From the cockpit of the Valkyrie, warp two translated itself into that familiar elongation of light: streaks drawn out along some invisible curve. Ayres used to find the experience comforting. But watching the sensor ghost of the second fighter running ahead of him, it felt devastating.

“Parr,” he said, for the sixth time in as many minutes, “answer your damned comm.”

His voice filled the small cockpit, bounced off the canopy and consoles, and ran up against the wall of static that had settled on the open channel. The Valkyrie’s systems hummed under his hands, the little interceptor’s warp field a low, insistent thrum transmitted through the frame and into his ribs.

The tactical display showed her fighter half a light-second ahead, running steady. No drift. No erratic movement. Just a quiet, implacable course at warp two along a vector that, when extrapolated, led nowhere in particular. Nowhere charted: a direction that was more absence than destination.

Ayres flicked a control with a practiced, economical gesture, boosting his sensor gain. The Valkyrie’s cockpit was familiar to him. He had spent his early career in fighters and these instincts, at least, remained comforting.

“Computer,” he muttered, “confirm current relative distance to target fighter.”

The Valkyrie’s onboard voice replied at once. “Distance to transponder zero point four eight light-seconds.”

“Any response to hails?”

“Negative.”

Of course it was.

He rapped his knuckles gently against one of the side panels, an old pilot’s superstition he’d picked up and never quite shaken. The gesture settled something in his chest.

“Emilia. Talk to me.”

This time, the static shifted. Just a fraction. Enough that the silence felt deliberate rather than empty.

He swallowed the sharp reply that wanted to come – ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, what have you done’ – and forced his voice flat instead. He wanted to keep the emotions, his anger, on a short lead.

“You transmitted your command codes to the Pilgrims, Emilia. To them. They almost took the Farragut because of those codes. I’m following you because I’m assuming that wasn’t entirely voluntary. You’re going to confirm that assumption now.”

The static hissed and crackled.

Then, very faintly, he heard breathing.

“Captain.”

His spine straightened.

“Say again, Emilia.”

“Mike,” came the reply. Quiet. Strained. It was not her usual tone but not entirely devoid of it either. “You shouldn’t be here.”

He exhaled, slow. “You don’t get to make that decision.”

A short, choked sound reached him that could have been a laugh, or something snagging on the way out. “You shouldn’t be here,” she repeated. “They don’t want you.”

“And yet,” Ayres said dryly, “I’m here.”

He eased the fighter along its path, the Valkyrie’s warp field nudging into a slightly narrower corridor to match her course more precisely. He was close enough now that his sensors could pick up low-level fluctuations in her power systems. Nothing obvious. No sign of overload or malfunction. No evidence at all, in fact, that she was not simply on a very steady, very deliberate, leisurely flight.

“Emilia Parr,” he said, letting her full name carry a weight all of its own, “do you know where you’re going?”

“Yes,” she replied promptly.

He waited. She did not elaborate.

“Would you like to share it?”

“No.”

The way she said it struck him harder than a shout. There was no petulance in it, no defiant bridge officer pushing back; just an absence, a hollowing-out around the syllable.

He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again onto the tunnel of starlight. “I’m going to make some leaps here,” he said. “You had contact with the reliquary in the lab. We thought it had gone dormant. We took it aboard anyway because we were arrogant enough to think that locking something in a secure field would protect us. I didn’t notice you were off your game until Orantei. That’s on me.”

There was a crackle. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

That was not the answer he had been looking for.

“What is?”

A pause. The breathing changed, fast then slow, as if she were somewhere between running and then meditating.

“The song,” she said eventually.

“Parr, there is no song. There’s a box of alien circuitry that hijacks technology and played puppet with the station’s administrator until she started speaking in two voices at once.”

“You didn’t hear it.”

“I heard enough.” He tried to shift the memory shoving itself forward: Orantei’s corridors shuddering, Lara Tei’s face splitting into overlapping layers, the station humming in frequencies that crawled under his skin.

“They showed me,” Emilia said. “They showed me how quiet everything is. How loud it could be.”

It’s not her, he thought. Or not only her.

He had felt it too, in the periphery. Not like she had, but enough to recognise the architecture: the reliquaries, the Pilgrims’ ships, the station were all singing pieces of the same hymn. And she, thanks to that damned box, was wired in.

“Let me guess,” he said. “They suggested you open the doors.”

“I didn’t want to,” she replied, and for the first time her voice cracked properly, a human fracture rather than an alien echo. “I didn’t want to, Mike. I tried not to. It’s difficult, when something’s in your head and it’s not telling you to do something, but it’s becoming you. You know?”

“No,” he said, very softly. “I don’t know. But I want to help you. You transmitted your command codes,” he said. “They used your authority to access the Farragut’s systems. Even with the arrival of the Victory, I don’t know if my ship and my crew survived! Your ship, your crew.”

“Don’t,” she said quietly. “I remember. Don’t make me remember all of it. I can’t sort which parts were me any more.”

He let the silence hang, the anger shearing away and leaving only a tired sort of grief behind it.

“Do you know where they’re taking you?” he asked.

Another pause. Then: “Home.”

“Emilia…”

“Not their home,” she said, sharper now, a flicker of the officer he knew. “Not the ships. Those are tools. And they aren’t in charge. The boxes are. The boxes are fragments. Shards. They’re like… like dropped pieces of glass from something bigger. They want to go back to the place where they fit.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t have the coordinates,” she said, frustration cutting through the otherness. “They don’t either. It’s like a pull. A direction. Enough to know where not to be.”

He glanced at his own navigation display. The course projection was a long line into under-mapped space; here and there, faint notations appeared where some long-ago probe had nodded at a gas giant or dark nebula.

“Explain to me why you needed to be in a fighter for this,” he said. “They already had your codes. Why not take you with the ship?”

“They tried,” she said. “The station tried. The Pilgrims tried. Lara tried. I remember her eyes. The other voice was too strong. It wanted us all quiet. Dead, if necessary. Fewer independent variables. I…“ A sharp inhale. “I pushed back. I think she helped, in the end. She broke their grip just long enough. I ran.”

“In a Valkyrie.”

“They wanted the big ship,” she muttered. “The reliquary didn’t care about the scale – only the connectivity – but the Pilgrims did.”

He found himself smiling in spite of everything. “You stole my fighter.”

“You always said you’d rather be flying one than sitting on a bridge,” she murmured.

He sobered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“When?” she shot back. “When it was a whisper in the back of my head? When it started sounding like my own thoughts? ‘Sir, request permission to consider betraying the ship because an alien paperweight is telling me stories?’”

“Something like that,” he said.

The warp tunnel rippled. For a heartbeat the stars outside blurred into an indistinct smear as both their fields flexed. He frowned, checked his console. Something had brushed their warp bubbles; a momentary interference.

He increased the sensor resolution again. The region ahead showed slightly higher subspace noise than baseline, almost like a trail. A disturbance left by something larger that had passed this way, once, some time ago.

“Are you following them,” he asked, “or are they pulling you?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

He closed his eyes for half a breath. “All right. New plan.”

He straightened in the seat and shifted his tone into a command register. “Emilia Parr, this is your captain speaking now, not your partner. You are under the influence of an external force. You are currently heading into uncharted space under instruction from that force. That ends here.”

She laughed. The sound was brittle. “You going to shoot me down, sir?”

“If I have to,” he said, before he could stop himself.

Silence. Then, very quietly, “I thought so.”

He breathed out through his teeth. “Emilia, listen. I don’t want to. I’m not here to be your executioner. I’m here to pull you out, to help you.”

“Mike…”

“But,” he continued, “if you continue on this path, and risk hurting more people, or undermining who I know you to be, I will take action.”

The warp field sang around him, a faint high note in the instrumentation, as if the ship itself were listening. Parr did not answer immediately. When she did, her voice had lost some of its breathless, distant quality.

“Do you remember Framheim?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You said you’d rather fly into a storm with someone who could argue with you than sail calmly with someone who’d just nod at your orders.”

“I was attempting to flirt,” he said.

“But you also said,” she added, and now he heard something else threading through, like another voice following the line a heartbeat behind, “you’d never let me walk into danger alone.”

He stared at the console. “That still stands.”

“I don’t want it to. I don’t want to lose you,” she said. “Because that’s where I’m going, I can feel the danger.”

“Drop to impulse,” he ordered. “Now.”

“No.”

“Parr…”

“I can’t,” she said, and there it was explicitly, the fracture in the words. One syllable sounded like her, the other like something else. “I would, Mike, I really…” A sharp intake of breath, almost a cry. “But I can’t. It’s like trying to fall backwards and trust someone will catch you, but my body won’t act, I can’t fall even though my mind is shouting to trust you.”

His hands tightened on the controls. He could force her out of warp, in theory: disrupt her field, destabilise the corridor, cripple her drive. He could take the shot. He stared at the little icon on his display that represented her ship.

“Emilia,” he said, quietly this time. “Em. Where are you in there?”

Silence. Only the hum of the warp field.

Then: “I don’t know,” she whispered.

He swallowed hard against a sudden tightness in his throat. “All right. Then we do this together. You say they’re shards. They want to go home. Fine. We’re going together and then we’re going to figure out a way to stop them.”

“They won’t like that,” she murmured.

“I don’t like them,” he said. “They can file a complaint.”

The interference spiked. Alarms flickered half-heartedly on his display.

“Something’s up ahead,” he muttered. “Some kind of subspace disturbance. You seeing it?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re excited.”

“Good for them. We’re throttling back.”

“Can’t,” she said again, but this time it sounded more distant, as if she were watching herself from across a room. “It’s… pull, Mike. I told you. I want to resist and I can’t resist.”

He gritted his teeth. “Then I’ll slow you from back here.”

He shifted the Valkyrie’s field harmonics, bringing his own warp bubble marginally out of phase with hers. The fighters’ relative positions altered subtly; his craft began to exert a drag, bleeding kinetic energy out of the shared corridor.

The strain built. His consoles groaned warnings. The stars ahead rippled.

“Stop it,” she hissed suddenly. Not at him. Not entirely. “Stop. You’ll tear. It’ll tear.”

“Good,” he said through clenched teeth. “Maybe it will.”

He watched their relative velocity tick down. The interference screamed around them. The fighters shook, small frames protesting the mismatch between their design tolerances and what was being asked of them. He smelled something overheating: a bitter, acrid scent from behind the panels.

“Mike,” she whispered, “it hurts.”

“I know. Stay with me.”

The warp tunnel flickered again. For a moment he saw, not stretched starlight, but something else: a faint lattice of darker shadow threaded through the void, like an old structure half-hidden behind the curtain of reality. A shape-not-shape, vast and distant, imprinting itself on the corridor.

The reliquary’s song swelled.

He felt it. Not in words, but in a pressure at the back of his skull, in an ache behind the eyes. A pull that said they should come home.

“No,” he said aloud, and the refusal shocked him with its vehemence. “We’re not yours. Not her. Not me.”

The Valkyrie’s warp field buckled. An alarm blared properly this time, a hoarse wail. The star-tunnel collapsed in a smear of light as his ship dropped out of warp. The sudden transition threw him forward against the harness; the universe snapped back to pinprick stars.

His stomach lurched as the fighter tumbled once, twice, before his hands corrected the spin. The engines whined in protest.

He sucked in a breath, heart pounding.

“Emilia,” he rasped. “Report.”

Nothing.

He looked at the display.

Her icon was gone.

He froze, then ran a quick active sweep. Space around him was quiet, a mild subspace wake fading slowly. Far ahead, too far for his short-range sensors to resolve properly, there was the barest hint of something: an anomalous reading, a ghost of activated subspace.

She had slipped through, the tether he had tried to throw had snapped.

“Fuck,” he muttered, throttling the Valkyrie’s impulse to maximum. He tried to reacquire her warp trail, but the small fighter’s systems were not built for long-range tracking.

He sat there for a long moment in the dim starlight, breathing slowly, feeling the warp engine’s residual heat fade behind him.

“All right, my love,” he said softly to the empty channel. “You run ahead. I’ll find the long road round.”

He reached for the controls, began plotting a cautious, slower-course trajectory along the approximate vector she had taken. Somewhere back along the line, he told himself, the Victory and Anthemius would be figuring out what is going on and come to their aid.

“Michael,” he whispered to himself, “do not be a fool.”

He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, saw her face as it had been in their quarters on Framheim, amused, wary, and beautiful. Then the Valkyrie turned its nose toward the hunt.