Location: Sargael Station – Data Vault Sector Zeta-9
ALERT: Reactor destabilization in progress.
T-minus 3 minutes to core implosion.
All personnel: evacuate immediately.
The klaxons wailed like a dying god.
Aika sprinted through the failing corridor, vaulting over cracked tiles and debris. Veyla was beside her—blades sheathed, pulse rifle in hand, a grin of pure adrenaline spread across her face.
Behind them, the vault room was already gone—swallowed by flames, shattered containment pods, and the core-melt of a corrupted AI guardian.
They had what they came for: the MIRA file, locked in Selene's quantum-safe case.
But now the station wanted to bury it with them.
Selene's voice crackled in their comms:
"Evac window's collapsing! Rin's inbound with the skimmer, but the ring shaft's buckling—forty seconds or less!"
"Forty seconds?" Aika snapped. "That's not enough!"
"Then hold the damn line," Rin replied. "I'm cutting through ring debris now."
The corridor bent as a secondary explosion ripped open the wall ahead. Shrapnel carved the air. Aika pulled Veyla down, shielding her with her own body as fire bloomed around them.
The heat was unreal. Her armor sizzled.
Veyla turned under her, staring up at her savior.
"You always throw yourself on top of people you barely know?"
Aika exhaled, violet eyes flaring in the light.
"Only the ones who make me feel something."
They made it to the drop ledge—barely.
Rin's skimmer screamed overhead, banking hard to match the docking bracket.
"Jump!" Selene yelled from the rear compartment.
Veyla hesitated.
Not from fear—but something deeper. The kind of hesitation born of people who always expect to be left behind.
Aika saw it.
"No time for self-sabotage," she growled, grabbing Veyla by the waist and throwing them both over the edge.
They hit the skimmer's rear hatch in a slide of heat and broken gravity. Selene sealed it just as the station began to implode behind them.
The skimmer soared into cold space.
Silence returned—thick, fragile.
Aika sat back, breathing hard. Her body thrummed with leftover Omega energy, nerves still lit from near-death.
Veyla sat beside her.
For a long moment, they said nothing.
Then Veyla leaned in.
"Do you mean it?" she asked, voice low. "What you said back there. About feeling something?"
Aika met her eyes. "Yeah. I don't know what it is yet. But it's real."
Veyla's mouth quirked. "You're not afraid of what I am?"
"No," Aika said. "You should be more afraid of what I might become."
They were inches apart now—heat rising, not from battle, but from the gravity between them.
Veyla leaned in.
Their lips met.
It wasn't delicate.
It was desperate.
Messy.
Earned.
A promise made not in words, but in fire.