My brain stutters. "I'm sorry-what?"
"Command deck. Immediately."
The officer's tone is iron wrapped in calm. No explanation. Just an order. He stands there, motionless, with that uncanny Zypherian stillness-the kind that makes you feel like time itself has paused to wait for your compliance.
My stomach drops. Command.
"I... Are you sure?," I start, the dumbest possible response to an officer carrying direct orders.
He doesn't even blink. Zypherians don't blink often; their eyes are designed for darkness, for the depths of sublight travel. "The Admiral does not make errors in personnel requests," he says simply.
Right. Of course he doesn't.
I yank the rest of my shirt into place, fingers fumbling on the fastenings, trying to smooth my hair into something less like panic personified. My pulse is too loud. The officer waits, utterly still, until I nod that I'm ready, and then we walk.
My pulse hammers. My mind races through possibilities-did I do something wrong? Is this about the work reinstatement? Is this about Manav? About the resistance?
The walk is long. We pass from the lower habitation sectors into the command levels, and the light shifts-no longer the dim amber of crew quarters but a colder, sharper hue. Zypherian design loves precision. Corners dissolve into seamless curves. Zypherians pass us in clean, precise motion, They move in formation even when they don't need to, each step a study in silent efficiency. No one looks twice at me. I'm invisible until I'm not.
The officer doesn't speak. I don't either. My mouth is too dry. And then we reach it.
The corridor narrows and then widens again, opening into a stretch of alloy so black it swallows light. The air feels different here-charged, like standing too close to a storm.
The officer stops soundlessly. I almost collide with him.
He Gestures ahead with one taloned hand. "Go in."
I blink
"The Admiral is expecting you." His tone allows no room for negotiation. Then he turns, movements precise as a blade's edge, and walks back the way we came—swallowed by shadow and geometry within seconds.
The door to the command slides open.
Elara. Manav. And a third-a woman I recognize from the human sector meetings, Yara, one of the agricultural leads who always asks the sharpest questions and never seems satisfied with the answers
comes out.
They see me at the same moment I see them.
Their conversation cuts off like a wire snapped clean.
Elara's gaze locks onto me first. Her eyes are dark, deliberate, the kind that measure rather than merely see. There's a composure in her posture that doesn't come from calm-it comes from surviving. From choosing, again and again, to stay unbroken in a system designed to wear you down.
"Ruby," she says. Smooth. Controlled. Unlike the last time.
"Elara." I nod, matching her tone as best I can. Pretending I'm not halfway to unraveling.
Manav shifts his weight, hands tucked into his coat pockets. His expression is unreadable.
Yara just watches, arms crossed, her face a careful blank.
"Heading into Command?" Elara asks, and it sounds like small talk but isn't.
"I was summoned," I say, because the truth is simpler than a lie and I'm too tired to figure out which version of the truth she wants.
"Of course you were." Her smile doesn't reach her eyes.
"The Admiral seems to prefer knowing where his variables are during critical operations."
I hold her gaze. "Is that what you think I am?"
"I think," Elara says, stepping closer, voice dropping just enough that the others can't quite hear, "that you're standing in a hallway outside the most secure room on this ship, about to watch the Zypherians fold space, while the most of humans are confined to the sectors and told to wait." Her head tilts, a predator's curiosity.
"So what I think doesn't matter as much as what that looks like."
Heat prickles up my neck. "I didn't ask for this."
"No one asks for proximity to power," she says softly. "But once you have it, you choose what you do with it."
The implication hangs between us, heavy and unmistakable. She's not accusing-not yet. She's measuring. Waiting to see which side of the line I fall on when the floor finally shifts.
Manav clears his throat, a gentle interruption. "We should go," he says, glancing at Elara.
Elara doesn't move immediately. She holds my gaze a beat longer, and I see it-the question she's not asking aloud. Are you one of us, or one of them?
Her gaze flickers past me toward the doors ahead-the threshold of Command-and back again. "When things get unstable," she adds, "people look for anchors. Make sure you know what you're tethered to. Make sure it won't drag you under."
It's not a threat. It's not even a warning, exactly. It's something colder-an assessment delivered with the calm of someone who's already run the numbers and doesn't like the outcome.
"Understood," I say, because I don't know what else to offer.
Elara studies my face for a heartbeat longer, then turns, her movement as sharp as the snap of a magnetic lock. Manav and Yara fall into step behind her, three shadows swallowed by the corridor's light.
I watch them disappear down the corridor-three shadows moving in practiced silence, their footsteps swallowed by the ship's hum.
My chest feels tight. My hands are clenched at my sides.
Make sure you know what you're tethered to.I exhale slowly, forcing my pulse to settle, and turn back.
The doors to Command are massive, a dark, seamless alloy that parts like a mouth opening.
My feet carry me in before my brain agrees.
And then-
Everything stops.
The Command Deck is not a room. It's an ecosystem.
The first thing that hits me is the scale. The ceiling arcs upward into a sweeping dome of transparent alloy—not glass, something far stronger, molecularly bonded in ways human engineering hasn't cracked yet—revealing the cosmos beyond in ruthless, breathtaking clarity.
Below that impossible sky, consoles spiral downward in perfect concentric rings, glowing with bioluminescent intensity. The lights don't just blink—they *pulse*, breathing in rhythm with the ship's systems.
Amber tracers map propulsion vectors. Cobalt streams chart navigational data. Deep crimson codes flicker across command interfaces, each one a potential decision that could save or doom everyone aboard.
Everything here feels sentient, as if the ship itself is conscious and Command is where it thinks.
Zypherian officers move through the space like neurons firing across synaptic pathways.
Every gesture is economical, precise, beautiful in its efficiency. Their voices blend into a low, rhythmic cadence—orders layered over confirmations, data streams vocalized in their native tongue, a language that sounds like wind through metal.
It's a heartbeat that never stutters. One wrong keystroke, one delayed command, and the largest vessel in the Zypherian fleet becomes a coffin for ten thousand souls.
Stars. Not the tiny pinpricks you see from Earth, but vast, scattered fields of light, close enough to drown in. Nebulae bloom like bruises of color-violet, gold, deep indigo.
We're so far from anything I've ever known that my brain can't quite process the scale of it.
The air itself hums with electromagnetic activity—systems interfacing, quantum processors calculating trajectories through dimensions human mathematics hasn't named yet. I can feel it against my skin, a low-frequency vibration that makes my teeth ache.
And there—at the center of it all, standing before the primary command console like a monument to absolute authority—is Admiral.
He hasn't noticed me yet.
His attention is absolute, his hands moving across the interface in that fluid, predatory rhythm Zypherians are famous for, issuing commands in a voice too low for me to hear but that carries weight.
The officers around him respond like extensions of his will. The entire room moves in synchronous adjustment, each console flaring in subtle color shifts as orders ripple outward. The Command Deck is an organism, and Admiral is its heart.
I stop just inside the threshold, caught in the gravitational field of the place-and of him.
Waiting. Watching.
The stars beyond the dome seem impossibly close here, like you could reach out and touch their fire. They don't shimmer; they burn-cold, brilliant and merciless. The void presses against the dome, a patient, endless weight, and in its center stands Admiral, the line between everything known and everything waiting to devour it.
The precision takes my breath. The alien architecture, the flawless coordination, the sheer audacity of a species that looked at the infinite dark and decided it should belong to them.
Humanity was still struggling to send astronaut on Mars, and the Zypherians chart routes through uncharted dimensions as casually as breathing.
Someone glances at me-a quick, assessing look that slides away as if I've already failed to be relevant. Another officer brushes past without acknowledgment. Their movements are so smooth they barely disturb the air.
The star map shifts under his hands. Holographic light spills upward, refracting against the silver threading in his uniform, painting the sharp angles of his profile in shifting spectrums. The projection zooms, narrows, focuses—until the chart reveals what we're hurtling toward.
A wound in space.
A black spiral threaded with violent purple, twisting against the natural curvature of the cosmos like reality rejecting itself. The edges pulse with energy signatures that don't belong in normal space-time. It looks alive. Hungry.
The spacefold point.
The place where we're going to cut through the universe's fabric and hope it doesn't bleed.
My throat tightens. I've seen simulations, read the briefings the Zypherians bothered to translate into human terms. But seeing it rendered here—raw data transformed into visual threat—is different. This isn't theoretical physics. This is the knife we're about to press against existence itself.
The fold looks wrong in ways my brain struggles to articulate. Like a color that shouldn't exist, or a sound pitched just outside human hearing. My eyes trace its spiral edges, following the unnatural curve, trying to make sense of geometry that defies every law I was taught in schools.
For a moment, I forget to breathe. The sight hooks something deep in me, equal parts awe and terror. It’s exquisite and wrong, miraculous and monstrous in the same breath. The kind of beauty that demands surrender just to witness it.
I force myself to look away before vertigo takes hold, my gaze drifting back to the man commanding this madness.
And then—
He stills.
The movements of his hands over the console fade to stillness, the light from the interface ripples once, then steadies, waiting for his next command.
Slowly—with the deliberate quality of a predator deciding whether to strike—he turns his head toward the entrance.
Toward me.
It's not a glance-it's a fixing. Like the sensors of the ship have locked on and decided I am the only point of relevance in a room full of stars.
Our eyes meet.
The Command Deck doesn't go silent—the systems still hum, the officers still move, the data still streams—but all of it drops away, muffled beneath the roar of blood in my ears. There's only the sound of my own breathing, sharp and too fast, and the molten gold of his eyes catching starlight and throwing it back transformed.
And unbidden, unwelcome, the dream crashes back.
The memory slams into me with physical force—his hands on my skin, fingers and pearls tracing paths that felt like they were rewriting me from the inside out.
The weight of him above me, around me, through me—solid and impossible and utterly consuming. The dream had felt more real than waking, and now, standing here under his gaze, the boundary between the two blurs dangerously.
Heat floods my face, crawls down my neck. I want to look away—need to—but my body won't obey. Shame and want tangle so completely I can't separate them anymore.
It feels like standing in the gravity well of a planet. Inescapable. Heavy. Beautiful in the way black holes are beautiful—lethal and mesmerizing and utterly beyond human scale.
Something inside me braces for impact.
Something else leans forward, helpless, drawn toward the event horizon.