind my lips.

  Alkek doesn’t move for a long moment.

  Then he stands and goes to Cinder’s saddle.

  He pulls out a wineskin and drinks like it’s medicine. The leather creaks. His throat bobs—one gulp, then another—rough and greedy, like he’s trying to swallow what I just told him.

  “One pull won’t hurt her then,” he says, voice rough, like he’s trying to make it sound normal.

  He comes back and sits down a few feet from me—close enough to be here, far enough to run.

  “You don’t have to,” he says, but he still holds it out.

  I stare at it like it’s poison.

  Then I take it anyway. “Yeah. But I want to.”

  The first pull burns. The second tastes like relief.

  “It’s not like we weren’t drinking the other night,” I add, and my voice cracks on the end of it.

  “I’m a terrible person,” I say, owning it like an inheritance—unwanted, unsigned, still mine the second he died. “And I’m going to be a worse mother. I know that.”

  I drink again anyway.

  So much for sobriety, I think, bitterly.

  I hand the wineskin back.

  “Phoenix will keep her unaffected,” I say. “It burns through everything I put in me.”

  “That’s part of the horror.” I swallow. “I can’t even be human about my vices. It takes an ungodly amount of booze to get me drunk—more than any normal person.”

  I huff a broken little laugh. “Because I’m not normal.”

  “I wasn’t raised. I was engineered. Built. Poked and cut and rewritten until I fit what he wanted.”

  Alkek sits with that for a second, eyes fixed somewhere near my hands—like he’s trying not to look at the wrong thing and spook me.

  “You’ve… lived a lot,” he says finally. “How old are you, Sol?”

  “Nearly a century,” I answer. “If you count the years I was frozen.”

  Then the words come like blood from a split lip.

  “I’ve lived on ships—human and alien. In the highest diplomatic halls of the Citadel. Under a blue supergiant that could jump across the universe. On my own private planet, barefoot in clean sand, pretending the tide could wash me new. With a voice in my head that wasn’t mine half the time.”

  “I fought the Hive across the Orion Arm. I stood before the Council and the Senate and watched star-systems go quiet just to hear me speak. I killed a lot of people. I ended a republic that lasted millennia—then helped build an Imperium on its corpse.”

  “I watched us become saints when we were really the devil. A whole galaxy turned into tools—all in the name of Voss.”

  “And then I came here,” I breathe, “because I wanted small—wanted quiet. And then I met you and tried to pretend I could be normal.”

  “If you leave,” I start—

  “I’m not,” Alkek says. Simple. Final.

  The words punch something loose in me. Hot streaks cut down my cheeks before I can stop them.

  “But… but if you stay,” I force out, shaking, “you’re not staying with a tavern girl.”

  He nods once. “I know.”

  “No,” I whisper. “You don’t. Not really.”

  I wipe at my face, like that’ll fix anything. My hand comes away dirty.

  “You’re staying with an apocalyptic weapon,” I say, voice thinning. “With a hunger that turned a war into a genocide—”

  “Stop,” he cuts in—too sharp, like it hurts him to hear.

  His knee shifts in the leaves—hesitation, then choice.

  Then he’s on me, crossing the space and hauling me into his chest, arms locked like he’s bracing against a storm.

  “I don’t care,” he says, voice shaking. “Not about any of it.”

  He loosens his hold an inch—only an inch—so he can see me. “I’m staying with you, Sol. With you.”

  My hands hover at his ribs, not daring.

  He tightens like he’s afraid I’ll vanish.

  His gaze drops to my stomach—just for a heartbeat—then lifts back to my eyes.

  “All of you,” he says. “Even the parts you’re scared of.”

  I finally close my arms around him and break—one ugly sob that I can’t swallow back down.

  “You’re gonna regret that,” I whisper into his shoulder.

  He huffs a laugh, rough and warm. “Maybe.”

  I scrub at my face with the heel of my hand. “Wanna… watch the stars for a while?”

  “Yeah,” he says, then glances past me like he’s already picking a safer angle on the world. “Just—somewhere else.”

  He jerks his chin down the treeline. “I passed a hill about a mile back. Open view. No clearing. No… whatever this is.”

  A smile tugs at my mouth—small, real.

  “Okay,” I say—and for the first time all night, I think I might actually be okay.