Page 90 of Red Scale Daddy
That stops her again.
I keep going before she decides the compliment is a trap. “You wanted to stay in the open and repair. Bad call. Then the drones hit, and you used the terrain, the mineral veins, the foam, the ridge, the low gravity, and my charming willingness to be bitten. That was not theory.”
Her eyes search my face. “You are making a point.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“You can adapt better than you think. You just hate needing to.”
Her mouth opens, then closes as the ship creaks softly around us. Outside, claws scrape along the hull again. She turns toward the sound, and I see the war inside her: anger at the damage, fear for the mission, refusal to yield, and the first reluctant acknowledgment that control alone is not enough fuel for the road ahead.
“I do not hate adapting,” she says.
“Roma.”
“I dislike preventable deviation.”
“That is a fancy way to say you hate adapting.”
“It is a precise way to say I hate avoidable chaos.”
“The core is chaos with gravity.”
“And yet I intend to navigate it.”
“With me.”
She looks at me again.
There is no trust in her face. Not yet. Trust takes time, and Roma probably requires documentation in triplicate. But there is respect now, hard-won and inconvenient. I can feel it in how she holds my gaze, in how she no longer looks at me like an uncontained hazard that wandered aboard by clerical error.
I am still a hazard.
But I am hers, for the moment.
“Do not make me regret that,” she says.
“I will absolutely make you regret parts of it.”
“Dux.”
“But not the important parts.”
The vessel shakes as something heavy lands on the hull above us.
Roma squares her shoulders and reaches for the cockpit hatch. “Then help me keep them off my ship.”
I follow her, blood warming under the patch and laughter still sitting somewhere under my ribs, because she says my ship like a challenge now, not a prayer.
And for the first time since leaving the bar, I understand that Roma Larson is not fragile, not naive, and not merely a brilliant girl dragging grief through space.
She is dangerous.
She just prefers her danger organized.
CHAPTER 13
