Page 146 of Red Scale Daddy
“What did she look like?” he asks, voice lower now.
I know what he is really asking.
I see her again in that airlock window, control stripped away, fear naked in her eyes because she thought I was gone. I see her at the console, hair loose, face lit by the signal, grief turning into ferocious hope.
“She looked alive,” I say. “Angry as hell. Smarter than everybody in the room. Terrified when they spaced me.”
His shoulders tighten.
“That sounds like her mother,” he says.
“Pretty sure the terrifying part is all Roma.”
A rough breath leaves him, almost a laugh and almost not.
Then his face closes again.
“You should have kept her away from the signal,” he says.
“No one keeps Roma away from anything she’s decided belongs to her.”
“I would have.”
I step up beside him, close enough that he has to look at me.
“No,” I say. “You wouldn’t.”
His eyes sharpen. “You do not know what I would do for my daughter.”
“I know you left a signal on in the worst graveyard in the galaxy, and she heard it. You put a hook in the dark. She followed it. Don’t pretend you didn’t know she might.”
That hits harder than I mean it to.
Maybe exactly as hard as it needs to.
Pally’s face goes pale under the grime and age.
“I did not know she was alive,” he says.
“You hoped.”
His mouth tightens.
I nod once, grim. “Yeah. That’s the ugly part, isn’t it?”
He stares at the tactical map.
The anger between us does not vanish, but it changes shape. It becomes something we can stand on.
Pally taps the display again, refining the dark vessel’s projected route. “Throgg will not kill her quickly if he understands what she can do.”
“He understands enough.”
“Then he will use her.”
“Then we get her before he does.”
He looks at me. “You are injured, oxygen-starved, half-stunned, and barely standing.”
