Page 127 of Red Scale Daddy
He looks at me, and there is something in his expression that makes my pulse misbehave: frustration, yes, but also fear sharpened into usefulness. “Say the word and I’ll do it.”
I return my focus to the corridor ahead. “Left drift increasing.”
“Already on it.”
He adjusts the lateral compensation, and I alter the nose angle at the same moment. The ship slides between two rotating debris masses with a smoothness that neither of us could have managed alone. For one strange, suspended instant, our motions fit together cleanly: my hands driving the line forward, his hands strengthening the margins I am too impatient to preserve.
The signal blooms brighter across the display.
I lean toward it despite myself.
“There,” I whisper. “The source is close.”
“How close?”
“Less than a sector.”
Dux’s voice softens. “Roma.”
I know that tone now. It is the voice he uses when he thinks I am standing too near an edge.
“I cannot lose this chance,” I say before he can tell me to slow down again.
He shifts beside me. “Nobody’s asking you to lose it.”
“You are asking me to risk delay.”
“I am asking you to avoid turning rescue into suicide.”
The words strike old scar tissue. My grip tightens until the edge of the control column presses through my glove and into my palm.
“You do not understand what delay means,” I say. “For nine years, every person with authority told me this signal could never exist. Every committee, every instructor, every friend of my mother who spoke gently while calling me unstable said the same thing in different language. Move on. Accept reality. Stop building your life around a corpse. Now the proof is sitting in front of me, alive enough to answer, and you want me to treat it like any other navigation problem.”
Dux’s jaw tightens, but his voice remains careful. “I want you alive when you find him.”
The gentleness unsettles me more than his anger would have.
I force my attention back to the display. “Then help me get there.”
“I am helping.”
“Then stop trying to slow me down.”
“Let me give you wider margins.”
“Wider margins cost time.”
“Dead women don’t rescue fathers.”
My chest constricts. “Do not.”
“Roma.”
“I said do not.”
The cockpit’s warning tones layer over the hum of the engine, each sound sharpened by the pressure between us. I adjust the route again, cutting closer to the signal cone, and Dux reaches toward the secondary panel.
I catch his wrist.
