Page 169 of Red Scale Daddy
The guards flank me as I leave the engineering deck, and the corridor swallows us in amber light and metallic rhythm. My body moves with steady discipline, but inside, every calculation rearranges itself around a new truth.
I am not escaping alone.
The thought should feel like failure. Instead, it feels like the first accurate calculation I have made since Dux vanished into the dark.
I need my father.
I need Dux.
I need Throgg to believe he is using me while I pull all three trajectories into collision.
The guards lead me toward the docking spine, toward my damaged ship and the systems only I understand well enough to corrupt invisibly. My fingertips ache with the need to touch her controls, to wake hidden pathways, to leave a signal beneath a signal, a trail narrow enough for the right minds to follow.
When the docking hatch opens and I see my ship waiting under Reaper clamps, battered and beautiful and still alive, my throat tightens so hard I have to swallow twice before I can breathe properly.
One guard nudges me forward.
“Move,” it says.
I step onto my ship’s threshold, and the familiar deck accepts my weight with a faint vibration that feels almost like recognition.
For a moment, I could run.
I know exactly how.
I know the sequence, the overrides, the emergency burn that would tear us free and give me a handful of minutes before Throgg’s guns reacquired me.
I stand still instead.
The guard behind me shifts impatiently. “Proceed.”
I place my palm against the inner wall, feeling the ship’s damaged pulse beneath my hand, and begin writing the first hidden instruction in my head.
Not an escape.
A summons.
CHAPTER 26
DUX
Pally’s ship turns toward the Thorn Shelf, and for the first time since Roma dragged me into her impossible little mission, I care what happens after we survive.
The realization comes without ceremony while I am tightening the straps on a pressure rig that smells of old rubber, machine oil, and somebody else’s fear. The suit is too narrow through the shoulders, too short through the arms, and old enough that every seal makes me question its relationship with reality. A cracked visor hangs against my chest, the inside scuffed from years of use, and the breathing line clicks into place with a sound too small for the amount of faith Pally apparently expects me to place in it.
Across the cabin, he works over the tactical table with quick, practiced movements. The projection paints his face in blue-white light, deepening the lines around his mouth and hollowing the exhaustion under his eyes. He has not stopped moving for nearly an hour. Neither have I. Between us, Throgg’s projected route crawls across the map like a poisonous vein.
“You’re quiet,” Pally says.
I tug the left strap tighter until the buckle bites into the pressure rig. “You complaining?”
“I am observing.”
“That mean fatherly judgment is coming, or are we saving that for later?”
His fingers pause above the projection. “I have no idea what to do with you.”
“That makes two of us.”
