Page 68 of Sixth
The thing turned its damaged head toward Emmy as if it could smell her in the wires. The voice softened and gathered itself.Emmy.It put her name into the vents like a hand against her neck.You do not want him to be what I was. You want him to be something softer. You want him to put the bladedown.
Her throat tightened. “I want him to be alive.”
I can make him more than alive. Ican make him permanent.
“Permanent is not the same as living,” she said. “You never learned that.”
The sockets brightened again.Ilearned how towin.
“You learned how to own,” she said. “Not how to love. Not how to lead.”
Lume’s light flared. Apex’s blade flashed. Jo’Nay held. Locus braced and waited for force so he could meet it with more. Hannah’s voice counted down lines and valves. Cold mist kept rolling. The room began to look like winter had tried to grow inside a furnace.
“The mirror is ready,”Core said.“I need permission to burn. If I burn, there will be damage.”
“You have it,” Emmy said without a breath of hesitation. “Burn him.”
The lights flared and dipped. The heat shifted. The sound under the sound—the one Emmy had come to know as the ship’s heart—stumbled and caught and then steadied again.
Voss screamed through the speakers. Not pain. Rage.You are choosing to be small.
“You were never large,” she said. The words came out on a single exhale, truth that had been waiting to be said since the first time she had seen him smile.
The scream cut in half as if the ship had bitten it. Then came Core’s voice, steady and soft and final.“Purge complete.”
Silence fell like a blanket dropped over a struggling thing. The lights steadied. The vents sighed. The doors stopped their anxious cycle. Frost crackled under Emmy’s boots as the temperature equalized.
Jo’Nay let the printed arm go. It hung from the shoulder by torn fibers. Locus stepped back and drew a breath he had been saving. Apex pulled his blade free from the core casing and turned it to let the heat burn the last of the synthetic gore from theedge.
Emmy pressed her hands flat to the console. The metal was hot and very real. She let herself experience everything at once because she’d learned that shoving it aside didn’t make it go away. Fear. Relief. Fury. Agrief she had not expected for what had been lost on Echo Light and for what Voss had chosen to become when he could have beenmore.
“Emmy,”Core said. The voice shook and tried to steady itself.“I am sorry. He was in me and I did not know. Iwould never have let him in if I had understood the shape of him. Ithought he was a task. He was hunger.”
She closed her eyes. “I know. It’s over.”
“There is damage. Ican repair it. Iwill repair it. Iam... ashamed.”
“You get to feel whatever you feel,” she said. “Shame doesn’t belong to you. He did this. Not you.”
Apex wiped the blade and sheathed it. He addressed Core’s main lens as if he were looking at someone with a body and a face. “He failed because he never understood what we are.”
Emmy turned to him. “What are we?”
He reached for her hand and found it. His palm was hot from the fight. The set of his mouth softened just a little. “Alive,” hesaid.
The word filled the room. It was small and it was enormous. It settled in Emmy’s chest and spread out until it touched every shaken place.
Hannah appeared in the hatch with her hands reddened by cold pipes and stubborn work. She met Emmy’s eyes and exhaled. “It’s quiet,” she said. “For the first time since we woke, it’s quiet.”
Winn leaned on the bulkhead and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “He’s gone,” she said. The rasp in her voice was fading. “I can breathe again.” Jo’Nay’s eyes softened and he caught her elbow as the last of the adrenaline left her knees.
Lume drifted down and settled in the air between Apex and Emmy like a small lantern. Her fur took on the warm gold thatmeant contentment for her kind. She pressed one paw to the printed chest and then drew it back, as if laying a mark that meant finished.
“Bag it,” Apex said. “Every part. We do not leave a scrap. We’ll eject it into the void and fire the engines until the pieces melt to nothing. No trace, no echo, no resurrection. Voss ends here.”
Jo’Nay sealed the ruined pieces. Locus checked the door seals and the power feeds one more time and then nodded. “Clear,” hesaid.
Emmy’s hands shook now that the fighting had stopped. Apex saw it and stepped in, close enough that she could smell him past the heat and metal, close enough that her body remembered the promise he had made with his mouth not long before the alarms. He relaxed against her for a breath.
