Page 120 of Red Scale Daddy
I watch her hands tighten over the controls.
“Then we need you steady,” I say. “We find him by staying alive.”
“We find him by reaching the source before the corridor collapses.”
“We don’t reach anything if you fly us straight into a graveyard because hope’s got its hands on the stick.”
She turns on me then, eyes bright enough to cut.
“Hope is not flying this ship.”
“No?” I ask. “Because it’s sure as hell sitting in the pilot’s chair.”
The silence after that does not empty the room. It fills it. The engines hum under us, the hull ticks faintly as temperature stress crawls over the plating, and the signal keeps pulsing between us like a third person listening.
Roma’s expression closes.
“I have spent nine years preparing for this,” she says. “You have spent less than two days deciding you have the authority to tell me how to feel about it.”
“I’m telling you how you’re acting.”
“You do not know me well enough to make that distinction.”
“I know you enough to see when you’re about to trade everything for one more meter.”
Her laugh is small and humorless. “Everything was already traded.”
The words land in my chest harder than they should.
I straighten slowly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She looks back to the display, and that is worse than if she’d shouted. “It means the costs were paid long before you came aboard.”
“Costs like what?”
“My career. My reputation. My mother’s trust. My childhood. Any version of my life that did not orbit this.” She adjusts the signal lock, voice flattening into something practiced and cold. “You are concerned about the bill because you arrived at the end of the transaction.”
My jaw tightens.
“That include me?”
Her hands still.
The cockpit narrows around the question.
“Dux,” she says carefully.
I hate the way she says my name right then. Like she’s choosing from a list of safe responses and finding none of them useful.
“That include me?” I ask again.
She looks at me, and for a second I see the answer before she can dress it up. She would not call it sacrifice. She would call it acceptable loss, necessary risk, mission priority, every clean little phrase people use when the truth is too ugly to touch.
Her voice drops. “I will do what is required to retrieve my father.”
There it is.
Plain as blood on a white floor.
