The Imperial base behind them was playing a symphony of shrieking alarms and furious gunfire.

  Ahead of them, the darkness was so quiet it felt suffocating.

  Jack’s hands blurred over the virtual controls. On the holo-display, the APS (action-per-second / neural synapse frequency) readout jittered wildly between 250 and 300. That wasn’t showing off. That was fear, raw and unfiltered.

  The gutted, skeletal mech beneath him was moving at a speed that really shouldn’t have been physically possible.

  “Warning: patrol unit detected. Distance 1,000 meters, bearing 030,” STARK-2’s mechanical voice cut through the rattling cockpit noise. “Three ‘Vector’ single-unit mechs. Returning to base.”

  “Fuck,” Jack rasped.

  No heroic head-on engagement.

  He yanked the control stick back and to the side. Massive metal feet carved two deep trenches into the mud, and the mech slid down into the shadow of a leeward slope, vanishing into a stand of scrub like a panicked, oversized insect playing dead.

  Engines off.

  Coolant lines crackled as they bled off heat.

  A few seconds later, the howl of the Imperial patrol swept overhead. The elite Vector suits were too busy racing back to help put out the fire at their base to spare even a glance for the darkness below.

  Only after the red hostile blips disappeared completely from the radar edge did Jack finally let his lungs move again.

  Thirty minutes later, they vanished into the folds of the mountains to the east.

  Safe—for the moment.

  Jack cut the power completely. Silence crashed down on him like a flood. The comedown hit all at once; adrenaline drained, and he slumped in the pilot seat, boneless, shaking uncontrollably.

  He stumbled out of the cockpit. The night wind smacked his face like a bucket of ice water.

  Nya and Meadow were already outside. The taut wire inside them that had been strung tight for weeks finally snapped. The relief hit them like a collapse. They slumped into each other’s arms, quietly sobbing—like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to the same piece of driftwood.

  Jack turned away, a sharp, unfamiliar pain stabbing through his chest.

  He’d been the one to drive that insane skeleton mech, the one who dragged them out of hell.

  But he didn’t belong in that embrace.

  To remind himself of that fact, he walked a little way into the trees and pissed against a massive redwood. The sound of the stream was small, crude, almost ridiculous—but it was warm, human, real.

  Night settled in fully. Following STARK-2’s coordinates, they eventually found the mountain lake. It wasn’t a miracle, just a blue blotch on a topographical map—but right now, it was salvation.

  Dirt, sweat, dried blood, the stench of prison—all of it needed to be washed away.

  Jack lay sprawled on a rock still holding traces of the day’s warmth. To anyone looking, it seemed like he was stargazing. In reality, his eyes kept drifting, helplessly, toward the lake shore.

  Nya stripped without hesitation. There was nothing coy in the motion—it was practical, efficient, like field-stripping a weapon. But her body betrayed more than pure functional intent. Bronze skin, kissed by the sun, caught the starlight in brief flashes. Every line of muscle was carved by endless drills and flight hours: broad shoulders, tight waist. And yet the curves were still there—an uncompromising balance between strength and femininity.

  She stretched, and when she caught Jack looking, she didn’t flinch.

  Instead, she arched her back ever so slightly, as if daring him:

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Go on, Fatty. Look longer—if you think you can handle it.

  Meadow was different.

  She hesitated, carefully peeling off her clothes as if the fabric were fused to her skin. When the cold air finally kissed her body, a blush bloomed under her pale skin. If Nya was carved from stone, Meadow was porcelain: delicate, but full of quiet life, a kind of fragility wrapped around a core of grace.

  Even as she stepped into the water, she kept a blanket around herself. Every time it slipped, she grabbed at it in a small panic, never quite managing to fully hide the gentle lines of her figure. Her black hair clung to her cheeks, framing eyes that flickered between shame and a still, stubborn resolve.

  She was a different kind of beauty—restrained. Submission is not born of weakness, but of tradition and habit.

  Jack’s heart hammered in his chest louder than an overloading reactor.

  Desire? Sure.

  Guilt? Even more.

  But underneath it all, what he felt most was distance.

  One of them was a conqueror of the sky.

  The other, a mender of broken bodies.

  And him? Just a fat repairman who wanted to stay alive.

  He forced himself to turn away, to stare back up at the ancient river of stars overhead.

  Light really is a liar, Jack thought.

  Most of those stars had died millions of years ago. But their light still crossed the gulf of time to stab into his retinas here, now.

  Just like what he’d just seen—Nya’s wildness, Meadow’s fragility. That moment was already gone, but its light, its imprint, would haunt his memory like a ghost forever.

  Soft footsteps approached from behind.

  “Don’t move,” Meadow said quietly.

  Jack froze.

  She knelt beside him, hair still damp, blanket slipping off one shoulder. From her medkit, she took a strip of cloth, dipped it into the lake, then pressed it gently to one of his wounds. Her technique was professional; the touch was so careful he barely felt the pain.

  Jack’s whole body went rigid. He was a fat mechanic, covered in meat and cowardice, lying on his side with his bare back exposed under the hands—and the gaze—of two soldiers. Shame burned hotter than any injury.

  He could feel Nya’s stare: cold, evaluating.

  He could feel Meadow’s fingers: impossibly gentle, quietly determined.

  “All done,” Meadow said softly, her voice carrying the faintest tremor. “You have to keep it clean. Out here, infection kills faster than bullets.”

  Jack stared at the surface of the lake. The pain was gone. But her fingers, pressing into his skin, scared him more than any gunfire.

  They traveled by night and hid by day. Jack hunted, repaired, and scouted ahead.

  The three of them became a kind of broken family—a patchwork of roles stitched together by circumstance: one ruined mechanic, one predator, one healer.

  Until, at last, the D–T fusion core they’d salvaged from the scrap heap burned through its final isotopes just short of the Garipan defensive line. The blue glow in the mech’s eyes flickered twice and went out for good, leaving nothing but dead metal.

  That was when a Federation patrol found them.

  A rank of energy rifles snapped up as one, all leveled at their chests.

  “Hey! Friendly! Don’t shoot!” Jack yelled, hands thrown high.

  A sergeant strode over, scanned their biometrics, and confirmed their identities. He confiscated Jack’s combat recorder.

  And marched them back to base.

  There was no grand, tearful farewell.

  When the transport ship’s hatch opened, and the med staff surged forward, Nya and Meadow were whisked away almost immediately. They belonged to the sky and the infirmary now, to the world of heroes.

  Neither of them looked back.

  Not even once.

  That was fair.

  This was war.

  No room for fairy tales.

  Jack, meanwhile, was tossed onto another troop carrier and eventually dumped in the middle of a university campus—half in ruins, half converted. A major stormed up to him, red-faced and furious.

  “There you are at last, Fatty! Get your ass to muster—you’re late!”

  He punctuated the greeting with a kick to Jack’s backside, sending him stumbling into a line of fifty other poor bastards. Jack’s calves immediately started cramping.

  “Muster for what? Where are we going?” Jack looked around in horror.

  Shock troops?

  Death squad?

  No. He was not going back to that hell.

  Just then, he saw an old man in a white lab coat walking toward them. The badge on his chest marked him as senior lab management.

  Jack’s brain lit up.

  A lab. Yes. A lab.

  A repairman could work in a lab. A lab rat didn’t have to go to the front.

  Jack rushed over to him.

  “I’m the new arrival—sir—just reporting in. C-can you tell me where Lab 99 is?”

  His heart was beating in his throat. His fate was hanging there, waiting for a verdict from some god with a pen.

  Dr. Aris Thorne, head of the OURO Laboratory, looked down at the fat man who had materialized in front of him. His gaze dropped to the device strapped to Jack’s arm.

  STARK-2.

  The shift from indifference to delight took less than a second.

  The major had already caught up, barking, “Fatty! Back in line, now! What do you think you’re—”

  Jack didn’t get a chance to answer.

  “I’m Thorne,” the old man said, his tone mild in a way that made Jack’s skin crawl. He tapped Jack’s arm. “And this man…”

  He smiled, thin and knowing.

  “…is my new assistant.”

  The major froze. He clearly knew what that name was worth. After a moment of sour reluctance, he lowered his weapon and snapped a salute before marching off.

  Jack let out a long breath, certain he’d just cheated death.

  “Come along, Fatty,” Thorne said, turning away. His voice was so gentle that it was unsettling.

  STARK-2 vibrated faintly against Jack’s wrist—that was new. It had never done that before.

  Jack followed the old man, staring at the emblem on the back of his lab coat.

  A serpent devouring its own tail. The Ouroboros.

  The Martian-modified instincts buried in his genes clawed their way up his spine, screaming a warning:

  Compared to the assault team he’d just dodged,

  This wasn’t salvation.

  He’d just sold himself to a deeper, stranger kind of hell.

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