Page 52 of Red Scale Daddy
I release the breath I have been holding.
Dux says, “For the record, I did not touch anything during the shooting.”
“I noticed.”
“Heroic restraint.”
“Basic competence.”
“Feels like you’re underselling my growth.”
“Your growth cracked a display.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“Do not quote Loklo at me.”
He grins, but it fades as the gate opens ahead. The cockpit fills with cold blue-white light, washing over his scarred scales and turning my gloved hands spectral on the controls.
I should still classify him as a liability.
I do.
But the category is changing shape.
The Lamplight enters subspace cleanly. The stars vanish into structured brilliance, and the ship hums around us like a lamp carried carefully into a storm.
Dux sits beside me, too large, too irritating, too observant by half.
And useful.
Unfortunately, undeniably useful.
CHAPTER 8
DUX
Subspace has always looked to me like a god took a knife to reality and decided not to apologize.
The Lamplight moves through it cleanly enough, wrapped in fields and mathematics and Roma Larson’s stubborn refusal to let the universe behave naturally. Beyond the canopy, normal stars have vanished. In their place, long bands of blue-white distortion stretch and twist, folding into angles the eye does not want to understand. Light does not shine out there so much as shear. It glides across the glass in cold ribbons, making the cockpit feel submerged beneath a frozen ocean that has never heard of mercy. The ship seems too clean.
That is the problem with ships built by people who love control. They scrub the air until it loses history. No smoke. No stale liquor. No kitchen grease. No bodies packed shoulder to shoulder in a room where trouble has paid for a stool. The Lamplight smells of polymer, hot circuitry, filtered oxygen, and Roma’s machine oil, which clings faintly to everything she touches. Beneath that, if I pay too much attention, there is the warmer scent of her skin, soap, and blood from the split at her lip she keeps pretending does not exist.
I pay too much attention anyway.
Roma sits at the pilot’s station as if the chair grew around her bones. Her red hair is braided again, tighter this time, the escaping strands punished back into place. The bruise on her cheek has darkened under the cockpit lights, but she has not asked for a med patch, and I have not offered one because I have already learned she treats kindness like a possible ambush. Her hands move over the controls with precise economy, never fidgeting, never lingering, every touch a decision.
It is impressive.
It is also exhausting to watch.
“You breathe loudly,” she says without turning.
I glance down at my chest. “I’m seven feet tall and full of organs. They have opinions.”
“Your organs are disruptive.”
“My organs kept quiet during the shooting.”
