Page 135 of Red Scale Daddy
Roma presses hers to the other side.
Then the hatch opens.
Space takes me with a violence no battlefield has ever managed.
The air rips out of the chamber, and I am torn backward into the core’s black, tumbling end over end as the ship and Roma and the red glow of the cockpit vanish into distance. Cold clamps down around me so hard it feels like teeth in my bones. The pressure disappears from my lungs. Light bends around me in long, terrible ribbons.
Through the blur, through the spinning dark, I see the ship receding.
I see Roma at the window.
I see the moment she believes I am dead.
CHAPTER 21
ROMA
The moment the outer hatch opens, something inside me tears loose and does not come back.
I do not hear the decompression alarms anymore. I do not hear the Reapers securing the chamber or the locking clamps sealing the breach behind them. Sound collapses into something distant and hollow, as if the ship has sealed me inside a vacuum of my own making. All I see is the last image burned into my vision—Dux’s hand against the glass, the shape of his mouth forming words I could not hear, and then the violent, final absence where he had been.
My palm is still pressed to the airlock viewport.
There is nothing on the other side now.
Only warped starlight and drifting debris, bending through the core’s distortion.
“Move,” one of the Reapers says.
The voice reaches me as if it has to travel a great distance.
I do not respond.
A hand clamps around my upper arm, hard enough to bruise, and pulls me away from the glass. My body moves because it is forced to move, not because I choose it. My boots scrape against the deck as they drag me backward into the corridor, thedamaged section of my ship already receding behind layers of armored plating and foreign control.
My ship.
The thought arrives late, delayed, as if it must navigate around the larger, sharper absence that has taken its place.
“Let go of me,” I say.
The words come out flat, stripped of the sharpness I expect.
The Reaper holding me does not loosen its grip.
“You are being relocated,” it replies.
“I am not cargo.”
“You are an asset.”
“I did not agree to that classification.”
“You are not required to agree.”
The corridor shifts around us as we cross the docking threshold into their vessel. The architecture changes immediately—angles sharper, lighting colder, surfaces darker and more seamless. The air feels different, thinner in a way that is not measurable but perceptible, as though the ship itself resents the presence of anything not built for it.
They march me forward.
