Static hissed through the Morningstar's comm array like sand thrown against glass.
Sera's hand was already moving before the sound resolved into signal — fingers leaving the nav console where she'd been plotting fuel stops, reaching for the communications panel with the automatic reflex of a pilot who'd spent too many hours alone in a cockpit. The ship hummed around her, the familiar low-frequency vibration of engines at cruise, and the sound cut through it like a blade.
The distress signal hit full clarity.
Weapons fire. The staccato percussion of kinetic rounds against hull plating, layered under the shriek of energy weapons cycling. A station's structural integrity alarm — three tones, the sequence that meant load-bearing sections were failing. System warnings in the background, each one a domino: atmospheric containment, power grid, shield generators dropping offline in sequence. And beneath all of it, the hiss of emergency comms, someone shouting coordinates that matched—
Echo's outpost. Prime's last known location.
Prime.
The name moved her body before her mind finished processing the signal's content. Sera's hands hit the navigation controls and the Morningstar banked hard, the salvage hauler groaning as its mass shifted against the new heading. Course plotted. Coordinates locked. The engines surged as she pushed the throttle forward, past the comfortable cruise setting, past the fuel-efficient transit markers, into the red zone where the hauler's drives consumed reserves like water through a cracked hull.
Heat flared across her left shoulder. Crimson, the fire dragon's tattoo burning against her skin — not strategic, not measured. Raw. The dragon equivalent of hearing someone you love scream.
Faster. Go faster.
"I know," Sera said aloud, to the empty cockpit, to the dragon under her skin. Her voice sounded strange in the silence — rough-edged, too loud. Without Pip perched on the console, without Prime's steady presence in the co-pilot's seat, the Morningstar felt cavernous. A ship built for a crew of one and whatever companions she could gather, and right now she had five dragons and a distress signal and nothing else.
Gold stirred along her right forearm, the strategic dragon's presence cool and precise against Crimson's heat. We should scan the area before we arrive. If the station is under attack, we need to know by whom.
"Agreed." Sera's fingers moved across the sensor panel, queuing long-range scans to execute as they approached. "But we're not slowing down."
The signal's decay pattern is too uniform. Vexis, coiled along her left thigh — the truth-sense dragon's voice carrying the flat certainty of a lie detector reading a forged document. Authentic distress signals degrade unevenly. Background noise fluctuates. This signal's degradation is linear. Consistent.
The warning landed and slid past — a caution light on a secondary system, noted, filed, overridden by the signal still playing through the cockpit speakers. The signal was still playing through the cockpit speakers. Weapons fire. Hull breach alarms. The station dying in real-time audio, and Prime was there, Prime had been there hours ago, Prime might still be—
Her pendant pulsed against her sternum. Not warmth. Cold. A single cold beat, there and gone. The blue crystal her mother had worn, her father had given her, the tuning fork that read portals and dimensional resonance and things Sera was still learning to interpret. It read the signal and gave her cold.
Her hands stayed on the controls.
Azure moved along her right thigh, the healer dragon reading the signal's emotional content — the distress, the fear, the urgency layered into the audio. Present but flat, the emotional register too even, too consistent across the signal's duration. Real fear spiked and ebbed. This fear held steady.
Sera's jaw tightened. Her hands stayed on the controls.
From somewhere deep — Nyx. The void-sense dragon, coiled at the base of her spine, rarely speaking, barely present most days as more than a weight in the dark. A single impression, not words: the sensation of looking down into water that had no bottom. Something beneath the signal. Something under the surface that went deeper than audio frequencies and emergency codes.
The Morningstar's engines whined at the upper edge of their tolerance. The vibration ran through her teeth, through the soles of her boots against the deck plating. The ship wasn't built for this — a salvage hauler with good bones and better modifications, but still a working vessel, not a warship. She was flying it like one anyway. Burning fuel she'd need later, stressing systems she'd have to repair, pushing the old girl past every recommendation in the maintenance manual.
Because Prime was there. Because the signal said the station was dying. Because she'd been separated from him for too long already — him at Echo's base doing whatever Echo had asked of him, her out here tracing weapon signatures and mapping portal damage and trying to hold the investigation together with both hands. The distance between them had been necessary. It had also been a slow bleed, a constant low-grade ache in the place where his presence usually sat.
And now the distance might be the thing that killed him.
We should scan— Gold began again.
"I said agreed. Scans are queued. We're not slowing down."
The stars streaked past the viewport as the Morningstar ate distance. The nav display counted down the minutes to arrival. She willed the numbers smaller.
One word. A name. It moved her through space faster than reason could follow.
Echo's outpost hung in the void like a lantern in a dark room — running lights steady, hull intact, shield generators humming at standard output. No debris field. No weapons fire. No attacking ships. The station's communication array broadcast normal traffic on standard frequencies, the mundane chatter of a facility going about its business.
The adrenaline had nowhere to land — no enemy, no crisis, nothing to meet. Sera's hands unclenched from the flight controls. The ache in her fingers registered only now — joints stiff, knuckles white. Her shoulders dropped from where they'd climbed toward her ears. The breath she'd been holding came out in a rush that fogged the air in front of her face.
The station was fine.
Everything was fine.
She replayed the distress signal. The audio filled the cockpit again — weapons fire, hull breach alarms, systems failing in cascade. Through the viewport, the station broadcast normal traffic. The mismatch was total. The signal described catastrophic damage to a facility that hadn't been touched.
"Sensors," Sera said. "Full sweep. Everything."
The Morningstar's sensor array — still warm from the long-range scans she'd queued in transit — painted the space around Echo's outpost in data. Shield integrity: nominal. Hull status: undamaged. Power output: standard operational levels. Atmospheric containment: sealed and stable. And there, on a standard departure vector heading away from the station — a shuttle transponder. Prime's shuttle. Recently departed. Heading outward on a course that would eventually intersect with her original position near Frontier station.
He'd left. He was alive. He was fine. He was heading toward her while she'd been racing toward him.
The relief was so physical it made her dizzy. She pressed her palm flat against the console and breathed, counting the breaths the way she'd learned to after combat — in for four, hold for four, out for four. The pendant against her chest was still cool, that cold pulse from earlier making sense now in a way it hadn't when she was burning across space at maximum thrust.
Fabricated. Vexis's voice cut through the fog of Sera's decompression. Every element of that signal was constructed. The emotional content, the background noise, the damage indicators — all manufactured. The decay pattern I flagged earlier is consistent throughout. No natural variance. No organic fluctuation. This signal was built, not broadcast.
Sera closed her eyes. Opened them. The station's running lights blinked their steady rhythm.
"How good was the fabrication?" she asked.
Good enough to fool your ship's sensors on initial receipt. The audio layering is sophisticated — multiple frequency bands carrying different types of damage signature, all synchronized to suggest a coherent event. But the synchronization is too precise. Real stations fail messily. This signal fails neatly.
Gold's presence sharpened along Sera's forearm. If the signal was bait, we are standing in the trap.
The words landed. Sera straightened in the pilot's seat, the last of the adrenaline crash burning away under a new kind of alertness — colder, sharper. She had run toward the fire; the fire had been lit to draw her in.
Someone had manufactured that signal. Someone who knew that a distress call from Prime's location would make her abandon caution, override her truth-sense dragon's warning, push her ship past its limits to get here. Someone who knew about her and Prime.
The station's running lights blinked their steady rhythm, every system nominal, and that was the worst of it.
Crimson's heat shifted along her shoulder — the fire dragon's protective aggression pivoting, recalibrating. Not the roar of charging toward a threat. The low rumble of a predator realizing the threat was behind it.
Azure offered steadiness without words, a cool current against the whiplash of relief and confusion and the growing dread that was replacing both. The healer dragon couldn't fix what was wrong here, but the dragon could keep Sera's body from shaking while she figured out what that was.
"Someone wanted me at these coordinates," Sera said. Her hand found the pendant at her throat and held it — the crystal cool against her palm, reading the space around the station with whatever senses it possessed.
The question, Gold said, is what is here that we have not yet detected.
Sera's fingers moved to the sensor controls. Deep scan. Maximum sensitivity. Every frequency the Morningstar could read, every wavelength it could parse. She swept the space around the station in concentric circles, expanding outward from the hull, looking for whatever the trap's architects had placed here for her to find.
Or to find her.
The sensor alarm screamed.
Not the polite chime of a routine detection — the full-throated wail of a proximity alert registering something that shouldn't exist. Sera's hands were on the controls before the display resolved, pulling the Morningstar's nose around toward the anomaly, and what she saw through the viewport stopped the breath in her lungs.
Space was tearing.
This was violent — not the gentle fraying she'd read about, a shimmer losing coherence over decades, but a wound ripping open in the fabric of the void, and the wound ran backward. The edges of the tear crackled with energy that flowed inward, light and force and something that wasn't either of those things pouring into the opening rather than out of it. Colors that had no name — not the familiar iridescence of portal edges she'd seen in data recordings, but something forced into being, the mark of dimensional engineering at its most brutal.
Her pendant hit a frequency she'd never felt.
A vibration that started at the crystal and radiated outward through her sternum, her ribs, her jaw — a note so intense her vision blurred at the edges and her teeth ached in their sockets. The tuning fork her mother had worn was resonating with something it was never meant to read, a harmonic that belonged to no natural portal, no stable dimensional boundary. The crystal screamed against her skin, and Sera's hand left the controls to press against the pendant as if she could muffle it.
Reversed. Nyx spoke — not the brief, reluctant impressions the void-sense dragon usually offered, but three full sentences, each one landing like a door slamming shut. The current flows inward. It will not stop.
Sera had never heard Nyx speak that much. The void-sense dragon who lived at the base of her spine, who communicated in impressions and silences, who saw the spaces between spaces — Nyx had looked at the tear in the void and spoken three sentences, and every dragon in Sera's body went quiet in the aftermath, as if the others understood what it cost.
The Morningstar's sensors caught up with what her eyes and her pendant already knew. Energy signature data cascaded across the display — and the pattern matched. The weapon data Marcus had given them, the energy profiles of the attacks on the portals, the signature of the force that was killing magic across dimensions. The same engineering. The same source. Unbound technology, turned from a tool of slow destruction into a targeted weapon.
Engineered. Vexis, sharp and certain. Recent. Hours old at most. They built this for us.
For us. Not random. Not collateral damage from some larger operation. A trap built at specific coordinates, activated at a specific time, designed to catch a specific ship that had been drawn here by a fabricated signal.
Sera grabbed the flight controls and fired the engines.
The Morningstar lurched forward — not toward the portal but away, angling perpendicular to the tear, every ounce of thrust the salvage hauler could muster directed at escape. The engines roared. The ship shuddered. The viewport filled with stars that should have been sliding past as the hauler accelerated.
The stars weren't moving.
The inverted portal's pull hit the Morningstar like a riptide catching a swimmer. Not a push — a pull. Gravitational and magical forces braided together into something that grabbed the ship's mass and its energy signature simultaneously, hooking into the hull and the drives and the crystals and the tattoos on Sera's skin. The harder the engines pushed, the stronger the pull became. The portal was feeding on the Morningstar's resistance, drinking the energy of the ship's escape attempt and converting it into force that dragged them backward.
"No," Sera said. She rerouted power — life support to minimum, sensors to passive, everything non-essential stripped and fed to the engines. The Morningstar's drives screamed at a pitch she'd never heard from them, a sound like metal being tortured. Hull stress warnings lit up the cockpit in amber and red. The ship groaned around her, structural members flexing under forces they were never designed to withstand.
Crimson, can you—
The fire dragon's fury blazed across Sera's shoulder, heat so intense she felt it through the bodysuit. Let me burn it. Let me—
You can't burn a hole in space. Crimson's rage broke against the futility like a wave against a cliff, and the dragon's roar became something worse — a sound of impotence, of a protector facing a threat that couldn't be fought with fire.
Gold calculated. Sera felt the strategic dragon running scenarios along her forearm — angles of escape, power distributions, trajectory modifications. Each scenario collapsed as fast as it formed. The math didn't work. Every vector that pointed away from the portal required more thrust than the Morningstar could generate, and every increase in thrust fed the riptide's pull.
We cannot outrun it. Gold's voice was flat — a tactician accepting the inevitable. Prepare for transit.
"I'm not—" Sera hauled the controls to port, trying to angle the ship sideways, to slip along the edge of the pull rather than fighting it head-on. The Morningstar responded sluggishly, the portal's field warping the ship's handling. For a moment — half a second, maybe less — the lateral thrust found a seam in the riptide's grip, and the stars shifted in the viewport.
Then the portal adjusted. The tear in space widened, its edges crackling, and the pull intensified. The seam closed. The Morningstar slid backward.
This leads somewhere specific. Vexis, reading the portal's architecture even as it consumed them. This was aimed.
Azure wrapped around Sera. Not physically — the healer dragon's energy, spreading from the tattoo on her right thigh upward through her body, a protective layer between Sera's flesh and the dimensional forces that were about to tear through the cockpit. The dragon couldn't stop the transit. Azure could cushion it.
The cockpit lights flickered. Warning klaxons screamed. The smell of overheating circuits filled the air — ozone and burned insulation, the Morningstar's systems cooking under the strain. Through the viewport, the inverted portal filled the sky, its edges close enough now that Sera could see the individual arcs of energy flowing inward, each one a current in a river that had only one direction.
Sera stopped fighting the controls.
Not surrender. Decision. Gold was right — they couldn't outrun it. Every second she spent trying fed the portal's pull. She released the throttle, let the engines drop to idle, and felt the Morningstar lurch forward as the riptide's resistance-feeding mechanism lost its primary fuel source. The pull didn't stop — the portal still wanted them — but without the engines fighting, the acceleration smoothed from a violent wrench to a steady, terrible slide.
She locked her hands on the pilot's chair. Braced her boots against the deck. Drew the dragons close — all five of them, the full Bound Court, pulled tight against her consciousness like a lifeline in a storm.
The inverted portal swallowed the Morningstar.
The event horizon was a wall, not a gradient.
One instant the cockpit showed stars and the fading running lights of Echo's station. The next instant there was nothing but the transit — a violence of light and force and dimensional wrongness that hit Sera's body like a physical blow. The Morningstar wrenched sideways through space that wasn't space, the hull screaming, metal stressed past tolerance, the sound of a ship being folded in directions that engineering hadn't accounted for.
Navigation died first. The display went black, then white, then filled with characters that weren't in any language Sera recognized. Sensors followed — the array overloading, every detector redlining simultaneously before cutting to static. Life support flickered, the air recyclers stuttering, and for three seconds the cockpit went dark.
Emergency lighting kicked in. Red. Everything red — the console, her hands on the chair, the cracked viewport that she hadn't noticed cracking, the sparking conduit above her head raining tiny orange stars onto the deck.
Her pendant hit peak frequency.
The note blanked her vision white. A full second of nothing — no cockpit, no ship, no transit, just a frequency so loud it replaced sight. Pain that wasn't damage but overload, the tuning fork resonating with the inverted portal's harmonics, reading the dimensional crossing at a volume that overwhelmed every other sense. Sera's jaw locked. Her hands tightened on the chair until the armrests creaked.
Five dragons screamed in her mind.
Crimson — rage and fire, the dragon's fury igniting along Sera's shoulder in a blaze that should have burned through the bodysuit. The fire had nowhere to go, no enemy to consume, and it turned inward, a furnace with no vent.
Gold — trying to calculate and failing. I can't — the variables — The strategic dragon's voice cut off mid-sentence, the mathematical framework that Gold used to parse reality breaking against transit physics that didn't follow any rules Gold had learned.
Vexis — still reading, still analyzing, even as the portal's forces tore through the ship. This leads somewhere specific. This was aimed. The truth-sense dragon finding one more truth to speak before the transit swallowed speech.
Azure — wrapping Sera's body in protective energy, the healer dragon's power spreading through muscle and bone and organ, a shield between Sera's biology and forces that would have turned unprotected flesh to something unrecognizable. Azure couldn't stop the transit. Azure could keep Sera alive through it.
Nyx — silence.
The void-sense dragon who should have been most at home in dimensional space, who lived in the spaces between spaces, who had spoken three sentences when the portal opened — Nyx went quiet. Not gradually. Completely. The weight at the base of Sera's spine that she'd grown accustomed to, the dark presence that was Nyx's constant contribution to the Bound Court — gone. As if the transit had taken the dragon somewhere else, or inward, or nowhere.
The absence was terrifying.
Sera rode the transit the way she'd ride a ship through an asteroid field — reading the forces through her body, adjusting her weight, her grip, her center of gravity as the dimensional currents shifted direction without warning. Left became down became sideways became a direction that had no name. The Morningstar tumbled around her, the ship's orientation meaningless in a space where orientation didn't exist, and Sera held on and held the remaining four dragons close and refused to let the crossing scatter her mind.
She had been through a portal before. The source dimension crossing — the controlled step through a stable doorway. That had been a door. This was a throat. She was being swallowed.
The ship hit something — a boundary, a layer, a wall within the transit — and the impact threw Sera forward against her restraints. Her forehead cracked against the console edge. Blood, hot and immediate, running into her left eye. She blinked it away and held on.
Systems failed in sequence around her. The engine readout died. The comm array flatlined. The artificial gravity stuttered, and for a lurching second Sera floated against her restraints before the grav plating caught again at half strength. The Morningstar was being stripped of its functionality piece by piece, the portal's forces interfering with every system the ship possessed.
Then silence.
The screaming stopped — the hull, the alarms, the engines, the dragons. All of it, cut off as if someone had closed a door. The ship drifted in darkness. Emergency lighting cast the cockpit in dim red. The hum of minimal life support — barely there, a whisper. And Sera's own breathing, loud and ragged in the stillness.
She was alive.
Hands — she flexed them. Responsive. Feet — she pressed them against the deck. Solid. Vision — blurred in the left eye from the blood, clear in the right. Pendant — she pressed her palm against it. Warm. Still there. Still reading. The screaming frequency had faded to a low hum, and beneath the hum, warmth. Faint, but present.
The pilot's instinct took over: check yourself, then check the ship. Sera wiped the blood from her eye with the back of her hand and looked at the cockpit. Cracked viewport — a spiderweb fracture running from the lower left corner to the center, the transparent material holding but compromised. Sparking conduit overhead, the orange sparks dying to intermittent flickers. The smell of burned insulation thick enough to taste. Console displays dark except for the emergency systems — life support at forty percent, structural integrity holding, engine status unknown.
Through the cracked viewport: stars she didn't recognize. Or not stars — points of light in configurations that matched nothing in the Morningstar's nav database, assuming the nav database still existed. An unfamiliar sky. An unknown place.
The Morningstar drifted, damaged and dark, in a space that was not the space it had left.
A flare on the sensor display — the one sensor still functioning, the short-range proximity detector running on emergency power. A second energy spike, behind and above the Morningstar's position. The sealed portal, the wound in space that had swallowed them, flaring one final time.
Something was coming through.
Sera's hand found the sensor controls by muscle memory, coaxing data from the dying system. The proximity detector painted a single contact — small, fast, tumbling through the portal's collapsing edge with the desperate momentum of something that had thrown itself at a closing door. A transponder signal, warped by the transit but resolving as the Morningstar's systems fought to decode it.
Prime's shuttle.
The portal's edges were folding inward behind the shuttle — the tear in space sealing itself, the dimensional wound closing. Through the cracked viewport, Sera saw it: a flash of distorted light, the last gasp of the inverted portal's energy, and then a small vessel tumbling into the unfamiliar dark. The shuttle's hull was buckled, one engine pod trailing sparks, the other dark. It spun on two axes, uncontrolled, shedding debris.
The portal sealed. The flash died. The scar in space where the portal had been faded to nothing — a faint shimmer, then gone. Empty space. Closed door.
He'd followed her through.
Sera stared at the tumbling shuttle and felt two things hit her simultaneously, so hard they nearly canceled each other out. Fury — white-hot, Crimson-edged, terror for someone you love turned outward. He'd flown into an Unbound-engineered portal. In a shuttle that wasn't rated for dimensional transit. Without knowing what was on the other side. Without—
And gratitude. Deep enough to sit in her chest like a weight she'd carry for the rest of her life. He was here. He came. Whatever this place was, whatever the trap's architects had planned, she wasn't facing it alone.
The shuttle's spin was slowing — attitude thrusters firing in short bursts, the small corrections of a pilot regaining control of a damaged vessel. Or a synthetic regaining control. Prime's chassis was more durable than the ship around him; she knew that. He'd have braced against the shuttle's frame, absorbed impacts that would have killed her. His systems would be rebooting, his processors cycling through damage assessments, his blue energy channels—
The shuttle's hull was opaque. But the transponder was broadcasting — power, which meant his basic systems were online.
Sera opened the comm channel. Her voice came out rough, scraped raw by the transit, by the blood she could taste at the corner of her mouth from the console impact.
"Prime."
Static. A pause that lasted two heartbeats — his systems rebooting, processors coming back online, audio subsystems reinitializing. Then his voice, steady in the way that meant he was being steady on purpose, carrying the slight delay and minor audio artifacts of a synthetic whose systems were still cycling through startup sequences.
"Sera."
One word. Her name. The same way she'd thought his.
She gripped the comm panel. Took a breath. Let the breath out.
"Your shuttle looks like hell."
The pause before his response was fractionally longer than his usual processing time. She could picture it — his optical sensors assessing the Morningstar through whatever viewport the shuttle still had intact, cataloguing the cracked hull plating, the dark engine pods, the sparking conduit visible through the cockpit transparency.
"Your ship isn't much better."
The laugh that escaped her was half a sob. She caught it, pressed her lips together, tasted blood.
Her pendant was warm. Not the screaming frequency of the transit, not the cold pulse of the fabricated signal. Warm. The warmth she associated with connection, with Prime, with the hum the crystal found when the person she loved was close. Even here — wherever here was, on the wrong side of an Unbound trap, in a damaged ship drifting through uncharted space — the pendant read Prime's presence and called it safe.
Sera's hand rose to the crystal and held it.
The dragons were settling. Crimson's fire banked from a blaze to embers, the protective fury cooling to a watchful heat along her shoulder. Gold resumed operations along her forearm — the strategic dragon recalibrating, running damage assessments, rebuilding the tactical picture from whatever data the Morningstar's surviving sensors could provide. Assessing. Give me a moment. The tone carried something Sera had never heard from Gold before: a mind that had been overwhelmed, rebuilding itself from first principles.
Azure moved through Sera's body in slow waves, the healer dragon checking for damage — the cut on her forehead, the bruising from the restraints, the muscle strain from bracing against forces no human body was designed to endure. Nothing critical. Everything painful. Azure's assessment arrived as a gentle warmth spreading through the worst of the aches: you'll live.
Vexis scanned outward, the truth-sense dragon reading the unfamiliar space beyond the cracked viewport. We are not where we were. The dimensional coordinates are... unfamiliar. A pause — unusual for Vexis, who dealt in certainties. I have no reference frame for this location.
And Nyx.
Sera held her breath. The void-sense dragon had gone silent during the transit — completely, terrifyingly absent, the weight at the base of her spine vanishing as if Nyx had been ripped away. She reached inward, searching for the dragon's presence in the place where Nyx usually lived.
There. Faint. A weight settling back into place like a tide returning after it had pulled impossibly far from shore. Nyx didn't speak. Nyx offered no words, no impressions, no readings of the void they'd been thrown into. But the dragon was there. Present. The void-sense dragon's awareness flickering back on, dim but real, and Sera exhaled — a slow release she hadn't known she was holding.
Five dragons. All present. The Bound Court reassembling after the transit's violence, each dragon finding its place in Sera's body and mind, the constellation of presences that made her who she was settling back into alignment.
Through the viewport, Prime's shuttle had stabilized — no longer tumbling, holding position near the Morningstar with the careful precision of a synthetic pilot compensating for damaged thrusters. Close enough to dock, if the docking systems on either vessel still functioned. Close enough that Sera could see the shuttle's running lights, dim but active, a small constellation of green and amber against the unfamiliar dark.
Behind them: nothing. The space where the portal had been was empty. No shimmer, no scar, no residual energy signature. The door was closed. The trap was sprung. They were here, wherever here was, and the way back didn't exist anymore.
Ahead: stars that belonged to no chart she'd ever studied. No comm traffic on any frequency. No navigation beacons, no station transponders, no ship signatures. The silence of a place where no one else was — or where no one else had been for a very long time.
The Morningstar's damage assessment continued running in the background, systems coming back online one by one. Each report was a coin flip — hull integrity holding but compromised, life support functional at reduced capacity, engines responding to diagnostic queries but not yet cleared for thrust, navigation database intact but unable to correlate with any known stellar cartography. The ship was hurt. The ship was alive.
Like its captain.
Sera kept her hand on the pendant. The warmth held steady — her father's gift, her mother's inheritance, still reading the world for her even here, on the wrong side of everything. The crystal hummed against her palm, a frequency that was almost a voice, almost a word, almost the name of the person whose shuttle drifted beside her in the dark.
"Prime," she said into the comm. "We need to get you aboard."
"Agreed. My shuttle's structural integrity is... optimistic at best."
"Can you EVA to the dorsal airlock? I'm not sure the docking clamps will hold on either end."
"Already calculating the trajectory." A beat. The audio artifacts in his voice were smoothing as his systems stabilized. "Sera."
"Yeah."
"The signal was fabricated. The portal was engineered. They knew you would come."
"I know." She looked at the stars she didn't recognize, at the sealed space where the portal had been, at the small damaged shuttle holding position beside her small damaged ship. "They knew about us."
The implication sat between them — specific, dangerous. The Unbound had built a trap tailored to her psychology, baited with the one thing guaranteed to make her abandon caution. They knew about Prime. They knew about the Morningstar. They knew what she would do when the person she loved was threatened. Being known — being visible, being in a relationship, being loved — had made her targetable.
And Prime had followed her through anyway.
"For the record," Sera said, "flying a standard shuttle through a collapsing Unbound portal was monumentally stupid."
"For the record," Prime said, "so was flying a salvage hauler toward a fake distress signal without waiting for sensor confirmation."
She almost smiled. Almost. The blood on her face had dried to a tight mask, and the cut on her forehead was still seeping, and every muscle in her body ached from the transit, and they were lost in unknown space with a sealed portal behind them and nothing ahead.
But Prime was here. The dragons were here. The Morningstar was battered but breathing.
The Unbound had built a trap for one dragon-bearer and her ship. They'd gotten two people who loved each other, five dragons, and the stubborn, beat-up hull of a salvage hauler.
Probablysurvived worse than this. Maybe. Sera would check the maintenance logs later, assuming the database was still intact.
"EVA in ninety seconds," Prime said. "I'm venting the shuttle's remaining atmosphere to give myself a cleaner exit trajectory."
"Copy. I'll have the dorsal airlock cycling." Sera's fingers moved across the emergency console, coaxing the airlock systems out of standby. The controls responded sluggishly — power allocation was a triage exercise now, every watt accounted for, every system competing for the Morningstar's diminished reserves. She pulled power from the port cargo bay lighting, from the water recycler's heating element, from a dozen minor systems that could wait. The dorsal airlock's status indicator shifted from red to amber to a reluctant green.
Through the cracked viewport, she watched Prime's shuttle vent — a brief cloud of crystallizing atmosphere catching the light of unfamiliar stars, ice particles spinning outward in a silent bloom. Then a figure, dark against the shuttle's hull, pushing off with the precise economy of someone who had calculated the trajectory to the centimeter. No tether. No EVA suit — he didn't need one. His chassis was rated for vacuum, his systems sealed against the void. She could see him now, a silhouette against the starfield, the faint blue glow of his energy channels visible even at this distance. Dimmer than usual. Flickering. But there.
He crossed the gap between the shuttle and the Morningstar in a long, controlled arc — no wasted motion, no correction burns, just the clean physics of mass and momentum applied with synthetic precision. Sera tracked him on the proximity sensor until he passed out of its limited range, then tracked him through the viewport until the angle of his approach took him above the cockpit's line of sight. A faint vibration through the hull — boots making contact with the Morningstar's dorsal plating. Then the airlock cycle indicator shifted from green to cycling to pressurized.
He was aboard.
Sera unstrapped from the pilot's seat. Her body protested — the bruising from the restraints ran in diagonal bands across her chest and hips, and her legs had stiffened during the minutes she'd spent motionless at the console. She stood anyway, one hand on the chair back for balance as the half-strength gravity made the deck feel uncertain beneath her boots. Blood from the forehead cut had dried along the left side of her face, pulling at her skin when she moved her jaw.
The corridor between the cockpit and the dorsal airlock was dark except for the emergency strips along the deck — thin lines of amber light marking the path. Sparking conduits overhead. The smell of burned insulation stronger here, where the hull had taken the worst of the transit stress. Sera moved through it with one hand trailing the bulkhead, feeling the ship's damage through her fingertips — vibrations that shouldn't be there, a faint warmth in panels that should be cool, the subtle wrongness of a vessel that had been wrenched through dimensions it was never built to cross.
The airlock's inner door opened.
Prime stood in the small pressurization chamber, his dark chassis catching the amber emergency light and throwing it back in distorted reflections. The glossy finish that usually mirrored his surroundings with liquid precision was scuffed and scored — impact marks from the shuttle's disintegration, scratches where debris had raked across his frame. His gold accent lines were intact but dimmed, the warm metallic gleam reduced to a muted ochre. The blue energy channels that traced his musculature flickered in an uneven pattern she'd never seen — bright, dim, bright, dark, bright — his systems still cycling through reboot sequences, not yet stabilized.
He was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
Sera stopped in the corridor. Prime stopped in the airlock. Three feet of deck plating between them, amber light and the smell of burned circuits, and for a moment neither of them moved. His optical sensors — those blue points of light in the sculpted planes of his face — found her and held. She watched them track the blood on her face, the bruising visible at the edges of her bodysuit, the way she was favoring her left side where the restraints had dug deepest.
"You're hurt," he said.
"It's superficial. Azure already checked." She looked at the scoring on his chassis, the flickering channels, the way his left hand hung at a slightly wrong angle — a joint damaged in transit, not yet self-repaired. "You're damaged."
"It's functional. Self-repair is already running."
They stood there. The ship hummed around them, broken and breathing.
Sera crossed the three feet of deck plating and put her arms around him. The chassis was cool against her bare arms — his thermal regulation still coming back online — and harder than any body she'd ever held, and exactly right. She pressed her face against the smooth surface of his chest, where the blue channel ran closest to the surface, and felt the flicker of his systems against her cheek like an unsteady heartbeat.
Prime's arms came around her. Carefully — the damaged left hand compensating, the right hand settling against her back with the precise pressure of someone who could crush steel and chose instead to hold. His chin rested on the top of her head. She felt the vibration of his voice through his chassis before she heard it through the air.
"I didn't calculate the odds."
"I know."
"I could have. I can run survival probability assessments in milliseconds. Thousands of scenarios. I didn't run a single one."
"I know, Prime."
"I saw the portal take you and I went."
She pulled back enough to look up at him. His optical sensors were bright — brighter than the flickering channels, steady in a way the rest of his systems weren't. She reached up and touched the side of his face, her fingertips tracing the gold accent line that ran along his jaw. The metal was warm where the channel beneath it still carried power.
"That was monumentally stupid," she said again, softer this time.
"Yes."
"Don't ever not do it."
Something shifted in his expression — the limited range of a synthetic face finding new territory: his optical sensors brightened, his head tilted, and the damaged hand came up to cover hers against his jaw. Not a smile.
"Understood," he said.
Crimson's embers flared warm along Sera's shoulder — not alarm, not aggression. Something closer to approval. The fire dragon recognizing a fellow protector, someone who would burn themselves to ash rather than let Sera face the dark alone.
Gold interrupted. The strategic dragon's presence sharpened along Sera's forearm, and the impression that arrived was not emotional but practical: We need to assess. Damage. Location. Resources. Time is not our ally.
Sera stepped back from Prime. Her hand lingered on his jaw. "Gold's right. We need to figure out where we are and what we have to work with."
"Agreed." Prime's optical sensors swept the corridor, cataloguing damage with the rapid precision of a synthetic mind freed from the limitations of organic attention. "Your ship's structural integrity is better than I expected. The hull flexed rather than fractured — good engineering, or good luck."
"Good engineering. I rebuilt half the stress points myself after the salvage run on Theta-7." She turned back toward the cockpit, and Prime fell into step beside her. The corridor was narrow enough that his shoulder nearly brushed hers. She didn't move away. "The engines are responding to diagnostics but I haven't tried to fire them yet. Navigation's intact but can't match anything out there to known charts. Life support's at forty percent, which gives us air for days but not weeks."
"My shuttle's fuel cells are intact. If we can retrieve them before the shuttle drifts out of range, we can supplement your power reserves."
"How long before it drifts?"
"At current vector, approximately four hours before retrieval becomes impractical."
"Then that's our first priority." Sera reached the cockpit and slid back into the pilot's seat, the familiar contours of the chair grounding her in something known. Prime stood behind her, one hand resting on the back of the co-pilot's seat, his optical sensors scanning the displays that were still functional. Through the cracked viewport, the unfamiliar stars held their positions — steady, silent, offering nothing.
Vexis spoke. The portal's energy signature has fully dissipated. There is no residual trace at our entry point. Whatever mechanism opened it has been exhausted or deliberately shut down.
"So we can't reopen it from this side," Sera said.
There is nothing to reopen. The portal no longer exists at those coordinates. It was single-use.
Single-use. Built to catch them, pull them through, and seal behind them. A one-way door designed by someone who wanted them here — wherever here was — and didn't want them leaving.
Sera looked at the stars she couldn't name, at the empty space where the portal had been, at the damaged console and the cracked viewport and the synthetic standing beside her with scoring on his chassis and conviction in his steady blue gaze.
"Okay," she said. Her hand found the pendant one last time. Warm. Steady. Still reading the world for her, still humming with the frequency it found when Prime was close. Her mother's crystal, her father's gift, carried to the wrong side of a trap and still doing its job.
"Okay," she said again. The unknown stretched ahead of them — vast, silent, unmapped. The sealed portal sat behind them, already fading from memory into fact. Forward was the only direction that existed.
She'd take it.
"Let's get to work."