Page 42 of Alien Devil’s Crown

“Wounded count,” I said, taking the ramp rail one-handed.

“Everyone walks,” Tamsin reported from the top, already triaging with her eyes. “You’re the worst of it, which given the day is either a miracle or excellent planning.”

“It was her,” I said. Tamsin looked at Lika and nodded.

The ramp came up. The deck heeled. Talon took us out of the bay through a defense grid that had gone dark. The Spire fell away beneath us, gold in the afternoon sun, while people poured from its open doors onto the white plaza.

We climbed until the city, the district, and the whole tower filled the forward lounge glass. My family stood there in bloodstained trade clothes and breach armor. Lika took my hand in front of all of them, and I held on.

Kallum stood at the far end of the glass with Anhara under his arm, still the way only Kallum is still. Brevan let the silence have him.

Bronwen leaned into Zarek with her looted banner pole across her back, and Varrick counted something under his breath that I eventually identified as floors.

Just after the eighteen-minute minimum, the last living biosign inside the containment boundary cleared. The field locked around the empty footprint.

Lika went still against my good side as the first tremor ran the tower’s height. I knew where she was looking: high on the east face, toward the throne level and the small old access door hidden inside it. Her grip tightened a moment before the final release. I held her hand through it.

Shield curtains rose around the footprint as the pressure sinks opened beneath the plaza. The core columns released from the bottom in sequence, and a hundred and twelve floors descended into the containment field. Gold and sunburst banners disappeared into dust. The sound reached the hull seconds later as one low vibration through the deck plates.

The dust rolled out white across the plaza, struck the containment curtain, and folded inward before it reached the fleeing crowds. Even his demolition kept faith.

I rolled my good shoulder carefully. Lika felt me do it and didn’t ask.

“It’s done,” Lika said quietly.

“That part,” I said, “is done.”

She turned toward me. I wanted to tell her the rest somewhere we could sit down.

We watched the dust settle inside the containment field. One by one my family left for showers, med kits, and food. Each touched my good shoulder on the way past.

Tamsin’s voice, gently, on the net: “Rylos. Med bay. Before you fall down in front of your whole crew.”

I went. It was close, on the falling down.

LIKA

Iwaited my turn, and it was the most instructive hour of my study of this crew.

The adrenaline had died somewhere between the viewport and the corridor, all at once. My hands wanted to shake now that the danger was over. Blood remained under two fingernails despite the shower.

Tamsin had left clean shipboard clothes outside the washroom. I wore them because, after years of uniforms, nobody was asking me to put one back on.

Tamsin had offered to bring me in first. I’d asked her to let the others see him while I got my hands steady.

Through the med bay hatch came the regenerator’s hum, Tamsin working, and once, Rylos answering a question. I sat on the bench with my brother’s case at my feet while Rylos’s family queued to see him.

Talon went first, of course. Through the gap as the hatch cycled I saw it: Talon clasped Rylos’s forearm. Neither spoke until their grip loosened. Then, muffled: “You roared at a firing line.” A pause. “Tamsin owes me money.”

When Talon came back out, the Sovereign’s old seal was under his flight collar again.

Zarek’s visit lasted under a minute. He filled the hatch, looked at his commander bandaged and propped, and nodded once, the same nod that had passed to Kallum in a corridor. Rylos nodded back. Zarek left. Neither needed more.

Between visits I studied the order of the queue the way I study everything: seniority first, then the pairs, and none of it organized by anyone. They simply knew. I sat beside a case of erased names and watched the household part of Household Guard take its turn at a bedside. Soren would have understood these people.

Bronwen was not brief. Her voice came through the door in full: a list of everything she’d looted “for morale,” a proposal to mount the banner pole in the mess. Then, in a register I’d never once heard her use, low and fierce: “You scared me today. Do it again if you have to. But you scared me.”

I heard a kiss, then Tamsin’s protest about sterile fields. Bronwen swept past me with wet eyes and a raised chin, daring comment. I did not comment. I am dangerous, not suicidal.