Page 218 of Red Scale Daddy
Then, deliberately, she hooks two fingers around my wrist and tugs me onward.
Not because she needs balance.
Because she chose.
And damn me, in the middle of a dying ship with monsters crawling through the walls, that almost feels like hope.
CHAPTER 33
ROMA
Dux’s pulse is under my fingers.
That is not useful information. It does not help me calculate hull integrity, pressure loss, hostile movement, or the shrinking probability of reaching auxiliary launch access before the ship tears itself into expensive shrapnel. His pulse is warm and fast beneath the grime on his wrist, beating against my fingertips like an argument I have already lost.
I keep hold of him anyway.
“Roma,” Dad pants on my other side, “tell me that sound is not what I think it is.”
The corridor ahead trembles, not with the ship’s usual dying groans, but with something outside it. A layered vibration rolls through the walls, a chittering resonance that makes the fillings in my teeth ache. Metal panels rattle in their seams. Dust lifts from the floor in a fine silver haze.
Dux’s wrist flexes in my grip. “That’s not Reapers.”
“No,” I say.
Dad wheezes. “Wonderful. New nightmare flavor.”
The ceiling above the next junction caves inward with a shriek of rupturing alloy. I shove Dux sideways as a section of conduit crashes down where his skull was a breath ago, sprayingsparks and hot coolant. The vapor hits my face, bitter and chemical, and my eyes sting hard enough to water.
Dux catches the wall, then looks at the demolished ceiling. “You just saved my head.”
“I need it intact.”
“For tactical reasons?”
“For quieter ones, eventually.”
His mouth tugs despite the blood at his temple. “That almost sounded affectionate.”
“Don’t get cocky. It causes structural damage.”
Dad stumbles between us and points down the junction. “Flirting. Still happening. Still deeply inconvenient.”
A dark shape slams into the corridor ahead from outside the ship.
Not through a door. Through the wall.
The hull blossoms inward like torn foil, and vacuum screams past us for one vicious second before emergency seals slam down halfway, choking the breach to a ragged opening edged in molten metal. Cold punches through the corridor, stealing heat from my cheeks, turning sweat icy beneath my collar.
Then the Zenos come through.
They are not elegant. I hate that my mind reaches for the word anyway, because they move with horrible coordination, bodies slick and black-blue under the emergency glow, limbs folding and unfolding like broken geometry. Their wings scrape against the torn hull, shredded membranes twitching as they force themselves into the passage. Behind them, beyond the breach, I glimpse chaos—stars smeared by spinning debris, Reaper hull plating buckling outward, more Zenos swarming the ship like a living storm.
Dad makes a strangled sound. “Nope.”
Dux lifts his weapon. “How many?”
“Too many,” I say, already scanning the nearest control node.
