Page 5 of Kazmyr: Molten for Her
Jenna's jaw set, determination replacing fear as sweat beaded at her hairline. She tracked the navigational display with unexpected competence, fingers dancing across the controls with increasing confidence. "Thirty degrees starboard, narrow gap but cleaner exit."
Her assessment matched what I felt through the ship's sensors… a thread-the-needle maneuver that required perfect timing.
Collision klaxons screamed as we angled toward the gap, proximity warnings flashing angry crimson across the displays.
"Fuck!" Jenna's curse echoed my own thoughts as a smaller asteroid fragment spun toward our path. Then she surprised me, hands steady as she called out adjustments. "It feels like we're being hunted by a cosmic Roomba with murder issues. Five degrees down-angle."
I executed her suggestion without hesitation, feeling the Heartforge respond with unusual precision. The fragment scraped our dorsal shielding, sending a shower of sparks across the viewscreen, but we slipped through the gap with room to spare.
"You've done this before." Not a question.
"It's not that different." A bitter smile twisted her lips. "Fire inspector. I navigate burning buildings for a living."
The irony wasn't lost on me… A woman who survived flames now bound to a man composed of them. The universe had a cruel sense of humor.
The drone's signal strengthened, its tiny engines pushing it to match our erratic course. I slewed us behind a tumbling slab of carbon-rich rock, killing all non-essential systems and ghosting our thermal signature. My Heat Phase nibbled up my spine like hungry teeth, the familiar pressure building at the base of my skull. Soon I would need to vent excess energy or risk damaging the ship's delicate systems.
Jenna felt it. Her free hand brushed my forearm where the ember marks pulsed most visibly. "You're burning up."
The ship sighed at her touch, systems stabilizing as if soothed. My temperature dropped three degrees, not enough to matter but enough to notice. Impossible. The cooling beads were designed to be the only external method of regulation.
"The ship—" I began, then broke off as the tactical display lit with multiple contacts. The drone had called its masters, and they had answered.
We slingshotted around the carbon slab, grazing against space-gravel that sparked like fallen stars. Each impact transferred kinetic energy to our shields, bleeding into my connection with the ship. Pain flared along my marks, but I channeled it into the engines, using the excess heat to boost our thrust.
Jenna's eyes widened as she watched the marks brighten. "You're using your own body heat to power the ship."
"The Heartforge and I are... connected." An inadequate explanation for a bond forged in catastrophe, when my flesh had merged with the ship's systems to contain a reactor breach. The price of heroism… becoming neither fully man nor machine, but something uncomfortably between.
We bled into the shadow of a carbon mountain, a planetoid-sized asteroid that offered momentary shelter from pursuit. The drone's ping sharpened, more insistent now. Its reinforcements flexed on the edge of sensor range—six ships, just as I'd predicted, spreading into a search pattern that would flush us from cover within minutes.
I tasted iron and choice, the metallic tang of decisions with no good outcomes. My lungs burned as I fed the reactor with deliberate pulses of heat, whispering to the ship in the ancient language of my people. Words of courage and fire, of defiance and protection.
The Heartforge fluttered beneath my touch, then steadied… alive, listening, hungry for harmony. Its systems recalibrated, adjusting tolerances I'd never been able to fine-tune alone. With Jenna aboard, the ship operated at almost twenty percent greater efficiency. A coincidence that couldn't be a coincidence.
"Why are they after me?" she asked, voice thin but unbroken. Her fingers hadn't left the console, maintaining contact as if instinctively understanding the ship's need for connection.
"Because unbound mates sell," I answered, hating the truth but respecting her enough to speak it. "The chemical markers of compatibility are valuable to certain research facilities. And the Intergalactic Dating Agency has... gaps in its ethics protocols."
Her mouth tightened, something dark and knowing passing behind her eyes. "The agency that supposedly matched us."
"Yes."
The drone's pulse quickened, its signal strengthening as it locked onto our position. We had minutes, perhaps less, before the hunting party converged.
I scanned the tactical display, seeking any advantage in the asteroid field's chaotic pattern. Only one option presented itself. A magma-vent cavern yawning in the side of the carbon mountain, its interior temperatures high enough to fry standard sensors. For a normal ship, suicide. For the Heartforge, piloted by a man whose blood ran with liquid fire... merely dangerous.
"You're not seriously considering going in there." Jenna had followed my gaze to the cavern's heat signature, pulsing angry red on the thermal imaging.
"The drone can't follow us inside. Its components will melt." I adjusted our course, feeling the Heartforge respond with unusual eagerness. "The hunters will assume we've found another exit or hidden ourselves elsewhere."
"And if there isn't another exit?"
I met her eyes, seeing the calculation there. Not just fear, a tactical assessment, weighing risks against certainty.
"Then we make one."
Her fingers tightened on the console, knuckles whitening. "With what? More of your... whatever this is?" She gestured at my ember marks, now pulsing visibly through my cooling suit.
