"Do not mistake this for gratitude on my part," Odris said, voice returning to its full, cold clarity.
"You have committed an act that, under any civilised charter, would see you executed the moment you set foot off this vessel. The only reason you are still breathing is that my engine is worth considerably more than the satisfaction of watching you suffer for it. Do not confuse the two."
"You still want to keep making more threats, even in this situation?" Rohan questioned.
Odris remained silent due to his warning, before continuing:
"Good. Then let us discuss terms properly, since it seems we are both invested in this conversation ending without either of us losing something we cannot afford to lose."
The negotiation that followed took the better part of an hour, conducted through a comm panel while Rohan sat with his back against a drive core he had no intention of actually damaging and increasingly little ability to damage even if he changed his mind, his Origin Energy reserves scraping along somewhere near empty, his whole body trembling with a fatigue that had nothing left to do with adrenaline and everything to do with simple biological limits finally catching up to him.
Odris probed for weaknesses the way Rohan imagined the man probed every negotiation — testing edges, offering small concessions in exchange for larger ones, feeling for the exact point where desperation might override judgement.
"A compromise course," he suggested at one point. "There is a mid-transit relay station three days from our current heading. Modest traffic, but stable, regulated, entirely capable of processing an independent passenger transfer."
"No," Rohan said. "A relay station isn’t a system with real traffic. I need somewhere with enough ships coming and going that one more passenger doesn’t get noticed, doesn’t get tracked, doesn’t end up as a line item somebody remembers later when they’re deciding whether Veyrhold helped me disappear."
A pause. "You are better informed about merchant logistics than I expected from an ash-world hire hand."
"I had good teachers."
Another pause, this one carrying a different quality — something almost, though not quite, like respect.
"The Halcyon Span, then," Odris said eventually. "Six days’ transit at current speed. A crossroads system, several dozen registered ports, traffic in the thousands of vessels monthly. You would vanish into it the moment you stepped off my ship, which I confess holds a certain appeal from where I currently sit."
Rohan turned the name over, testing it against everything he didn’t know about this universe and finding, unsurprisingly, nothing.
"Six days."
"Six days, during which," Odris continued, and here his voice sharpened again, "you will remain confined to a secured section of this vessel under guard, will not attempt further sabotage of any kind, and will surrender that spear the moment you exit that engine room, or this conversation is over and my people resume cutting."
"No."
The single syllable landed heavier than Rohan intended, surprising even himself with how immediate and how absolute it came out.
"I beg your pardon?"
"The spear stays with me. It’s not a weapon to me, not really — not just a weapon. You can post as many guards outside my door as you want. You can confine me to whatever section of this ship makes your crew comfortable. But I’ve had exactly one thing keep me alive since the day I woke up in a world I didn’t choose and don’t belong to, and it isn’t a spear to be handed over on request. It’s the only thing in this entire universe that’s actually mine."
The silence that followed lasted long enough that Rohan began composing, in the back of his exhausted mind, several increasingly desperate fallback arguments.
He never needed them.
"Very well," Odris said, something unreadable threaded through the words. "The spear remains yours. Everything else stands. Confirm your agreement, and I will have my engineer begin recalibrating our heading toward the Halcyon Span."
Rohan closed his eyes, felt the drive core’s low thrum vibrating gently through the metal at his back, and thought — briefly, achingly — of Liora’s charm, of Iri’s voice telling him to make the fear worth something, of Maerin’s warning that hope had teeth.
It does. But apparently so do I.
"Confirmed," he said.
[Quest Updated: Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron]
[Objective: Secure passage terms via engine compartment standoff. — Complete]
[Reward: Escort to Halcyon Span — Active Star System]
[Title Acquired: Ship-Held Hostage-Taker]
[Effect: Minor reputation penalty among lawful merchant factions. Minor reputation increase among factions valuing self-sufficiency and defiance.]
[Great System Note: Route toward personal objective — Return to Origin Realm — marked as Progressing.]
Rohan read that last line three times before he let himself believe it.
The engineering team that came to escort him out of the drive core chamber, some twenty minutes later, moved with the careful, wary energy of people who had been explicitly instructed not to provoke him and were taking that instruction extremely seriously. Six guards, weapons lowered but not holstered, flanked a slim, harried-looking woman in a soot-stained jumpsuit who Rohan assumed was the chief engineer Odris had mentioned — the one currently, judging by her expression, silently calculating exactly how close her precious drive core had come to catastrophe.
She said nothing to him. She only ran a scanning wand over the housing where he’d pulsed heat into it, muttered something under her breath that sounded distinctly unflattering, and gestured the guards forward to escort him out.
Rohan rose on legs that barely held him, spear gripped in one hand — not raised, not threatening, simply present, exactly as agreed — and let himself be walked out of the engine room and into a corridor lined with more guards than he could easily count, every one of them watching him with the particular wariness reserved for something that had already proven itself more dangerous than it looked.
He did not fight them. There was, at this point, nothing left in him to fight with, and no reason left to try.
They led him to a small, spare cabin somewhere in the ship’s mid decks — not a cell, exactly, though the door locked from the outside and a guard took up post beside it the moment Rohan crossed the threshold. A narrow bunk. A single porthole showing nothing but the deep, star-scattered black of open space. A washroom barely large enough to turn around in.