None of the guards spoke to him during the walk, though several exchanged glances Rohan pretended not to notice — the particular, wary sort of glance people gave something they weren’t entirely sure they’d correctly identified yet. He couldn’t blame them for it. He wasn’t entirely sure he’d correctly identified himself either, not anymore. Seven months ago he’d been an eighteen-year-old sitting through his third and final Awakening ceremony, dreading nothing worse than the prospect of remaining ordinary. Now he was walking through the corridors of an alien starship under armed guard, having just held an entire vessel’s engine hostage to buy himself six days of passage toward a system he’d never heard of until an hour ago.
Ordinary would almost be a relief at this point.
It was, by any measure Rohan could construct, an improvement on every place he’d slept since the day he woke up in a dungeon that shouldn’t have existed and stumbled into a universe that hadn’t wanted him.
He set the spear down carefully against the wall beside the bunk, checked — out of habit rather than any real expectation of danger — that the door was as locked as it appeared, and finally, finally allowed his body to fold down onto the thin mattress.
[Status]
[Condition: Fatigued (Severe)]
[Origin Energy: 3% / 100%]
[Recommendation: Extended rest required before further skill use.]
’Yeah. I noticed that too.’
He should have felt triumphant. Some distant, rational part of him understood that he’d just done something that shouldn’t have been possible — stowed away aboard an interstellar merchant vessel, survived a firefight against trained soldiers with weapons centuries beyond anything he understood, taken an entire ship’s engine hostage and walked away with exactly the terms he’d demanded.
Mostly, he just felt tired, and small, and a very long way from anywhere that had ever felt like home.
He thought of Veyrhold — of Maerin’s cold competence and Bryan’s careful ledgers, of Jorren’s silent loyalty and Iri’s fierce, frightened care, of Pell’s twelve-year-old certainty that everything would work out because Rohan had said it would, of Liora’s hand brushing his as she pressed her father’s charm into his palm.
’I made it off the ground. I’m actually leaving.’
He didn’t know, yet, what waited for him at the Halcyon Span — what a crossroads system full of thousands of ships would look like, what dangers or opportunities or answers might be scattered somewhere among that traffic. He didn’t know how many more overlap points or anchor fragments or impossible odds stood between him and whatever door Hestia had told him might, eventually, lead back to his own universe.
But for the first time since a wolf had nearly killed him on a slab field beneath a violet sky, the path ahead of him pointed somewhere other than survival for its own sake.
It pointed forward.
Outside the porthole, stars slid past in slow, steady procession, and somewhere beneath the deck plating, the engine he’d threatened to unmake carried him quietly, faithfully, toward all of it.
Rohan closed his eyes, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, allowed himself to sleep without one hand resting on the shaft of his spear.
He woke to the soft chime of the cabin’s comm panel and the grey, filtered light of what he assumed was the ship’s manufactured "morning" cycle, his body aching in a dozen places, his
Origin Energy reserves crawling back toward something resembling functional.
[Status]
[Origin Energy: 41% / 100%]
[Condition: Fatigued (Minor)]
[Recommendation: Continued rest advised, though not required.]
The comm panel chimed again, more insistently.
"Yes?" Rohan said, voice rough with sleep.
"Captain Odris requests your presence," came a guard’s flat voice through the panel. "He indicates it is not urgent, but suggests you will want to hear what he has to say regarding your destination."
Rohan sat up slowly, testing the various protests his body offered against the motion, and reached for the spear resting against the wall.
Six days to the Halcyon Span. I suppose I’d better learn what I’m walking into.
He rose, steadied himself against the bunk frame for a moment while the room finished deciding whether it wanted to spin, and moved toward the door.
Whatever Captain Odris wanted to say, Rohan intended to hear all of it — carefully, cautiously, and with a great deal less trust than the man’s smooth voice would ever earn from him again.
But he would hear it standing, on his own two feet, aboard a ship carrying him somewhere new for the first time in seven long months.
The guard outside his door — a broad-shouldered man with a scar bisecting one eyebrow, who introduced himself with obvious reluctance as Corrin when Rohan asked — escorted him through corridors that looked entirely different in the ship’s manufactured daylight than they had under the bleeding red of emergency lighting. Clean. Efficient. Lined with crew going about ordinary business who each, without exception, found some reason to watch Rohan pass out of the corners of their eyes.
Word travels fast on a ship this size, apparently.
Captain Odris waited in a modest meeting chamber just off what Rohan guessed was the command deck, seated at a round table with a data slate in front of him and, notably, no visible weapon and no additional guards beyond Corrin, who took up position by the door rather than crowding the room.
Up close, without the smoothing effect of a comm channel, Odris looked older than his voice suggested — fine lines etched around eyes that missed very little, a stillness to him that Rohan recognised now as something other than warmth. It was control. The same kind of control Maerin wore, though aimed at entirely different ends.
"Please," Odris said, gesturing to the chair opposite him. "Sit. You look like a man who has earned it, whatever else I may think of the manner in which you earned it."
Rohan sat, spear laid across his knees rather than set aside, and said nothing, waiting. Odris studied him for a long moment before continuing.
"My chief engineer wanted you confined to the brig for the remainder of this transit," he said. "My head of security wanted rather more permanent measures discussed, before I reminded her that permanent measures tend to complicate insurance claims involving stowaways who never officially existed in the first place." A thin, humourless smile. "I overruled them both, as you may have gathered, given that you are currently sitting across from me instead of in either of the places they proposed."
"Why?"
"Because you were correct." Odris set the data slate down, folding his hands atop it. "You are, at present, considerably more valuable to me alive, cooperative, and discreet than dead, martyred, or the subject of an inquiry into how a stowaway managed to compromise this vessel’s primary drive systems. There will be a report filed, of course. Reports of some kind are unavoidable. But I intend to write it in a manner that reflects rather better on my crew’s competence than the truth strictly permits, and I would ask, in turn, that you not contradict it once we reach port."
Rohan considered that for a moment. "That’s not a request. That’s the price of the deal we already made."
"Call it what you like." Odris’s expression didn’t shift. "I find people respond better to requests than prices, even when the underlying arithmetic is identical."