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Cal just nods. He barely said a word all night, but it’s not rudeness. I can tell he’s introverted, and he flicks his smart-watch, already engrossed in a stream of data before I’ve stood up.

She takes me down a hallway. “I barely know half the rooms in this place. It’s way too big for us. I spend most of my time in the lab, but that’s probably boring…” She has a hopeful look in her eyes.

“No, I’d love to see it.”

“Sure!” She takes me back into the grand hall, and down a set of stairs into the depths of the manor. Doors lead out to glass-windowed rooms with workout equipment and training dummies for Orb-Blade practice, but we go down a deeper hallway, into a spacious room that feels smaller than it is, packed full of processors running at full whir, spitting out data into holo-vid feeds. The steel, skeleton structure of a Mark-10 Cyborg stands strictly to attention, like a silent guardian, unthinking. Her wooden desk at the end of the room is covered with papers,a bracken coffee mug half full of ancient brew. It sports a couple of chairs, one sized for a human and the other much larger.

“Me and Cal spend a lot of time down here. He’s a genius… a little different, but a genius. Coffee? It’s not half bad,” she says, pointing to the organic replicator on the wall. “I hate bothering Hazel and Grace, and since I’m on decaf now it’s not going to taste good either way…”

I smile. “Don’t worry, I’m okay. I don’t think I could put anything else in me after that meal.”

“Just one thin wafer?”

I blink, confused, and she smiles, embarrassed. “Sorry. It’s a really old reference, my team used to watch these skit shows from Old Earth back in the lab. It was this recurring joke we’d use and… never mind that.”

She trails off, a little sheepishly, and I realize she’s really been spending a lot of time with the awkward Aurelian Cal, who rubbed off on her. “So, what do you work on down here?”

“I’m split. Queen Jasmine wants me on the Cyborgs, and that’s what my triad is working on. Tarik and Griffon are at the main factory right now, doing some simulated combat to model the next generation of Cyborgs off them. But my true passion is the Rift.”

“Can I touch it?” I walk closer to the skeleton of the Cyborg. It towers over me, with thick metal bones, and I shiver as I imagine a civilization finding these remnants in a million years and picturing a race of giants.

“Go for it.”

I run my hand over the arm, cool to the touch. “Do you ever worry they’ll… stop listening to you?’

She nods. “Yeah. That was a big factor in the Mark-10s, which were the first combat-ready model. The previous ones… well, it’s a top-secret scandal, but… shit, I should watch what I say. I keep forgetting you’re a Prime Minister.”

“My lips are sealed. But it’s okay. What are you trying to learn about the Rift?”

Her face lights up. She pulls herself up on the oversized chair, spinning it to face me. “I’m obsessed with it. My triad was trapped in it… you heard about that?”

I nod.

“They spent near a century in that… place. I thought I’d lost them, that they’d never come back. I made it my mission to break them out, no matter how long it took. We were lucky. They had the will to escape.”

A cold thread of unease works through me as I try not to remember the endless darkness of that place between worlds. She sees my discomfort, and winces. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“No, it’s okay, I mentioned it. How’d you know we had a failed shift?”

“Doman broadcasted it on coms, when he was messaging the palace. And well, Cal’s got coms cracked. We also saw signatures from the shift. First one seemed normal, but then there was a second one at the same location—the only thing that made sense was that someone was lost in the first shift, and Doman ordered the ship back in to get them. It was you, right?”

“Yeah. It was me.”

“Your crew is the first humans to have been in the Rift in… decades.”

“I’ll tell you whatever I can, but I doubt it’ll be much help. The first shift. Everyone else got out, but it… it grabbed me. My triad went back in to get me out. They lost Aurelians to save me.”

The icy coldness of it. No, something deeper than cold, a place that have never touched warmth, and when it sensed me, it had no hunger. The rules of that place simply meant it must consume me. I can still feel it, when I close my eyes, my mind melting and atrophying

“Gods,” says Evelyn, shuddering. “I’m sorry. I really shouldn’t have said anything, it’s too soon. I’m an idiot, bringing you to my lab where I study your worst nightmare.”

“It’s fine. You know, I think Doman’s been wanting us to get together for a long time.” I take the human-sized chair, resting my elbow on a tiny empty space of wood on the desk between stacks of papers, most written in Aurelian, the tall, lilting letters of the alien species.

“Why’s that?”

I look down at her swelling belly and back up at her.

“Oh. Yeah. Bruton said you’re Doman’s Fated Mate… but unless Titus and Gallien are wearing grey contacts, you haven’t done anything about it. So, logically, Doman thinks that talking with me means I’ll convince you to be Bonded?”