Page 167 of Red Scale Daddy
“I need access to my ship.”
He considers me for several seconds. “Granted under escort.”
My heart strikes once, hard.
There it is.
The door.
Not freedom. Not enough for escape and not enough to reach my father alone, but enough to touch my systems, enough to leave a mark, enough to create a path someone else could find if someone else is still alive to look.
Dux would look.
The thought arrives with such certainty that I almost sway.
He would be furious and half-dead and making terrible jokes in some impossible corner of the core, but he would look.
Pally would too, if he found him.
The possibility opens inside me with dangerous force. My father alive. Dux alive. Two impossible men moving somewhere through the same murderous dark, both too stubborn to do the decent thing and stay dead or hidden.
I can escape alone.
The realization forms as Throgg turns away to issue commands. With access to my ship, even under escort, I could trigger emergency separation, vent the docking clamps, route power through the auxiliary drive, and burn hard toward the last known signal cone. The odds are miserable. The ship is damaged. Throgg would pursue within minutes.
But I could try.
The old version of me would have already chosen it.
My father’s signal would have been enough. My mission would have narrowed to one line, one objective, one acceptable cost. I would have told myself Dux was dead because the alternative complicated the calculation. I would have told myself rescue required sacrifice, and I would have made the ugliest possible choice sound clean.
My hands curl against the edge of the projection table.
I see Dux’s face through the airlock glass.
I hear his voice in memory, rough and impossible. I’m hard to kill.
I see my father’s hands in an old workshop, grease under his nails as he steadied a soldering iron in mine.
Two points of gravity.
The past.
The future I did not mean to want.
Throgg looks back. “You are quiet.”
“I am calculating.”
“What conclusion have you reached?”
I release the edge of the table and straighten. “An escape attempt now would fail.”
His eyes brighten.
He thinks I mean mine.
Good.
