Page 9 of Red Scale Daddy
I should shut this down. I should tell her nobody in this room worth hiring will take her job for any sum she can pay, because those with sense will refuse and those without sense will get her killed before the core has a chance. I should send her away before her name brings worse trouble through my door.
Instead, I ask, “What signal?”
She hesitates. It is small, but I catch it.
Not because she lacks an answer. Because the answer matters.
“My father’s engineering signature,” she says.
The words are almost swallowed by the room.
I stare at her.
That is the hook in her, then. Not money. Not fame. Not the kind of arrogant scientific lunacy that gets a crew vaporized while someone shouts about discovery. Her father is buried in the dark, and she has spent nine years building a knife sharp enough to cut him out.
Hell.
That is worse.
Loklo returns through the side door, brushing his hands together. “Varkun is communing with the alley pavement and reconsidering his choices. I give that revelation four minutes before it wears off.” He slows when he sees the room. “What did I miss?”
“Grief with equations,” I say.
Roma turns on me. “Do not trivialize this.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“No,” I say, and the word comes out rougher than I intend. “I’m calling it what it is because nobody else in this room has the spine to do it. You built a beautiful coffin, and you want to hire someone to climb inside with you.”
Her lips part slightly. For the first time, I think I have actually hit something.
Then she recovers.
“No,” she says. “A coffin is passive. My vessel has three redundant escape architectures, independent thermal regulation, modular shielding, and a manual override system that does not rely on shackled artificial intelligence or prayer. If you want to critique my work, do it accurately.”
Loklo leans toward the scarred woman. “I think she just flirted with him.”
“She threatened him with documentation,” the woman says.
“With Dux, that counts.”
Roma’s gaze slices toward Loklo. “I can hear you.”
“I was counting on that.”
I grin, and she looks back at me as if my amusement is an instrument she intends to disassemble.
The grin fades slowly.
Because she is still standing there. After the laughter. After Varkun. After losing the hood, the anonymity, and the clean shape of her plan. She is angry, exposed, outnumbered, andsurrounded by people who would sell each other’s bones if the price came with a drink voucher.
Yet she stands.
Not wild. Not fragile. Not merely stubborn. Controlled under pressure, yes, but not cold. That is the lie everyone probably believes about her because she speaks in numbers and wears discipline like armor. Underneath it, something is burning hot enough to light a route through hell.
I know reckless when I see it. I shave with it.
