Page 12 of Claimed By the War Brute
I exhale in measured relief: this is it. My pulse vaults, wings beating in cageless joy. My palm itches to hit the panel again—two more pulses, this time saying: I’m here. Where are you?
I don’t need rescue. This is no damsel scenario. I don’t lean on melodrama. I lean on me. Engines hum again as systems attempt to patch the breach. External lights flitter. I tap again. Send.
A ripple of acknowledgement slams through me in a second round of pulses—short, then long. The meaning isn’t decrypting yet: maybe confirmation, maybe a relay of his status. But it shouts: We’re aligned. We’re both doing this.
My thermal implants trace a dark corridor in my brain, indexing busloads of structural schematics. There’s a side-duct, four meters south, that connects to a maintenance crawl keyedoff that same vent I’ve compromised. One entrance. One exit. And when I reach that wall, I’ll be free. The habitat grid quakes above, mechanical breath drawn and released. My skin pulses with heat. My lungs tremble. My soul sings.
I slip back onto the cot—collected, distant, contemplative. I let the food panel slide open and shove the tray away without touching it. I don’t need calories right now. I need resonance.
The camera’s lens swivels. I imagine it sees me staring off into space—lost—but really I’m lining up bullet-proof psych. I let my breathing slow to measured softness, my chest polished like a drum, waiting. I feel Garrus in each planted vibration. I feel him in my bloodline. I feel the promise of something raw and rebellion-born in every nerve.
The moment stretches into ritual. Lights dim. The vent hums. The echoes come and go—an electric heartbeat, shadow-clasped. My pulse matches it. I tap again; he taps back. We compose choreography of revolt.
With the final surge of sirens, security shutters shift. Guards rush through corridors, opening gates, shouting sealed orders. I don’t flinch. I wait for my signal. And when it comes—a pattern of three long pulses followed by two whispers—I push off the cot like a coiled spring and slip through the partially unlocked panel.
The moment is kinetic. My hand unclips the shard; I wedge my wrist through the gap. My toes stay anchored, braced. One second. Two. Three. Then I’m out—feet first—into the food-bay corridor. The stale smell of repurposed rations hits me. It’s cold, metallic, reek of recycled bodies and dormant dreams. My stomach roils. I don’t stop. I move.
I hear him before I see him. A low breath, a footfall uncharacteristically deliberate. A screen’s faint buzz flickers over his crimson plating. I round the corner to find Garrus pacing, arm on my implant pad. His golden gaze finds mine. There it is—connection. Everything we’ve risked, built, dreamedof, current in his eyes. The rails blur behind him with the precision of warship lights accelerating past.
I glide toward him, cautious but untethered. He nods minutely. No weapons drawn. No blur of suspicion. Just two wounded people, fissured and ready, in the eye of the storm.
His voice is a whisper, husky and echoing against metal: “You did good.”
Mine comes back fast: “We did it.”
He reaches out, gloved fingers tracing the graphic chart on my wrist-band, where he’s already piggybacked a comm-link. Pins align. Frequencies link. Colors bloom in my HUD softly—enemy patterns, map green, blue for escape path.
The camera overhead whirs, frozen. For once, I don’t care. We have each other, this moment, and a promise older than hope. The kiss doesn’t come—instead we sync breathing, rhythms, shared intent: We’re breaking this thing. Together.
My heart bursts.
We move. He pushes a pallet with me behind it, covering us as we flank out of the bay. We don’t speak. Every unit we pass, he cues me: one beat. Two. Three. Turn. Pause. Step. And I stay with him, eyes forward, mind singing.
We’re hellraisers.. We’re fate-carved allies. And when we cut the next panel, steam washes over us—and I think: If we make it out*,* I’m buying him that drink. Or three. Then I’ll start a bar fight just to see if he smiles when my fist lands.
This? This is our anthem.
CHAPTER 12
GARRUS
Itime it down to the nanosecond. The combat drone maintenance bay is half-lit, half-guarded, and full of opportunities. It's early shift: the first glow of synthetic caffeine in a guard’s hand, the stale tang of machine oil and burnt circuits in the air. I linger behind supply racks, chest compressed by worn armor, scaled shoulders tensing with anticipation. Every breath tastes like danger. I wait for the third-shift technician—the one with the nervous tic in his eye and the coffee-stained sleeve—to waddle in, caffeine cup shaking. That’s my signal.
I don’t hit him with a fist. Too loud. Too obvious. Instead, I slip behind the console, fingers dancing across the comm grid with enough sophistication to deceive AI but not trip alarms. I reroute the drone AI, pushing it into a diagnostic loop timed perfectly with the scheduled sanitation cycle. I override certain failsafes, add a subtle feedback parameter. Sparks. Glitches. The kind of malfunction that appears mechanical until the ship trembles in its bones.
The bay hums. Drone chassis clang. Panels groan. But no siren. I engineered it precise—audible to me, silent to others. That quiet is the blank canvas I need.
With a deep inhale, I shove my elbow into the conduit relay beneath the main panel. Metal shatters. Blue arcs fly like miniature lightning storms. The ship groans the moment power filament tears free. Lights gutter. Ventilation thumps behind me as the grid recalibrates.
And then I feel it: beneath my boots, the ship flexes—an electrical pulse rolling down metal ribs. She did her part.
Shields around the mercenary wing collapse. Sixty seconds. No more. I don’t breathe. I move.
I slip through the backup corridor like a wraith with purpose. My armor slides against the bulkhead in muted rubs. My HUD pulses with map overlays and guard timing markers—every footstep calculated from scans, every shutter position imprinted hours ago.
The first guard outside the secondary bulkhead twitches. His hand hovers at his weapon holster as lights flicker. But protocol halts him; authority is louder than instinct. I blast through the panel—a thick metal wall that trembles before it yields. I skid inside the prisoner deck.
And there she is.
