Page 141 of Red Scale Daddy
Because it matters too much.
And I cannot afford to break here.
Not now.
Not when I am closer than I have ever been.
Not when I still have a path forward.
I lift my head and follow the Reapers toward the exit.
And somewhere beneath all of it, buried deep enough that it cannot interfere with what I need to do next?—
I begin calculating how to destroy him.
CHAPTER 22
DUX
Space does not take me gently.
It tears the last breath out of my lungs and replaces it with nothing, and that nothing has weight. It crushes inward from every direction at once, cold enough to bite beneath my scales and deep enough to make my bones ache as if the core itself has reached into me with both hands. The Reaper ship falls away behind me in a smear of black armor and bent light, and Roma’s face vanishes with it, pale behind the airlock glass, her mouth open around a scream I cannot hear.
I tumble through darkness, end over end, arms useless for the first few seconds while my body tries to understand that there is no floor, no air, no sound, and no good reason to keep fighting.
My chest locks.
Every instinct demands breath.
Vakutan bodies are stubborn things, built by ugly evolution and uglier wars to survive where softer species turn into memorial plaques. I can hold pressure longer than a human. My blood does not boil the second vacuum kisses it. My lungs can clamp down and keep the last scraps of oxygen in play for a few miserable minutes before the universe finishes the job.
A few minutes.
That is not a lot of time to be alive.
It is a damn eternity to be dying.
I spin past a shard of wreckage, close enough that its jagged edge flashes across my vision like a knife. I reach for it and miss, my fingers closing on empty dark. The motion sends pain ripping through my side where the drone cut me, and the numbness from the Reaper shock rounds still crawls through my limbs in broken currents. My body wants to fold in on itself. My thoughts start to smear at the edges.
Roma.
The name burns through the fog.
I see her hand on the airlock glass. I see her eyes when the hatch opened. I see the exact moment she decided I was dead, and that pisses me off more than the vacuum, more than the cold, more than the Reaper bastard who threw me out like trash.
“No,” I try to say.
Nothing comes out.
My jaw moves around silence.
Fine. Silence can listen too.
I am not dying where she can’t yell at me about it.
The core turns around me in impossible ribbons of light, every star bent into a curve, every shadow stretched too long. Debris drifts everywhere, fragments of old ships caught in slow rotation, pieces of engines and ribs of hull and frozen sheets of metal glittering with frost. One chunk passes beneath me, big enough to matter, moving along a lazy path through the gravitational distortion.
I angle my body toward it.
