BAMF!
The second shot strikes my temple. I feel bone crack, flesh cauterize, my eye sizzling in its socket as I fall forward, pistol slipping from my hand and clattering across the grille.
BAMF!
The third shot hits my lower back, bursts out through my belly. Burned blood spatters onto the metal in front of me. I gasp again, white light in my head, no feeling in my legs as they go out from under me. I hit the deck, blood in my mouth, cracking my brow hard on the metal. There’s blood on my face. I can’t see out of my right eye, I can’t—
Running boots.
Pulsing heat.
A shadow falls over me, and as I roll over, groaning, I see a Legion uniform, a disruptor rifle aimed square at my face. “Game over, trait—”
Something slams into the figure from the side—something long and gleaming, moving like liquid. The trooper’s torso is torn away from his hips, his body collapsing in a spray of gore. I hear roars of alarm, what sounds like a cracking whip, wet, splashing sounds. A shadow flashes overhead, charcoal gray, pale white, tiny pinpricks of glowing blue, flower-shaped.
Cat.
I blink hard, tracking her movement through the steam. She moves among the troopers like a razor, like a demon, like a monster. Her mask is cast aside, blue eyes aglow, burning with ghostly light. Sick with horror, I see the arm of her GIA uniform has been torn off where I shot her. And from that bloody rent, a long cluster of thorned tentacles is spilling, two, three meters long—the same blue green as those awful plants that engulfed the colony on Octavia, lashing through the air, sharp as swords.
She cuts through the troopers as though they were made of paper and she of broken glass. They roar in alarm and fire back, disruptor shots ripping through the air. But she doesn’t stop, barely slows, hardly breathes as she tears them all to ribbons, leaving them smeared up the walls and scattered in pieces across the floor.
And then she stands, head bowed, shoulders slumped, breathing hard, that long mass of thorned whips seething at her side and dripping blood onto already soaking ground.
I close my good eye. Salt and copper in my mouth. Trying to rise.
Trying to reach for my fallen pistol.
Trying to—
“Tyler.”
She stands over me, and my heart breaks at the sight of her. Two tiny flowers of blinding blue burn in her irises. Her uniform is covered in blood. I can see the shape of what she used to be in the line of her lips, the phoenix tattoo at her throat. But my eye drifts to those long, barbed tendrils, spilling from the torn sleeve where her arm should be.
Blood is pooling at my back. My legs are growing cold. My face is numb. The logical part of my mind tells me I’m going into shock, I’m bleeding out, I’m dying. But it’s not the logical part of my mind that whispers.
“You s-saved me.”
She kneels beside me, looking at me with those eyes that were once brown. Still somehow filled with the same love she used to carry for me.
“An Ace always backs her Alpha,” she smiles.
I’m almost crying, sobbing as she reaches out and runs her fingertip down my scorched brow, my mangled cheek.
I’m wondering if I somehow got through to her, if she’s somehow realized what she’s become, my voice just a shaking whisper as I ask, “Why?”
“Don’t you understand? I love you, Tyler.” She smiles, infinitely sad, infinitely gentle. “So we love you too.”
She rises to her feet, arm writhing, and walks back toward the terminals. I struggle to raise my head, follow her through the steam, the flashing red. Her fingers blur across a series of controls, and the blast door comes crashing down, sealing us inside the chamber with a heavy THUMP.
“Wh—” I wince, holding my guts in. “What are you d-doing?”
She keeps typing, the light shifting deeper, the floor shaking harder.
“Ending this.”
I frown, trying to rise. “But … you s-s …”
“We wanted it to be us, Tyler.” Glowing blue eyes fix me through the swirling vapor, the rising dark. “In the end. You deserve for it to be us.”
“Cat … ,” I whisper, heart breaking. “Y-you’ll die too… .”
“NO.” She shakes her head, tears glittering in her eyes. “This flesh will die. But my memories, my thoughts, my love will live on. We wish you could have been in here with us. We wish you could have understood.”
“Cat …”
“We’ll miss you, Tyler. So, so much.”
I try to get up, blood spilling through my fingers, but the pain is too much to bear. I crawl toward her a meter or two, sticky red fingers scraping metal, my fingernails breaking. But I’m hurt too bad. Lost too much blood.
It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe. Hard to ignore that vision of the station coming apart, the thought of my friends, my family, everything we’ve given and lost ending here like this and just think, think, think.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I cough blood, swallow thickly as I nod.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes. “It won’t be for much longer, Ty.”
I reach toward her, bloody fingers curling. I try to speak, but choke instead. I don’t want to die here. Not like this.
And I’m so scared of it, so scared of dying alone, for an awful moment I wonder what it would be like to be one with it.
Because that’s what the Ra’haam is, I realize.
To never be alone.
I beckon her closer. Whispering. “K … Ki …”
“What?” she asks.
“Kiss,” I whisper, “… g-goodbye?”
The tears are shining in her eyes as she stops typing. I can hear the sound of heavy thumping at the blast doors now, faint voices, an alarm finally being sounded. But it’s all too late, I know. Too late. They’ll never get in here in time. Cat moves through the dark toward me, a small black shadow with a bigger shadow inside her, so vast and hungry it’s going to swallow the stars.
She kneels at my side. Looks me in the eyes.
“Kiss m-me,” I beg her.
She sighs, tears falling from those glowing eyes. And running her fingers down my cheek, she leans in and presses her lips to mine. For a moment, I’m back in that hotel on shore leave with her, the one and only night we spent together. All the love she had for me shining in her gaze, shattering like glass when I told her we shouldn’t, we couldn’t be together afterward.
I should have loved her better. I should have loved her more. And I try to tell her, with the breath I have left in me, with the lips I press to hers, opening my mind and pouring into her, telling her I’m sorry.
I love you.
And then I drive the knife right into her neck.
She reels back, flower eyes gone wide, blood spilling from her throat. But Saedii’s knife is sharper than razors, monofilament edge and Syldrathi alloy cutting clean through meat and artery and bone.
I stab again, again, drenched by the look of hurt and pain and fury in her eyes as she stumbles back onto her haunches, dark blood gushing from the wounds. Tiny tendrils whip from the edges of the stab wounds, pale and bloody, snaking blindly in the air.
The tentacles at her side flare, snaking around my neck, but she collapses before they can squeeze, shock etched on her paling face as her legs kick feebly, heels scraping, breath rattling.