Page 58 of The Sovereign, Part One (The Sovereign Saga #1)

I rolled onto my back, eyes still closed, dragging the covers over my head as if they could reverse the date.

Sleep had never really come—just a cycle of worry and what-ifs, stacking in my mind like a tower of leirs at a Vanguard soirée—painstakingly planned and arranged until some clueless socialite elbowed them into oblivion.

Ninety or so minutes from now, an assessment meant to examine every crevice of our Vesture would commence.

A Vesture that, from nearly the beginning, had been filled with deviances and infractions—minor, major, and some that would warrant a one-way ticket beyond the wall.

“Attire selection is complete,” Calyx reported. “ Your Hydrabay sequence will activate in five minutes. Cortisol levels indicate a sustained stress elevation. Shall I administer a microdose of serenity serum to stabilize your neurochemistry?”

“No,” I groaned into the pillow. “Just… give me a minute.”

There was a pause, longer than Calyx’s usual beat. When he spoke again, his tone had lightened again.

“Of course, Isara. I’m here when you’re ready.”

I stared at the arched ceiling, its light beginning to glow in subtle pulses.

My heart was beating far too loudly for such a quiet room.

We were no longer taking just another step toward our Oathbond.

It was a mirror held up to everything we couldn’t say aloud: the breaches, Maxim’s deviations, the truths Lev had buried beneath layers of Citadel compliance.

What Maxim and I had become since the Eidolon was something far outside their sanctioned design.

We were something that, to The Citadel, to Hyperion Systems, was dangerous.

I threw off the blankets and sat up, palms pressed into my thighs. “Okay,” I breathed. “Calyx, activate Hydrabay.”

Water dispersed from the ceiling and the atomized jets along the walls in fine sheets, striking the composite floor and transpane with a hiss—like rainfall on polished stone—while the dressing alcove’s panels emitted a low, harmonic hum.

The alcove illuminated and slid open. A cream blouse with lightly structured shoulders appeared first, followed by a tailored skirt in fired clay that parted at the knee. Elegant. Intentional. Forgettable.

“Would you like a chicory infusion to aid your reentry to consciousness, or shall we face the morning on sheer willpower alone?” Calyx asked.

“Just water,” I muttered, a reluctant smile tugging at one corner of my mouth.

A frosted leir materialized beside the en-suite basin, condensation beading along its sides. I rinsed my face, then met my own gaze in the mirror. Same sharp bob. Same pale blue eyes. Same expressionless mouth. But I didn’t feel the same—not after yesterday.

They will come. And when they do, you won’t have time to think.

Lev’s words seeped into the seams of my thoughts, heavy and clinging like oil to silk.

I washed and dressed in silence, my body obeying routine while my thoughts scraped against each other. The Dyadic Assessment was standard. Required. Every couple had one. Sometimes two. But for us, it felt like stepping into The Citadel’s crosshairs with a lit flare in my hand.

By 08:11, I was ready.

At 08:16, Calyx’s voice filled the acquell.

“Maxim has arrived,” Calyx said.

I paused at the bottom step, staring at the threshold panel. On the other side was my accordant, and the future we might not survive. “Grant entry,” I whispered.

This could be our last day. This was the moment we’d been spiraling toward, slowly, then all at once. Weeks of veiled infractions and deviations. A Supplicant who wasn’t behaving like one. A Sovereign who couldn’t—wouldn’t—report him.

If we failed the assessment, it wouldn’t just be separation.

Maxim would be taken, to be deactivated, decommissioned, or worse.

I’d be exiled beyond the wall, into whatever wasteland Hyperion excluded from sanctioned discourse unacknowledged, unnamed, and utterly abandoned, just like the Drave in the Skaarth.

No one came back from exile. Not alive. Even if I could somehow make it to The Vale from the far side of the wall, use Joss’s name to gain entry, did I want to exist without Maxim?

I dragged a shaky breath through my nose and tried to still my hands. They wouldn’t stop trembling. This wasn’t protocol like it was for everyone else. For us, the Dyadic Assessment was a guillotine disguised as a formality.

Maxim stepped into view like he’d been summoned by every desperate thought I hadn’t said aloud, dressed in a charcoal coat cut close to his frame, its collar standing just high enough to graze his sculpted jaw.

Beneath it, a slate-gray shirt opened at the throat, tie absent.

It was as if he’d known my strategy, to dress purposefully understated, to fade into the room, to be present as expected, but wholly unremarkable.

Slim black trousers tapered clean to the ankle, and his boots—polished, angular, subtly assertive—moved without sound across the composite floor.

But his olive-green irises, they’d locked on mine before the panel had even fully cleared. His gaze, confident and intent, almost broke me.

For one second, I wanted to pretend. Ask him to read to me, slip beneath the covers like we had so many times before, safe, suspended.

But any delay would trigger alerts we could afford even less than failure.

We could lose everything, including our lives, just an hour or so from now. And still, I stepped toward him.

“Good morning, my love,” he said, his voice smooth. “Waiting to see you was nothing less than torture. Our Oathbond can’t come soon enough.”

“Hi,” I replied, quieter than I intended. In the next moment, my face was buried in his chest, my knuckles white as my fingers gripped his coat.

He held me tight, his cheek against my hair. “You’re exhausted. I should’ve stayed with you last night. Helped you to fall asleep.”

My shoulders sank. “The last thing we should do is break the rules before our appointment.”

“Lev was confident we would pass. He’s protected us this long. He’s not going to risk losing data now.”

“Data,” I muttered.

He leaned back, waiting until I looked up to meet his gaze. “You’re more than that to him, and you know it. He’s ten steps ahead of The Citadel. And even if he’s not, what have I told you?” he asked with a gentle smile.

I exhaled. “You have a plan.”

“I have a thousand plans.”

I nodded, closing my eyes and leaning in as he kissed my forehead. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Maxim took my hand as we approached the transport—toward the Assessment, toward The Citadel’s unforgiving lens, and into the aftermath of an experiment we never agreed to.

He only let go long enough to guide me to my seat before circling to the other side, slipping in beside me, and once again lacing his fingers through mine.

His thumb moved in slow sweeps along my palm, as if coaxing my breath into a steadier rhythm.

“Calyx,” he said. “Initiate route to The Paragon. Interior sector, private intake.”

“Confirmed,” Calyx replied. “Estimated arrival is in approximately twenty-two minutes.”

I swallowed hard, my gaze clinging to the familiar terrace greenery draping lazily from our Sablestone as we pulled away, from the landing outside Ibith’s house, the signage at the edge of our district, the community gardens.

I wanted to believe that if I just kept our home, the safety of our district in sight, I could stay, that holding on with my eyes might keep us tethered to the only place we could be ourselves, beyond The Citadel’s watchful eye.

The structures grew sparser as we neared the Auriel Span, its glistening arc rising ahead, suspended in silent strength over the Iveris Sound.

Those last two kilometers bridging the mid districts to the Core Sector felt like the final threshold, my last bastion before the descent.

A dull sickness settled in my stomach, dense like the sediment pressed deep beneath the waters of the Sound.

As if reading my mind—which, in some ways, he could—Maxim’s voice softened. “Calyx, play track: Ariadne Threadlight, Volume Six . Moderate volume.”

The music began, subtle and spatial, threading through the air like water beneath transpane. It wasn’t distracting, but it shifted the silence and dread just enough.

“You’re holding tension in your fingers,” Maxim said, lifting my hand slightly, his thumb brushing over the joints. “You’re imagining too many variables we can’t control.”

“I’m imagining the one I can’t live through,” I said, finally looking up at him. “If something goes wrong in there—”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

He waited to respond as the transport curved through the last turn and slowed to a soundless stop, its slipgates opening like a held breath finally exhaled.

Then, he turned to me with resolve that didn’t ask for permission.

“I do know this,” he said. “Every trace of my programming anomalies is buried under layers of synthetic normalcy. Not by chance, Isara. By design. By Leviticus Phineas Navon, Hyperion’s Chief Architect.

And he’s confident that not even the Lead Psychometrician will identify a single inconsistency.

Eshran Virek will not find what he’s not cleared to see. ”

“But if Ezri sees it? She’s his counterpart and a Supplicant. Some say she’s even tougher than he is. If she even suspects—”

“She won’t,” he said, voice low. “We’ll enter together, and we’ll leave the same. You’re afraid of a misstep. I understand. But Lev has accounted for this. And if he hasn’t… I have.”

I stared at him a beat longer, then finally gave a small nod.

“Walk me through it again.”