Star Wars: Reborn As A Sith Medical Droid Chapter 77 77 - Through the Opened Ship

Elliot POV

The hatch did not fail all at once.

That was the first lesson of the mont.

It trembled.

Coughed.

Went dead on one lock, then another, then held anyway because old ships, like old tyrannies, often survived a little longer than the systems keeping them alive deserved. Red warning light pulsed over the tal seam. The deck under Elliot's boots groaned with the strain of the descent burn the captain had forced through damaged guidance. Sowhere above them, the ship scread again as if the opened wound along its flank had rembered it was a body.

Teren shifted first.

"Now," he said.

Elliot tore his wrists the rest of the way free, skin burning where the binders bit through the last of his resistance. Across the hold, Adam had one arm loose already. He pressed silver fingers against the restraint collar fixed to the wall and listened to the failing current inside it the way another being might listen to a pulse.

Patch was half up on one knee, small body taut with fear, hope, and the ugly practice of surviving both at once.

Varis stood in the red dark with his cuffs still on and his face unreadable, as if the whole ship's death were only another clock he intended to consult before acting.

Elliot hated him for that before anything else happened.

The next impact ca from sowhere forward and above—another exact, controlled strike that passed through the hull and out along the ribs like a blade dragged through an instrunt string. The hold lights flared white. Adam's collar died completely.

He tore it off.

The freed restraint sparked on the floor.

Teren slid his own bound wrists under one boot, twisted hard, and ripped one cuff loose at the thumb joint with a grimace that told Elliot more than any oath would have about how much the maneuver hurt.

Patch did not wait for permission.

He darted toward the dead guard still lying by the door slot and ca back with a dropped sidearm clutched in both hands.

"Patch," Elliot snapped.

The boy looked up.

"I know how to use it."

That was not the reassurance Elliot wanted.

The hatch gave another violent shudder.

Then a body hit it from the outside.

Hard enough to sar blood down the viewport slit.

The corpse slid away.

Teren was already at the controls, fingers working inside the half-dead panel.

"No power on the lock," he said. "Manual catch jamd."

Adam ca beside him. "Move."

Teren moved.

Adam slid two silver fingers into the seam, found sothing within the chanism Elliot could not see, and pulled with a precision too exact to call strength alone. The hatch shrieked half-open.

White breach-light poured through the gap.

Smoke ca with it.

And beyond the smoke, a corridor of opened tal and dead n.

The first guard still moving outside the hold tried to rise as the hatch cleared. Elliot crossed the distance before the man understood he was no longer alone. One knee into the sternum. Elbow to the jaw. A hard wrench of the rifle from his hands. The man went down and stayed there.

Patch flinched backward at the first crack of another shot sowhere farther down the passage.

Adam, already free of the wall, cut the boy's remaining wrist-binders with the industrial blade he had taken earlier from a dead crewman. The motion was so exact it looked surgical.

"We move together," Adam said.

Patch nodded too quickly.

Varis stepped through the hatch last.

He did not hurry.

That made Elliot want to strike him almost more than the mory of the west arm did.

The corridor outside looked less like a ship interior than the cross-section of a wound.

The red-painted tal walls had been opened in places by pure white beam work so clean it seed almost blasphemous. One whole section of passage had peeled outward toward vacuum before ergency plates slamd shut and trapped the wound in molten seams. Bodies lay in hard positions around the breaches—not torn apart by panic fire, but placed there by sothing more disciplined. Crew. pirates. one station enforcer Elliot did not rember boarding with them at all. Each dead by clean, chosen violence.

Farther ahead, across two intersecting corridors and the ghost of a catwalk, a black figure moved through smoke.

Not rushing.

Not hunting in the frantic way ordinary n hunted when fear took hold.

Simply moving forward with the authority of sothing that had entered the ship already knowing where it ended.

Patch saw it too.

His breath caught.

Elliot did not look at the boy. He did not have to. He could feel the change in him—the old lower-ring dream and the imdiate reality trying to occupy the sa child at once.

"Which way?" Elliot asked.

Teren had gone pale from pain in the wrist he had half-dislocated to free himself, but his eyes were still cold and exact. He scanned the corridor, the ceiling markers, the dead console lights, the vented steam.

"Portside auxiliary lift," he said. "If it still lives, it reaches the prisoner decks and ergency bay."

"Ergency bay?"

"Pods."

Patch said, "The last ones will be at the stern."

Teren looked at him. "Why?"

"Because the captain ran descent. Stern pods get the cleaner drop."

Adam added, "He intends atmosphere."

Varis, from behind them, said, "Or collision."

No one answered that.

Another burst of blaster fire crackled farther forward.

Not sustained. Three shots. Pause. One more.

Then silence.

The group moved.

The opened ship had beco a maze of interrupted purpose. Every corridor felt like it had been designed by one authority, modified by another, and judged now by a third more ruthless than either. Elliot took the lead because soone had to, blaster in one hand, the other near the saber he still had not drawn. Behind him ca Teren and Patch, then Adam, then Varis with the patient stride of a man who, even in falling steel, refused to let urgency claim too much of his posture.

They passed one chamber where the deck had buckled upward and trapped three dead raiders together under a beam scorched black by breach-light. Another where a half-sealed cargo door had locked seven screaming crewn out of an escape lane they had clearly intended to reach first. Another where a prisoner cage had burst during the strike and left a scatter of freed captives crouched among ripped blankets and broken feed trays, too stunned to understand whether the opened ship ant salvation or a more elaborate form of dying.

A child cried sowhere in the next corridor.

Elliot turned toward the sound before Teren could stop him.

The room beyond had once been storage. Now it held twenty or more bodies behind a freight sh field that had lost most of its power. Slaves, Elliot thought first, then hated the simplicity of the word because each face in there had a history broader than the cage now trying to define it. n. Won. Children. Thin yellow-skinned offworlders with large dark eyes and trembling joints. A horned family huddled beside a collapsed crate. Two Rodians. A Bothan boy with blood down one ear. A human woman holding a child not her own. Old people. Work-scarred people. People with the particular look of those who had been moved too many tis to imagine the next wall would hold them long.

Their eyes all ca to him.

Not on the blaster first.

On the hilt at his side.

And behind that, on the thing he had been refusing to beco in open view since the west arm.

This was the mont.

Not for heroism.

For honesty.

The Outer Rim was already war and ruin. The ship was already judgnt and fire. If he kept pretending there were still conditions under which concealnt mattered more than what stood in front of him now, then the lie would be his.

He drew the saber.

Blue broke the corridor.

Not gently.

It ca alive in his hand with that clean impossible sound that had once, in the Temple, ant training halls, discipline, masters, purpose. Here it threw cold light across red-painted steel, white breach-fire, dead n, and cages of the terrified. The contrast made the whole ship look like an argunt between two kinds of order.

Several of the prisoners recoiled at first.

Then saw where the blade went.

Not toward them.

Toward the lock seam.

Elliot cut.

The cage field died under the strike. The manual braces failed next. The freight sh sagged inward and hit the deck in a collapsing shriek.

For a breath no one moved.

Then the woman with the child stepped through first.

The rest followed in a rush.

Not grateful yet. Not trusting yet. Too shocked, too frightened, too close to other forms of betrayal. But their eyes changed. Not safety. Not relief. Recognition that soone had finally used power in front of them for a purpose they could understand.

Adam moved among them at once.

Not with the blade.

With his hands.

"Keep to the inner wall," he said, calm in the red-white smoke. "Take only what you can carry without choosing death. Hold the smaller children above the deck line when the ship turns. If you are wounded, say so now, not later."

He knelt beside one elderly yellow-skinned man whose leg had gone bad beneath a brace and lifted him with surprising care. Patch took the man's other side without being asked.

Teren stepped into the freed chamber and started counting bodies, then counting the corridor widths, then counting the ti they did not have.

"Twenty-one including the children," he said. "Too many for any single pod."

"No pod fits them all," Varis said.

Elliot rounded on him, blue light in his face. "Then we find another way."

Varis looked at the blade, then at Elliot.

"You are late to your faith."

Elliot ignored the line because if he answered it, he might swing.

The ship rolled again, harder.

Freed prisoners stumbled into one another. A little girl scread as a vent burst overhead and spat steam. Adam pushed her down behind a cargo brace without losing hold of the old man beside him.

Then he spoke, low enough that only those nearest might have heard all of it, but sohow the words went farther anyway.

"n are not born free because the world is kind to them," he said. "They beco less governed by the world through what they choose to protect."

Elliot cut another cage.

Then another.

With each burst of blue, faces turned toward him. Small thanks. Not shouted. Not formal. But there in the eyes. In the way the frightened began shepherding the weaker instead of trampling them. In the way the children edged toward the light instead of away from it.

A slaver's ship was not ant to hold gratitude. It made the chamber feel stranger than the breaches had.

"Move them!" Teren called. "If the captain drives lower, the stern will turn into a coffin."

They started downship.

Elliot took point, saber low, blaster dead now and forgotten. Teren moved through the cluster of freed captives with an ugly competence that turned panic into columns. Adam and Patch kept the old and small moving. Varis brought up the rear and said very little, though the few tis a corridor threat erged too close behind them, it collapsed before Elliot had ti to turn and see exactly how.

They crossed a conveyor bridge half lit by breach fla and entered the midship transfer galleries.

The ship's interior war had fully opened by then.

pirates in stolen rebel wraps firing from cargo slots. Belt fighters screaming the nas of seized fields while looters cut bonded crates open beside them. Two crewn dragging a fuel canister between them only to abandon it and run when sothing black and armored turned the next bend. Alarm tones fighting one another across separate systems. Smoke. flashing ergency glyphs. Floor blood.

Elliot had fought in campaigns before. Had seen Yarnik. Had lost flesh there. But this was different in scale and intimacy. Too close. Too structural. Every corridor a choice between strangers. Every bulkhead a new edge between saving and abandoning.

A raider stepped from behind a freight stack and brought up a rifle toward the children.

Elliot crossed the distance before the stock cleared shoulder height. Blue cut the rifle in half. The return stroke took the man at the collarbone and sent him down in a hard wet collision with the deck.

A second ca from the left. Elliot punched him with the prosthetic arm first and felt the break travel through the man's face.

Patch fired around Elliot's hip with his scavenged pistol and dropped a third who had been lining up Teren.

The boy's hands shook afterward.

He kept shooting anyway.

Adam's industrial blade flashed silver and red as he turned inside a pirate's lunge and opened the inner arm at the elbow, disarming without flourish. Then, when the sa man tried to rise with his off-hand, Adam drove the blade once into the throat and moved on.

Nothing in him changed.

That was the terrible thing.

Even in violence he seed to remain what he had been at the exchanger panel—exact, useful, sincere. It made his lethality more disturbing than cruelty would have.

They were three corridors from the auxiliary lift when they t the first true obstruction.

Not pirates.

Not crew.

One Night.

He stepped from the breach-lit smoke with the simple finality of a door deciding it was a wall. Seven feet in armor, perhaps slightly less in truth, but that truth no longer mattered once black plating and silver edgework had taught the eye a larger proportion. His face was hidden beneath a sealed helm whose lines gave away nothing except function. In one hand he carried a dark blade not yet lit with any obvious energy, yet held with such ease that the distinction felt temporary. Behind him, through torn steel and white fire, Elliot saw more movent—other black forms elsewhere in the ship, not converging here by chance but working toward so mission he still did not understand.

The freed captives behind Elliot stilled as if the whole corridor had beco a shrine.

Patch's breath stopped.

The Night's gaze settled first on the blue blade.

Then rose to Elliot's face.

"Blue light," he said.

The voice through the helm was neither humanly warm nor machine-flat. It was simply clean.

"In this ship."

He took one step closer.

"Who is your master?"

Before Elliot could answer, Varis moved.

Not in front of him exactly.

Into the conversation.

"My master," Varis said, "is the dark that failed to finish ."

The Night's helm turned.

Silence followed.

Then: "Varis."

The na ca without uncertainty.

Small shock went through Elliot—not that the Night knew him, but that he spoke it like a history, not a rumor.

Varis's yellowed eyes held steady in the wound-light.

"Still literate, I see."

"Excommunicated," the Night said.

Varis almost smiled.

"Not enough."

The freed captives behind Elliot began to fracture under fear. Teren hissed at them to keep moving. Adam pulled two children behind a cargo brace. Patch stared as if the world had finally opened exactly the way the corridor walls promised it might.

The Night's blade ignited.

Not blue. Not crude red. Sothing whiter at the core and darker at the edge, as if the weapon had learned severity from stars rather than from blood.

He raised it.

"Go," Varis said.

Elliot turned on him. "No."

"Go."

The word ca not as plea, but as command older than the corridor.

For one terrible second Elliot saw too much at once. The ship burning. The freed captives pressed behind him. Adam and Patch. Teren calculating like a man trying to map collapse faster than it could outrun him. The Night in black armor asuring him through the blue blade. And Varis stepping toward that judgnt with sothing almost like familiarity.

"I have not t your kind in so ti," Varis said to the Night.

The Night tilted his helm a fraction. "You knew our tongue before it was ours."

There it was.

Not explanation.

Hint.

A seam left intentionally visible.

Varis's face in the white-red light showed all of its age then—gray drawn through the skin, the old scar at the brow, the yellow in the eyes gone dark enough to seem almost lit from within. He did not look like the old man from the prison cell. He looked like the ruin of sothing that had once walked nearer a throne than Elliot had guessed.

"I know many things that should trouble you," Varis said.

The Night ca on.

Fast enough that even Elliot, ready for it, barely saw the full line of the strike.

Varis answered with no saber of his own.

Lightning.

Not the wild theatrical kind Sith favored when they wanted fear to do half their labor. This was tighter, thinner, cruelly exact. It struck the Night's forward shoulder and helm seam with a crack that lit the corridor in violet-white.

The blade faltered by an inch.

By only that much.

Varis's hand snapped outward.

The dead pirate knife at Elliot's belt tore free and crossed the space between them like a thought sharpened into tal. Varis caught it midair and drove it hard under the Night's raised arm where armor t movent.

The Night jerked.

Not down. Not broken. rely interrupted.

And sohow that interruption frightened Elliot more than if he had fallen.

"You rember , then," Varis said softly.

The Night's free hand closed around the knife buried in his side and snapped the hilt off without sound.

"Reaper," he said.

Patch made a tiny involuntary noise.

Elliot felt the word like an opening underfoot.

Not because he understood it.

Because he did not.

Varis's mouth thinned.

"How much of did he leave in the stories?"

"Enough."

"We thought you dead," the Night said.

"You were taught poorly."

Varis struck again—not with lightning this ti, but with the Force shaped as raw impact. The Night hit the bulkhead hard enough to dent the plating and still ca forward.

That was the second lesson of House Nights.

Not rely that they were mythic.

That they continued.

Varis said, without looking back, "Move."

Teren did not argue. He shoved the first wave of freed captives down the side corridor and barked at Elliot, "Now."

Elliot backed one step, then another, blade still between the group and the duel as long as he could manage it. He hated every inch.

Varis lifted his hand once more, lightning splintering across the corridor in a narrow brutal fork that forced the Night's blade wide and lit his black armor from within for a heartbeat. In that sa impossible mont, Elliot saw more black figures moving through the torn passage beyond. Not coming to help. Not hurrying. rely continuing their mission through the ship as if even one of their number crossing blades with an old exile did not alter the larger geotry of the operation.

That, more than anything else, made them feel mythic.

They did not belong to the duel.

The duel belonged to them.

"Tell him," Varis said into the crackling light, "I am waiting."

The Night answered by driving forward through the dying lightning.

Teren grabbed Elliot's arm.

Then they ran.

The sternward corridors had beco a harsher world.

Descent burn had begun in earnest. Everything slanted wrong now, gravity tugging toward the forward-left under changing thrust. Steam vented in sheets from burst lines. One whole gallery had opened to the outer skin, leaving a screaming wound behind ergency plates where the world below burned faintly blue through atmosphere scatter. People moved in jerks and slides, not strides. The ship no longer belonged to its designers.

The pod bay should have been orderly.

It wasn't.

Nothing in the opened ship remained orderly except the Nights.

Half the ergency shells were already gone. Two had launched cleanly. One had exploded in the tube and blackened the ceiling above its cradle. Another hung cocked half-deployed, nose smashed into the release gate. Red warning glyphs pulsed over all of it. Crew fought with civilians for places. Freed captives scread nas over one another. A belt fighter with half his face burned away tried to cut into a sealed pod seam with a welding torch while a child beat uselessly at his back.

Teren saw the layout once and swore.

"One working descent pod," he said. "One maybe."

"Which maybe?" Elliot asked.

"The one I wouldn't trust if I hated you less."

Patch pointed. "The aft shell."

Adam had already gone there. He crouched beside the pod's lower seal, reading its damage through touch.

"It will fly," he said.

"Will it land?" Teren asked.

"That is a more difficult question."

Elliot almost laughed from sheer strain.

There were too many people.

That reality entered the bay before anyone said it.

Twenty-one freed from the midship cage, plus others who had staggered in from adjacent holds or work compartnts. n and won of every kind fear could arrange. A yellow-skinned couple pressed together near the aft bay wall, one barely able to stand. The woman's side was dark with blood. The man kept one arm around her and one hand over the wound as if human pressure alone could argue with opened tal. A horned father carrying a limp child. Two laborers hauling an old grandmother between them. Three n who had clearly been crew one hour ago and prisoners now. Too many. Too late.

Elliot knew it.

Still he heard himself say, "We can fit more if we—"

"No," Teren said.

"We try."

"No. We count."

Patch shouted from the pod hatch, "It seats six if two are small!"

"Not under damaged atmospheric entry," Teren snapped. "Six becos a coffin. Five if we want the floor bolts to survive."

"Then two trips," soone scread from the far side of the bay.

"No ti!" another answered.

Adam stood and looked at Elliot.

"Children first," he said.

The room took that as hope.

It was not.

It was arithtic wearing pity's face.

Elliot turned toward the crowd, blue saber still in his hand, the light of it casting false promise over too many eyes.

"We load the small first," he said. "The wounded next. We—"

A blaster shot cut across the bay.

Everyone dropped.

A surviving pirate, hidden behind the smashed launch cradle, fired again toward the pod hatch.

Patch hit the floor.

Adam crossed the space in two steps and threw himself over the boy as the second shot burned overhead. Elliot turned and cut the third bolt out of the air before it reached the crowd, then closed the distance and drove blue light through the pirate's rifle and chest in one motion.

When he turned back, the pod bay had changed.

Not because more people had appeared.

Because panic had.

The weak no longer waited in lines. The desperate surged. A woman tried to lift her child into the pod through bodies already climbing. One of the laborers shoved another man aside and got a fist in the mouth for it. The yellow-skinned husband near the wall was trying to half-carry, half-drag his bleeding wife toward the hatch with the useless determination of soone who had not yet accepted that love changed nothing about weight.

Teren stepped into the center of it and bellowed like a dock boss, not a strategist.

"Stop!"

The force of the sound froze the nearest ring for two breaths.

It was enough.

"Five only," he said. "The rest die if you crush the seal. Choose now or no one goes."

No one wanted to be the one who heard the sentence and believed it.

That was the real problem.

Patch stood in the pod hatch, white-faced and furious, pistol in one hand.

Adam beside him. Teren below. Elliot turned between the crowd and the corridor where Varis had vanished with the Night. Smoke thickened there now. Distant clashes of blade on blade—or blade on bulkhead, he could not tell—rang irregularly through the stern approaches.

The horned father set his limp child on the deck and fell to his knees. The child was already dead. It took Elliot only one look to know it.

The yellow-skinned woman collapsed as the husband pulled her another step.

She did not get up.

He tried to lift her again.

Couldn't.

Patch whispered, "We have to go."

Elliot rounded on him. "No one's leaving yet."

The boy stared at him as if he had said sunlight would return to the bay.

"They're all going to die."

"We don't know that."

Patch's one good eye blazed with sothing too old.

"I do."

Then Varis returned.

Not grandly. Not like a savior stepping from legend. He simply ca through the smoke with blood on one sleeve and one side of his collar burned black, as if the corridor itself had taken a bite out of him and failed to finish. No Night followed close behind.

That frightened Elliot more than if one had.

Varis looked once at the bay and understood it all at the sa speed Teren had.

Too many bodies. One real pod. One failing ship. One descent already begun. One argunt between rcy and physics that rcy was losing.

He saw the yellow-skinned couple.

He saw the dead child.

He saw Patch in the hatch.

He saw Elliot still trying to turn chaos into order by insisting it should want that.

Varis walked to the husband first.

The man looked up, wild-eyed, still trying to drag his dying wife across the deck with hands too weak to do it.

"Please," he said.

There are words that should change a room.

This one did not.

Varis crouched once, almost gently, and touched the woman's throat.

Then the man's.

He asured.

Looked at Elliot.

And said, "Weakness can hold so much."

The sentence did not make sense until his hand moved.

Fast.

Too fast for warning.

The knife he had taken from the Night's corridor clash flashed once.

The husband's throat opened.

Then the woman's, quick and rciful only if one had already abandoned every other moral vocabulary.

Both died before the blood had fully reached the deck.

The bay went utterly still.

Patch stared.

Adam did not move.

Teren's face shut into sothing colder than shock.

Elliot crossed the space with the saber raised so fast the blade almost reached Varis's throat before thought did.

"You should not have done that."

Varis did not flinch.

Behind him the pod bay alarms scread descent warnings into red smoke and blood-light. The dead couple lay at his feet like an answer no one had wanted phrased so exactly.

"We could have saved them," Elliot said.

"No," Varis answered. "You wanted to save them."

"They were alive."

"They were dying."

"We could have carried them."

"And drowned the hatch in indecision while the ship burned around us."

Elliot's blue blade hovered at the old man's neck.

For one insane second he thought of doing it.

Varis saw the thought and did not back away.

"War does not kneel to wanting," he said. "If you cannot let go when the mont demands it, this road will kill you. Then I will be the only one left to seek him."

The words hit Elliot like a second strike.

Not because he agreed.

Because in the smoking bay with one pod and too many dead already, he could not completely prove the man wrong.

That was the worst part.

Teren stepped between them before the blade touched flesh.

"Kill him later," he said. "Launch now."

The whole bay lurched.

A second pod cradle tore loose from the wall and crashed across the deck where three more civilians had been trying to reach it. One disappeared beneath it with a sound Elliot would rember longer than any argunt.

There was no longer ti for grief shaped like ceremony.

Adam moved first.

Not past the corpses. Not around them. Through the choice.

He pulled Patch bodily into the pod and strapped him hard into the side seat before the boy could protest. Then he looked back toward Elliot.

"There is room for four more at stable load."

Teren shoved two small children from the crowd toward him. Elliot caught one, Adam the other. The horned father did not follow. He knelt by his dead son and stayed there, not in surrender exactly, but in the posture of a man who had reached the edge of further motion.

Elliot forced the first child into the pod harness.

Patch grabbed the second and held him still long enough for Adam to lock the restraints.

Teren climbed in next.

"That's four," he said.

"Five," Adam corrected, taking the inward seat by the hatch.

"Then you."

"No."

The word ca from Elliot before thought.

Patch shouted it too.

Adam looked back out at the smoke, the dying bay, the corridor where more impact sounds now rolled toward them from the opened stern.

"I can guide descent better inside," he said.

"That wasn't the question."

"It is the useful answer."

Teren snapped, "Inside. Now."

Adam obeyed.

That, sohow, made the mont hurt worse.

Only Elliot and Varis remained outside.

Five seats.

No more.

The freed captives nearest the pod had already understood it. So were screaming. So pleading. So had gone beyond voice and simply watched with the unbearable expression of those seeing mathematics finish them.

Elliot wanted to break under it.

Instead he grabbed the hatch edge and hauled himself halfway in, then looked back.

Varis remained where he was, blackened sleeve, blood at the cuff, face like old stone set against fire.

"You coming?" Elliot said.

Varis looked at the bay once more, at the dead couple, the kneeling father, the burning cradle, the smoke.

Then at Elliot.

"For now."

He stepped into the pod.

The hatch sealed on the screams.

Inside the small shell there was no room for nobility.

Patch on one side, jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. Adam strapped in opposite him, silver face unreadable in the ergency glow. Teren already at the failing descent console, blood from his wrist trailing across the cracked screen. Two rescued children sobbing in low animal bursts against their harnesses. Elliot half turned in his own restraint, blue blade dead now, temple throbbing, hands still shaking with more than combat.

Varis strapped in last.

The pod released.

The drop hit like a fist.

The burning red ship lurched above and behind them, huge now through the pod's rear slit, opened along one flank by white breach-fire, black figures moving sowhere within it with the calm inevitability of a civilization reclaiming what lesser n had stolen.

The pod spun once, caught, and plunged toward the contested world below.

Cloudbanks swallowed the stars.

Atmosphere ignited around the hull in brief sheets of orange.

No one spoke for several breaths.

Then Elliot did.

Too quietly at first. Then not.

"You murdered them."

Varis looked forward, not at him.

"I chose."

"They were not yours to choose."

"They were already the ship's." The old man's voice remained level even now, which Elliot found almost unbearable. "I shortened the argunt."

Patch whispered, "Stop."

No one listened.

"You call that rcy?"

"I call it ti."

"We had enough."

"No. You had hope." At last Varis turned his head. The descent fire painted his face in strips of red and black. "You confuse the two because you still believe a clean heart alters gravity."

Elliot pulled against the harness, not to escape it, but because if he sat still he thought he might suffocate on rage.

"We could have saved them."

"Then why didn't you?"

The question landed with brutal precision.

Not because Elliot accepted it.

Because there was no answer that did not wound him more.

He had spent the whole chapter cutting cages, lifting children, choosing movent over despair, bringing blue light into a ship that had forgotten what rescue looked like. It had not been enough. It would never have been enough. That was what the bay proved.

Varis leaned back as if the conversation bored so older pain in him.

"If you cannot let go when the mont demands it," he said, "this journey will break you. The Force will teach you rcy until rcy becos a chain. Then the world will drag you by it."

"And what should I beco instead?" Elliot asked. "You?"

Varis's expression did not change.

"No," he said. "That mistake has already been made once."

There it was again.

Not confession.

Not explanation.

Only one more seam left intentionally visible.

Patch looked between them with horror he did not know where to place. Adam, still and terrible in his restraint, said nothing. But Elliot felt the machine's attention like another presence in the pod—witnessing, storing, perhaps understanding more than he wanted understood.

Teren interrupted from the controls.

"Fight later. Burn now."

The pod bucked under another layer of atmosphere and all argunt beca secondary to surviving the sky. Through the forward slit Elliot saw storm-dark cloud, bursts of fire, then below that the first shape of the contested world: black land, pale river scars, distant lightning, and the faint geotry of settlents or camps burning in scattered points across the dark.

The outer rim again.

Hell and war and no peace.

Exactly as he had thought in the hold.

And yet he still believed, sowhere beneath the fury and grief and the opened truth of what rcy could and could not buy, that light ant sothing. That cutting cages mattered even when one pod could not hold the world. That order did not belong only to empires and higher warriors and n willing to choose the knife before the plea finished sounding.

He closed his eyes once.

Opened them again to fire and falling.

Behind them, high in the sky, the red ship burned.

And sowhere within that burning wound, the Nights still moved on a mission none of them yet understood.

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