Chapter 8: Night Terrors
The bed was a slab of warm, hard alloy that seemed to cup her body. The living silk had loosened to a whisper against her skin, a neutral presence. Sleep, when it came, was a black pit she fell into willingly.
Then the hands were back.
Not Vexis’s claws. Human hands. Ryland’s hands. Calloused from flight controls, grease under the nails. They were on her shoulders first, in the ready-room after the debrief, his breath sour with synthetic gin. “Easy, Liora. Just easy.” The memory was a physical shove. She could smell the recycled air of the carrier, the sweat, his cheap soap.
In the dream, she was pinned. Not by force, but by rank, by the terrible, familiar weight of before. His thumb stroked the nape of her neck, a mockery of comfort. “You flew good today. Real good. That calls for a toast, don’t you think?” The other hand slid down her arm, possessive, claiming a prize.
She tried to speak, to shout, but her throat sealed shut. This was the old terror, the one that predated plasma fire and alien warlords. It was smaller, dirtier, and it lived in her marrow.
The dream shattered into a scream.
It ripped out of her, raw and tearing, as she jackknifed upright on the slab. The silk constricted violently around her ribs, a sudden, shocking pressure that mirrored the panic. Her chest heaved, pulling in gasps of the ozone-and-gunpowder air. She was clawing at her own skin, at the memory of his touch, her blunt nails scraping over the smooth, adaptive fabric.
“Be still.”
The voice wasn’t from the dream. It was here. Now. Low, resonant, cutting through the aftermath of the scream.
He was already there. Sitting on a low, backless seat of obsidian she hadn’t noticed in the dark, mere feet from her bed. How long had he been watching? The bioluminescent veins on the wall behind him pulsed a slow, steady gold, outlining his silhouette. He was just… there. A part of the chamber’s ecosystem. His gold eyes reflected the faint light, fixed on her.
Liora scrambled back, the silk tightening further, a warning bind. “Get out.” The words were a hoarse scrape.
Vexis didn’t move. He’d been holding something—a small, jagged crystal that glowed from within. He set it aside on the floor, where it clicked softly against the metal. The sound was final. His full attention was on her.
“You were not screaming at me,” he observed. It wasn’t a question.
“I said get out!” She was shaking. She couldn’t stop it. A full-body tremble that was pure humiliation. The nightmare had left its residue on her skin, a sticky, invisible filth. And he’d seen it. He’d seen her break over a ghost.
He rose. Not with a threat, but with a slow, inevitable grace. He crossed the space in two strides. Before she could react, before she could even flinch properly, his hand was at her face. Not a strike. His claws, cool and smooth, traced the wet path from her eye to her jaw. He caught a tear on the tip of a talon and brought it to his own senses.
He tasted it.
A flicker of a dark, forked tongue. His eyes closed for a fraction of a second, analyzing.
“Your terror tastes different than your rage,” he murmured, his voice a vibration in the quiet room. He opened his eyes, and his gaze was disturbingly intent. “The chemical signature is altered. More complex. Acrid, where your anger is clean and hot.” He leaned in, his scent—crushed petals, cold metal—filling her space. “This was not a fear of death or pain. This was… older.”
“Don’t.” She turned her head away, but his other hand came up, not to hurt, but to frame her face, holding her gently, insistently, in place. His touch was an immovable fact.
“You show me shattered glass and defiance. You show me a pulse that rages. But this…” He brushed his thumb, where the scale gave way to smoother, leather-like skin, under her eye. “This is the core fracture. The one everything else is built upon. Show me why.”
His command was soft. Absolute.
“Go to hell.” She tried to pull back, but his hold was firm. The silk tightened around her torso, a partner in his containment.
“This is my hell,” he said, and for the first time, she heard something beneath the authority. A weariness so deep it sounded like the hum of the dying ship itself. “And you are its most fascinating occupant. Now. The name you cried. ‘Ryland.’ Was he your enemy?”
A bark of laughter, harsh and broken, escaped her. “Yeah. You could say that.”
“Did he cause you physical harm in battle? A scar I did not map?”
She stared at him, this terrifying, alien creature, trying to parse human violation through the lens of combat. He understood war. He didn’t understand this. The inequality of it. The betrayal that wasn’t on a battlefield, but in a corridor where you were supposed to be safe.
“It wasn’t a battle,” she said, her voice hollow.
Vexis was silent, waiting. His eyes scanned her face, reading the micro-expressions, the tension in her jaw, the way her eyes lost focus, looking inward. The trophies on the walls seemed to lean in, the skeletal prisoners frozen in their eternal judgment.
“He was my wing commander,” she heard herself say. The words felt like pulling shrapnel from a wound. “After the war broke out… everything was chaos. Rules were… flexible. He liked flexibility.”
She didn’t give details. She couldn’t. The hands on her hips, pinning her against a radar console. The hissed promises of grounded flights if she made a fuss. The laughter of the others who chose not to see. The way the fear curdled into a permanent, quiet hate she carried with her into every dogfight, hoping an enemy laser would solve her problem by solving his.
Vexis listened. He didn’t interrupt. His thumb still moved in a slow, rhythmic arc on her cheekbone. When her voice trailed off, thick with shame, he spoke.
“This Ryland. He used authority as a weapon. He took what was not offered, under the cover of disorder.” He said it slowly, piecing it together. “He polluted the hierarchy. He broke the covenant of the pack.”
It was such an alien, yet brutally accurate, summary. Liora could only nod, a stiff, painful motion.
A low sound emanated from Vexis’s chest. Not a growl. Deeper. A reverberation of pure, unadulterated contempt. The vines on the wall flared a sudden, violent crimson, casting his sharp features in hellish light.
“A weak predator,” he hissed, the word dripping with disgust. “Preying on the perceived weakness of his own. This is not strength. It is a sickness. It is vermin behavior.”
The ferocity in his voice shocked her. It was personal. She was still shaking, but now it was from the intensity of his reaction, a reflection she hadn’t expected.
“Is he alive?” Vexis asked, the gold of his eyes now molten.
“I don’t know.” It was the truth. The last she’d heard, his carrier had been hit. She’d felt nothing when she read the report. Nothing at all.
“A pity.” He released her face, straightening up. The atmosphere in the room shifted, the crimson glow of the vines fading back to gold, then to the faintest blue. He looked down at her, a new, unreadable expression carving lines beside his eyes. “You carry this… infection… with you. It colors your reactions. Your defiance is, in part, a rejection of that memory. Your trust is impossible because the first hand that held authority over you was unclean.”
He picked up the glowing crystal from the floor. “You fear my touch not because it is alien, but because it is a touch. You see a claim in every look. You are braver than any warrior in my legion because you fight a war on two fronts: the one outside, and the one he left rotting inside you.”
Liora sat frozen, his words stripping her bare more effectively than any chamber scan. The living silk, sensing the shift, the draining of panic, loosened completely, becoming a soft, barely-there film.
Vexis turned to leave, then paused. He didn’t look back.
“Sleep again, Liora Voss. The monitors will remain. But I will now filter the data. This… sickness… will be quarantined from your profile. It is not defiance. It is contamination.” His claws flexed around the crystal. “When you rage at me, I want it to be for me. Not for him.”
He left her alone in the dim light, the ghosts of Ryland’s hands fading under the sharper, more present scrutiny of the alien who found them beneath his notice. The hum of the ship filled the silence. She lay back down, her cheek still cool where his thumb had been. The terror had receded, replaced by a vast, bewildering emptiness. He hadn’t offered comfort. He’d performed an audit. And in his ruthless, alien calculus, he had just taken her oldest enemy and dismissed him as irrelevant.
It was the strangest kind of mercy she had ever known.