Archive of Our Own

Rin opens her eyes.

Her room is dark. The clock reads three hundred hours, which means she’s only slept for four. Rin stays in her bed for two, three, five minutes, staring up at the ceiling before kicking off her sheets. She gets up, cracks her back, and does a couple of stretches. Her breaths even out by the next round and Rin begins to count them out of habit. One, two, three.

She always feels this way after a particularly satisfying flight: restless, thrumming with unspent energy. She’d shot down her fair share of Federation ships yesterday and the rush always lingers, bone-deep. Space is cold and empty but Rin feels like she can still cut through the expanse and then some.

Rin finishes her stretches and looks at the clock again. Zero three-thirty. Her room is still dark; she hasn’t bothered to turn on the lights. She puts on her flight suit, movements regimented and quick. The tinted blue light of the hallway is the first thing that greets her when she opens her door.

The Argo is not a big starship by any means—it’s on the standard end for most transport cruisers—but it’s big enough for Rin in the way uncharted territory is: vast because of the mystery, the feeling that there are still things to be discovered.

So she walks. Rin lets her feet guide her to the cafeteria and past the med bay. She pokes around storage, finding nothing particularly interesting besides extra flight suits that aren’t in her size and a few boxes of soon-to-be expired rations. She rides the elevator down to the engine room and back up again.

And then Rin finds herself in the cockpit.

Altan swivels around in his chair when she enters. “It looks like you’ve been having fun,” he says in lieu of a greeting.

She frowns. “I wouldn’t call not being able to sleep fun.”

“The security feeds have never been so enlightening,” Altan says before turning back around. “Just don’t push all the buttons at once on the elevator again.”

“Okay.” Rin walks over and takes a seat in Chaghan’s chair. “Sorry for pushing your buttons.”

She barely pulls her feet away in time when Altan tries to kick them. “It makes the ship look like it’s haunted when the elevator is opening the doors on every floor.”

The corners of her lips twitch. “Didn’t know it would be something that freaked you out.”

Altan gestures vaguely out the viewport. His smile is grim. “It’s a graveyard out there, after all.”

Like she needed any reminder. “If you put it that way,” she murmurs, turning her attention to the navigational panel. Rin doesn’t know what she’s looking for specifically, only that she doesn’t want to look in Altan’s direction or out the viewport where there’s nothing but darkness and scattered stars. The computer shows that they’re still on track to reach station Seven at eight hundred hours. To the right, the power gauges are all green with the exception of fuel which toes the line between yellow and red.

“Get some rest,” Altan finally says. He crosses his arms behind his neck before leaning back, stretching his legs out. “It’s going to take a lot of energy to deal with the bureaucracy once we dock.”

“I could say the same to you,” she replies. “If anything, you’re the one that’s going to deal with General Yin. So by that logic, you should’ve slept hours ago.”

“Chaghan takes up too much of the bed.” Altan pauses, considering. “And it’s okay, you know, to say that you like being out there. Flying, fighting, and everything in-between. It’s nothing new.”

Her hands grip the armrest. Rin feels the start of an argument flutter in her chest. “That’s—“

“You and I, we’re not that different,” Altan says. He slowly turns his chair to face her and Rin fights the urge to look away. There’s always been something in his gaze that she can’t shake; he looks at her like he is picking her apart every time, like he’s always choosing what he wants to see.

“I can’t see myself doing anything else.”

“Of course,” Altan concedes. “Because you know war, don’t you? You’ve spent your entire life fighting.”

“So have you,” Rin bites back before she realizes that she’d just proved his point. She couldn't help it; that had been one of many things Chaghan drilled into her. Both of you might’ve come from Sinegard, he’d said, but there wasn’t a moment in Altan’s life when he wasn’t a soldier.

“I know what they’ve always said about us,” Altan says. “Pilots, or the good ones at least, don’t fear death. That it takes a special kind of crazy to do what we do. But the thing isn’t fearing death, it’s accepting it. And that’s what people fail to understand.”

Altan’s gaze sharpens that much more. In a second, the cockpit has narrowed down to just the two of them and the steady hum of the engine.

“People think accepting something means defeat. But you, me, and everyone else on this ship has accepted it at some point. So what do we do? We take that fear and shape it into something else.”

And there it is: the ask to the answer she’s never voiced aloud. It’s there in the grit of his teeth, in the quiet fury that sings like the edge of a knife.

“You could die out here,” Altan says. “Or you could live.”

Rin swallows.

“Isn’t that right,” he says, not a question. “Phoenix.”

The Thirteenth Division wasn’t her first choice for a unit, nor was it the second or third. It wasn’t even on her list (not that it had been on anyone’s, and that’s a different story) but she’d been one of the last students to receive division assignments after the evacuation of Sinegard Academy.

She was the only one on her shuttle, desperately wishing Kitay was with her. Actually, scratch that—she was happy her best friend was able to enlist as an engineer with his pick of stations. On the other hand, the station for Thirteen was a little more than an outpost, really—a fact that was becoming more apparent as her shuttle began to descend.

Rin had looked over the division profile on her tablet earlier. The pilots called themselves the Cike, and they were positioned at the edge of Nikara space to scout for rogue Federation ships. Rin spent her time committing their names and faces to memory; it was in her best interest to be on good terms with the people who were going to watch her back. There was only one familiar face at the end of the report: Altan Trengsin, Commander of the Cike. Small world, or so the old saying went.

She shouldered her only duffel bag when the shuttle finally landed. Rin stepped out, made it past the airlocks, and walked into a room that had probably seen better days.

“Hello?” she called out into the dim room. Above her, the lights flickered. “I’m Rin, and—”

“Oh good, you’re early,” said a voice from above. Rin watched as a girl jumped from the railing and landed gracefully on her feet in front of her. It was Qara—the only other girl in the squadron. “I’d love to give you a tour of our station later, but you need a proper flight suit first.”

“Right now?”

“Now’s as good a time as any.” Qara began to walk away, motioning for Rin to follow. “You’re just in time for patrol.”

“Patrol?”

“Yes.” Qara turned back to look at her without slowing down. “You trained as a pilot, right? This should be more than easy.”

It was quite the opposite, in fact. Rin knew that flying well in a simulator didn’t necessarily translate into flying in an actual starfighter—or flying with a squadron, for that matter—and that was where most of her hesitation came from.

“Where’s everyone else?” Rin asked, changing the subject.

“Waiting for you.” Qara smiled. “They’re going to make their judgment after you fly. Better buckle up.”

In the end, she’d let her instincts take over. She surrendered to that primal part of her that had found a home among the stars long before her consciousness did. It helps if you think of meditating, Jiang had told her once. Anything to empty your mind.

So she did. Rin listened to Altan’s instructions over the comms and followed through with the rundown for different formations, burning miles and miles of space between the ten of them. Everything felt strangely familiar—she’d like to call it muscle memory, some fluid grace born out of rounds of repetition, but something told her that it ran much deeper than that.

Back at the station, she was the last to land. By the time she disembarked and took off her helmet, something in the air had changed. The rest of the Cike were gathered in a loose semicircle and Rin glanced around, repeating their names to herself as she met their gazes: Suni, Baji, Unegen, Ramsa, Aratsha, Enki. Qara offered a small nod of encouragement as Rin stepped forward to face her commanding officers.

Altan gave her a slow grin, sharp and full of teeth. “You,” he drawled, pointing a finger right between her eyes, “still look like you’re out for blood.”

When Chaghan turned to her, Rin instinctively braced herself. No one had ever looked at her the way he was doing now—not Jima, who’d taken one look on her first day and made it clear that space wasn’t for everyone; or even Jun, who’d used her as an example of someone who should’ve stayed planetside. Chaghan looked at her like he already knew everything there was to know about her, like she was an open-shut case he’d seen before.

“You fly like you'll never get the chance to again.” He waved a hand at her as if to say, this one, she dances with danger. “You fly like you never want to land.”

Rin gritted her teeth. Chaghan sounded so much like Jiang at that moment that she wanted to march up and throttle him, audience be damned. Every pilot had their tactics, their own hidden aces. When you were up in the air, it came down to whatever helped you stay alive. So what if I do, she wanted to scream, so what if I fucking do.

She bit her tongue right after. The realization came to her with sudden clarity, then—the evidence had been all there. You remind me of someone, Jiang had said. She never bothered to ask; Jiang once said the moon reminded him of cheese. When Rin glanced at Altan, the expression on his face was unreadable.

She shook her head, all too aware of the eyes on her. “Is that a bad thing?” Rin challenged.

Altan finally spoke. His voice was a low rumble, but it cut through the tension like nothing else. “No. The good thing about flying is that the only way you can go is up from here.” He inclined his head at her in the palest imitation of a nod. “Isn’t that right, Phoenix?”

Later, she had the opportunity to call Kitay. His face was a clear square in the middle of her tablet, brightening up her room.

“Phoenix? Well, that beats all the other callsigns. You could’ve been—” Rin knew Kitay well enough to know when he was holding back a laugh, “—Cike Ten.”

“Yeah.” Rin laid down on her bed. “It’s a theme, apparently.”

Apollo and Artemis, Icarus and the sun. Rin ran through the rest of them in her head: Mercury, Neptune, Aries, Taurus, Leo, Cygnus. She was more than familiar with the old stories. To be a myth, a legend—those were the type of narratives that could own you. It was one thing to be remembered. It was another to be immortalized.

“At the end of the day, it’s just a name,” Kitay said. “And you’re the type to rewrite a story with an entirely different ending just to make it yours.”

“The story of the Phoenix is already inspiring. Icarus, on the other hand, is at the other end of the spectrum.”

“Think about how it must’ve felt to be a legend in the body of a boy who flew the line between danger and salvation.”

Rin narrowed her eyes. “Spoken like a true engineer. You make it sound like we have an expiration date.”

“I’ve never met a pilot who didn’t fly like they had a vendetta against the stars.”

Was that true? Probably. No, not probably. Yes. It was a feeling that rang familiar for every pilot: how heavy it was, to have the weight of a galaxy on your shoulders.

“I’d rewrite more than just the ending.” Rin threw an arm over her face and sighed.

Kitay’s laugh bridged the distance between them in the span of a second.

“I’ve never known you to do otherwise.”

Rin wanted to walk right back into the Argo the minute they landed on station Seven. Altan and Chaghan were immediately led away by a delegation of Division officers, which left everyone else standing awkwardly on the dock before Baji suggested that they should look for food.

So now they’re in a mess hall that could probably pass for a medical wing with the all-white decor, only broken up by people in matching blue uniforms bearing the crest of the Dragon General. Everyone had given them a wide berth as they entered the hall, so they made their way to a corner table after getting food.

“Well,” Ramsa says. “The five-second rule can probably be extended to ten here.”

“I feel like I’m getting my dirty everywhere just by existing,” Baji agrees. “But out of all the stations we’ve docked at, this is definitely the one with the best food.”

Baji wasn’t wrong. Anything was an upgrade from the prepackaged meals they had on the Argo, but this was the first station that had more than five options at a given time. Rin had ordered a serving of steamed buns and was pleasantly surprised by the fluffiness.

“I hope this is our permanent assignment,” Suni says. “I’m tired of hopping between stations even though it means serving Yin Vaisra.”

“You’re only saying that because it’s Altan that has to deal directly with him,” Unegen points out. “You’ll have a different opinion if you were in his shoes.”

“I have a feeling that if I was in Altan’s shoes, we wouldn’t have made it off the ramp.”

“Rin.” Ramsa waves a hand in front of her face. “Didn’t you go to school with one of his sons?”

Rin stops chewing. On some subconscious level, she had accepted the fact that she was bound to run into him sooner or later on his father’s station. But if she’s honest, the thought of Yin Nezha hasn’t crossed her mind since.

“Yeah,” she says through a mouthful of bread. “He was a real asshole.”

Ramsa bursts out laughing. Qara, Enki, and Aratsha have varying levels of interest on their faces but she doesn’t have the energy to elaborate as she finishes off her food. If the General was anything like his son, well—maybe she should’ve taken Altan’s earlier advice to sleep.

When Chaghan calls them back to the Argo an hour later, Rin’s only half-awake on her feet.

“Barring Imperial orders aside, General Vaisra has graciously welcomed us into his ranks,” Altan starts, and the sarcasm in the last half isn’t lost on anyone. “The chain of command will remain the same but we will now be patrolling this sector of Nikara space with Seventh Division squadrons.”

Baji raises his hand. “You’re leaving something out. There’s no way that was all Vaisra said.”

Altan smiles thinly. “We have two options moving forward. We can transfer over to the Kingfisher, one of the Division’s capital ships under Captain Jinzha, or we can keep our operations on the Argo—”

“Yes,” Ramsa says.

“—and have a new pilot join our unit,” Altan finishes.

“Yes—wait, what?”

“It’s exactly what it sounds like,” Chaghan cuts in. “Either way, we’ll be under surveillance to make sure we’re still in line.”

“Okay,” Suni says. “But do we know who the new member is?”

“Does Yin Nezha ring a bell?” Chaghan asks and Rin feels her nails start to dig into the palms of her hands. That rings many bells, actually. Of the alarm kind. She pointedly ignores how she can suddenly feel the weight of seven pairs of eyes on the back of her head.

“The General’s second son.” Qara’s voice is thoughtful. “Well, I’m leaning towards the second option. The Argo is more than capable of serving as our base of operations. All we need to do is request more fuel and have a hyperdrive check.”

“I agree,” Baji says, a bit too loudly for it to be not on purpose. “We’ll take the smaller asshole.”

Altan nods. “Show of hands for the second.”

She’s the last one to raise her hand. It doesn’t go unnoticed by Altan and Rin forces herself to not flinch when she meets his gaze. She breathes in, out. One, two, three. She empties her mind the same way she has done many times before. When Rin lowers her hand, she feels entirely in control of herself again.

“Alright,” Altan says. “I’ll report this back. Patrol logistics will be sent to your tablets shortly. And before I forget, Vaisra said that we have free reign of this station so try not to blow anything up, Ramsa. Dismissed.”

Rin is hopelessly lost.

The others had decided to explore the station together, but exhaustion had crept up on her before she could make it very far with them. She’d ended up on a couch in a nondescript lounge with the intention of catching up with everybody after a nap. That had been her first mistake; she’d woken up disoriented with no clear recollection of how long she’d actually slept for. Her second was when she’d picked a direction and started to walk, as a few turns down several identical hallways only made her even more frustrated.

Rin eventually finds herself in an observatory that was twice the size of Sinegard’s and plants herself down on a chair, cursing the architects who’d planned the layout of this station. She’s on the verge of screaming out in exasperation when a voice she has not heard in six months cuts across the room.

“Are you lost?”

She whips her head around to face the doorway. Nezha’s there, leaning against the wall like he’s been watching her this entire time. He offers her a half-smile when she meets his eyes, uncrossing his arms as she stands up and takes a single step in his direction.

“No,” she replies. Rin lets herself look at him, really look at him, in the way she’s never gotten the chance to before: unguarded, with no weapons drawn. He’s gotten taller—one whole head, how unfair is that—and his shoulders fill out his flight suit in a way that makes her feel inadequate in comparison. He still carries himself in that old, self-assured way—something that must be inherent in all members of the Yin family—but it’s more tempered this time around, a little more restrained.

“Okay,” Nezha says, still keeping his eyes on her. “But would you like a guided tour anyway?”

It would be the easiest thing in the world to reject his offer and move on; she has a feeling he’ll leave if she told him to go away. But he sounds sincere, as sincere as he sounded when he apologized to her before war broke out—nothing like a life-altering event to make amends—and Rin figures that she has nothing to lose now.

“Fine,” Rin says and crosses the room. “You can also tell me who designed this station because it’s confusing as fuck.”

Nezha smiles as he leads her out into the hallways. “So you were lost.”

Rin fights the urge to wipe it off his face when she falls into step beside him. “I was just exploring,” she answers. “Freely. At my own pace.”

“Well, your exploring led you to the fifth floor which also happens to be the topmost floor,” Nezha concedes. “The landing dock, hangar bay, and medical wing are all on the first floor, dining and maintenance is main, command on the third, and recreation areas on the fourth.”

As Nezha leads her through the station, Rin realizes that she actually enjoys listening to him. The thought becomes less horrifying with each passing second she spends with him. It reminds her a little of Kitay in that moment, of how she’s always been content to listen even when she was unfamiliar with the subject half the time.

“In response to your earlier question, I don’t know who designed the station. But I know Father wanted to make it white because he said that it brightens up the space. Or something along those lines.”

Rin snorts. “There are other ways to accomplish that without making it look like he just hates color.”

“I’m sure. But at least it makes everything cleaner.”

“Is it clean because if a spot gets dirty someone is compelled to clean it or because everyone is afraid to make a mess?”

“Both reasons are perfectly valid,” Nezha says. “They would probably accomplish the same goal.”

Rin is almost disappointed when he leads her back to the entrance of the mess hall. “I have to meet with Father,” Nezha says apologetically. “But the Cike should be in there.”

True to his word, the rest of her squadron is crowded around the same corner table as earlier. Altan and Chaghan are seated at the end of the table, engrossed over what had to be patrol logistics. Qara, Enki, and Aratsha look like they’re all in the middle of a heated debate, complete with wild hand gestures. Rin orders another round of steamed buns and arranges herself between Ramsa and Suni.

Ramsa reaches for one but she swats his hand away. “You can order some for yourself.”

Qara looks over. “Oh, so he meant it.”

“Meant what?”

“Nezha said that he was going to look for you earlier. Something about having a feeling of where you’d be.”

Rin’s not going to look too deep into that—she’d gravitated towards the observatory the same way she did at Sinegard. People were creatures of habit, and she knew that fact better than most.

“So,” Baji says, dragging out the o’s. “Is he still an asshole?”

Rin considers the question. “Not as bad as before,” is what she ends up saying. Let it be known that she’ll give credit where it’s due.

Suni ruffles her hair and nods sagely. “Could be worse.”

“Did he give you a tour too?”

Aratsha props his chin on his hands. “A tour and the entire history of this station.”

Big fucking surprise. “Sounds about right.”

“He showed us the training room,” Unegen says. “Then flew one round on the simulator.”

That was logical. One of the ways to get acclimated with a new squadron was to practice flying on the simulator just to build up that cohesiveness. Her initiation just happened to take that to another level.

“It’s funny, because he flies a little bit like you.”

Now that stops her thoughts. The only person that remotely flew like her was Altan and that was because they had both trained under Jiang. From Kitay’s recollection, Jun was strictly methodological. Every move had to be deliberate, executed precisely the way it was meant to.

And Nezha had been Jun’s best student.

Rin tries for a smile that she can’t quite feel. “Guess we’ll have to see if he can keep up on patrol.”

She shot down her first Federation starfighter a week after joining the Cike. She also shot down its partner approximately thirteen seconds later according to her flight log. Time was the furthest thing from tangible when you were burning miles in the fraction of a second.

“How do you feel?” Altan asked when they disembarked.

Rin shrugged. “The same.”

It didn’t hit her until she was showering later. She’d turned on the water on the coldest setting, hoping that it’d be enough for the adrenaline that still ran through her veins.

Action and reaction were the only two things a pilot would ever need, or so the saying went. But she hadn’t been relying solely on those two, no—if Rin was honest, she was shocked at how pleased she’d felt. Like it was just another accomplishment to aim for. The heavens only knew how badly she was starved for those.

She began to look forward to patrol. It became a game to her, after that. Her body was a weapon and her ship was a natural extension of it. Rin understood it well: in war, it was victory or death. And in a battle of cosmic proportions, winning meant surviving.

She wanted to win. She wanted to take off and never land.

Kitay had said that he’d never met a pilot who didn’t fly like they had a vendetta against the stars. Rin couldn’t speak for the others, but she could confidently say that she didn’t have one against them—just one for everything else.

Which was why she didn’t know what to make of it when Altan announced that they were ceasing operations in their sector of space during one of their daily briefings.

“Imperial command has acknowledged our efforts and decided that we’re a better fit for the frontlines,” Altan said. “The intelligence reports show that the Federation of Mugen is growing bolder. Divide and conquer—it’s a tried and true tactic that nearly won them the second war. And unfortunately for us, all signs point to the fact that we have not learned from our mistakes.”

Altan gestured at the star maps in front of them. “There’s been increased activity in the second and third quadrants of Nikara space. One day they’ll target stations One and Two then Eight and Nine. It’s all guerilla tactics. Command hopes that we can establish a united aerial front with the rest of the Divisions.”

“Why does this sound like something that's good in theory but bad in execution?” Baji asked.

“That’s because it is,” Ramsa said. “This is going to work out as well as our month-long request for rations that aren’t dried yams and jerky.”

Altan’s smile was brittle. “We ship out at ten hundred hours.”

Rin glanced at the maps. Over the last month, attacks had increased in frequency but not in scale. There hadn’t been a direct target yet but Irjah had loved to remind everyone to always look for patterns and she didn’t like what she was seeing now. The Federation was just testing the limits with these border skirmishes.

She had a feeling that an eventual strike was just on the horizon.

A single look around the table told her that she wasn’t the only one who’d picked up on it. The unspoken message was clear: this was only the calm before the storm.

Something must’ve shown on her face because Altan stopped her before she could exit the room with the rest of the Cike.

His expression was grim in the dim light, serious in a way that drew all the shadows to the corners of his eyes. Altan was all blade, no handle. It was not how she always saw him, but she could not see him any other way now.

“This doesn’t change anything.”

She didn’t answer immediately. Rin let the silence hang in the air for a little bit longer, listening to the sound of their breathing.

Her fingers twitched. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

Rin’s thinking about that conversation now as she streaks toward a squadron of Federation starfighters, shooting down two of them in a rapid burst of laser fire.

Rin was aboard the Argo within seconds when the station-wide Code Red alarm sounded. She could barely concentrate on Altan’s rundown as they suited up. She’d caught the gist of it—station Six was under Federation attack; they needed immediate assistance—but all she’d heard was the station number and her mind had only thought of one thing: Kitay.

Jumping from hyperspace into the middle of a battle was one of the worst tactical decisions anyone could ever make, but they had no choice. They had joined the rest of division Seven’s ships on the station’s perimeter, facing a total war zone.

“All wings in formation,” Altan had said over the comms. “We’ll fly in and clear a path for the Kingfisher, Cormorant, and Seagrim. Our goal is to divert attention away from the station.”

It was a solid plan—up until the Federation had taken notice of reinforcements.

“Under heavy fire,” Chaghan said before cutting the line. “Section off and split. Phoenix, you're with Orion.”

So she’s flying with Nezha now, facing a squadron of Federation fighters that have locked onto their trail. They barrel roll to avoid the first few blasts of fire before flying head-first into another wing of Division Seven ships, banking sharply to the left and right to avoid friendly fire at the last possible second.

“Good split,” she says, slightly breathless.

“I did say that I would counter you,” he reminds her as they reverse course, heading back in the direction of the station.

It doesn’t get any easier from there. She lapses into silence with Nezha, deflecting laser blasts and shooting down ships together. This is good. Easy. The explosions are a mere blip in her consciousness; she’s stopped feeling them a long time ago. Her mind is only focused on one goal.

Until, of course, she sees an explosion from Station Six out of the corner of her eye. It brings her back, just for a moment: Kitay.

The momentary distraction is enough for a Federation ship to clip her with a laser blast.

“Fuck.” Her shields flicker for a moment before stabilizing again. She’s lucky that it wasn’t a direct hit.

“Are you okay?”

She wants to nod but remembers that he can’t see. “Yeah,” Rin answers. “It’s just—” Her heart clenches. “Kitay,” she finishes softly. Rin doesn’t know what made her confess that, but the words are out before she can take them back.

“Kitay?” Nezha echoes before realization hits. “Oh.”

“He’s on there somewhere,” she confirms before flying directly at a Federation unit and opening fire with a new vengeance. Nezha follows suit and soon they manage to clear their immediate area.

Altan’s voice is a static crackle when he comes back online. “Fall back. They’re retreating.”

“Not all of them,” Suni says.

“It’s unusual for the Federation to pull out like this.” Qara’s voice is steady. “There must be an ulterior motive.”

“Orders from Division command. The Kingfisher and Seagrim are going to cut them off before they can make the jump. Rendezvous at the Argo.”

Rin cuts the line. Station Six is still standing in the distance, so close—

“Rin.” Nezha’s voice breaks through her thoughts; she hasn’t muted him. “You can go, you know. I’ll cover for you. Your ship did get clipped, after all.”

That’s all the convincing she needs. Rin reaches the station in a matter of seconds and her eyes widen. She takes a few cursory laps around, noting how the defensive shields were completely destroyed.

Rin doesn’t get the full picture until she docks and enters the half-collapsed hanger bay. The Federation must’ve bombed this to forcefully gain entry, and it shows. Rin sticks to the walls, hoping that the ceiling was stable enough to not cave in.

The hallways are strangely empty. Rin feels her stomach sink when she sees the remains of what must’ve been a struggle every few feet or so. There were only so many rooms that Kitay could be in. She’d ruled out the hangar, which meant that it was either maintenance or communications.

She goes for maintenance.

If the layout was anything like station Seven, it would be one floor above. Rin half runs, half walks up the stairs. What greets her are collapsed hallways and flickering lights, unmoving bodies piled near doorways. She tastes bile in the back of her throat as she hurries on, calling out Kitay’s name.

There’s a shuffle underneath one of the fallen metal sheets in the corner and Rin rushes over, nearly tripping over shattered glass and what must be pieces of the wall.

“Rin?” It’s a little more than a croak, but it’s enough to make her cry out in relief.

“I’m here,” she says, crouching down. From what she can see, Kitay’s bleeding from a deep gash on his forehead and from several cuts on his neck where his engineer’s uniform did not cover. The rest of him is pinned down below the sheet. “I’ll try to get this off of you.”

Kitay shakes his head, wincing in the process. “Go find Venka,” he manages. “She needs help more than me.”

How many more people and classmates would she find in the rubble? She thinks of Raban and Niang, Kureel and Arda. Rin gives a tight nod to Kitay before she turns away.

It doesn’t take long to find Venka but when she does, Rin curses herself for forgetting her emergency medical kit on her ship in her haste. She’s hardly the most qualified person to administer medical treatment, but at least she remembers enough from Enro’s class on how to treat entry wounds. Rin unzips her flight suit and strips off her undershirt, bunching it in an effort to slow the flow of blood but it’s not close to being enough.

Rin fumbles for her comms and reaches the first person she thinks of.

“Are you back on the Argo?”

“No,” Nezha says. “Altan wants us to shoot down every straggler—”

“I found Kitay and Venka in maintenance,” she interrupts. “They’re badly injured and—”

He doesn’t let her finish. “I’ll be there.”

“Bring your medical kit. Please,” Rin adds as an afterthought, mainly because that’s the only thought circling around in her mind as she watches over Venka’s unmoving body. Please be okay, she thinks. Please.

Nezha keeps his line open; she can hear his breathing and it grounds her even as her heart feels like it’s going to burst out of her chest.

A few feet away, Kitay stirs. “Rin, listen—”

“Don’t move,” she says. “I called Nezha. He’s coming now.”

“The Federation came in with the intent to look for something,” Kitay says, talking over her. “They made their way through the hanger, then maintenance, then all the way to command.”

She frowns. “I’m not following.”

“They could’ve damaged the airlocks or sabotaged the reactors, but they needed this station to be running while they were searching for whatever they were after.”

On the other side of the line, she hears Nezha docking. She hears the sharp intake of breath and a string of muttered curses when he probably sees the wreckage, and then there’s nothing but the sound of running.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she says. “What could they possibly be after? And why this station in particular?”

“I don’t know,” Kitay says. “But I know no one storms a station and leaves it operational unless it’s worth their lives too.”

Rin’s so deep in thought that she doesn’t notice Nezha until he drops down on his knees next to her, shouldering his medical bag. He jerks his head sharply in Kitay’s direction as he opens the kit, pulling out the necessary supplies with clinical efficiency. She takes the hint and stands on shaky legs, making her way back to Kitay.

The sheet isn’t easy to move. Rin relies on a mixture of desperation and adrenaline as she shifts it a few inches at a time, trying her best to not set it back down again. Once Kitay is in the clear, Rin collapses on the ground next to him, breathing hard. She crawls over, finds his hand, and holds on to it like a lifeline.

“Rin.” Kitay’s eyes are fixated on hers. Around her wrist, his fingers are cold iron. “Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t.” Not now, not ever.

“Talk to me,” Kitay says. “Tell me something you’ve never told me before.”

Her laugh is hollow. “You know everything about me.”

“Not everything,” Kitay replies. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his face and Rin begins to blot some of it away. “I don’t know who you were before.”

Her hand stills. “That’s not important,” Rin says a little more sharply than she intends to. “Who I was before doesn’t matter.” It never mattered, she doesn’t say.

“It matters to me,” Kitay whispers. His voice is earnest in the only way he can make it sound and it lands like a punch to her chest. “Nothing you say or do will change who you are to me.”

“It’s just—” Rin pauses. Where does she even start to explain that she had to kill every part of her just to get into Sinegard? How can she recount the times where she had to piece herself back together after she’d broken apart?

“Tell me about Tikany then,” Kitay says, sensing her hesitation.

“Tikany?” Rin fails to keep the disbelief out of her voice. “Tikany’s just full of dirt.” It was also full of anger and sadness and endings. She’d been hungry, always hungry, so hungry, for a new beginning.

“Then tell me about dirt.”

Kitay, she thinks, must be delirious now. “What?”

“Dirt has life in it too, you know. I’ve only read about it, but I know that things can grow out of it. You just have to look closely.”

She doesn’t know what to make of it when he looks straight and through her when he says it.

“Alright,” Rin says. “I’ll tell you all about it if you just stay with me.”

The Tikany of the new Nikara Empire wasn’t all that different from the old in the days of Earth. Actually, nothing much in general had changed—if the first Poppy War ended with the destruction of Earth, the second was proof that humanity had yet to find a universe that could be big enough to satisfy the greed of men.

The planet Nikan was still divided into twelve provinces, but everything was directly managed by the Imperial government this time. The twelve Generals retaliated by concentrating their power and resources to build their space stations, literally taking their politics out of the world. Consequently, there was a swift response to build a neutral station creatively dubbed Sinegard Two to keep an eye on things, proving that there was no easy escape from the higher powers—or from taxation, for that matter.

What runs in a circle? Tutor Feyrik liked to ask. History, and the mistakes of man.

She’d been a war orphan, a product of two unfortunate planetsiders who’d been called to serve for the second war and had never come back. Taken to the stars, people said. Born on the ground, taken to the stars.

Rin tried scouring the public databases but had come up empty; that was when she was forced to accept that some things were just lost in war. She didn’t know why she’d expected differently. Who was she kidding? Planetsiders were but a mere second thought to the people who lived above them.

Auntie Fang’s backhands were often delivered with words like greedy and selfish. Rin learned to deal with the taste of iron on her tongue, telling herself that she was allowed to want more in life. Her life consisted of taking care of Kesegi after school and laboring as a runner for the Fang’s smuggling ring on the weekends. Rin didn’t want to work in the Fang’s textile factory when she grew up, and she couldn’t see the end of her days if she went to work in the fields. The only other option was to head to the capital to work in the shipyards, but that had sounded as appealing as walking into a cage.

So she’d directed her gaze upwards, mapping out her future in the cosmos. It’s a big world and an even bigger universe; if she’s greedy to want more then so be it. Maybe she wanted to take to the stars too, if only to claim the part of her that had died before she even lived.

And maybe that’s why she persisted through her early years at Sinegard, brushing off the sneers of dirtsider and go back to the ground where you belong. It had stung when she couldn’t activate her anti gravs the first couple of times and even worse when she’d realized that she had absolutely no prior knowledge of the working mechanics behind a flight simulator. But Rin knew theory better than anyone else, and that was more than enough to give her a fighting chance.

Until Jiang, of course.

“No one ever bothers with Lore,” he said. “Actually, I take that back. There was somebody else, and he was just like you.” He raked his gaze over her. “People who’ve grown up with the galaxy within their reaches think that they’ve got it all figured out. Why concern yourself with the why’s if you know the how’s, Runin?”

“It’s Rin,” she corrected more out of habit than anything else.

“Hmm. Better than what others have been calling you.”

She bristled. “I thought we were here to discuss the mechanics of flight.”

“Yes, you are,” Jiang conceded. “But for me—”

He paused and turned his attention to the skies, fixated on a passing starship. The Academy’s observatory was a large glass geodesic dome situated on the southern end of the school, overlooking the landing dock. Before she could ask him about what he meant, Jiang shook his head sharply and began to pace the perimeter of the room.

“If you’re really serious, give me your tablet.”

Rin gaped at him. “What?”

Jiang only held out his hand expectantly, wiggling his fingers. Rin barely held in a sigh when she reluctantly dug it out of her satchel and handed it over.

“You should really organize your home page,” Jiang said as he tapped away. “I don’t understand how you can navigate anything on this. Is Irjah still going by Sunzi’s principles? And a ninety on Jima’s latest test? I think you can do better, Rin.”

Her mouth dropped open. “What are you—”

“Done!” Jiang handed her the tablet back. “Please review these videos I’ve downloaded and meet me back here next week.”

“Wait—”

“Wait? Your assignment is waiting,” called Jiang as he swept out of the room without looking back.

She had the pleasure of relaying the events to Kitay during dinner. He nearly choked on his soup when she’d said that the assignment had been to watch twenty videos of birds.

“Birds? That’s so—”

“Stupid, I know,” she hissed. “What the fuck do birds have to do with Lore?”

Kitay shakes his head. “I was going to say ‘interesting’.”

“What? You’re supposed to be on my side.”

Kitay shrugged. “I’ve never seen birds before.”

Rin stopped chewing. “Never?”

“I’ve never been planetside,” Kitay reminds her. He propped his elbow on the table, resting his chin on his hand. “I’ve only read about them. And there were some that couldn’t fly too, which I think defeats the purpose.”

“Back on Nikan, we only have like ten different kinds of birds,” Rin says. “And they’re all kind of small.”

“Those videos are still a thousand times more interesting than my engineering homework. I’m more than happy to watch the videos with you. We can start tomorrow.”

True to his word, Kitay watched them with her. By the next week, she’d had a whole sheet of notes detailing the flight patterns of different species. She went to the next meeting with high hopes, thinking that she’ll finally be making progress.

She was wrong.

Every week, Jiang downloaded new videos for her to watch. And after every week, she was no closer to receiving proper pointers for the simulator runs. He would only watch her man the controls, staying silent the entire time before she would be shot down under three minutes. The only comment he would have for her was to calm her breathing, as her biometric readings were off the charts. “Count your breaths and empty your mind,” he’d said. “Try meditating in your free time.”

In Rin’s opinion, that hardly sounded like advice.

“He’s the best thing you have after Jun banned you,” Kitay would say every time she complained. “Just stick it out for a little longer.”

But she couldn’t. The date for the Trials was creeping closer every day, so much that she finally broke and demanded an explanation.

“I don’t understand! I’ve analyzed the flight behaviors of eighty different species of birds, including this—this penguin bird, which doesn’t fly, by the way—and I haven’t gotten any feedback from you.”

Jiang shook his head slowly like he was about to discipline a young child. “The first masters of flight were birds.” He narrows his eyes at her expression. “I know, I know. You’re so young. In the days of the Red Emperor, the skies were full of them. And as for the penguin, you can think of it as flying in the water—or is that too different for you?”

At her silence, he continued. “Birds can take to the skies, but they have to come back down to land. You are just like—” Jiang shook his head, but not before Rin caught how his face darkened.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that have to do with flying?”

“The entire thing is a cycle,” Jiang continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “It won’t save you, you know, whatever it is that you’re looking for out there. Whatever that’s making you always want to take off and never land—what goes up must come back down.”

“Good thing I’m not looking for anything,” she spat back. “I got off the ground all by myself. I’m not going to be shot down again.”

Rin didn’t think she’d ever been so mad in her life. She was here to become a pilot, no matter the cost. She’d felt like she had a purpose for once, something other than the tiny voice in the back of her mind telling her that she could live forever if she just learned how to fly.

Jiang looked at her like she had blown out all the stars in his skies.

“If you fly because you want to be saved, then you’re already gone.”

Nezha’s the only one in the cafeteria when Rin walks in. She’s not all that surprised to see him, to be honest. He did look rather worried when Altan had called her to stay behind on the Argo after the team debrief.

“How did it go?” Nezha asks when she slides in the opposite seat. Rin picks at the sleeves of her flight suit before answering, considering her words.

“Better than expected,” she says. “I was reprimanded for going against orders, but that’s a given. He wasn’t going to let me off until I mentioned what Kitay told me about the Federation. He said that it would be a good piece of information to report back to Vaisra.”

“Why does that sound so callous? Station Six is down, there is possibly a data breach, and it just comes down to making a report.”

Rin pulls at her cuffs. A thread is starting to come loose; she should probably cut it before it unravels. “We’re not equipped to deal with that. Backup is usually what a Division can offer,” she snaps. “I don’t know if you missed it or not, but the Cike is just one unit. We have barely enough ships to be considered half a wing.”

“That still doesn’t explain why he was ready to throw you under until you explained otherwise.”

“It’s not like that,” she says defensively. “With Altan, it’s not so much as me disobeying orders but the fact that he has to correct that oversight from your father, of all people.”

“Is that all?”

“He still thinks you’re the enemy. That you’ll report differently to your father.”

Nezha makes a noise of disbelief. “Altan has nothing to be afraid of. Our stories match up. I’ll tell my father what we agreed on: that your ship was clipped, you had to land, and I was just there for backup.” Nezha lets out a long breath and shakes his head, clearly agitated. “If anything, this made it look like our division cared enough to order a rescue operation for station Six survivors.”

“Yeah, but Altan doesn’t know that. You need to understand—the Cike, we’re used to scouting and shooting down some rogue Federation starfighters here and there. And we’ve gotten fucked over plenty of times before, like the time when the Fifth sent us to the frontlines in our last assignment with no backup.”

She sees the instant the argument leaves him—Nezha visibly deflates, shoulders falling back like she’d knocked the breath out of his lungs. Rin slumps back in her seat too. She would’ve gone after Kitay no matter what the consequences were, but there’s something comforting knowing that Nezha was willing to have her back. Her eyes widen right after that realization—when had she started thinking of him as her partner? Since he was the first person you called, a tiny voice inside her says.

“Is something wrong?”

Nezha’s voice breaks her out of her thoughts and Rin realizes that she had been scowling at the table. She jerks her head back up and tries for a neutral expression.

“No,” she says and immediately realizes that it’s the furthest thing from convincing. Rin tries for another route. “What’s the story behind Orion?”

Nezha leans forward and props his elbows on the table, cupping his chin in his hands. “Chaghan said that I had the look of a hunter, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Said that I flew like I was always chasing after something I couldn’t let go of.”

“Don’t take it personally,” she finds herself saying. “It’s a theme here for people to look too deep into something. Half the time they come up disappointed.”

“What about Phoenix?” Nezha asks, turning the question back on her.

Rin shrugs. “I don’t know. Something about being reborn every time I fly. Or so the legend goes.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve thought about the old stories,” Nezha admits softly. “And even longer since I’ve thought about how everything was like before. No one bothers with the stars now because everything looks the same up here.”

“What else do we tell stories for, if not to remember?” For a brief moment, Rin lets herself think of her last days on Nikan. If there’s anything she’s missed at all, it has to be how the sky had looked in the minutes before sunrise: with light breaking through, turning the last traces of night into gold. “When you name something, you own it. Every single sad and sorry part.”

“Rin. Stop pacing.”

She slowed down but didn’t stop, at least not completely. It was definitely not enough for Kitay, who set his tablet down on his desk with a resounding thud.

“You’re going to wear a path down on the carpet,” he said, the faintest trace of exasperation in his voice.

“It can be something to remember me by.”

“I can confidently say that I don’t need any more reminders.”

Rin flopped down on Kitay’s bed, turning her head and pressing her cheek into his sheets. “I’m just anxious about tomorrow.”

“Oh trust me, the rest of our class is too. But maybe not as much as you.” He eyed her from across the room. “I bet money on you.”

That brought a small smile to her face. “As you should.”

“I don’t think you need to worry so much,” Kitay continued. “You’ve become a force to be reckoned with under Jiang. Han yielded to you along with two other people yesterday. Even Venka did, in the end.”

Rin closed her eyes. Everything Kitay said was true. She wasn’t going to deny that it felt good being at the top for once, especially when she’d spent half the time being at the bottom. But she knew her match with Nezha extended beyond having something to prove; it wasn’t a match where she could just focus on outflying someone or having the most points at the end—this was personal. And it would remain personal from the moment she sat down across from him on the simulator to the second it ended.

“I don’t want him to yield,” Rin said.

“Then what do you want?” Kitay asked, sounding like he already knew the answer.

She wanted to tear him down. She wanted to even the score. She wanted to see the look on his face when the girl he’d called a foul-mouthed, skinny bitch beat him at his own game.

“Complete annihilation,” Rin said. She failed to say it with a straight face and ended up laughing along with Kitay until her vision was on the verge of tearing up.

“I know something that will get your mind off the Trials.” Kitay scooted over in his chair until he was at the foot of his bed. “At least for a little while, I promise.”

Rin sat up, leaning against the wall. “Is this for Irjah’s class?”

“Yeah. I just finished my final report and I was hoping you could play devil’s advocate or something. Poke some holes here and there.”

“I have a feeling your argument is airtight. Chen Kitay and loopholes? Don’t know him.”

“I know. But this isn’t a pure report on engineering principles and strategies. It’s a critique of a particular defense mechanism.”

That got her attention. “Okay. What is it?”

“The Trifecta’s Belt.”

“Isn’t that thing still under construction?” The confusion must’ve shown on her face because Kitay rushed to explain.

“No. It was completed a week ago but it hasn’t been announced to the general public yet—” Kitay smiled sheepishly as if to say, perks of being the Chief Engineer’s son “—although all the Generals know about it. They’re still testing it, as far as I know.”

“Won’t this give you an edge in Irjah’s class?” Rin questioned. She didn’t know a lot about engineering, but she knew that some concepts were more hotly debated than others.

“Oh, Irjah doesn’t care about what topic we choose. He just cares about how well we present the issue and how to fix it.”

Rin settled back down and hugged her knees to her chest. “Alright. I’m listening.”

Kitay cleared his throat and set his tablet up. “Before the construction of Trifecta’s Belt, the only aerial defense we had against the Federation were the twelve stations along with the Division starfleets. We almost lost the second war because those very same forces were overwhelmed, making way for a breach.”

Kitay paused and looked expectantly at her. Rin stared blankly back until he mouthed humor me over the edge of his tablet.

“That’s right,” Rin said in what she hoped was a good impersonation of Irjah. “Nikan’s army consisted of tanks and mounted cannons, which were designed specifically for shooting down capital ships, not individual starfighters.”

“And that’s when the idea of a defense net came into play. Plans were drafted for one that would cover the airspace between the planet and the stations, aptly named after the three legendary pilots who put up one final fight for Nikan. When activated, the net was designed to explode on impact, enough to wipe out multiple fleets of starfighters.”

As Kitay talked, the details became clearer to Rin. Nikan’s communication lines between its ground and aerial forces had always been restrained at best; when she had been planetside, she’d only heard bits and pieces about the construction.

“But the problem isn’t with the initial design; it’s with the execution,” Kitay continued. “Simply put, there are two separate activation sequences. A fail-safe, if we’re going to be technical. There needs to be an agreement from both sets of forces because the net keeps what’s inside in and what’s outside out.”

Rin could suddenly see why Kitay had chosen to hone in on this issue.

“This could be easy to implement in theory, but the twelve Generals didn’t want just one station to be in control,” she cut in.

Kitay nodded and pointed to a diagram of Nikan’s airspace. “The next best thing was a compromise to make each station responsible for a section of the net. In other words, all stations must activate their sector within two minutes of Imperial command.”

“What if a station is overwhelmed again?” She suddenly felt something heavy settle in the pit of her stomach. “Or if it even gets destroyed in a firefight?”

“If a station is unable to input their codes in time, their sector would be the place for a breach.”

“Please tell me that there’s a second method.”

Kitay closed his presentation and sat back. “That’s what they’re testing right now. The activation codes are set to a specific frequency, unique to each station. Theoretically, if such a thing does happen—which I really hope doesn’t—one of our ships can act as a carrier by proxy if it just mimics the hailing frequency.”

“I’m still guessing that it’s still a problem.”

Kitay frowned. “To get close enough to signal, the ship would be at the very edge of the blast radius. You’ll have to be at the edge of the atmosphere.”

“Oh.” Rin blew out a breath. “Yeah, that’s bad.”

“A capital ship with intact shields could probably withstand it,” Kitay said. “But like I said, they’re still figuring things out even though I’m sure it’ll take another year to come to a conclusion. That’s why I wanted Irjah’s feedback in the first place.”

“Or he could just report directly to your father.”

“He could,” Kitay agreed, “but it’ll make me feel better if I could also deliver my report with Irjah’s citations to my father.”

Rin laughed and shot Kitay a thumbs-up. “What did I say? You really thought of everything.”

Rin visits the overflowing medical wing the next day right before patrol. She figures that she has fifteen minutes or so before she’d be officially considered late, and it’s just her luck that a few wrong turns here and there brings her time down to ten.

Kitay waves at her when she steps into the room. He’s on a bed right next to Venka and Rin weaves her way through disgruntled medics to reach him. Kitay doesn’t look too bad, actually—he’s sitting up when she approaches, only wincing when he raises his arm to wave at her.

“You’re awake!” It takes everything in her to not throw her arms around him. Rin reaches for his hand instead.

Venka shifts in her bed and murmurs something that sounds suspiciously like “me too.”

Rin peers over Kitay’s shoulder. “Oops. Sorry for waking you.”

Venka blinks, cat-like. “Don’t be. I can only be asleep for so long.”

“How are you?” Rin asks tentatively, not really knowing what to say but feeling like she should ask. It sounds inadequate the second it leaves her mouth—if she was in Venka’s place, she wouldn’t know what the fuck she was supposed to say either.

“They gave me the good stuff,” Venka says. “I hardly feel it anymore. It’s certainly a step up from bleeding out.”

Rin flinches, thinking back to her blunder.

“Don’t worry about it,” Venka murmurs, reading her mind. “Kitay told me. You did everything you could.” She lets out a long sigh and directs her gaze to the ceiling. “Kitay was actually fixing my ship when the first explosion hit. It didn’t register that the hangar was breached until it was too late. I don’t want to think about what happened on the command deck.”

Rin also hears what she doesn’t say, from one pilot to another: I don’t know what happened to the rest of my squadron. I don’t think I want to know.

She’s not good at this, comforting—soldiers weren’t made for it—and she knows Venka’s the same.

Rin swallows hard. “Speaking of which, I have some news to pass on. They couldn’t find any evidence of a data breach, which means—”

“Either someone was compliant under threat or they found what they were looking for without obstruction,” Kitay finishes.

“Well, that’s fucked,” Venka says. “Oh, we’re so fucked.”

“So we’re no closer to finding out what happened?”

“They’re still investigating. All the other Generals have sent their own individual teams to station Six.”

Kitay snorts. “Yeah, because that’s going to push them to be more cooperative.”

“It is what it is,” Rin says. She pauses for a beat before remembering that her ten minutes were nearly up. “I have to go on patrol now, but I’ll be back.”

Kitay waves her off, or attempts to. She turns back around at the last second, catching her hand on the doorframe.

“Venka.” Rin might not know comfort, but what she does understand is the language of loss. Rin takes a chance, from one pilot to another. “I’ll put in a word for the Cike, if you want it. Flying and defying the social order of things.”

Venka’s eyes glint under the fluorescent lights. “Let your commanding officers know I’ve got a record of exceeding expectations.”

“Let’s try something different today,” Altan says. “Who wants to lead?”

Ramsa, Suni, and Baji raise their hands.

“Let me clarify. Who hasn’t gotten the chance to lead for the past three patrols and wants to?”

Rin has never liked leading. Actually, no—that hasn’t always been true. She liked it better when it was just her squadron in their own little corner of space because she’s always been a little selfish like that.

It also didn’t help that everyone had been on edge for the past few days, wondering when the next strike was going to be. Security had tightened, and walking through the station now felt like wading through a minefield. What available downtime was split between visiting Venka or fixing ships in maintenance with Kitay, who had been cleared for active duty again.

“I can lead.”

Her eyes widened. If Altan’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. The only thing he does is nod and signal for everyone to head to their ships.

Here is a secret: Rin had tried to ask Chaghan about what he’d meant when he said that she flew like she never wanted to land. She’d cornered him outside of his room, jamming her foot in his door before demanding an explanation.

“Fly long enough while you’re Altan’s wingman and you’ll know.”

It was one of his standard cryptic answers, which was as good as a non-answer as far as she was concerned.

“That’s all you have to offer after seeing me fly once?”

He’d given her one last glance before closing it in her face. “I wasn’t so much watching as I was feeling.”

Rin had walked away before the urge to separate his door from its frame could surface.

She’s never thought about it again, but that conversation is all she can think about now as she follows Nezha in formation. If she really thinks about it, maybe Chaghan wasn’t full of shit—because the other half of flying was feeling. Broken down to its core, flying was just you and your ship, the feeling of having your body exactly in tune with what your soul was reaching for.

She’d flown enough times with the Cike to break down how it felt to fly with one of them in an element: Chaghan and Qara were all about precision. Ramsa had the tendency to bank his turns sharply, while Enki and Unegen were the opposite. Suni and Baji flew like they were racing each other to get back to the mess hall in time. And Altan, she supposes, flew like he was out for blood.

But with Nezha, Nezha—

She knows this flight sequence. This was what she’d used against him in the last round of the Trials when they were neck and neck in standing. She had channeled everything Jiang had taught her—emptied her mind, steadied her breath—and did whatever the fuck she could to come up on top.

“Jun would tell you to shoot the enemy down before they can do it to you,” Jiang said. “Irjah would tell you to evade until you’ve got them all figured out. And Jima would tell you that there’s a balance between the two methods.”

“And what,” she had dared to ask, “would you tell me?”

“There is no real way to fly, is what I’m trying to say.” Jiang’s voice is perfectly level. There is only their action and your reaction. There are the principles of a fight, and what you choose to do with them.”

Following Nezha now feels like she’s being pulled back in time back to the moment she was challenging him, calling her shots in response to his own.

She knows this flight sequence, because this was what he must’ve felt when he faced her too.

Rin is almost thankful when they turn back to the station. The realization had more or less dulled her senses in the air and she is the last to land back at the station, disembarking in record time. The evidence had been all there. All she needs is confirmation.

Rin grabs his hand as he walks past, pulling him to the side as the rest of the Cike shuffle past them in the direction of the mess hall, judging from Baji and Suni’s expressions. She drops it just as quickly when he turns to face her, eyebrows raised.

“How did you learn to fly like that?”

He opens his mouth—probably to say some quip about Sinegard, duh, where else—but the seriousness on her face must’ve stopped him because he takes a moment before answering.

“From the best,” Nezha finally says, not a hint of deceit in his voice.

Rin can feel her patience wearing thin. “And who might that be?”

“Probably the person who got the highest simulator score on the Trials in our year.”

Rin knows that no one owned space and no one owned a particular formation, much less a flight pattern. But the way she flew and all the time spent relearning every little thing over and over? She came to space not having anything to her name; she’d like to think that she has earned something since then.

She’s always been a little selfish like that.

“At first, I didn’t believe Unegen when he said that you flew like me,” Rin says. “I didn’t believe it when we were partners because everyone reacts differently in a fight. And I guess I never bothered to pay attention to it again until I saw what you just did.”

“Rin—”

“You were a complete asshole to me in school because I didn’t know the first thing about flying. And then you went around and decided you wanted to fly like me. You knew what the stakes were when Jun kicked me out of combat.” Her voice has gone low. Dangerous. “You wanted to see me grounded.”

His expression is stricken. “No—that wasn’t what I wanted, ever. It was never my intention—”

“You have a funny way of showing your intentions.”

Nezha reaches for her but she sidesteps, ignoring how he looks absolutely wrecked now. Good, she thinks, maybe it’ll eat at him the way it did for her.

“Rin,” he says, pleading, “I said that I was sorry—”

“I’m also sorry,” she interrupts, pushing past him, “because I have to take a shit and I’ve been told it’s bad manners to tell you to eat it.”

Kitay’s not in maintenance when she looks for him. Rin circles around the area a few more times until other engineers begin to give her dirty looks. She finally runs into him in the hallway and breathes out in relief.

“I went to look for you,” he says by way of explanation. “I asked Nezha in the hangar bay, but why does he look like somebody sank his ship?”

“Probably because I did.”

Kitay does a double-take. “What?”

“No,” Rin says, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was joking. If I really did that he wouldn’t be here.”

“Okay.” Kitay eyes her, definitely sensing the anger that still radiates off her in waves. “Do you want to talk about it?”

She tells him.

“Oh.” He looks like he’s at a loss for words, and she can’t blame him. “Is this a bad time to say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?”

Rin snorts. “Maybe if he didn’t act the way he did. But anyway, was there something you wanted to tell me?”

“Right. Well, I got reassigned to command,” Kitay says. “They wanted some engineers to look over security. Make sure all the protocols are working, the typical high clearance stuff you’d expect after what happened.”

“Permanently?”

“Until further notice,” he says almost apologetically.

Rin gets the hint.

“Okay.” She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “I won’t keep you away any longer. I’ll just—“

Go get some food, she almost says. But she’s honest, Rin doesn’t feel hungry at all. What she does feel is an overwhelming urge to head back to her ship and fly one more round just by herself.

So she walks. Rin hugs Kitay before they part ways, promising him that she wasn’t going to do something drastic in his absence. She makes her way through the station until she reaches the only place she’s ever felt entirely in control of herself.

The observatory is as empty as the day she’d first stepped foot into it. It doesn’t bother her; she’s always welcomed silence. Even back at Sinegard, no one except for her and Jiang had frequented the room. No one likes being reminded of something that’s infinite, Jiang had said. No one likes to think that their presence is a mere blip in the cosmic timeline. Rin was the opposite—she’s eternally grateful to be a part of something that made her feel bigger than herself.

Rin lies down in the middle of the room with her hands behind her head. The only downside to the quiet is that it makes her think about things she isn’t ready to confront. She knows that she should’ve let it go. Wasn’t that what she was good at, anyway? She’d cut ties with Tikany and shed her past like a second skin at the earliest opportunity.

So why did she have to go ahead and revisit the old grudge she’d left in the miles she’s burned since?

And why did it feel there was no moving forward until she took a few steps back?

Maybe she owes it to herself, just this once. She’d treated every flight as a fight because there had been nothing else.

Flying to, and flying from.

If there was even a difference.

Here is another secret: Nezha had approached her the night after the Trials.

She’d celebrated with Kitay in his room earlier, snacking on some leftover crackers that they’d smuggled out of the mess hall and rewatching some of Jiang’s videos on her tablet.

“I guess this is proof that Jiang does know what he’s doing,” Kitay had said. “Who would’ve thought?”

Rin shrugged. “I think his point was that flying is different for everyone. What works for a sparrow won’t work for a duck.”

“Oooh. Are we getting philosophical now?”

She elbowed him. “Feel free to quote me on that,” Rin said right when the curfew bell sounded.

She’d given Kitay a quick hug before she slipped out of his room and out of the boys’ dormitory, cutting a path straight towards the other side of the courtyard.

She’d taken one step on the stairwell of her dorm before a shadow caught her eye on the landing. When she jerked her head up, Nezha stepped out and into the faint glow of the entryway.

Rin froze, instinctively straightening and setting her shoulders back when she met his gaze. Her grip tightened on the railing. She wasn’t going to lie—she’d always hated whatever this was between the two of them. The feeling that something was going to snap any moment, enough to set her teeth on edge.

Nezha must’ve read it on her face because doesn’t move any closer—she couldn’t decide if that was good or bad because he was still blocking the only way up to her room—but he cleared his throat, getting her attention.

“Good fight.”

Rin could only stare. Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that was not on the list.

“Thank you,” she replied, the words rusty on her tongue. She couldn’t think of anything else to say—you too sounded way too insincere and she’d always been a believer in saying what you meant.

Nezha shrugged; she watched the line of his shoulders rise and fall in one smooth motion. “I just thought you should know.”

And there it was: she felt a spark of anger ignite in her chest at his words.

“I don’t need your acknowledgment or anything,” she says. “I’ve been doing just fine without it.”

Rin saw the instant irritation bloomed on his face. “I know you don’t. It’s just—” Nezha ran his hand through his hair and began walking down the steps. “You know what, forget it.”

He swept past her on the stairwell, inadvertently brushing his hand against hers. She felt the heat for a split second before she had the distinct feeling that she’d interrupted something important.

They didn’t talk again after that. She put the memory of that night behind her as best as she could, even though she got the feeling that he wasn’t avoiding her anymore so much as avoiding her gaze. Sometimes, she’d catch him looking at her when she was pretending that she wasn’t looking back.

Rin didn’t know what to make of it.

It all came to a head when they received the evacuation order for Sinegard. He caught her outside the dormitory again, stopping her with a single sentence.

“I’m sorry.”

She felt the same way on that other night—stunned, mouth partially frozen in an ‘o’. She’d liked to think that there weren’t many things that could catch her off guard. Apparently, being apologized to was still at the top of her list.

“About everything,” Nezha added helpfully. “If you can believe that.”

She found her words right before the silence could turn awkward.

“Are you just saying this because there’s a possibility that we’re going to die tomorrow?”

Nezha looked at her for a long, long time.

“We can die any day up here,” he said. “Which is why I’ve been wanting to say it for a while.”

There’s a knock on her door at twenty-two hundred hours. Rin stops pacing around her room, hoping that whoever the fuck it was would take a hint and move on.

No such luck. One knock turns into five and Rin yanks the door open before it can turn into six. Nezha’s fist is inches away from her forehead, already poised to knock again. At her glare, he hastily lowers his hand.

“It better be important,” she says, without preamble.

“I really am sorry.” The words are rushed, spoken in a single intake of breath like he wasn’t sure she was going to let him talk without slamming the door in his face.

Anger, she thinks, has always been her easiest shield. She’d used it as the fuel to her fire, and it had gotten her as far as she’d let it. But not too far to realize it wasn’t that he hadn’t apologized, but maybe it was that she'd never given him the chance to do so.

Properly, at least.

“I know,” she says because that much is true. Softer, then, “I haven’t forgotten.”

Nezha nods once. A lock of his hair falls into his eyes and she fights the sudden urge to brush it away. Sometimes, Rin forgets how beautiful he is—ridiculously, unfairly so—until he’s close enough to touch.

“Somebody once told me that I should own my story. So that’s what I’m trying to do now—I’m owning the parts that I want you to remember.” His smile twists, on the side of rueful. “Every single sad and sorry part.”

If the past week has taught her anything, it’s that they could be something better. She doesn’t want them to be a collection of missed chances.

Rin steps away from the door and jerks her head back. “Just come in.”

Nezha looks surprised at that, darting his gaze to her room and back to her face. “Don’t overthink it,” she says, staring him down until he complies.

Her room is pretty standard: she has a bed, a small sink and mirror, and a rack for clothes. Her one chair is pushed against the wall, functioning as a nightstand. And now Nezha is standing in the middle of it all, staring at her pink toothbrush with the matching cup on the sink like he’s never going to see it again.

“Let’s hear it,” Rin says once she shuts the door and locks it.

“I never wanted to be a pilot,” Nezha says. He slowly turns around to face her and she is struck by the honesty on his face. “I wanted to be an engineer like Kitay but that was never an option for me. My father’s a general and my brother and sister are both captains. Every Yin was expected to choose the path for flight.”

Nezha’s gaze becomes that much sharper, piercing through every part of her. It reaches all the way to the phantom ache between her shoulder blades.

“And I guess I hated you for excelling at something that you actually wanted to do.”

“You were good too,” she replies. “Good enough for Jun to award you top marks for every simulator run.”

Nezha shakes his head. “But I didn’t want it. Any of it. You were good in a way that was natural. Like you were born to fly. You fit in as a pilot better than me, and I wanted that. Because when you fly,” he says, very quietly, “it’s like the stars shine just for you.”

The admission sinks in, bit by bit, until she can feel something resurface in its place. She has felt this way exactly once before—when she’d stepped into the shuttle bound for Sinegard, feeling free for the first time.

“Word got back to my father when you beat me on the Trials. He wasn’t happy when I wasn't at the top of the class. Even Jun was impressed if you could believe it.”

Rin lets out a small laugh. “Yeah. He hated my guts.”

“We all needed to be taken down a notch.” Nezha shrugs. “I guess spite will do that to all of us.”

Rin blinks, affronted. “Spite? It was a lot more than that, you know.”

“I know, I know.” He raises his arms in a placating gesture. “But what else would you call it if you flew like you needed to prove something?”

She closes the distance with a single step. Rin hates that he’s a whole head taller than her; she has to tilt his chin up to him.

“Listen,” she says. “I only needed to prove something because everyone made me feel like I had to. Like I was less of a person if I didn’t.”

“Rin—”

“Don’t ‘Rin’ me.” The lights go off, signaling to her that it was twenty-three hundred hours and therefore time to sleep. The only light left comes from underneath her locked door, a thin band of silver that reaches everything in her room except them.

“Everyone was telling me that I couldn’t fly. It was the same old story every time—they were telling me that I was better off on the ground, and the worst part was that I almost believed it. But not anymore. I’m not going to apologize for becoming somebody after being nobody.”

For a long while, Nezha is silent. Rin is close enough to feel the heat radiating off him in waves, passing through the layers of fabric between them. His chest rises and falls in tandem with hers and Rin wonders how his heartbeat would feel beneath her hand.

“Why did you want to fly, anyway?”

The answer is already outlined in her mouth but Rin still pauses. For a moment, she lets herself remember how it felt when the shuttle had broken cloud cover, feeling free for the first time. She thinks about how she’d stepped into Sinegard’s observatory, placing her hand against the glass like she was mapping her story out in the stars.

“I don’t think I was living until I flew for the first time.”

“But weren’t you scared? Because we die every day up here.”

“Is that what you really think?” There’s less bite to her words than what she would’ve wanted but Rin suddenly feels the anger bleed out of her all at once like an open wound. “That I’m not afraid every time I’m out there?”

Rin sinks down to her bed and draws her knees to her chest. When Nezha takes a seat next to her, she doesn’t have the energy to push him away.

Flying was my escape, she wants to say but doesn’t. That had sounded like what you’d tell someone when you let them in, so she settles for something else. “Flying’s the only time I don’t think about dying.”

“Funny,” he says, and maybe it really isn’t that funny at all because there’s gravity in his voice and in the space between them; she feels the force that must've kept them in orbit the same way tides have always turned towards the moon. Rin takes a chance when she reaches out and places her hand at the crook of his neck, spreading her palm against the hollow of his throat. Nezha swallows and Rin trails her fingers up until she reaches his lips.

“I think about it all the time,” he confesses. His voice is low, the sound muffled in the palm of her hand where it cups his jaw. “And then,” Nezha continues, mouthing the words against her skin, “I think about you.”

Her hand stills. Nezha must’ve predicted her withdrawal because his hand is immediately at her wrist, rooting her in place. Rin tenses; the instinct to fight is right there, clenched tight in her fists. But what holds her back is the way his fingers loosen a split second after and it’s the gesture, spoken without words, that stirs something deep in her bones.

This, she knows. It’s the feeling before takeoff.

“I’ll follow you anywhere,” he says in a voice that flies straight to her heart and lands there. “I just thought that you should know.”

She closes her eyes and counts her breaths, breathing in the way Jiang had walked her through so many months ago. One, two, three.

When she opens them again, Nezha’s still looking at her, unblinking. You’re alive, she thinks. You’re alive and breathing and the only place you can go from here is up.

She feels the weightlessness first. The rush of adrenaline comes next, followed by the lightness in her soul.

“I won’t believe you,” Rin says, “unless you yield.”

Nezha’s movements are slow. Deliberate. She watches him, he watches her as he slides off her bed, sinking down to the ground. In some dim corner of her mind, she faintly registers how they’re much more equal like this—their faces are perfectly level, eye to eye.

He kneels before her. Her room is dark; half of Nezha is shrouded in shadow but she thinks that she’s never seen him so clearly. Whatever miles that have bridged the distance between them are now stripped away, laid bare. He doesn’t flinch when she brushes the hair out of his eyes and traces a line straight down from his temple to his collarbone.

She could do anything right now and she knows that he’ll take it. The breath she lets out is shaky at best. So this was it, she thinks, to have someone’s whole being in the palm of her hand.

Nezha says, “Rin.”

And maybe that’s what undoes her, in the very end—the softness, the openness given so freely in a way she would never have to ask for. She’d spent the majority of her life weaving her way through the stars for a language that would quell that restless heart, never learning to listen for the words inside.

This is what she will remember, later: the exhale of her name, repeated in breaths small enough to keep in the spaces between her ribs. Nezha’s mouth on the pulse-point of her throat and his hands at the small of her back, fingers spread apart to cradle her close. He says something she can’t quite catch but maybe her heart recognizes the sound for what it is because something cracks open in her, then—it feels like light shining through, guiding her down to land.

On the morning of her departure for Sinegard, Tutor Feyrik was the only one to see her off at the station. Auntie Fang had slammed the door and told her to never come back, drowning out Kesegi’s cries for her to stay. She stood outside the house that had never felt like a home for a couple more minutes before she began to walk, not looking back.

She threw her arms around him five minutes before the shuttle was scheduled to arrive, unable to hold back the few traitorous tears that she failed to blink away.

“Rin, listen to me.” Her former teacher’s voice was steady, a sharp contrast to her uneven breaths. “You might doubt yourself but I know what you’re capable of. I’ve seen you go through it all and come out to the other side.”

“I’ve never—there’s still so much that I don’t know,” she mumbled into his chest. “What if I don’t make it? I’ve never felt so lost.”

He was quiet for a minute. “Do you remember the stories about the constellations?”

“Of course,” she said. “You’ve only talked about them a couple hundred times.”

“Back then, people relied on the stars to guide them home. But up there, maybe it’ll feel like you’re always home.”

He pulled back just as the shuttle alarm sounded. “You’ll make it. I’ve never doubted it.”

She took one last look at him, silhouette superimposed against a pale blue sky—the last bit of Nikan’s sky that she would see for a while, if everything went well.

“You’ve always had that look,” he continued. “Like gravity could never hold you down.”

(Until it did.)

Another patrol calls it at zero hundred hours.

She’s already up and running when the first wail of the alarm—Code Black, this time—sounds in the station. It’s almost surreal to look at the radar of her ship and take note of the dots on the horizon, jumping from hyperspace.

“All wings in formation,” Altan says. All or nothing, he doesn’t say. Victory or death.

Her hands tighten ever so slightly on the controls. They’ve gone over their strategy enough times for her to execute it in her sleep, but the nervousness is hard to shake off when it comes down to it.

“Expect no reinforcements,” Altan had said. “It’s every Division for themselves when it’s Code Black.”

The order was clear: The Cike would focus on intercepting bombers and any missiles heading their way, holding their positions along with the rest of the fleet. Heavy fire directed at the station would be handled by the capital ships, positioned in staggered rows across the sector. Any rogue Federation starfighter that managed to break through would have to make their way past a handful of repurposed transport shuttles equipped with laser cannons.

“Apollo, Phoenix, and Orion are with me, finger-four formation. We’re going to draw them out first. Artemis, you lead the others to follow up.”

She sections off with Nezha again, seeking out bombers that are heading their way. They circle around the Seagrim, deflecting laser blasts in response to an incoming Federation squadron that had taken a particular interest in them.

Rin feels foolish for ever doubting Nezha when she veers off and corkscrews through the air, leading them in a loop before Nezha meets her halfway, shooting down ships with deadly accuracy. The remaining fighters in the squadron double down on the offensive, streaking towards them with a renewed vengeance.

Qara and the others swoop down in an arc, intercepting them in a shower of laser fire. The resulting explosions fade just as quickly and they regroup just to have another unit lock on to their tails.

If there’s just one thing Rin had underestimated in the beginning, it would be the sheer number of ships the Federation had in their fleet. Their starfighters also outclassed theirs, trading agility for firepower with the extra mounted laser cannons; one direct hit would be enough to nullify her shields.

Altan leads them back in line with the rest of division Seven’s squadrons, which are currently engaged with approaching Federation bombers, armed to the teeth with missiles.

There’s no real advantage facing them as a unit, so they all split at the first onslaught of fire. She locks onto one but it returns fire before she can get one shot off.

“Another one at your six o’clock,” Nezha says. “We can counter if you break. Force them to overshoot and I’ll cover for you.”

Rin barely has time to answer as she dodges another blast. She’d forgotten how wide their range was. Making them overshoot was going to be a challenge—she was never used to being the one put on the defensive.

So she flies, leading the bombers on. Rin’s well aware that they could sandwich her so she pushes on until she angles off sharply, cutting her trajectory short.

The blast misses her by some miles. One’s still on her tail—about to shoot, she knows—and Rin thinks that it’s now or never.

Nezha doesn’t disappoint. He slots into place in her four o’clock, locking on and firing right when she splits in a spiral dive, putting everything she has into his when she plunges down.

The bomber’s pilot isn’t so lucky. Nezha’s blast clips the ship neatly, sending it veering off-course. It’s still enough time for Rin to regroup so she’s no longer being chased. She manages to finish off the job, prompting a fiery explosion.

“Close call,” she says. Throughout the whole ordeal, her heart hasn’t stopped pounding.

Nezha makes a noise of assent. “Too close.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that bombers engaged us?” Rin asks as they reverse course. “Usually they would be fighting with their escorts to get to the capital ships.”

“I’m not complaining. That just means one less bomber to deal with later.”

He had a point. But even as they rendezvous back in the heat of the battle, something still nags at her in the back of her mind. If she’s not mistaken, the Federation had only advanced far enough to draw them out, not the other way around. Rin can’t help but feel that they were playing right into their hands.

“I think all this fighting on the frontlines is a distraction,” she finally says after their third fight. “They’re trying to flush us out so they can get behind us.”

“It’s the only logical choice on their end. The station’s like, right there.”

Rin deflects a blast of laser fire headed their way and tries not to sigh in exasperation. “No. I think they’re trying to get to Nikan.”

“The planet?” Nezha’s voice is doubtful, but at least she knows she has his attention now—or as much as he was willing to split between listening to her and trying not to die. She can see why Altan had the tendency to mute the command line unless he had to give orders. “So let them. Even if they pass the other ships, they’ll still be well within the blast radius.”

Of course. She’d forgotten all about Trifecta’s Belt. Chaghan had never trusted it, which meant Altan didn’t trust it, and so he’d planned everything to make up for it short of overriding direct orders from the chain of command.

“It doesn’t matter how secure these access codes are,” Chaghan had said. “We’ll still be fucked if the other stations don’t comply within the two-minute timeframe.”

“That’s why we’re still going to hold until we have the official order to fall back.” Altan had zoomed in on the battle plans, outlining different tactics. Chaghan didn’t look completely convinced, muttering something about chances for failure.

Looking back, Rin wished she’d paid better attention. That theory didn’t feel so implausible now with the current situation.

“They’re closing in,” Nezha says. “There’s no end to them.”

And there isn’t. Rin lets Nezha lead now, still rattled from her thoughts. It becomes apparent that they’re quickly losing momentum when incoming fire puts them on the defensive.

Now it’s her turn to overshoot. She gets clipped by a shot portside, sending her reeling to the right. Rin scissors through the air, hoping to correct the course.

“Are you okay?”

Her shields flicker, powered down to fifty percent. “Could be better.”

“We can’t take them,” Nezha says. She catches a hint of panic in his voice. “Not when it’s six against two.”

“We have to fall back,” she says, immediately hating it. “We have to lose them.”

Losing them proves to be a challenge. She streaks by fiery explosions, one after another. Dread settles in her stomach when she realizes their forces are dwindling down while the Federation ranks are closing in by the second.

When Altan comes back online, Rin nearly cries out in relief. “Fall back,” he says with visible strain. “They have somehow managed to block the hailing frequency.”

There is a muttered curse from Chaghan and several sounds of disbelief from the rest of the Cike. Rin is stunned silent herself, barely catching herself in time to dodge enemy fire.

“If we fall back, they’ll reach Nikan,” Qara says quietly.

“They’ve been alerted and are taking precautions,” Altan says. “The only thing we can do is to remain on the defensive.”

Kitay’s words come back to her: we’re tightening security so what happened on Six won’t happen to us.

The laugh that comes out of her is hysterical, sudden. Present in an instant, stolen in the next.

There was never a data breach because the Federation was never after intelligence reports or station defensive intel. Everyone was looking at the wrong things—Mugen’s end goal was never about destroying the stations.

It was always about the planet.

For all the Generals liked to think that their stations were self-sufficient, there would be no true long-term sustainability without the shipyards in the capital to the farmlands in every province.

If you really surrender, all you had to do was to put out the home fires.

She thinks back to how the second war had ended, how close the Federation was to a touchdown on Nikan soil. The only difference was that they had one more obstacle to overcome now.

“No station was ever really in danger,” she says. “They didn’t need all the stations to fall. They just needed one.”

Nezha exhales slowly. “The net. That was their plan all along.”

“The remaining Division fleet has been ordered to cover for the Kingfisher. If we can clear a path, we can establish another connection with Imperial command,” Altan says.

“In two minutes?”

“We have our orders. There’s not enough time to figure out how they’ve intercepted the frequency. We just have to trust that the Kingfisher can make the jump.”

She never thought she’d hear the word trust from Altan. But it must speak to how dire the situation really was when that was all he had to offer.

“Fall back and rendezvous at launch point,” Altan says. “Final call. And that’s an order.”

The line goes silent. Rin runs Altan’s words over and over in her head. Two minutes. Even less, now. The battle’s still going on, and she can see no end to it. She’s not going to waste time analyzing why it had to be this sector under direct attack or why the timing couldn’t possibly be worse.

There would be no winning this fight if nobody survived. She can’t speak for the other stations, but she knows their stakes were just as high. Last resort. Not if she has anything to say about that.

Rin takes a deep breath. Altan was wrong—there was something she could do. The Kingfisher would never make it in time, and they were already so, so close—

She thinks of Kitay and Venka back on the station, holding the defenses on a station that was on the brink of collapse. She thinks of her squadron—her brave, fearless pilots, the whole lot of them—fighting for their lives among the stars.

She thinks of all the ships in the distance and the living, breathing bodies on them. All the souls of the Nikara Empire, holding out for one more chance at a future.

Altan was right—it’s a graveyard out there.

They could die out here. Or they could live.

They could all live and fight another day.

Do you trust me, she wants to ask, but they’ve gone through too much to not. So maybe that is why her heart clenches at knowing what she’s about to do.

“Cover me until we reach the perimeter,” Rin says instead. She doesn’t have to wait for Nezha’s confirmation before she takes off, dodging laser blasts from both sides.

They’re good at this, fighting together. Flying together. Rin only wishes that things had been different before.

“What’s the plan?” Nezha finally asks after they’re on the edge of the sector, away from immediate attack.

She scrolls down her flight log and selects the coordinates for Nikan.

“You should fall back with the others,” she says. “Somebody told me once that it’s impossible to outfly the blast.”

Rin hears the instant it registers—the sharp inhale, the barely audible no.

Then she takes the jump.

He had asked her if there had been anything she’d wanted to do if there hadn’t been a war. Anything, he’d whispered, no matter how small or insignificant.

The question took her by surprise. She’d never let herself consider alternatives—never had a chance to, really.

So she'd told him, honest and simple and true: I’ll probably visit Nikan again. One more time.

Oh? he’d turned to her, one eyebrow raised. I’ve never been.

You’re just like Kitay. She’d smiled, a quick flash of teeth. But I think you’d like it. There’s trees and plants and birds. Dirt beneath your feet, everywhere you go.

Tell me more.

You’d like the ocean, she’d wanted to say. Miles and miles of blue as far as you can see. You can help Kitay build a boat to sail it. Repurpose a ship or something.

And maybe she could’ve, but then the alarm had sounded and she was pulled off her feet and then she was running and then she was flying.

What she had really wanted to say was this: You should see the sunrises. The sunsets. All that color, shades of gold and bronze and crimson, washed out over our heads. I could show you, she’d wanted to say, just like how I told Kitay and Venka we could go see one day.

Thinking back: there had been no chance of forgetting about Nikan in the years she’d been gone. She could scrub her past clean all she wanted but it would still be impossible to erase that it had been a part of her once.

Nikan had endured. Maybe it had taught her how to do the same, too.

She’s close enough to the planet to see the swirls of brown and green on the surface, only broken up by sections of blue. She’s also close enough to feel the first signs of a telltale gravitational pull.

She should be within range now, with thirty seconds left on the clock at most. One look at the sky tells her she’s in the right spot—she sees the faintest evidence of the net in place over the horizon; it’s an iridescent sheen, glinting silver in places under the light.

Her comms crackle, coming back online.

“Phoenix—“

“Don’t,” she says, already keying into the hailing frequency. She’s scared that if he says one more thing she’ll lose the resolve she has left.

“I wasn’t,” Nezha says, and the note of resignation in his voice chips away at it anyway. “You can’t outfly it,” he continues, “so you should reroute the power line to your shields.”

“And let gravity take me home?”

He doesn’t laugh. “No.”

Her radar beeps, flashing red. She barely manages to dodge the storm of laser fire from the incoming Federation fleet before following Nezha’s suggestion, putting her shields back at full power.

Seconds, now.

All or nothing.

“I wanted,” Rin says, “to watch a sunrise with you.”

She inputs the final sequence of the activation code and closes her eyes.

Nezha says, “Rin—“

“Isn’t that right,” Altan said, not a question. “Phoenix.”

That made her pause. She’d liked to think that she knew better than anyone how it felt to own the things you’ve done. Her question came out unbidden, like gravity taking hold.

“When Chaghan said that I flew like I never wanted to land—he wasn’t just talking about me.”

“No. He wasn’t.”

“What happened between you and Jiang?”

Altan drew his legs to his chest, propping his chin on his knees. He looked a lot younger then, curled up in the captain’s chair, the outline of a boy framed against infinity.

“I wanted to prove him wrong,” Altan said. “I wanted to prove that I could find whatever I was looking for out there. That it was worth saving.” His gaze flickered briefly to her before turning back to the viewport. “Maybe it was freedom, at first. The chase, the high. Maybe it was the feeling after every flight, knowing that I made it out alive. For pilots, the whole lot of us—it’s always been all or nothing. I wanted to prove Jiang wrong,” Altan said, “because maybe Icarus knew what he was doing all along.”

That stilled her thoughts in a way she was not accustomed to. “Was it worth it?” Rin dared to ask. She found herself bracing for the answer, despite not knowing exactly why.

Altan was quiet for a long time. “Flying’s easy. Landing is the hard part.” He tossed his head back into the chair and blew out a breath like he’d just let go of something heavy. “It’s something you have to do for yourself. No one else can do it but you.”

Rin opens her eyes.

The first thing that gets her is the whiteness. She almost closes her eyes again because it’s suddenly too bright, too blinding, but that’s when the smell hits. She’s only landed herself in the med bay twice before in her life, but it’s one of those experiences that just stick—or rather, the disinfectant does.

She leans back, exhales through her teeth, and tries to move.

And that’s when the pain sinks in.

“Fuck.”

Movement in the corner of the room catches her eye and it’s a struggle to move her neck five degrees to the left.

Kitay’s slumped over in the only chair, arms crossed with his head thrown back against the wall. There’s a sheet—stolen, she bets—draped haphazardly over his head and shoulders. These kinds of rooms have always been a bit drafty—the circulation’s top-notch.

“Kitay,” she calls out, or tries to, because what actually comes out is ‘tay’ and Rin has to wet her mouth a couple of times before she can force the whole thing out of her cotton-dry throat. “Kitay.”

Nothing.

Rin frowns at nothing in particular before trying again. That seems to do the trick because she can see him come back to life the only way Kitay can: with arms failing, desperate to not be caught drifting off when there were things to be done.

“I’m awake!” Kitay blinks slowly, surveying the room. His eyes land briefly on her and she can see the instant it registers in his mind. “And you’re awake.”

His expression twists; she sees the evidence of whatever aftermath she’d left behind in her wake. It was the same look he’d given her every time she’d decided to roll the dice. Rin knows him well enough to tell that he’s torn between lecturing or hugging her.

And because he’s her best friend, he finds a way to do both.

Kitay launches himself at her, nearly tripping over his blanket in the process. “You promised,” he says. Up this close, she can finally see the bags underneath his eyes. He’d confessed to her once that his greatest fear as an engineer was that he wouldn’t know who lived or died until after a battle. “I thought I told you to do whatever you could to stay alive and come back to me. I thought—“ he pauses, breathing out slowly, “—I really thought—“

“I know,” she says hoarsely. Kitay quickly turns to the bedside table and picks up a glass of water, holding it to her lips. When she’s done drinking her fill, she thinks about her final seconds, fueled by desperation. “But I wouldn’t have done it if there had been another option. Your father probably tried his best, but this empire was never proactive. We’ve only ever been reactive.”

Kitay tries to smile but it comes out as a grimace. “That’s finally changing. My father finally got the push he needed.”

Rin tries to shake her head, wincing when her neck throbs in protest. “Better late than never, right?”

Kitay’s hand finds hers under the covers. He brushes her thumb with his own, stroking the parts that were not covered by bandages.

“I prepared myself for the worst,” Kitay says, changing the subject. She feels his hand still at the IV drip at her wrist before he laces his fingers through hers, one by one. “Nezha flew in after you,” he continues, and Rin feels her breath catch. “Rerouted all the power to the engine and nearly burned out the boosters chasing after you.”

Rin is silent. She doesn’t know what to say to that exactly, not when her stomach feels like rejecting the water she had earlier.

“Oh.” The word comes out as a whisper; she’d never thought her voice could sound so small.

“Yeah,” Kitay says. “He’s come a long way from before. And Venka? She’s finally cleared for active service again.”

“Really?” That was news. Extremely good news, actually. “That’s amazing.”

He nods. “Yeah. I think she’ll like to see you later.”

“Yeah,” Rin echoes. “I miss her. And everyone else, actually.”

Kitay’s watch beeps and he winces. “I have to report in but I’ll be right back when my shift ends. I'll also let everyone know you’re awake.” Kitay sighs and runs his hand through his hair. “I’ll be back soon. Promise.”

When Kitay leaves, Rin lets out a shaky breath. So Nezha came after her. The confirmation makes her mouth dry all over again and she wishes she could move her arms for the glass of water. She stares at it longingly before turning back to the vacant seat Kitay had occupied earlier—

—just to find Nezha in the doorway, leaning against it like he’s never left.

Rin opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. He’s still looking at her in the way only he can, like she’ll always be in his orbit. It comes back to her in flashes, now: Nezha telling her how to manually reroute power for one last shield, Nezha telling her to fall planetside.

Nezha, telling her that he’ll follow her anywhere.

Anything she can say right now sounds wholly inadequate when she looks back at him. So maybe that’s why she settles with just his name.

That, at least, gets a reaction. Rin doesn’t read him as easily as she does Kitay. She likes to think that she’s still learning everything she’d missed in the past, peeling back the layers of herself that had been attuned to seeing him as an adversary.

Nezha crosses the room to stand beside her bed. She notices that he carries himself a little bit differently—hesitantly, like there’s wreckage in the room that extends out of her. For the first time, Rin wonders about how long she’s been out.

“You scared me, Rin.” His voice is the softest she’s ever heard it and his gaze is misty and faraway when he starts to recite the events to her. “I really thought that I was going to be too late. The shield absorbed most of the impact, but it still wasn’t quite enough.”

“How long?” Rin barely manages to get out. “How long was I…”

“A little over a week,” Nezha says. “They had to put you in a pod to stabilize everything at first. And everything after that—” Nezha shrugs, a little helpless gesture that she’s familiar with by now, “—was a blur, to be honest. But they did tell me that you had four broken ribs and the rest of your body was badly bruised.”

Nezha suddenly turns away and Rin feels panic bubble in her chest. She’s on the verge of saying something pathetic—something along the lines of don’t go—but Nezha only walks to the corner, picks up Kitay’s abandoned chair, and drags it back to her bedside.

The unspoken plea must’ve shown on her face because Nezha raises a brow. She quickly schools her expression and settles for another question.

“What happened after that?”

Nezha leans forward and rests his chin on his hands. “The activation of Trifecta’s Belt successfully eliminated every Federation starfighter within striking distance. Long story short, their warships had to withdraw from battle against all the stations for the time being.”

“That’s good,” Rin says. Relief isn’t a strong enough word to describe how she’s feeling. “That should buy us enough time to get supplies and reinforcements from Nikan.”

“There’s also other news. We got word from the Republic of Hesperia.”

Rin snorts. “They sure took their time.”

“It’s still something.”

“What did they say?”

“Just that they’re willing to work with us,” Nezha says. “And that they’re open to negotiations.”

“Of course. They should’ve led with that first.”

Nezha makes a noise that could pass for a snort. He scoots his chair a little closer to her; the bed shakes when his knees hit the frame.

“So,” Nezha says. “Do you want something to eat? Or actually, I should probably tell you how the rest of the Cike is doing. This might be the closest Chaghan has gotten to admitting that he was scared for you. Also, there’s—”

Rin says, “Nezha.”

That gets him to shut up. “Sorry. It’s just been a while, that’s all.”

She feels her face soften that much more. A week. Rin directs her gaze to the ceiling, exhaling softly, or as much as her lungs would allow. Maybe that hits her a little harder, then, knowing that he’d watched after her all this time. Maybe it fills her with a little more courage when she drags her eyes back down to land on him.

“You came for me,” she says. Her eyes are just the tiniest bit watery when she blinks.

Nezha reaches out and brushes some of her hair away from her face. “You say it like you still can’t quite believe it.”

“Accept my gratitude before I take it back.”

“Alright.” Rin doesn’t need to look at him to tell that he’s smiling now. “I will accept it wholeheartedly and offer my sincerest thanks in return.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“But you like me. So I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.”

Nezha leans in and if her heart speeds up she doesn’t pay it any mind. Rin thinks she can finally put a name to this emotion—after all, someone had told her once that she’s always been good at making something hers. She remembers the night where he’d knelt between her legs, looking at her like she was the center of all things.

“Maybe I did doubt just a little,” she confesses. Rin lets the ghost of a smile flicker across her face. “But you kept up, even in the end.”

“I did say that that I would follow you,” Nezha murmurs against her cheek. He blows out a breath, stirring the hairs at the back of her neck.

Rin shifts ever so slightly, turning her head to face him. Their noses are almost touching but there’s still enough distance to see the side of his mouth twitch. Her arms still feel like they're on fire and her ribs are still broken and she’d nearly died, but she’s never felt more alive. The war is far from over but at least they’re all here to fight another day. Maybe this was all she never needed, she thinks. A place to land. Space is cold and empty but here, here—

A few feet away, the beeps of her monitor are steady, steady.

Rin closes her eyes.

“To the ends of the universe?”

Nezha lets out the quietest laugh. “And to the spaces between the stars.”

In a normal year, Sinegard’s graduation ceremony was a full-day affair. The graduating class would be ushered into the main assembly hall in the morning to be awarded their certifications. Graduates would have to endure hour-long speeches made by the Generals before they could walk up to the stage to receive their individual awards and badges. This would be followed by the swearing-in process, painfully reminiscent of the traditional initiation rites from the days of the Red Emperor’s reign. After reciting their oaths of allegiance, the day would close with a campus-wide banquet for dinner and other festivities that usually ended with a morning hangover.

Rin liked to say that a single night’s dinner was an insufficient reward for sitting through a five-hour ceremony. “Make it two banquets, and I’ll reconsider.”

“It’s more symbolic than anything else,” Kitay had replied the night before Raban’s graduation. “They like to put on a show of unity, or something like that.”

“Because nothing unites people more than suffering for five hours together.”

“Exactly.”

Rin recalled that conversation when her class was herded into the assembly hall seven hours after the official declaration of war. She was still rubbing sleep out of her eyes when she caught up to Kitay, slipping her hand into his. She’d woken up with her credentials already downloaded onto her identification badge which meant that the only thing left to do was to take her oath.

The silence in the hall was suffocating, broken only by the shuffling of feet as people found their seats. She didn’t let go of Kitay’s hand even as they sat down in the back of the room; if anything, she gripped his hand tighter when the gravity of the situation finally sank in. Rin suddenly felt too awake, too alert. She’d give anything for it to be a normal year now with the five-hour ceremony that left Raban claiming that it had taken a full hour for him to finally regain feeling in his legs.

Rin tried to catch Jiang’s eye up on the stage but his gaze was fixed on the glass ceiling, staring straight into the cosmos like he was about to demand answers from the stars themselves. He was mouthing words that she couldn’t hear, would never hear, and all she could think about was his first lesson to her, spoken with the kind of resolution that she had yet to earn. It had slipped right in the cracks of her defenses and hadn’t left since.

If you fly because you want to be saved, then you’re already gone.

Please, she thought now. Show me how to land one last time.

Her plea went unanswered along with all the other things she would not get the chance to say when Jima stepped onto the podium to make the first and only speech. She was sorry of course—as sorry as anyone could be—that this was the reality they’ve woken up to, the future that they would have to be awake for. Rin was at the edge of her seat, balancing her weight on the tips of her toes. Her heart was pounding somewhere deep in her chest, staccato beats in an all-too-fragile cage, seconds away from flight.

Jima thanked them for the things they have done and for the things they would continue to do. “I hope,” she said, quiet, “that the challenges you’ve overcome here will prepare you for what has yet to come.” Her gaze swept across the room and Jima ended her speech in a voice that reminded everyone she’d once commanded a fleet of thousand ships. “For honor, for service, and for duty.”

Rin was more familiar with this part. She stood up with the rest of her class and tilted her chin up to face the flag of the Empire above the stage.

“I pledge my allegiance to the Nikara Empire, given freely and with my whole being,” Rin recited with a hundred other voices. She closed her eyes when everyone else did, as if they could all wish their resolve into existence. “I join myself within the ranks of the Divisions to protect and defend the people with all the courage and loyalty as a soldier of the Empire.”

Her mouth suddenly felt dry and Rin licked her lips, unconsciously opening her eyes in the process. She took this chance to sneak a peek at Kitay, biting back a laugh at how his brows were drawn together in the utmost expression of concentration. On the stage, Jiang’s head was bowed, hands clasped together on his chest.

And six seats away to her right, Nezha’s eyes were open, too.

He met her gaze and held it—commanded it—in the way that had always been some kind of challenge, a reminder of the fight that had always been between the two of them. What came to her next was easy: she’d never been the type to back down.

“I will fight on,” she said without missing a beat, the pledge long since memorized in the back of her mind, “and I will carry this oath with me to the ends of the universe and to the spaces between the stars.” Nezha was still looking at her, mouthing the words like they were a lifeline, a prayer for flight. “For honor, for service, and for duty.”

Rin jerked her head back when it was all said and done. Kitay squeezed her hand reassuringly in response to the sudden movement and she bumped her knee against his, ignoring the way she could still feel the weight of Nezha’s gaze on the side of her head.

Rin turned their exchange over and over in her mind even as they filed out the assembly hall and into the courtyard for their division assignment. It had felt too personal—dangerously so, if she was willing to admit—but she told herself not to look into it.

She wouldn’t find anything that could be worth it.

“I hope we’re in the same Division,” Kitay said, breaking her out of her thoughts.

“We better be,” Rin replied. “I don’t trust anyone else watching my back.” She tried—and failed—to not look at Nezha in her periphery. He was lingering at the edge of the crowd, flanked by Venka and Niang. This time, she did not look back when he did.

Rin didn’t think she could see herself flying alongside him in any universe, much less the spaces between the stars.

She doubted that he could keep up.