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⮞ Chapter Four: Nightfall Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 22.2k+ Summary: Stranded on a barren planet lit by three suns, a group of survivors struggle to survive after their transporter crash-lands. Their situation grows dire when pilot Y/N discovers that every 22 years, an eclipse plunges the planet into darkness, unleashing swarms of flesh-eating creatures. Facing both external threats and internal tensions, the group forms a fragile alliance. As mistrust and secrets surface, Y/N's complicated dynamic with convict and murderer Jungkook intensifies, making the fight for survival against the darkness and the creatures even more perilous. Warnings: Strong Language, Side Character Death, Main Character Death, Aliens, Vicious Carnivorous Aliens, Violence, Blood, Jungkook is a huge prick, Cocky too, Talks About Past Characters Dying, Trauma Bonding, Bickering, Arguing, If Kook is a prick then Lee is a dick, Child Death, Graphic Death Scenes, Sexual Tension, Y/N is just trying her best, Jaded Characters, Religious Themes (I mean no harm and do not want to offend anyone), Bad Character Choices, Peter is Iconic (and a dumb ass), Surviving, Alcohol Consumption, Aliens killing A LOT of people, SUSPENSE, ANGST, Lee is genuinely the WORST person here, and he's in competition with a murderer so, I love how much of a jerk JK is, In Namjoon we trust, kissing, love/hate, complicated emotions, lowkey toxic, highkey really, drug use, drug addiction, use of needles, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: Be prepared... there's a pretty graphic death scene. Proceed with caution. Thanks for reading!

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The coring room was too quiet.

Its silence closed around Soobin as soon as he slipped through the doorway, settling over his shoulders and throat like a cloth heavy with heat and dust. Outside, the settlement burned beneath relentless sunlight, the air so thin that panic could become dizziness before a person understood what was happening. In here, the heat had gone stale. It sat trapped beneath the roof and inside the walls, thick with dust, corroded metal, and something older, something that had been shut away too long without properly dying.

Soobin remained just inside the entrance with one hand hovering near the door, as though the sensible part of him had not yet let go.

He had not meant to come in alone. That was the explanation he would have offered Namjoon later, though it sounded weak even inside his own head. He had only intended to look through the doorway and prove that the squat little building contained nothing worse than another dead machine.

The others were occupied with the water and the skiff. Every capable pair of hands had already found work, while Soobin had spent most of the day being told to stay close, stay out of the way, conserve his breath, and let the adults handle things.

No one had said it cruelly, which somehow made it worse.

Before the crash, adulthood had seemed like a door that opened at a certain age, and fourteen felt close enough to see the handle. On New Mecca, boys younger than him carried siblings through crowded transit terminals, bartered for meals, and recited entire passages of prayer without stumbling. His older cousins had begun apprenticeships at thirteen. They repaired climate seals, balanced household accounts, and stood beside their fathers during evening services with the solemn concentration of grown men.

Soobin had believed the pilgrimage might change the way Namjoon saw him. He would endure cryosleep, learn the prayers correctly, and arrive with something solid inside him.

Instead, he had awakened inside a dying ship surrounded by strangers screaming in the dark.

Since the crash, every useful task seemed to happen just beyond his reach. Namjoon kept him close because he loved him, but love became humiliating when everyone else was bleeding, lifting, searching, and deciding. Even Kai and Yeonjun had found work carrying salvage between the settlement buildings. Soobin had followed until Namjoon sent him back for water, and the shame of it still burned in his face long after Namjoon turned away.

That was when he noticed the coring room.

The outer door stood partly open, its broken chain hanging against the frame. Something mechanical had groaned inside, and a pale indicator blinked weakly on a wall panel that should have been dead.

Soobin told himself there might be tools in there, emergency lamps, survey maps, or anything useful enough to carry back and place at Y/N’s feet without being asked.

He imagined Namjoon’s surprise.

Not pride exactly. Hoping for pride made him feel childish.

Recognition, perhaps. A brief look admitting that Namjoon had been wrong to protect him from every sharp edge in the world.

That thought had carried him across the threshold.

Now, with stale darkness breathing around him, Soobin understood that usefulness and courage were not the same thing. Courage belonged to people who understood what they were entering and went anyway.

This was only a boy trying to outrun embarrassment.

A blade of alien sunlight entered through the narrow gap behind him and cut across the cracked floor in a thin white line. Dust drifted through it, each particle briefly visible before disappearing into gray.

Metal groaned overhead.

The sound filled the room, long and aching, and made Soobin press his teeth together. Ancient gears coughed rust from their joints as the sand shutters dragged themselves away from the roof seams. Dust shook loose from the rafters and descended in pale curtains while more light crept inside.

It was not much, but it was enough to show him he was not alone.

The smell reached him first, sour and metallic, with something organic woven through it. It was not ordinary rot. Rot belonged to spoiled food, dead flesh, or wet cloth forgotten inside a sealed bag.

This was decay cooked in heat and trapped inside metal until it had sharpened into something with teeth.

Soobin looked toward the rafters.

Nests crowded the beams overhead. For a few desperate moments, his mind tried to make them harmless: bundled insulation, torn cargo webbing, old tarps caught in the supports.

The details refused the lie.

Swollen sacs clung to the rafters in clusters, their fibrous surfaces bound together by sinewy strands stretching from beam to beam like muscle pulled thin. Some were small enough to cradle against his chest. Others could have contained a crouching child.

None of them were still.

Their surfaces rose and fell in slow, uneven rhythms.

They were breathing.

Soobin’s mouth opened, but no sound came.

A faint click moved through the rafters above him, claws touching metal with deliberate care. It was close enough to make his pulse thunder in his ears, and for one terrible moment he imagined the creatures following that heartbeat straight to him.

He did not blink or move. His entire body became a listening thing as the clicking spread overhead. One sound became two, and two became six, skittering along the beams and slipping behind the hanging sacs where the new light could not reach. It circled the room in irregular bursts, never quite where he expected and always nearer than before.

The strip of daylight behind him became the only thing in the world.

The door. The narrow opening. The way out.

Soobin forced his legs to move.

His boot scraped against the floor, and the sound seemed to crack the room open.

He ran toward the light as something shifted above him. Fear pulled his gaze upward before wisdom could stop it, and he saw the inside of one nest catch the sun. The fibers shone wetly, translucent and alive, while something writhed beneath the surface and pushed outward.

The seam split with a sharp crack, and the sac opened like rotten fruit.

Bodies spilled into the air in a tangled rush of claws, legs, and mouths. Wings snapped open as they fell, their shells catching the narrow light in oily flashes. Their collective shriek struck Soobin like a physical blow.

It was more than sound. The layered cry rattled the bones of his skull and scraped across his thoughts until there was no room left for breath.

He staggered as his chest locked tight. For one suspended instant, the swarm hung above him like a torn shadow.

Then it found him.

Hunger changed the shape of its movement.

Soobin screamed.

The sound tore through the settlement, raw and unfinished.

Namjoon’s head snapped up. The goblet trembled in his hand, cloudy water shivering against the crystal as everything else vanished beneath the scream. The low conversation around him, boots scraping over the floor, the uneven hum of old machinery, Peter’s half-formed remark, and Bindi’s curse from the doorway all disappeared.

The cry echoed once across the settlement.

Namjoon knew.

His body understood before his mind could give the thought a name.

“Soobin.”

The goblet fell from his hand as he began moving. Glass and precious water struck the floor behind him, unseen and unheard.

Namjoon burst outside, and the heat struck him full in the face. The thin air began burning his lungs almost immediately, but he ran harder. He needed no one to tell him where the scream had come from. Some part of him already knew it had come from the coring room, the squat building at the edge of the settlement that no one had wanted to enter, the place that had been waiting.

His robes tangled around his legs, and he gathered them in one fist as he forced himself faster. The settlement blurred into streaks of rust, sagging canvas, broken railings, and sunlight glaring from dead glass. Voices rose behind him, followed by the pounding of more feet, but he barely heard them.

He remembered Soobin seated cross-legged in the pilgrim quarters before the crash, his bracelet wound around his fingers as he asked whether fear made prayer stronger or weaker. He saw him again in the cargo hold, trying not to cry when the water ran out, followed by a hundred smaller moments Namjoon had never known he needed to preserve until the scream sharpened every one of them.

He knew before the coring room came into view.

He kept running because love had not yet accepted the answer.

Halfway across the settlement, his lungs began to seize. Air scraped down his throat without reaching any deeper, and black flecks gathered at the edges of his vision. He had warned the boys about this after the crash. Panic consumed oxygen quickly. Fear made the body greedy.

Slow your breathing, he had told them. Count. Trust the body to take what it needs.

He could not follow his own advice.

His mind dragged him backward through the weeks before the pilgrimage, searching for some point where he might have changed what was happening. Soobin had nearly stayed home. His mother had worried about the cost, the cryosleep, and the long journey into systems she knew only from devotional broadcasts.

Namjoon had persuaded her.

He had promised to watch Soobin as though he were his own brother. He had said the pilgrimage would give the boy confidence and a broader understanding of faith. At the departure terminal, Soobin’s mother had enclosed Namjoon’s hands in both of hers and held on until boarding was called.

Bring him home kinder than he left, she had said.

It had been half a joke. Soobin had rolled his eyes and complained that everyone spoke about him as though he were five. Namjoon had smiled.

He had promised.

The memory struck so hard that his stride broke. He caught himself against the rusted side of a container, skinning his palm, then shoved away before the pain could become real.

The screaming had stopped, and the silence was worse. A scream meant breath, and breath meant time. Silence allowed the imagination to finish what the ears could not.

Namjoon shouted Soobin’s name, but the settlement broke his voice apart and hurled it back from the buildings. It sounded as though several terrified men were calling from different directions.

Someone behind him yelled for him to slow down.

He could not.

Every instinct had narrowed to one command: reach the boy before the world made his promise impossible.

Inside the coring room, the nests began rupturing one by one.

A single catastrophe might have been merciful. One impossible instant, one horror too large for the mind to divide.

Instead, the sacs opened in sequence, each tear answering the last in an obscene flowering.

Another split, and three more followed. Soft, intimate tearing filled the room, like overripe fruit collapsing beneath its own skin, while the smell of birth and decay thickened the air.

Shapes fell from the rafters and unfolded before reaching the floor. Their bodies were sleek and reflective, black across the shell and pearly underneath, with pale bellies shining wetly in the light. Wings snapped open and beat hard enough to churn dust through the room, and they moved too quickly for Soobin’s eyes to hold. One became three, three became six, until motion swallowed form and the vibration of their wings entered his chest, rattling his ribs around a single thought.

Run.

Claws flashed through the dust-heavy air as the swarm filled every open space with wings, talons, and shrieks. The room seemed to contract around him. When Soobin turned toward the entrance, the strip of daylight had disappeared behind a living curtain of bodies.

There was no way back.

He searched blindly for anything that was not teeth, but something struck his side before he found it. Pain tore beneath his ribs, sharp and burning, like a blade drawn too deeply across him. His hand flew to the wound and came away wet with blood, but he kept moving because he was still upright and still alive.

A metal door appeared to his left beneath faded lettering.

STORAGE.

Soobin threw himself against it. His shoulder struck hard enough to jar his teeth, but the door held for one unbearable moment while the pressure of the swarm gathered behind him. Then the rusted latch gave.

He stumbled inside and slammed the door. Darkness swallowed him as he crashed into a bank of shelves, driving the air from his lungs. Dust billowed around him, and glass shattered beneath his boots as claws struck the other side.

The metal screamed.

Soobin searched for the bolt with hands slick from sweat and blood. His fingers kept slipping while the door bucked against his shoulder and his breath broke into small, torn sounds. At last, he found the bolt and shoved it across until it caught with a dull, corroded clunk.

The assault stopped.

For one brief moment, the storage room became silent.

Soobin sagged against the shelves and pressed his hand to his side. Blood seeped steadily between his fingers, hot enough to make the surrounding skin feel cold. Pain burned deep beneath the wound, dragging thoughts of venom, infection, or something worse through his mind, but he forced them away. There was no room for them yet.

The storage room was cramped, its darkness older than any shade outside. Shelves sagged beneath boxes and equipment cases, broken tools littered the floor, and a cracked monitor leaned against stacks of sample tubes with its screen filmed white by dust. The air smelled of old chemicals and abandonment.

Soobin searched the clutter for anything useful, a pry bar, cutter, flare, gun, pipe, or miracle. The silence beyond the door was not safety. It was only borrowed time.

He slid down the shelving into a crouch with his back pressed against cold metal and strained to hear through the dark. Something moved outside, slower now and more deliberate. A single claw dragged lightly across the door, raising gooseflesh along his arms, and another followed, tracing the seams as though memorizing them.

Soft chirrs filtered through the metal, high and curious.

Then the bolt rattled.

Soobin threw his weight against the door, palms spread flat and his shoulder jammed into the steel. The first impact rocked him backward. The second struck harder, sending dust sifting from the ceiling to coat his hair, eyelashes, and tongue until every breath tasted like old stone.

A claw punched through the door above the handle, ripping the metal apart with a shriek. Soobin stumbled back as the talon withdrew, leaving a jagged opening rimmed with curled steel. A blade of sunlight slipped through and caught the dust spinning in the air.

More claws appeared almost immediately. They struck in rapid succession, tearing and folding the metal inward with brutal precision while frantic screeches filled the storage room and burrowed into his skull. Soobin retreated until the shelves pressed against his spine and panic erased everything but the need to move.

The door collapsed beneath the swarm’s weight.

It peeled inward, and the creatures poured through in a writhing mass. Wings snapped open, bodies collided, and every corner of the room vanished beneath movement and noise.

Soobin ran.

He vaulted a crate as glass burst beneath his boots. The wound in his side tore wider, sending fresh heat across his ribs, and before he could regain his balance, one of the creatures struck him from behind.

The impact hurled him face-first into the shelves. Something cracked, though he could not tell whether it was bone or metal, and agony tore through his shoulder as he clawed desperately at the concrete.

Talons hooked into his jacket. Fabric ripped, and skin followed.

The swarm covered him.

Claws sank into his arms and legs, pinning him while wings battered his head. The noise became a single living pressure, too loud and complete to separate into individual cries. Soobin struck blindly, his palms sliding over carapaces that felt unnaturally smooth and cold. A hooked mouth snapped inches from his face, its breath hot with decay.

Claws opened his chest in long, brutal lines. Another talon buried itself in his thigh and twisted until his scream broke apart. He kicked uselessly as the swarm began dragging him backward through blood and dust.

Something bit deeply into his side and wrenched away. He felt the tearing before the pain fully arrived, an awful stretching sensation as though his body had discovered seams where none had existed.

Heat flooded over him. His clothing soaked through, and blood spread beneath his body as strength poured from his limbs. The world narrowed until sound dulled into a distant roar and the wings, screeches, and clicking mouths blurred together. His failing vision caught broken glimpses of black shells, wet claws, and teeth darkened by his blood.

His fingers lost their grip on the floor.

A violent pull lifted him completely as the creatures dragged in opposing directions. Pressure tore through every joint. Muscles strained until they split, and skin stretched and opened beneath the force.

For one awful, perfectly clear moment, Soobin understood what they were doing.

They were taking him apart.

Something inside him gave. Pain became white and absolute, then vanished along with his scream as the swarm swallowed both.

When the noise finally receded, blood covered the storage room. It streaked the concrete, shelves, and torn remains of the door before dripping slowly into the quiet.

Nothing remained that could still be called Soobin.

The others ran through the settlement, their boots hammering across cracked earth and sand-scoured hardpan while dust billowed around their legs. Panic drove them faster than the atmosphere allowed, tearing breath from lungs already punished by heat and exhaustion.

Y/N stayed with them despite the pull in her injured calf. The first few strides cracked the healing edges beneath the bandage, and wet warmth spread into her boot. She kept her wounded arm tucked close to her side as she ran, the swollen muscle jolting painfully with every step, but she did not stop.

Namjoon remained ahead of them with his robes gathered in one hand.

“Move!”

“Where is he?”

“Soobin!”

“Namjoon, wait!”

He ignored them and kept running. By the time he reached the coring room, his face had gone pale and his eyes were wide with a dread that had already found its answer.

Jungkook had not followed immediately. He remained beside the table for several seconds after the others scattered, one hand resting on the rim of a crystal goblet. He lifted the final cloudy mouthful and swallowed, his gaze tracking the chaos with a stillness that seemed wrong in the middle of it.

He did not look surprised. He watched the scene as though a pattern were unfolding exactly as he had feared, alert and calculating.

Then he set the glass down and moved.

By the time the others reached the coring room, the storage door tore free with a shriek of tortured metal. The impact shuddered through the walls.

Namjoon surged past Lee before anyone could stop him.

“Soobin?”

The name barely carried, half prayer and half plea.

Something rustled inside, soft and wrong.

Namjoon pulled the outer door open with shaking hands.

The chamber convulsed before him. Fibrous sacs split along the rafters, releasing pale winged creatures in a rushing tide. Their slick bodies caught the light in oily flashes while their wings churned dust into the air and their talons carved through it.

The screeching swallowed every other sound.

Namjoon staggered backward as something fell from above and struck the floor at his feet with a wet, final weight. It was blood-soaked, torn open, and wrong, but beneath the ruin he could still recognize what it had once been.

The world hollowed around him. He could neither breathe nor move, and his mind refused to connect the broken body on the floor with the boy who had stood beside him only hours earlier. Limbs bent at angles no body should allow, flesh had split wide enough to expose pale bone, and Soobin’s brown eyes, earnest and familiar and always too quick to seek approval, stared upward without focus. He did not look merely attacked. He looked emptied.

A broken sound tore from Namjoon’s chest as he dropped to his knees. His hands shook when his fingertips brushed skin already beginning to cool. Only hours ago, Soobin had prayed and laughed. He had been embarrassed, hungry, frightened, and alive, fourteen years old and full of questions and breath. Now he lay in pieces across the concrete.

Soobin Kang was fourteen years old, and he would never be anything else.

Namjoon bowed over him until his forehead nearly touched the blood-slick floor. For several breaths, grief would not become sound. It crowded behind his ribs, too large to pass through his throat, while his hands hovered uselessly above what remained. He wanted to gather Soobin to his chest. He wanted to cover the boy's exposed wounds and restore some dignity to him, but there was nowhere safe to touch. Every familiar part had been altered by violence.

One of Soobin's bracelets lay several feet away, caught beneath the bent leg of a storage shelf. The cord had snapped, scattering small dark beads through the blood and dust. Namjoon recognized the imperfect knot Soobin had tied himself aboard the Hunter Gratzner after the original cord frayed. He had complained that the replacement looked ugly. Namjoon had told him prayer did not care about appearances.

Now he crawled toward it on his knees.

His fingers slipped once before closing around the broken cord. Three beads remained threaded. He pressed them into his palm so tightly their edges marked his skin.

Around him, the others began to arrive, but their presence felt distant. Someone swore. Someone else made a choking sound and turned away. The Chrislams gathered near the doorway, their faces losing all color beneath the strange daylight. Kai covered his mouth with both hands. Yeonjun stared at the floor as though looking directly at Soobin might make the death contagious.

Namjoon tried to speak the opening words of the prayer for the dead. Nothing came. He had offered it over strangers, elders, infants, and men whose bodies had never been recovered. He knew each line in three languages and had taught the younger pilgrims that ritual existed precisely for the moments when ordinary words failed.

Yet the first syllable broke in his mouth.

A shameful anger rose beneath the grief. It turned toward the room, the planet, the vanished survey team, and finally toward himself. He had left Soobin unwatched. For a handful of minutes, perhaps less, he had allowed his attention to drift toward water, machinery, and survival, and the boy had slipped into the dark.

Namjoon knew grief's oldest lie: that love should have made him omniscient. He had counseled others through that lie. He had sat beside parents and told them gently that devotion could not control accident, disease, or another person's choices.

The wisdom was ash now.

He had promised Soobin's mother.

A hand settled on his shoulder. Namjoon did not look up, but he knew Y/N by the careful pressure, the way she used her good hand and kept her injured arm guarded. She did not tell him it was not his fault. He was grateful. Mercy spoken too soon could sound like dismissal.

"We need to move him," Lee said from somewhere behind them.

The words entered the room like a contamination.

Namjoon's head lifted. "No."

Lee's expression hardened, though he kept his voice measured. "Those things are still in the rafters. We don't know how many. We can't stay in here."

"Then leave."

"Namjoon."

"I said leave."

The authority in his voice surprised them both. It carried the weight of sermons, funerals, and years spent holding communities together when fear made people cruel. Lee took one step forward, then stopped when Bindi moved between them without appearing to do so.

"Give him a minute," she said.

"We may not have one."

"Then spend yours somewhere else."

Lee's jaw worked, but he retreated toward the shaft.

Namjoon looked down at Soobin again. The boy's eyes remained open. With trembling fingers, Namjoon closed them. One lid resisted because blood had dried along the lashes, and the small difficulty nearly undid him more completely than the ruin around it.

At last, the prayer returned. It came quietly, damaged but recognizable. Kai joined first, his voice thin and shaking. Yeonjun followed, then the others, until the words passed among them and became strong enough to hold what no single person could.

Behind Namjoon, Lee and Y/N approached more slowly. Their attention moved over the carnage and beyond it, past the ruined storage room and torn door toward the open coring shaft farther inside.

Bones filled the walls below.

They had been packed into the earth layer upon layer, stripped clean and pressed together until individual bodies became part of something larger and more terrible. A graveyard had existed beneath the settlement all this time, hidden under their feet and waiting in silence.

Y/N stopped at the edge of the room. The run across the settlement had reopened the wound in her calf, and blood had begun soaking through the dressing beneath her trousers. Her injured arm remained tucked close to her side, the swollen muscle pulsing beneath its bandage with every beat of her heart. She braced her good hand against the nearest counter and forced herself to remain upright.

Under the pale blue light of one sun drifting toward alignment with the others, the Chrislams gathered behind Namjoon. Their prayers began softly and uncertainly before finding one another, their voices braiding together through grief. Peter and Leo stood among them with their heads bowed. Every trace of cleverness had emptied from Peter’s face, while Leo’s jaw was clenched so tightly that the muscles stood out along his neck.

Jungkook remained apart from them at the edge of the settlement, his back turned and his attention fixed on the horizon. He looked like a man waiting for something only he expected to arrive, a signal, a sound, or an enemy old enough to have followed him across worlds.

Bindi broke the silence.

“Why the hell was that door chained?”

Her hands had closed into fists, and fury, grief, and exhaustion pulled her voice apart at the edges.

“Why would they lock themselves in there?”

Lee dragged a hand over his jaw, his expression dark and unreadable. “Don’t know.” His answer was short, though something angry tightened beneath it. “But I’ll tell you this. The Chrislams better not be out there digging another grave.”

“It wasn’t about graves.”

Jungkook spoke before the words could settle, and everyone turned.

He had moved to the doorway, leaning against the frame with an almost casual looseness that failed to disguise the sharpened attention beneath it. His silvered eyes caught the slanting light as he stepped into the room and surveyed them.

“The other buildings weren’t secure,” he said. “So they came here. Heaviest doors in the settlement. They thought they’d be safe inside.”

His gaze shifted toward the coring shaft and the bones compressed into its walls. A small movement of his wrist directed everyone’s attention downward.

“Someone forgot about the back door.”

Bindi followed his gaze, and her breath caught. There was nothing left to interpret or soften. The truth lay exposed in bone and dust. Whatever lives had once filled the settlement had been reduced to the parts that could not decay.

“So that’s what came of my Deku,” she whispered, the words breaking at the edge of her grief. She did not seem to care. “And you saw it. You were right there.”

Jungkook nodded once, precise and deliberate. He did not look away from her or flinch beneath the accusation, and his face offered nothing back.

Bindi’s fists trembled at her sides. Anger pushed through the grief because grief alone could no longer keep her standing.

“You were trying to kill him too.”

Jungkook did not deny it or attempt to defend himself. He only lifted one shoulder slowly, as though her anger were another fact to be accounted for.

“Wanted his O-two.”

The answer hung between them, stark and unapologetic. There was no regret in it and no effort to wrap the truth in anything more tolerable. That was Jungkook’s particular cruelty, or perhaps his idea of respect. He did not dress ugly things in pretty language.

“He tried to ghost me first,” he added after a moment, a faint smirk touching his mouth.

Bindi’s expression faltered because she knew he was telling the truth. Deku had gone to the grave armed, frightened, and raw with grief. Every one of them had started seeing Jungkook in the shadows, and fear had already turned one survivor into a target and nearly done worse since. Jungkook had not forced Deku near the grave or opened the earth beneath him. None of them had.

Silence stretched through the room, taut enough to snap. Without speaking, Bindi reached for her breather and pulled it away from her face before holding it out toward Jungkook.

“Take it.”

He studied her outstretched hand, suspicion narrowing his eyes. “You trying to poison me?”

Bindi shook her head. “I’m starting to acclimate. Enough, anyhow.” Her anger had worn smooth beneath exhaustion and loss. “Take it. I didn’t fuck with it last time I gave it to you.”

Jungkook hesitated, his gaze moving between the breather and her face. Distrust appeared so deeply rooted in him that it seemed almost physical, something built into his nerves. A gift was never simply a gift until it had proved there was no hook hidden inside.

At last, he accepted it. He pressed the mask over his mouth and nose and inhaled slowly. His shoulders lifted as oxygen entered his lungs, and some of the tension eased from his body before he could hide it.

Across the room, Lee watched with his arms folded and his jaw set hard enough to crack a tooth. Disapproval sat plainly across his face, but no one acknowledged it.

Y/N had barely noticed the exchange. Her fingers moved along the counter beside the coring shaft, brushing over rows of sample cylinders arranged neatly in their racks. Each contained a narrow column of the planet’s history, stone, mineral, and sediment preserved in precise layers. Dates had been etched into the glass in clean industrial lettering.

She read them without much attention at first, her thoughts still caught between the bones, the skiff, and what Jungkook had said. Then her fingers stopped.

Sixty years ago. The same month.

Something clicked into place inside her mind.

“Sixty years,” she murmured.

Lee’s head turned sharply. “What?”

Y/N drew a careful breath and forced herself to slow down. Ground yourself. Do not jump ahead. Read what is in front of you.

“This sample.” She tapped the glass with one finger. “It’s dated sixty years ago. Same month.”

Bindi frowned. “And?”

Y/N did not answer immediately. She shifted her stance to ease the pull in her injured calf, though the dried fabric clung to the reopened wound and tugged painfully against it. Her good hand remained braced on the counter while her eyes stayed fixed on the sample.

The pieces began aligning in her mind: the skiff, its age, the wrongness she had felt when she first touched it, the materials, the design, the settlement’s layout, the lack of proper emergency lighting, the coring room, and the bones.

Then she remembered the copper wiring.

Her stomach turned.

A memory returned in fragments, like an old file struggling to open on a damaged terminal. She saw a briefing room on Nexus, recovered footage washing the walls in cold blue light, and Jimin standing over the projection table with one hand braced against its edge. He had mentioned the planet almost in passing, a grim piece of history folded into what should have been a routine lesson.

Hades was what people who knew the story called it. On official records, it had been designated M6-117.

The planet had once been considered a promising candidate for terraforming. Hostile, certainly, but not impossible. With enough infrastructure, atmospheric processors, money, and patience, the models suggested it could support a permanent settlement. The projections had been beautiful, and on paper, the world made sense.

The paper had not accounted for what happened when all three suns disappeared.

Scientists identified the Eclipse cycle shortly before the project was meant to expand, though not soon enough to save the people already stationed there. It was not sunset or weather, but a rare alignment in which the suns were occluded in succession, stripping a world built beneath constant light of every trace of illumination.

The darkness did not last a few hours. It lasted three days.

Researchers warned NOSA to suspend the mission. No one knew what prolonged darkness might do to an unstudied biosphere, particularly when early scans suggested that something large lived beneath the surface, something the endless daylight kept buried.

All twenty-four members of the survey team died during the Eclipse.

The creatures had not yet been given a name. Bioraptor came later, after damaged recordings were recovered from the colony: grainy shapes racing through blackened corridors, brief flashes of serrated teeth, and screams echoing through rooms later found empty.

NOSA held a single press conference, and then the incident disappeared. Files were sealed, reports redacted, and the mission quietly removed from public records. Human expansion had little patience for hesitation. Fear complicated investment. Dead surveyors became an unfortunate loss, redactions became policy, and colonization continued because bureaucracy had always possessed a remarkable talent for stepping over bones when the paperwork was clean.

Now they stood inside the remains of that decision.

The official history had called the settlement Acheron Survey Annex Six. Hades was the name whispered through pilots' lounges and engineering forums after the files began leaking, usually by people who had never come close enough to feel the planet's heat. Y/N remembered the first recovered image she had found: twenty-four personnel posed in front of a prefabricated habitat, squinting into relentless daylight while a NOSA banner snapped above them. They looked tired, proud, and ordinary. One woman held a cake someone had decorated with three yellow suns. A technician in the back wore his infant daughter's knitted cap over his work helmet.

The photograph had been taken nine days before the Eclipse.

The first warning came from the coring team. Their drill entered a hollow region beneath the basalt shelf, and the acoustic returns suggested a cavern system far larger than any geological model predicted. Surveyors lowered thermal probes through the shaft. The instruments recorded movement, then failed. The team assumed heat damage and sent another array.

That one returned coated in a clear organic film.

Researchers requested an evacuation window, not because they understood what they had found, but because the alignment models had finally resolved. The three suns were never meant to vanish together. Earlier calculations treated the ringed planet's orbit as stable, but its rings distorted the optical data and concealed a slow precession. By the time the error was corrected, the colony had less than two weeks.

NOSA administrators denied the request. A full evacuation would delay the terraforming schedule, alarm investors, and force the agency to admit that its models had missed the defining event of the planet's cycle. The survey director received instructions to maintain operations while a remote committee reviewed the findings.

The review was still pending when the first sun disappeared.

The surviving recordings had never shown the creatures clearly. Y/N had watched them anyway, alone in a dark archive room on Nexus with the brightness lowered until the pixels became gray wounds on the screen. The first hour contained nervous jokes and technicians carrying portable lamps through the corridors. By the fourth, something moved beyond the windows. By the seventh, personnel had barricaded themselves in the coring room because its doors were built to withstand pressure breaches.

The final recording lasted forty-three seconds.

A woman whispered that something was inside the shaft. Someone else argued that the lights were drawing them closer. The camera turned toward a service corridor just as every lamp failed. For six seconds there was only breathing. Then the image returned in the green wash of emergency optics, showing the corridor packed from floor to ceiling with pale wings.

The file ended before the screaming did.

Y/N had shut the archive terminal and sat in the reflected darkness of the blank screen, telling herself the story belonged to another century and another kind of mistake. She had believed knowledge created distance. Once a disaster was named, indexed, and placed safely in history, it could no longer reach out and take hold of the living.

Standing over the same bones, she understood how childish that belief had been.

Bureaucracies did not bury disasters because they were finished. They buried them so someone else would repeat them without warning.

Y/N had searched for Hades after Jimin mentioned it. She had been younger then, still naive enough to believe buried truths stayed buried because there were so few of them. She chased rumors through archived mission logs and half-erased reports, piecing together sentences around entire paragraphs of black ink.

The colony had been ambitious, and terraforming should have succeeded. Instead, the mission collapsed with startling speed and violence. A handful of ships escaped carrying fragments of the truth. Everyone left behind, colonists, engineers, and scientists, vanished into the planet and was never recovered.

Sixty years later, Y/N stood beneath the glare of the same mistake.

Her fingers tightened against the counter. The movement pulled at the wound in her upper arm, sending a hot pulse beneath the stained bandage, while the reopened bite in her calf throbbed with every shift of her weight. The pain barely registered.

The planet had never followed an ordinary day and night cycle. The suns did not set. They aligned. The light would not fade gently and return after a few hours. Once it vanished, it would remain gone for three days.

Three days of total darkness.

More than enough time for everything beneath the surface to rise.

The bioraptors would not retreat at dawn because there would be no dawn to wait for. The instant the final trace of sunlight disappeared, they would be free to move through the open world unhindered, swarming, hunting, and stripping anything living down to bone.

Y/N’s breath caught as the implications crowded together. The abandoned settlement, the bones pressed into the shaft, the nests in the coring room, and the emergency skiff left behind. Above them, the suns were already drifting toward alignment with a slow inevitability that made every remaining moment feel stolen.

Y/N turned toward the others, keeping one hand against the counter as pain tightened through her calf.

“The planet,” she said, her voice so quiet it nearly disappeared into the room. She swallowed. “It goes dark.”

Silence fell with the finality of a blade. No one spoke, and the thin air seemed to grow heavier as understanding moved through them.

Lee reacted first, his head snapping toward her while disbelief and anger collided across his face.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Bindi drew a sharp breath, the color draining from her face as the meaning settled in. She did not need every detail. None of them did. They could feel the truth of it in the bones beneath their feet.

Namjoon’s jaw tightened, his hands closing into fists at his sides. He was a man built to answer fear with action. Move, help, pray, decide. Even he understood that some disasters offered no clean decision.

Peter stood unnaturally still. No joke came, no brittle remark salvaged from the wreckage of civilization. There was only pale concentration and the dawning horror of a man who had finally encountered something no amount of money, taste, or clever phrasing could soften.

Jungkook leaned against the wall and tilted his head. The changing light caught in his silver eyes, drawing an unreadable gleam from them. A faint smile touched his mouth, sharp at the edges and entirely without humor.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

The settlement erupted into nervous motion after that. It was not ordinary activity, the kind with rhythm and purpose, but something closer to a sealed room splitting open. Everyone moved because the moment they stopped, terror would settle fully across their backs.

Voices rose over one another. Packs were dragged open and repacked, tools clattered against metal, and someone dropped a coil of cable hard enough to make half the room flinch. Nearby, another person began praying beneath their breath and never quite stopped. No one lingered or rested. Whatever was coming felt close enough to breathe against their necks, though the planet barely had breath to spare.

Y/N crossed the open ground with as much purpose as her injured leg allowed. Her stride remained steady, but stiffness had begun creeping into her calf, and the reopened bite pulled beneath its bloodstained dressing every time her heel struck the ground. She ignored it, keeping her wounded arm tucked near her side while plans spilled from her faster than she could organize them.

“We need the cells from the crash ship. Still have to check the hull under load, patch the wings, seal the inner seams, test pressure...” She dragged her good hand through her hair. “Shit.”

Lee stepped into her path. He did not raise his voice, because he did not need to.

“Let’s hold off on the power cells.”

Y/N stopped so abruptly that pain shot through her calf. She shifted her weight before the leg could buckle and stared at him.

“Hold off for what?” Her voice came out sharp. “Until the Eclipse hits and we can’t find our way back?”

“We don’t know when it’s going to happen,” Lee said.

He was calm, too calm, as though he had already prepared himself for her anger.

“So we don’t—”

“Get the fucking cells over here, Lee.”

Several people nearby went still, but Y/N did not care.

“What are we even arguing about?”

Lee looked at her without changing expression. Something sharpened in his eyes, not anger so much as calculation. He had tried one approach and found it useless. Now he was reaching for another.

“Ever tell you how Jungkook escaped?”

The fury drained from her quickly enough to leave confusion behind.

Y/N frowned. “No. Why?”

“You want to know?”

She rubbed her bloodstained palm against her trousers, unease tightening beneath her ribs.

“Depends. Is this relevant, or are you stalling?”

Lee turned away without answering and headed toward the skiff.

“Come on,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s not a quick story.”

Inside, the skiff’s air was thin, hot, and stale. Its systems hummed unevenly, old circuits struggling to remain alive on borrowed power. Weak light glowed across the cockpit displays, jaundiced beneath the glare forcing its way through the ports, and the walls smelled of overheated metal, dust, and aged insulation.

Outside, the settlement continued in bursts of shouting and clanging tools. In the cockpit, the world narrowed to Lee’s pacing and the slow change in Y/N’s irritation as it curdled into dread.

She leaned against the bulkhead to take some pressure off her calf. Folding her arms pulled too hard at the wound in her upper arm, so she kept the injured one close while the other rested across her stomach.

Lee paced with his hands clasped behind his back. When he finally spoke, his voice had become quieter and more deliberate. It was not theatrical. It was worse than that.

Recited.

The voice of a man delivering testimony he had memorized because forgetting any part of it might prove dangerous.

“Jungkook started at Ribald S,” he said. “Correctional institute. High walls, razor wire, guards who shoot first and don’t waste time asking questions.”

Y/N waited.

“He lasted less than three years. Overpowered a guard, took his uniform, killed two more, and murdered the pilot of the only freighter on the planet. By the time anyone understood what was happening, he was gone.”

Lee’s jaw tightened.

“Left bodies behind like trail markers.”

Y/N adjusted her stance. The movement pulled at the scabbed flesh beneath her trouser leg, and fresh warmth began gathering beneath the bandage, but she barely noticed.

“They put a million-credit bounty on him,” Lee continued. “Every mercenary, bounty hunter, and idiot with a blaster went looking. Most never came back. The ones who did came back afraid.”

He stopped pacing long enough to look directly at her.

“They called him a serial killer. A sociopath. The psych evaluations said he was irredeemable. Violence wearing skin.”

Lee’s mouth hardened.

“I agreed.”

Metal crashed outside. Someone shouted for more tape, and survival continued absurdly close to them.

Lee resumed pacing.

“Ribald wasn’t the only prison. Hubble Bay. Q9. He broke out of every one. Guards, medics, inmates, anyone who stood between him and the exit didn’t walk away.”

Y/N’s mouth had gone dry.

“During the Sigma border war, he joined a mercenary unit. Five hundred men went in. One came out.”

Lee looked toward the cockpit window.

“Him.”

Y/N’s stomach tightened.

“Rumor was he killed half his own unit to survive.” He let the words settle before continuing. “And Slam City. Ursa Luna Penal Facility. Maximum security. They transported him frozen and woke him only long enough to prove he was alive. He killed one escort, took the other’s gear, bribed his way through the prison, and escaped in under twelve hours.”

Y/N swallowed. “No one ever stopped him?”

“Oh, they tried.” Bitterness entered Lee’s voice. “Every time they caught him, he got out. Butcher Bay. Dark Athena. He stabbed me once. Nearly killed me. Slaughtered crews, drones, civilians.”

He hesitated.

“There was a kid once. Leee. Supposedly he helped her. Don’t know why.”

His eyes hardened again.

“Doesn’t change the body count.”

Y/N looked through the cockpit glass. Beyond the settlement, the sky had begun bruising where the different lights crossed, colors pooling strangely along the horizon.

“You said he can fly.”

Lee met her gaze.

“He can do more than fly. He hijacks ships, steals freighters, and outmaneuvers trained squads like it’s nothing. He was military once. Ranger out of Sigma Three.”

He stepped closer.

“Put him in that cockpit and he’ll turn on you the moment it benefits him.”

The warning settled between them, heavy and unresolved.

Y/N was not naive. She knew what kind of man Jungkook was, or at least what kind of man he had been, and perhaps there was no meaningful difference. Bodies did not become less dead simply because the person responsible was complicated.

Still, she could not erase what she had witnessed. Jungkook had heard the creatures before anyone else, warned them however crookedly, and honored his word after the chains came off. He had accepted Bindi’s breather with the suspicion of a man who did not understand gifts, and his hand had closed around hers with careful certainty.

No more blood.

She hated that memory most.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Maybe that isn’t only a liability.”

Lee’s eyes narrowed.

“If he can actually fly, if he understands old systems, that might give us something useful. I could have him help with—”

“He kills the pilots he steals from.”

The sentence struck with blunt force, snapping whatever fragile thread of optimism she had been holding. Heat drained from her face, and her stomach rolled sharply enough that she had to breathe through her nose to keep the nausea down.

“You said we were trusting him,” she said, her voice quieter now. “You said there was a deal.”

“There is.”

Lee’s tone remained calm, almost patient, though his eyes did not.

Y/N’s jaw tightened as pain pulsed through her injured arm and her hand curled at her side.

“You’re playing a dangerous game.”

Lee shrugged as though they were discussing a cracked panel rather than a person. “Chains don’t hold him. Prisons don’t either. The only thing that works is letting him believe he’s free. The second that belief cracks—”

“You mean the second he realizes you’re planning to screw him over,” Y/N cut in.

“We need a fail-safe,” Lee said without missing a beat. “Power cells come last, after the wings are patched, the fuel’s ready, and we can launch. Not before.”

She stared at him, searching his face for hesitation, doubt, or any sign that he understood how thin the line beneath their feet had become. There was nothing there but calculation, and it made her skin crawl.

“He hasn’t hurt any of us,” she said. Her voice came softer now, not because she had weakened, but because if she spoke any louder, she might start shouting and never stop. “Not once. And as far as I can tell, he hasn’t lied. Stick to the deal, Lee. Let him go if that’s what keeps this from blowing up.”

Lee shook his head slowly and deliberately.

“He’s a murderer. The law says he serves his time. What kind of lawman would I be if I let him walk?”

Y/N turned away with a frustrated breath, her shoulders sagging beneath the weight of the argument.

“We’re walking a knife’s edge here.”

Lee’s voice hardened. “I won’t give him the chance to steal another ship or cut another pilot’s throat.”

The finality in his tone left no room to argue, and that was what frightened Y/N most.

It was not that Lee was necessarily wrong about Jungkook. Maybe he was right about every terrible thing. Maybe Jungkook Jeon had earned every chain ever put on him and then some. What scared her was that Lee had already decided the shape of the ending, and endings were dangerous things to decide too early.

She studied him for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice remained quiet, but the warning in it was unmistakable.

“Be careful, Lee. You’re trying to outplay someone who lives for this. Just make damn sure you’re done thinking three steps ahead before he is.”

She did not wait for an answer. She turned and stepped out of the skiff, her boots crunching away into the noise of the settlement.

Bindi brought the power cell back in the sandcat with dust boiling behind her and murder set into the line of her shoulders. The machine ground into the settlement yard like something hauled from a grave and ordered to remember how to move, its treads chewing through the sand-scoured hardpan, clanking and slipping over stone while the entire frame shuddered beneath the load strapped to its rear platform. Cable and cargo netting held the salvaged cell in place, its dull casing dented and scarred from the wreckage of the Hunter Gratzner.

Twenty-five kilos of battered metal and borrowed hope, and still only one power cell.

Y/N tried not to resent the sight of it. She failed.

“One,” she muttered as Bindi killed the engine and climbed down. “Apparently we’re leaving this planet one-fifth at a time.”

Bindi wiped the sweat from her jaw with the heel of her hand. The look she gave Y/N held more exhaustion than temper.

“Don’t start with me, Captain. I just drove halfway to hell and back for that lump.”

“It’s aimed at Lee.”

“Then aim better.”

Despite herself, Y/N almost smiled. The expression reached her mouth and died there. Smiling required energy, and energy had become something to ration alongside water, oxygen, and patience.

Namjoon helped them unload the cell. They eased it down onto a sheet of scrap plating and dragged it toward the skiff, all three breathing too hard for work that should have been simple beneath a kinder sky. The strain pulled at Y/N’s wounds almost immediately. Her injured calf tightened whenever she planted her boot, the half-healed bite rubbing raw beneath its dressing, while the weight forced her to compensate through her good side and made the swollen muscle in her upper arm throb harder every time she steadied the cell.

She adjusted her grip and kept moving.

Lee remained nearby only long enough to make sure Jungkook was nowhere within knife range, then stalked off to inspect the perimeter with the grim righteousness of a man who believed mistrust and leadership were the same thing. Peter offered advice from the shade until Bindi informed him, without looking up, that if he contributed one more observation without lifting anything, she would find a practical use for his spine.

Peter discovered urgent business elsewhere.

At first, the others lingered, drawn toward the skiff by hope the way starving people gathered around the smell of food. They watched Y/N open the power housing, strip insulation from ancient wiring, and swear when the Hunter Gratzner’s cell refused to communicate with systems old enough to qualify as archaeological evidence. For a while, the small audience gave her something to push against.

Boredom eventually scattered them. The boys drifted off first, whispering and kicking stones until Namjoon intercepted them and redirected their energy toward useful work. Bindi returned to the sandcat, Peter retreated to whatever passed for his dining table, and Lee disappeared into the brittle shade between the containers with his shotgun over one shoulder and his jaw locked tight.

Soon, only Y/N and the machine remained.

The silence left behind was not complete. It was threaded with the settlement's small failures: a loose sheet of metal ticking in the heat, a cable striking the side of a container whenever the wind shifted, and the deep intermittent knock of the old water pump struggling against mineral buildup. Above it all came the faint mechanical complaint of the skiff, systems warming and cooling in uneven cycles like an animal breathing through damaged lungs.

Y/N spread the salvaged components around her in careful rows. She had learned the habit during her first engineering placement, when every tool in the training bay belonged to three different crews and anything set down carelessly vanished forever. Jimin used to tease her for organizing disaster sites as though preparing a surgical tray. She had told him machines deserved the same respect as bodies. Both punished arrogance, and both tended to fail in chains rather than all at once.

The memory of him came with unwanted clarity: Jimin leaning against the door of her workshop on Nexus, sleeves pushed to his elbows, watching her rebuild a guidance assembly everyone else had declared unsalvageable. He had brought coffee and refused to leave until she drank it. Later, when she admitted she had been awake for thirty-two hours, he had quietly locked her tools in a cabinet and carried the access key home.

At the time, she had been furious.

Now she would have given almost anything for someone to take the work from her hands and tell her the world could wait eight hours.

It could not.

She stripped the cell casing and found heat damage along the lower bus. The insulation had bubbled without fully melting, which meant the surge through the Hunter Gratzner had been brief and violent. She scraped carbon from the contact points, checked each conductor for continuity, and replaced two fused relays with components scavenged from a compressor control board. Every movement demanded negotiation with her injuries. Reaching across the housing pulled the torn muscle in her upper arm. Kneeling compressed the wound in her calf until her boot filled with a sticky warmth she tried not to identify.

Twice, she stopped to rewrap the bandage. The second time, the cloth came away dark with blood and yellow at the edges. Infection, she thought, then refused to give the word space. The bite had occurred too recently for certainty. The heat, swelling, and stiffness could all be explained by overuse, contamination, exhaustion, or the planet's air drying every wound faster than it could close.

Or venom.

She flexed her ankle experimentally. Pain moved upward in a bright line, but the muscles answered. Good enough.

Y/N returned to the cell. Her hands knew what to do even when the rest of her began slipping. That was why she trusted machines. Grief could interrupt memory, fear could distort judgment, and attraction could make an otherwise intelligent woman kiss a murderer during a pressure test, but voltage remained voltage. A circuit did not care who had lied to whom. Current followed the path available to it.

The thought brought Jungkook into her mind with such force that she nearly dropped the converter pin.

She swore and set it down.

He had been absent since the coring room, though absence meant little with him. Jungkook could stand ten feet away and feel hidden, or vanish into open ground without anyone noticing the exact moment he left. Earlier, she had caught a flicker of movement along the settlement roofline and found nothing when she looked again.

Lee believed that made him dangerous.

Y/N believed Lee's need to control him might be worse.

She fitted the final pin into the improvised bridge and sealed the joint with resin. The skiff's diagnostic panel blinked amber, considered her work, and returned an error code in a language no one had used commercially in fifty years.

"You are not doing this to me," she told it.

The panel blinked again.

"I have had a truly terrible day. A child is dead. The sky is going to disappear. My leg may be rotting off, and every man within fifty meters is competing to become my next problem. You will accept the cell."

She bypassed the authentication line and forced a manual handshake.

The indicator turned green.

Y/N stared at it, breathing hard. "Thank you."

From somewhere above the cockpit came a soft scrape, too measured to be settling metal.

She looked up.

Nothing moved across the dusty glass. The roof remained empty beneath the crossed light of the suns.

Still, she had the distinct feeling that someone had heard every word.

That suited her. Machines had moods, but they did not lie. They did not decide to trust her one moment and undermine her the next, nor did they watch her through black goggles with silver eyes and make her pulse behave like an idiot. Machines broke according to rules, stubborn and occasionally cruel rules, but rules all the same.

The skiff was very stubborn.

It fought her for every connection. The cell from the Hunter Gratzner belonged to newer architecture, with cleaner load distribution, different safety protocols, and a regulatory system intelligent enough to assume that any vessel it powered would possess the basic decency not to be sixty years old and half-filled with sand. The skiff’s housing treated the new cell like an invader and locked her out twice.

Y/N rewired the handshake circuit with scavenged converter pins, bypassed one regulator using parts from a mining compressor, and lied to the system in three separate languages before it finally stopped objecting.

Working on her knees made the wound in her calf pull until the bandage beneath her trousers grew damp again. Each time she leaned into the housing, the bite in her arm pressed against the edge of the compartment and sent a hot pulse through her shoulder. She shifted when she needed to, breathed through the worst of it, and carried on.

At last, she sat back on her heels with sweat running from her chin. She pushed herself upright with her good hand, waited for the stiffness in her calf to loosen, and climbed into the cockpit. Lowering herself into the pilot’s seat required an awkward turn to keep from striking her injured arm against the console.

Her fingers settled over the power controls.

She threw the switch.

For one awful second, nothing happened. The skiff remained dead.

Then it woke ugly.

A harsh buzz rattled through the deck plates, and something beneath the console struck with enough force to vibrate through her teeth. The cockpit displays flickered, failed, and returned in a sickly wash of green and amber. Overhead, the environmental system groaned like machinery dragged awake against its will, and the vents coughed out a thick brown cloud of dust that rolled across the cockpit.

Y/N threw her good arm over her face as the skiff wheezed and sputtered, coughing dust through the vents before settling into a low, uneven hum. The displays remained illuminated, the cell load stabilized, and the atmospheric controls responded.

She lowered her arm and stared at the console. Despite the heat, the dead, and the sky tightening toward the Eclipse, a grin spread across her face.

She worked through the initial checks. Auxiliary power held, the diagnostics limped but answered, and the pressure sensors responded. A warning flashed over the rear hatch, blinked twice, and cleared itself as though the skiff had decided not to embarrass her in public.

No one was there to hear her gloat, which felt deeply unfair.

Y/N leaned forward and wet her dry lips as she brought up the hull-integrity protocol.

“Moment of truth.”

The test required a sealed cabin. There was no way around it. If the vessel could not hold pressure, the number of cells loaded into its belly would not matter. Space would find every seam, patch, and old wound in the hull. It was patient that way and did not negotiate.

Y/N reached overhead to activate the hatch. The stretch pulled painfully through her upper arm, forcing her to finish the motion with her opposite hand. The door closed with a hydraulic hiss and locked with a heavy metallic clunk.

Outside noise dulled immediately. The settlement became a blur of movement behind dusty glass, voices flattened into indistinct murmurs, and the wind faded to a faint pressure dragging across the hull.

The cockpit seemed to contract around her, suddenly close enough to raise the hairs along her arms.

Only nerves, she told herself. Everything was nerves now.

She initiated the integrity test, and numbers began climbing across the display.

Pressure rising. Seal response active. Atmospheric retention reached twelve percent, then twenty, then thirty-four.

“Come on,” Y/N murmured, her fingers moving across the console. “Work with me.”

The patched seams reported stress without failure. The forward hatch seal held, and although a slight fluctuation appeared in the wing-root sensors, it remained within acceptable tolerance.

Y/N pushed herself away from the console and stood. The moment she put weight on her injured leg, the damaged muscle in her calf seized. Pain tightened beneath the dressing and climbed toward her knee, forcing her to catch the pilot’s seat with her good hand. She waited with her jaw clenched until the spasm loosened, then continued toward the rear bay. The manual gauges still needed checking.

She made it two steps before she saw him.

Jungkook Jeon stood in the dimness at the back of the cabin.

Y/N stopped so abruptly that her wounded leg nearly folded beneath her. For one suspended moment, her mind refused to place him there. The cabin was sealed. She had been alone when the test began and had watched the hatch close with her own eyes.

Yet he leaned against the rear bulkhead as though the skiff had formed him out of its stale air. His goggles concealed his eyes, while the weak glow from the cockpit displays traced the hard line of his cheek, the slight curve of his mouth, and the sweat-dark fabric clinging to his chest.

He looked pleased with himself, and worse, pleased with her reaction.

Y/N’s heart struck once against her ribs, hard enough to hurt.

“You’re joking.”

His mouth twitched. “Not usually.”

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to hear you call the ship beautiful.”

“It deserved it.”

“Did it?”

“It listens better than most men.”

That nearly drew a real smile from him.

The integrity test hummed around them as pressure continued building through the cabin. The hatch would remain locked until the cycle finished, which meant she was trapped inside with him.

He knew it. Of course he knew it.

Jungkook pushed away from the wall and approached without hurry. He rarely moved quickly unless speed served a purpose, and that was part of what unsettled her. He carried himself like something confident that everything eventually wandered close enough to catch.

“Looks like you’re a few short,” he said.

His voice filled the confined space, low and rough, brushing through the stale air like a hand over dust. Y/N’s skin prickled.

“Power cells,” he added, amusement touching the words when her expression tightened.

“They’re coming.”

“One at a time?”

“That wasn’t my decision.”

“No.” He stopped several feet away and tilted his head. “Didn’t figure it was.”

Y/N turned toward the console and reached for the overhead monitor. The movement pulled through the bite in her arm, sending a warm pulse beneath the stained bandage, but she switched the display off before lowering her hand. The peripheral diagnostics vanished, and her body partially blocked the main atmospheric-integrity screen behind her.

Petty, perhaps, but she could live with petty.

Jungkook noticed. He noticed everything.

His mouth curved. “Hiding something from me, Frenchie?”

“I’m working.”

“That wasn’t a no.”

“Shut up, Jeon.”

His quiet chuckle moved through the cabin. She hated the sound, not because it was unpleasant, but because it was low, effortless, and traveled through her exhausted body in a way she did not trust.

The integrity reading climbed past fifty percent.

Outside the forward glass, the settlement lay beneath a bruised sky. Blue and orange light bled together across rusted containers, patched wings, and figures moving too quickly through the yard. The suns had not set, but they had drawn closer, stretching three distorted shadows across the ground as the alignment tightened.

The Eclipse was coming. It would not be an ordinary night with stars overhead and morning waiting on the other side, but three full days without light while the creatures beneath their feet, creatures that had waited sixty years, prepared to rise.

Y/N rubbed her temple with the heel of her good hand. The headache had returned, pulsing behind her eyes. It had followed her since the crash, a hot electric pressure that never entirely faded. Her empathy felt broken, jammed, or overwhelmed beyond usefulness, feeding her sensations without context: fear with no direction, pain with no source, and hunger that might not belong to anything human.

Jungkook went still.

The change was slight but immediate. His posture did not visibly tense, yet the air around him seemed to narrow with his attention, and Y/N felt it before she understood it.

“What?”

His head angled faintly. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

A private smile touched his mouth, that same lazy amusement he wore whenever he knew something she did not and intended to enjoy the advantage.

The test passed seventy-two percent.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said.

“The door’s closed.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Wasn’t trying for one.”

Y/N let out a humorless laugh. “Fuck off, Jeon.”

His smile sharpened, though he offered no reply. He tapped one knuckle against the ceiling before reaching up and curling both hands around the overhead support bar. Leaning forward between his arms stretched him long beneath the weak cabin lights, all hard muscle and controlled ease.

Y/N turned back toward the console. If she kept looking at him, she was either going to hit him or do something considerably more foolish.

Pressure climbed steadily, and the hatch remained locked. Behind her came the faint scrape of his boot against the deck, a small sound she felt all the way down her spine.

“Stay where you are.”

“You get jumpy when you’re scared,” he said.

Y/N turned too sharply. The movement twisted her calf, and she had to steady herself against the console before he could see the leg falter.

“Excuse me?”

“Your pulse. Your breathing.” His head tipped toward the sealed hatch. “The way you keep checking the door even though you know it won’t open until the test finishes.”

She tried to fold her arms, but the movement pulled too painfully at the wound above her elbow. Instead, she planted her good hand on her hip and kept the injured arm close.

“How would you know any of that?”

“I know better than your boy Lee.”

“He’s not my boy.”

Jungkook’s teeth flashed. “Good.”

Heat climbed Y/N’s neck.

The integrity reading moved past eighty-two percent. She faced the console again because looking at him felt too much like surrendering ground.

“I’m sealed inside a ship with a convicted murderer. Yes, Jungkook, I’m a little fucking jumpy.”

His grin dimmed by a fraction.

Good.

She wanted to wipe it from his face and make him stop carrying himself as though every room belonged to him simply because he knew how to occupy it.

“You scared?” he asked.

Y/N turned back toward him, again too sharply. The damaged muscle in her calf pulled beneath the bandage, but she caught herself against the console before the leg could give.

“No. I’m annoyed. There’s a difference.”

His gaze traveled over her face with insulting patience.

“Is there?”

Her jaw tightened. “You do this with everyone?”

“Do what?”

“Play stupid.”

“I’m good at it.”

“You’re not, actually. That’s the problem. You think being vague makes you interesting.”

The smirk slipped from Jungkook’s face as he pushed his goggles onto his forehead. His eyes caught the weak cabin light, silver and luminous, their depths shifting like something unearthed from stone. He watched her with a stillness that made her feel measured down to the breath.

Y/N stepped closer before good sense could intervene.

“You keep everyone guessing so no one gets close enough to call you on your shit.”

His attention fixed on her. Green light from the console sharpened one bruised cheek, the hard line of his mouth, and the damp strands of hair resting against his brow. He looked battered, dangerous, and so offensively attractive that the sight of him only made her angrier.

“And stop looking at me like that.”

His gaze flicked toward her mouth, barely a movement, but she saw it anyway. Worse, she felt her body answer with a bright pull low in her stomach that had no place inside a pressure test, on a dying planet, with him.

Jungkook’s fingers tightened around the support bar overhead, tendons shifting beneath the skin of his forearms. He felt it too, which was satisfying for half a second and terrible immediately afterward.

Y/N stepped fully into his space because anger was easier than retreat.

“You’re not as charming as you think you are.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Move.”

She stopped.

The word was soft, almost lazy, but it landed like a challenge. He did not touch her. Both hands remained curled around the bar, leaving the choice entirely hers. He only held her gaze with those unnatural silver eyes and waited to see which instinct would win.

Her breath caught.

She should have stepped away. She was a pilot. She understood warning lights and knew what happened when pressure climbed too quickly, systems overheated, or one bad choice threatened to tear an entire machine apart.

She also knew herself, and right now she was furious. Furious at him, at herself, and at the fact that he could stand there, rude and dangerous and impossible, while her body wanted things her mind would gladly launch into space.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

She caught the front of his shirt and kissed him.

The sudden reach pulled painfully through the bite in her upper arm, but the pain vanished beneath the shock of his mouth. Jungkook’s lips parted under hers, yet he did not take control, force her closer, or seize the opportunity she had handed him.

He allowed it.

That restraint startled her more than aggression would have. She had expected hunger to crash over her, rough and immediate, proving every warning Lee had ever given. Instead, she found heat held carefully behind his teeth, a measured resistance that felt almost like teasing.

It made her want to push, so she did.

Their mouths moved together, tasting of salt, sweat, and dry breath. A low sound passed through Jungkook’s chest, rough and involuntary, and she felt the vibration against her ribs. Her thoughts went silent as her body recognized something she had not yet agreed to understand.

Y/N brushed her tongue across his upper lip.

Jungkook groaned.

The sound broke whatever restraint remained between them. His mouth caught hers harder, deepening the kiss until the cabin seemed to tilt. His hands stayed locked around the support bar, tendons standing hard beneath his skin, but the rest of him leaned toward her with barely contained need.

“Frenchie,” he breathed against her lips. “Please.”

The plea sent heat through her. Y/N pressed closer, her good hand sliding over the hard, sweat-slick plane of his chest before curling behind his neck. She kept the injured arm tucked near her body, using it only to hold his shirt, though even that made the torn muscle throb beneath the bandage. She did not care.

Their bodies met chest to chest and hip to thigh, fitting together with a precision that felt dangerously inevitable, yet it was still not close enough. Y/N hooked her uninjured leg around his thigh, careful to keep her weight off the calf that had already begun to tremble, and they groaned together.

For one frightening moment, it felt less like attraction than recognition, as though some hidden mechanism beneath her skin had been waiting all her life for someone to touch it correctly. She drew his face down and kissed along his jaw, tasting sweat and dust before catching her teeth lightly at the hinge.

His entire body jerked.

“Fuck,” he whispered, almost reverently.

Jungkook turned his face and dragged his tongue along the sweat on her cheek, slow and thorough, as though committing her taste to memory. His mouth passed over her temple and brow before finding her lips again. He kissed her as if every sharpened sense he possessed had narrowed entirely to her, and the world beyond the hull ceased to exist.

The frightening part was how good it felt. Not merely good, but right in a way that was too easy and too complete.

Y/N tore herself away.

Her injured leg failed to catch her cleanly, and she stumbled into the pilot’s chair, gripping the armrests as the impact sent pain tearing through her calf and up into her hip. Her breathing came ragged, her lips tingled, and every nerve in her body urged her to cross the space between them again.

Jungkook snarled.

The sound was low and not entirely human. He surged forward, and for one terrible heartbeat, Y/N thought he was coming for her. At the last moment, he twisted away and drove both palms into the wall. Metal rang through the cabin as he remained braced there with his head lowered between his arms, his shoulders rising and falling with each uneven breath.

Neither of them spoke while the integrity test climbed past ninety percent.

Eventually, Jungkook turned his head, and his silver gaze cut toward her.

“What was that?”

His voice sounded scraped raw.

Y/N swallowed. “What did you do to me?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Her voice trembled, and she hated it.

Jungkook’s breathing caught, and only then did Y/N recognize the rhythm between them. He was matching her, perhaps not consciously and perhaps not willingly, but every time her lungs filled, his followed. Whenever she exhaled, he released the breath with her.

The realization settled heavily in her stomach.

She straightened, gripping the arm of the pilot’s chair as she put weight back onto her injured leg. Pain tightened through her calf, but it was nothing compared with the expression that crossed Jungkook’s face. He retreated three quick steps, and for the first time since she had known him, he looked genuinely unsettled. There was no anger, amusement, or search for another angle, only a raw uncertainty he could not quite hide.

His jaw hardened, a muscle jumping along one side as though he were trying to force his body back under control.

The console chimed behind her.

HULL INTEGRITY: 100%.

The rear hatch unlocked with a heavy clank and opened on a sigh of hydraulics. Light flooded the cabin, followed by a rush of hot desert air carrying dust, rust, and the distant noise of the settlement.

Whatever had formed between them shattered beneath it.

The hot air struck Y/N's damp skin and made the kiss feel immediately impossible, something created by the sealed pressure of the cabin and unable to survive oxygen, daylight, or witnesses. Her body had not received the message. Her pulse remained high, her mouth tender, and the place where Jungkook's chest had pressed against hers seemed to retain its own heat.

She hated him for recovering first.

The goggles came down, his breathing steadied, and every trace of uncertainty disappeared behind the familiar arrangement of his face. Y/N watched the transformation happen and understood that it was practiced. Whatever he felt, he had spent years learning how to remove it from sight before anyone could use it against him.

She wanted to do the same. Instead, her injured calf trembled beneath her weight, and she could taste him whenever she swallowed.

Jungkook paused at the threshold before stepping into the light. For half a second, his head turned toward her. The goggles hid his eyes, but she felt the focus of them move over her face, her throat, and the hand still gripping the pilot's chair.

"That stays here," she said.

His mouth shifted. "Does it?"

"Yes."

"You kissed me."

"I remember."

"Good."

The single word carried enough satisfaction to reignite her temper. "Do not make me regret it more than I already do."

He leaned closer, not enough to touch, but enough that his voice reached only her. "You don't."

Then he stepped outside, leaving her alone with the certainty that he was right about at least that much.

Y/N remained in the cabin for several breaths after the hatch opened. She checked the integrity report twice, though the numbers had not changed, and ran her thumb along the edge of the console until the sensation of metal replaced the memory of his shirt in her fist.

The empathy under her skin had gone strangely quiet. Since the crash, it had battered her with fragments of everyone around her, fear, pain, hunger, shame, all of it blurred until she could not separate herself from the crowd. During the kiss, that noise had narrowed to one impossible point. Jungkook's restraint had not felt like emptiness. It had felt like a locked room thrown open too quickly: hunger, recognition, and something close to panic beneath both.

Now the room was closed again.

That frightened her more than the attraction. Desire could be dismissed as stress, proximity, or the body's crude insistence on proving itself alive near death. What passed between them had been too organized for that. Their breathing had synchronized. His fear had entered her without the usual confusion, clean enough to recognize as his.

Y/N had spent years learning not to treat every empathic impression as truth. People carried contradictions. A person could love and resent someone at the same time, want to flee while longing to be held, or feel guilt for things they would willingly do again. Emotion was information, not judgment.

Jungkook had given her something she could not categorize.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, immediately angry at herself for the gesture, and followed him into the yard.

Jungkook pulled the goggles down over his eyes. The man who had kissed her like the world was ending disappeared behind the black lenses, becoming something closed and dangerous again, a stranger, a weapon, a blade that happened to have a mouth.

Boots crunched outside, and Lee appeared in the open hatch with dust caught in his hair and across his shoulders. His expression was carefully blank as his gaze moved from Y/N to Jungkook and back again. He did not stare because he did not need to. The tension in his jaw told her enough.

Jungkook undoubtedly noticed more. He studied Lee with that unnerving precision of his, and the smirk returned with plenty of teeth and no warmth.

“Bad sign,” he drawled. “Shaking like that in this heat.”

Lee went still. His hand twitched toward his weapon before he smothered the reaction and stepped over the threshold as though the comment had never touched him.

“You done?” he asked Y/N.

“The hull holds.”

“Good.”

“The housing is ready for the other cells. I adapted the connections, so once they’re here, installation should move quickly.”

Lee gave a short nod. “We’ll bring them over when we’re ready.”

Y/N’s temper flared. “We are ready.”

“We’ll talk.”

“No. We already talked. You stalled.”

His eyes narrowed. For one sharp moment, she thought he might answer her there in the yard, with half the settlement listening while pretending not to. She saw the words gathering behind his teeth and the familiar anger tightening his face, the kind that always seemed to arrive wearing a badge whether he deserved one or not.

Namjoon and Yeonjun interrupted before he could speak, carrying a long roll of pale Vectran between them like a stretcher. In a way, perhaps it was. Not for a body, at least not yet, but for the skiff and the thin membrane standing between them and whatever would rise when the Eclipse smothered the world.

Namjoon adjusted his grip and patted his belt with one hand. “Knife?”

“I’ve got it,” Jungkook said.

The blade appeared so smoothly that Y/N could not tell where Jungkook had hidden it. There was no flourish or dramatic turn of the wrist. One moment his hand was empty, and the next, steel rested in it.

Whatever tremor had shaken him inside the skiff was gone. His grip was steady, practiced, and clean as he sliced through the Vectran with one precise stroke and passed the strips over without comment.

Yeonjun climbed onto the wing strut with the confidence of someone who had not yet learned enough fear to respect gravity. Namjoon remained below, feeding him lengths of fabric while stitching the lower seams with methodical care. For several minutes, the yard settled into something close to peace. Hands moved, fabric stretched taut, and tools clicked against the old hull while the skiff hummed beside them, alive but incomplete, waiting for the rest of its heart.

Y/N tried to let the work steady her, but it did not.

The skiff should have been enough. The hull had held pressure, and the adapted housing had accepted the Hunter Gratzner cell after hours of rewiring, bypassing regulators, and swearing at systems that had no business still functioning. The displays now glowed with clean green lines instead of dying orange warnings. The old vessel no longer behaved like a corpse. It behaved like a machine, and machines were something she understood.

That should have comforted her.

Instead, Jungkook’s voice lingered beneath her thoughts, low, rough, and far too pleased with itself.

Ask him about the shakes. And why your buddy screamed like that before he died.

Y/N stood beside the open battery bay with one hand resting against the warm metal housing. Empty slots waited for the remaining cells. Her injured arm stayed tucked close to her body, the bandage pulling whenever she reached too far, while the wound in her calf had stiffened after the pressure test. She shifted her weight discreetly, easing the ache without allowing the leg to buckle.

Around her, the settlement worked in nervous bursts. Voices rose and dropped, tools struck metal, and no one looked toward the sky for long, though nearly everyone glanced at it.

Y/N hated that Jungkook had gotten beneath her skin. That was the worst part. It was not that he had said something cruel. Jungkook said cruel things as naturally as other people breathed. It was not even that he had accused Lee of being a mercenary rather than a lawman. She had known for some time that something about Lee did not fit.

The trembling hands. The bloodshot brightness in his eyes. The way his temper shortened with every passing hour. The way he kept delaying the power cells while the Eclipse closed around them like a door.

What she hated was that Jungkook had pressed directly against the bruise, and she had flinched.

The kiss remained an entirely separate disaster, one she did not yet know how to examine without setting fire to whatever remained of her judgment. She stepped carefully around that smoking crater in her thoughts and concentrated on Lee instead.

The badge. The shaking. The possibility that she had ignored the obvious because she desperately wanted one person here to be uncomplicated.

Could she truly have been that foolish?

Perhaps it should not matter. The skiff had passed its hull-integrity test. Once the remaining cells were installed, they could leave. When they reached the shipping lanes and some freighter or rescue beacon carried them back into civilization, she would never have to see Lee again.

Or Jungkook.

The thought landed harder than she expected.

Jungkook would likely be betrayed, restrained, and returned to prison. He would disappear behind walls again, surrounded by wardens, guards, and men eager to build reputations by surviving five minutes alone with him.

The sensible choice was to keep her head down and watch her own back. Stepping between Lee and Jungkook would be suicidal, and Y/N was a survivor, not an idiot. She knew the difference between courage and walking barefoot into a grinder.

But Lee had lied to her.

Maybe. Probably.

If Jungkook was right, the lie went far beyond a false title. Y/N had trusted Lee. She had told him things she had barely managed to admit to herself, shameful pieces of her past she owed no one. He had listened with those pale eyes and that steady lawman composure, and all the while he might have been storing every word away for later use.

Her jaw tightened.

No one had the right to walk over her. Not Lee, not Jungkook, and not this godforsaken planet. She was not a puppet with a handful of obvious strings. She would find the truth and decide what to do with it herself.

Y/N slammed the battery housing shut harder than necessary. The latch struck home with a metallic crack that rang through the skiff.

“Damn it.”

Her own voice sounded too loud.

She powered down the test systems and climbed into the yard, lowering herself carefully to avoid jarring her injured calf. The moment her boot touched the ground, the damaged muscle tightened beneath its bandage. She paused with one hand braced against the hull until the pain eased, then pushed away before anyone could notice.

Heat struck her full in the face, bright, stale, and heavy. The air smelled of rust, sweat, scorched plastic, old dust, and the faint mineral tang of the recovered water. While she had been inside, the suns had shifted closer together, and their crossing light no longer looked natural. Shadows stretched in long, warped strips beneath the containers and crawled under the machinery like living things searching for somewhere to hide.

Y/N went looking for Lee.

He was not near the skiff or the perimeter, nor anywhere around Peter, who had somehow turned emergency packing into a running critique of the decline of civilized lifting techniques. Namjoon and Bindi had not seen him near the supply crates either.

Yeonjun and Kai finally directed her toward a smaller building at the edge of the settlement. They crouched over a game scratched into the dirt, using stones, old washers, and fragments of bone as pieces.

Kai looked up as she approached, his expression brightening with anxious concern. “Captain, are you—”

“Lee.”

Yeonjun pointed with a piece of rib bone. “That way. Little cabin near the old compressor.”

“Thanks.”

Kai tried to speak again, but Y/N was already moving.

Her anger carried her across the first stretch of ground, though the uneven terrain tugged at the bite in her calf and made her gait stiffer than she wanted. By the time she reached the cabin, the fury had cooled into something more dangerous.

Doubt.

Perhaps Jungkook had done what he did best. Perhaps he had found a crack and poured poison into it. Lee could still be exactly what he appeared to be: abrasive, controlling, damaged, but fundamentally useful.

Maybe the man manipulating her was the one who had kissed her like a confession and recoiled afterward as though she had burned him.

Maybe.

A real sleep cycle would have helped. The thought almost made her laugh. Sleep, on a planet where darkness did not mean rest but extinction, where the Eclipse had wings, teeth, and a memory older than the bones beneath the settlement.

Y/N stopped in the cabin doorway.

Lee stood with his back to her.

The room had likely belonged to whoever once managed the settlement, back when the place still had emergency lighting, schedules, and people who believed tomorrow was something they could rely on. Now the door sagged on its hinges, and the cramped interior smelled of metal, dust, and old sweat. A narrow table sat beneath a strip of weak light.

A box of red-metal shotgun shells rested on the table, their lacquered casings catching the weak light like drops of dried blood. One had been opened with careful precision, not cracked by accident or damaged in use, and Lee handled it with a degree of attention Y/N had never seen him give anything except his weapon.

He lifted the casing with steady fingers, and that was the first thing she noticed. Somehow, it chilled her more deeply than finding him shaking would have.

Lee drew a thin glass ampule from inside the shell. The vial flashed once between his fingers before he fitted it into the barrel of a syringe and pressed the plunger until a bead appeared at the needle’s tip.

Y/N did not move as she watched him slide the needle into his vein.

His shoulders tightened briefly. As the drug entered his system, he released a nearly soundless breath, and the strain in his face receded. It did not soften so much as smooth over, like damage hidden neatly beneath a sheet. The tremor vanished, the frayed edges drew inward, and Lee rebuilt himself with a syringe and a lie.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Lee looked up.

Y/N stood in the doorway with her good arm folded across her body and the injured one held close beneath it. Her face had gone still, all curiosity and patience stripped away until only cold anger remained.

The syringe rested between his fingers, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

“You’re not a cop,” she said.

It was not a question.

Lee placed the syringe on the table. Glass touched metal with a faint clink that sounded obscene in the cramped room. Irritation flashed through his eyes and disappeared almost immediately.

“Some mercenary asshole who talks about the law like—”

“I never said I was a cop.”

His tone remained calm, though a warning ran beneath it.

Y/N stared at him. “You did.”

“No. People assumed.”

“You let them.”

“That’s different.”

“You lying sack of shit.”

His mouth tightened.

Y/N stepped into the room without asking permission. The heat pressed close around her, sour and airless, as her gaze dropped to the orderly evidence on the table: shells, syringe, and empty ampule. Perhaps Lee had never expected anyone to see it, or perhaps men like him always expected discovery and cared only about controlling what came afterward.

She picked up another shell and turned it between two fingers.

“You have a little caffeine in the morning,” Lee said lightly. “I have a little morphine. What’s the difference?”

Her mouth twitched without humor. “Looks like you take yours twice a day.”

“It isn’t a problem unless you make it one.”

Her eyes snapped toward him. “You made it a problem when you let Shields die while you were sitting on enough drugs to keep him alive.”

She saw the reaction, though it was not guilt. Irritation, perhaps, at the inconvenience of being correctly accused.

Lee leaned against the wall and folded his arms.

“Yeah,” he said. “I knew.”

The room seemed to contract around them, and Y/N went still.

His gaze never wavered.

“I knew he was bleeding out. I knew the wound was bad. Even if he survived the first hour, he probably wouldn’t have lasted another cycle.” He shrugged. “And I didn’t care.”

The admission landed heavily, not because it surprised her, but because some part of her had already brushed against the possibility and refused to look directly at it. Hearing him say it so plainly stripped away the final layer of denial.

“You didn’t care,” she repeated.

“What do you want me to do, lie?” Lee asked. “Tell you I tried? Say I did everything possible to save him?”

A short, bitter laugh escaped him.

“I didn’t. Shields wasn’t worth the medication.”

Y/N’s fingers tightened around the shell until the metal edge pressed painfully into her skin. Lee watched her absorb the words, his expression unreadable.

“He was involved from the beginning.”

Her grip loosened. “What?”

“I offered him a cut if he rerouted navigation.”

The room tilted around her. She felt the uneven floor beneath her boots, the heat trapped within the walls, and the pulse hammering behind her ribs.

No.

“He knew which system we were approaching,” Lee continued. “Big-shot navigator from Aguerra, right? Smart man. Smart enough to alter the course and make it resemble debris scatter after a system failure.”

Y/N shook her head once. It was not quite denial, only reflex.

“He wanted the money.”

Her voice dropped. “You set us up.”

“Shields set you up,” Lee corrected. “I opened a door. He chose to walk through it.”

Something cold settled in her stomach, deeper and heavier than anger. Anger burned. This felt like a stone dropped into a well.

“You son of a bitch.”

Lee’s expression barely shifted. “If he was half as smart as everyone says, he wouldn’t have brought us anywhere near this system.”

Y/N thought of Shields on the flight deck, refusing to let her jettison the passenger cabin and choosing forty sleeping strangers over her desperate calculations. She remembered him bleeding out while she stood nearby, helpless, furious, and sick with guilt.

Had he known where they were heading before the crash tore the Hunter Gratzner apart? Had he helped bring them here?

The thought turned her stomach.

Lee watched the realization move across her face and tilted his head. “Still worked out for you, didn’t it?”

Her eyes lifted slowly as a curve touched his mouth.

“Shields can’t tell anyone about your little plan to dump forty passengers and save your own skin.”

For a moment, Y/N forgot how to breathe. The words struck a place already bruised black, and Lee expected her to flinch. She could see it in the patience of his expression, in the way he waited for shame to fold her shoulders and drag her down into the mud beside him.

Voices rose outside.

“Captain! Captain!”

They were young, urgent, and afraid.

Lee’s smile deepened, bitterness sharpening its edges. “Yeah, well. Look to thine own ass first, right, Captain?”

Y/N gave him nothing. Not the flinch he wanted, not the crack in her expression, not even the satisfaction of seeing how deeply he had cut. She turned toward the doorway with her back straight and her shoulders rigid despite the pull in her injured arm.

“That’s Doctor to you,” she said without looking back. “Unlike you, I worked for what I have. Fucking pig.”

Lee started to answer, more from reflex than intention, but his voice caught up with her before she crossed the threshold.

“Since the source of your new attitude is obvious, here’s some advice.”

Y/N stopped without turning.

“Watch yourself around Riddick.”

There was something ugly in the way he used the name, a private familiarity between one dangerous man and another.

“I caught him with a lock of your hair,” Lee continued. “Rubbing it across his mouth. Smelling it. Playing with it like a prayer bead.”

The room seemed to tighten around her.

“He’s fixating on you, Y/N. Probably spent weeks planning exactly how he’s going to kill you.” His voice dropped. “Remember that the next time he’s whispering in your ear.”

Y/N walked out without answering. Her boots struck the floor in quick, purposeful beats, though the injured calf pulled hard enough to shorten one stride. She refused to let it slow her, carrying her anger with her and leaving only its sour trace behind.

Lee remained against the wall, watching the empty doorway long after she disappeared. The smirk gradually left his face. An empty ampule rested on the table, its promise already moving through his veins, yet the room still felt heavy. Something ugly had been spoken aloud, and there was no taking it back.

Y/N did not stop until the noise from the cabin had faded behind her. She passed the skiff and crossed toward the far edge of the settlement, where shade stretched between two rows of containers and the air felt marginally less suffocating. Her calf burned with every step, the healing wound tugging beneath its stiff dressing, but anger carried her until the containers hid her from view.

Only then did she slow.

She bent forward and braced her good hand against her knee, keeping the injured arm close to her ribs as it throbbed beneath its bandage. She had not been running. She had been holding herself together.

Anger moved beneath her skin, bright and restless, while Lee’s voice echoed through her head, each phrase peeling back another layer of rot.

Shields was in on it. I didn’t care. Not worth the medication. Your little plan. A lock of your hair.

Y/N closed her eyes and drew air slowly through her nose, once and then again. The trembling in her hand eased, though it did not disappear.

Falling apart would accomplish nothing. It would not bring back Shields, Deku, or Soobin. It would not load the power cells, outrun the Eclipse, or change the fact that they were trapped on a planet with monsters beneath the ground and others wearing human faces above it.

“Captain! Captain!”

The voices came closer.

Kai and Yeonjun burst between the containers, both breathless and wide-eyed with alarm. Y/N straightened too quickly, and pain tore through her calf hard enough to make her catch the wall. The anger escaped before she could swallow it.

“I’m not your Captain.”

The boys stopped.

Kai flinched as though she had thrown something at him, and regret struck Y/N immediately. She wanted to take the words back, but Yeonjun was already staring past her, his expression gone slack.

She followed his gaze and saw that the sky had changed.

A ringed planet had climbed above the horizon, so vast it looked less like a celestial body than a wall rolling across the heavens. Its curve dominated the upper sky, while its rings glittered in fractured bands of lavender, pale gold, and white. It moved with terrible patience, and as it crossed the suns, the endless daylight began to dim, not gradually fade but weaken all at once, as though an unseen hand had reached out and turned down the universe.

“Hey.”

The voice came cautiously from Y/N’s left.

She turned to find Bindi emerging between two sun-bleached cargo containers with grease and dust blackening her hands. She wiped them against trousers that had stopped pretending to be clean sometime around the crash, while the wind caught the loose pieces of hair around her face and dragged them sideways with a dry whisper.

Bindi tried to make her expression hard, but concern showed through anyway, caught in the tightness around her mouth and the crease between her brows. She looked like someone who had already lost too much and understood that the universe had not finished taking inventory.

“You all right?” she asked. “You came out of there looking like you were about to murder somebody.”

Y/N gave a short laugh, though there was no humor in it. The sound came out raw, scraped over rust.

“Tempting.”

“Yeah?”

“But no.” She rubbed her good hand over her face, leaving a streak of dust across one cheek. “I’m fine.”

Bindi raised her eyebrows.

Y/N looked away. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m full of shit.”

Bindi leaned one shoulder against the container, and the metal groaned softly beneath her weight. She folded her arms and watched Y/N with the blunt patience grief sometimes left behind after burning away everything gentler.

“Are you?”

Y/N almost laughed again. Instead, she exhaled and looked toward the yard, where the old skiff waited beneath the changing sky, patched and scarred, all sharp edges and battered hope.

“It’s Lee.”

Bindi’s expression hardened, though not with surprise. It was the kind of change a blade made when drawn from its sheath, ready and familiar.

“He just...” Y/N stopped, her jaw tightening.

There were too many things, and each had hooks: morphine hidden inside shotgun shells, the false identity he had allowed everyone to believe, Shields dying while help sat within reach, and the deliberate cruelty with which Lee had dragged her guilt into the open and held it up as evidence against her.

“He pisses me off,” she finished. “That’s all.”

Bindi snorted. “Join the club. Guy’s got bad vibes written all over him.”

For a moment, neither woman spoke. The settlement groaned around them while the shadow of the ringed planet widened overhead. Somewhere beyond the containers, Namjoon directed the boys through the inventory in a voice made unnaturally steady by effort. His grief had gone underground, but Y/N could still feel it from across the yard, a deep pressure like water beneath stone.

Bindi's gaze followed hers. "He shouldn't have been alone."

Y/N looked back at her. "Soobin?"

"Deku. Soobin. Any of them." Bindi rubbed both hands over her face, smearing grease across her brow. "I keep thinking if I'd checked the graves sooner, or if I'd made Deku stay near the ship, maybe..." She let the sentence die. "Stupid, right?"

"No."

"Feels stupid."

"It feels like responsibility because helplessness is worse."

Bindi studied her for a second. "That your doctor answer?"

"That's my guilty answer."

The admission softened something between them. Bindi looked toward the skiff again, where one adapted cell sat inside a vessel needing five. "You still thinking about the cockpit?"

Y/N's stomach tightened. "Which part?"

"The part where you almost killed forty people."

There was no accusation in Bindi's voice, which somehow made the question harder.

"Every minute," Y/N said.

"Would it have saved the ship?"

"Maybe."

"Would it have saved you?"

"Probably."

"And Shields stopped you."

Y/N nodded.

Bindi picked at a split in the skin of her thumb. "Then you made the calculation pilots are trained to make when a ship is dying. Doesn't mean it was pretty. Doesn't mean I'd forgive you if my kid was in one of those pods. But ugly isn't the same as evil."

"Lee thinks it is."

"Lee needs everyone else dirty so he can stop noticing his own hands."

Y/N almost told her about the morphine, the hidden ampules, and Shields. The words rose and stopped behind her teeth. Once spoken, they would change the shape of the group. Bindi would confront Lee, and Lee would react badly. Jungkook might exploit the fracture, or perhaps simply watch it happen. They were already too close to the Eclipse to survive another battle over authority.

Silence could be cowardice. It could also be triage.

"He isn't who he says he is," Y/N said at last.

Bindi gave her a flat look. "None of us are anymore. Crash burned most of that off."

"No. I mean literally. He's not a marshal or a cop. He's a mercenary."

The humor left Bindi's face. "You sure?"

"He admitted it."

"And the prisoner?"

"Bounty."

Bindi swore softly. Her gaze moved toward the open yard, searching for Lee without making the motion obvious. "Does Namjoon know?"

"Not yet."

"Jungkook?"

"He knew before any of us."

"Of course he did." Bindi pushed away from the container. "What else?"

Y/N hesitated. "Lee had Shields reroute us toward this system. Offered him a cut."

Bindi's face emptied.

The distant clatter of tools became painfully clear.

"He brought us here?"

"He says Shields chose the route. Lee only paid him."

"That's the kind of difference guilty men love."

Y/N nodded.

Bindi began pacing the narrow strip of shade, two steps one way and two back. Anger changed her posture, pulling her shoulders high and tightening her hands. "Deku died because of that route. Soobin died. Everybody on the ship who didn't crawl out of the wreck died because Lee wanted a payday."

"And if we confront him now, he may take the cells, the weapons, or the sandcat and leave us fighting each other while the sky goes black."

Bindi stopped. "So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying we get the skiff ready first. We keep him where we can see him. Then we decide what justice looks like somewhere that isn't about to fill with teeth."

Bindi held her gaze for a long moment. "You trust Jungkook more than him?"

Y/N thought of silver eyes, a lock of hair, and the raw plea against her mouth. She thought of Lee's syringe and the ease with which he had described Shields as unworthy of medicine.

"I trust Jungkook to be Jungkook," she said. "That may be the only honest thing we have."

Bindi's mouth twisted. "That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Y/N glanced over.

Bindi shrugged. “What? He talks like he’s the only adult in the room, but half the time he’s just swinging his dick around and waiting for everyone to applaud.” Her mouth twisted. “Reminds me of my father.”

Despite the heat, the dirt, the pain pulsing through her arm and calf, and the monstrous sky closing above them, a tired smile tugged at the corner of Y/N’s mouth. She was not sure why she spoke again. Perhaps the approaching darkness had loosened something in her, or perhaps fear opened people in strange places. Maybe continuing to talk about Lee would force her to decide what she intended to do about him.

“I’ve never been to Earth,” she said.

The admission sounded absurdly small against everything around them, like asking about a restaurant from the threshold of an execution chamber.

“What’s it like?”

Bindi looked toward the horizon. Her grief quieted for a moment without disappearing. Grief like hers did not leave. It settled into the bones and breathed through whatever cracks remained. Memory rose over it now, softer and more distant, and when she answered, her voice seemed to come from somewhere far beyond the settlement.

“Shithole.”

Y/N blinked.

Bindi gave a small shrug. “The only people who have anything are the ones with money. Real money. Family-name money.” Her mouth twisted. “My father’s a powerful industrialist. One of the richest men in the inner systems. Mining, extraction, industrial development, corporate control. All those clean little words they use when they mean tearing things out of the ground and calling it progress.”

She looked down at her hands, at the grease embedded in her skin and the black crescents beneath her nails.

“I was supposed to inherit all of it. The offices, the contracts, the blood under the polish.”

The wind pushed a loose curl across her face, and she left it there.

“When I turned twenty, I cut him off. Donated my trust fund to an activist group so he couldn’t use it to buy me back.” A faint breath escaped her, nearly a laugh. “Met Deku not long after.”

Her voice changed around his name, only slightly, but enough. It softened and broke at once, like fabric tearing slowly in the dark.

“We left Earth together. Happiest I’d ever been. Just going somewhere. Seeing things. Fixing what we could. Making our own mess instead of spending our lives cleaning up somebody else’s.”

She swallowed, and the effort looked painful.

“I can’t imagine doing it without him.”

Y/N’s throat tightened. She understood, though not in precisely the same way. Absence had its own shape, and she knew it well enough to recognize it standing beside another person.

“I’m sorry about Deku.”

Bindi nodded once, sharp and controlled.

“He seemed like a good man.”

“The best.” A sad smile appeared briefly and disappeared. “Stupidly good sometimes. Take-the-shirt-off-his-back good, even when he only owned one damn shirt and we were freezing in some dockside hole waiting for fuel clearance.”

Her eyes shone, though no tears fell. Perhaps she had already cried herself empty. Perhaps the planet had taken even that.

“I suppose I have to honor him when we get off this place. Maybe settle down finally. I don’t want to keep traveling without him. Don’t want our places becoming my places.”

She turned toward the horizon again.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

Y/N offered no answer. Some grief did not want comfort. It would spit in the face of a pretty sentence and be right to do so. It wanted only a witness, someone willing to stand close without trying to make the loss smaller.

So Y/N stayed beside her.

The bite in her calf throbbed beneath the stiff dressing, and her injured arm had begun to ache from holding it too close to her body. She shifted her weight carefully, easing the pull in the damaged muscle without disturbing the fragile quiet between them.

The changing light finally broke it. There was no alarm or shouted warning. The world simply became impossible to ignore.

The suns remained overhead, but their edges had lost their authority. Heat still pressed against the settlement, though the color of it had soured. Gold bruised into copper, and copper drained slowly toward gray. Across the hardpan, the long shadows of the spires stretched like fingers searching for a throat.

Bindi raised her eyes. “We’re running out of time.”

Y/N nodded as the softness in her chest folded away, replaced by something clean, hard, and useful.

“The skiff is ready. The hull holds. We need the remaining supplies and the rest of the cells.”

“Let’s finish it.” Bindi pushed away from the container. “We load everything, get airborne, and leave this fucking rock behind.”

Y/N drew a careful breath and held it for a moment before releasing it. The anger remained coiled beneath her ribs, but at least now it had somewhere to go.

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s move.”

They returned to the yard together. Y/N’s calf had stiffened during the conversation, leaving her first few steps uneven, but she forced the leg into rhythm before anyone could offer help. The bandage around her arm pulled as she adjusted the strap across her shoulder, and warmth beneath the cloth warned that the wound had begun bleeding again. She ignored it and kept walking.

Noise swallowed them as soon as they emerged from between the containers. Heat struck first, thick and metallic, followed by crates scraping across dirt, tools clanging against the skiff, and ancient systems whining through their cycles like a machine waking in a foul mood. Commands, warnings, prayers, and complaints overlapped beneath the dying glare while the settlement, dead for sixty years, lurched into frantic life.

Everyone was there except Lee, and Y/N noticed immediately.

Namjoon and Yeonjun were hauling a sealed crate toward the ramp, their clothes streaked with dust and the muscles in their arms standing out beneath the strain. Peter hovered beside them, pointing with great authority while contributing nothing but panic dressed in vocabulary.

“No, no. Tilt it toward me. Toward me. That is emphatically away from me.”

“Peter,” Yeonjun grunted, “either lift or move. You’re blocking the ramp.”

Leo darted through the chaos with a coil of cable clutched to his chest, too slight, too quick, and far too determined to be useless. He nearly caught his foot on a toolbox, recovered through sheer stubbornness, and kept moving. Kai and the remaining pilgrims passed containers hand to hand, their prayers woven into the work now, a blessing beneath someone’s breath, a warning called over a shoulder, a name spoken once before being swallowed by the noise.

Jungkook crossed the yard carrying one of the power cells across his back.

The thing was enormous, a block of red metal scarred by age and heat, with bundled cables strapped tightly against its casing. It should have required two people, or three if Peter was included, but Jungkook carried it alone.

Not without effort. The thin air forced deeper breaths from him, and sweat darkened the collar of his shirt before sliding along his throat. The muscles in his shoulders shifted beneath the weight, controlled and brutal under fabric pasted with dust. Even so, he moved as though the burden were merely an irritation, something he had already decided would not be permitted to matter.

He passed Y/N without looking at her.

The choice was deliberate. She knew because Jungkook noticed everything, from a change in someone’s breathing to a poor lie or a hand drifting too close to a weapon. He recognized fear before people understood they were showing it, along with hunger, weakness, and want.

He had noticed her inside the skiff. Her mouth against his, her hands on him, and that terrible, breathless stretch of time in which both of them had forgotten enough of the world to make a mistake.

Now he gave her nothing. No smirk, no sideways comment, not even one of those lazy glances designed to irritate her into looking back.

Somehow, the absence was worse.

Y/N forced her attention onto the diagnostic pad rather than the sweat tracing his throat. The bandage around her upper arm pulled against tender skin whenever she adjusted her grip, while the bite in her calf protested sharply when she shifted too quickly. She welcomed both pains.

Pain was honest. It had the decency to mean one thing at a time.

Jungkook did not.

Lee had placed another image in her mind, and she could not seem to drive it out: her hair in Jungkook’s hand, a lock of dark strands wrapped around his fingers and lifted to his mouth, breathed in like a secret, a memory, or hunger.

Not because he cared. That would have been simpler to hate.

Jungkook would take something like that because it was useful. If the group scattered, he would want to know which trail mattered. Lee had a weapon, Bindi could repair machinery, Namjoon kept people steady, and Peter produced noise in nearly industrial quantities.

Y/N was the pilot and mechanic, the one who could force a dead ship to breathe.

The one he would follow.

Her stomach tightened as fear moved through her, tangled with anger and something hotter and more treacherous that made her want to curse herself. Beneath that lay another truth, made uglier by the fact that it had nothing to do with survival.

Jungkook wanted her scent because he wanted her.

He was shallow enough, cruel enough, and honest enough with himself to let beauty matter even on a planet trying to kill them. She had kissed him, and he had enjoyed it. Y/N’s fingers tightened around the diagnostic pad until the casing creaked.

“Asshole,” she muttered.

Jungkook reached the skiff and lowered the cell with controlled precision. It struck the deck with a heavy thud that shivered through the hull. He dropped into a crouch immediately, his hands moving over the clamps and ports with unsettling speed.

“Cell three seated,” he called. “Coupling ready?”

“Give me ten seconds,” Namjoon answered from the ramp.

“You get eight.”

“Then you get an improperly seated coupling.”

Jungkook’s mouth twitched. “Ten it is.”

Y/N hated that she noticed the almost-smile. She hated even more that some foolish part of her remembered exactly how that mouth had felt against hers.

She keyed in the alignment with more force than necessary. The indicator flashed green, cell three registered, and the load remained stable as the skiff accepted the feed without complaint.

The minutes stretched thin while the light above them continued to change, and irritation crawled steadily up the back of Y/N’s neck.

Where the hell was Lee?

As though contempt had summoned him, he emerged from between two collapsed structures with his shotgun resting casually across one shoulder and the pouch of red shells bouncing against his hip. He moved with his usual deliberate lack of haste, every step designed to assure the world that he was calm, that he remained in control, and that fear belonged to other people.

His gaze swept across the yard, counting, measuring, and possessing. The sight tightened something hot inside Y/N’s chest.

She looked away, not because she feared him, but because another few seconds of watching might force words from her that would split the group apart. They had no time left to bleed.

Lee stopped beside the skiff. “We good?”

“We’re getting there,” Namjoon replied evenly.

Jungkook rose from the open bay and wiped his hands against his trousers. His gaze passed briefly over Lee, bright behind the goggles and sharp enough to strip a man bare from across the yard. It moved on just as quickly, as though he had already taken whatever information he wanted.

Lee’s return changed the air. Conversations shortened, movements lost their rhythm, and people began watching one another without seeming to, even if they could not have explained why.

Y/N circled toward the skiff’s secondary latch, keeping the hull between herself and Lee. Her calf had stiffened again, leaving a slight hitch in her step, while the wound in her upper arm pulsed beneath the bandage whenever she reached across the casing. She kept working.

Lee noticed. She saw it in the tightening of his mouth.

He came closer once, near enough for her to smell dust, oil, and sweat, with the faint chemical tang beneath it that she now knew belonged to the drugs hidden inside his shells. Y/N shifted immediately and placed the skiff between them.

The message required no words.

Lee’s gaze remained on her back, but she did not care.

Another power cell arrived with Yeonjun and Peter staggering beneath its weight. Both were swearing by the time they reached the ramp, though Peter somehow managed to make profanity sound academic.

“This is barbaric,” he panted. “Machines should become lighter. That is the entire purpose of civilization.”

“Less talking,” Yeonjun grunted.

“I speak to survive.”

“You breathe to survive.”

“Debatable.”

Jungkook moved in without being asked. He steadied the cell, took most of its weight, and guided it into place with the same ruthless efficiency that made Y/N resent how badly they needed him.

She entered the alignment sequence. The indicator flashed green.

“Cell four locked,” she called. “One left.”

The words should have brought relief, but the sky seemed to answer them instead.

The change swept over the settlement so quickly that Y/N almost missed the moment it began. One instant, the yard still belonged to heat, rust, and three relentless suns. The next, color began draining from the world as though the planet had opened a vein beneath the horizon and light itself were pouring into some hidden place below.

The air grew heavier despite how little oxygen it held. Pressure gathered against skin, teeth, and the wet backs of the eyes, making every breath feel borrowed. Tools stilled in people’s hands, voices died mid-sentence, and even the wind seemed to withdraw.

Y/N lifted her head.

All three suns remained above them, but the smallest had changed. A dark curve had begun consuming its burning edge as the ringed planet rose behind it. Around that wound in the sky, blue deepened into violet and darkened toward a color with no honest name.

This was not night or weather. It was something ancient and patient beginning to open its mouth.

Everyone stood scattered across the clearing with their faces tilted upward. For one brittle moment, the settlement held perfectly still.

“What do my eyes see?” Peter whispered.

There was no performance left in his voice, only awe.

Y/N stared at the sky as her stomach dropped. “It’s starting.”

The words sank through her like a stone falling into a well.

A curved band of light appeared near the horizon and widened as it climbed, pouring pale fire across the sky. Lavender, gold, and silver-white scattered through the giant planet’s rings, bathing the settlement in colors too beautiful to trust.

Beautiful things could kill. Y/N had learned that long before reaching this world. A polished blade. A corporate promise. A smile from someone who already knew how they intended to use her.

The sky shimmered while the ground darkened beneath it. No one moved until Bindi broke the spell.

“If we need anything from the crash site, we go now.”

Every head turned toward her.

“The sandcat runs on solar.”

Stillness shattered.

People lunged for water tins, tools, weapons, packs, and sealed cases. Boots hammered against the dirt, and voices collided as fear converted itself into something useful. The sky could afford magnificence. They could not.

Bindi was already climbing into the sandcat. She struck the ignition with a practiced hand, and the engine coughed, choked, then roared awake with a harsh mechanical growl. Its solar panels twitched toward the remaining light like blind flowers seeking a dying sun.

“Now or never!” she shouted.

Y/N caught the side rail with her good hand and hauled herself up. The stretch pulled against the wound in her arm, while pushing off the ground sent pain through her calf, but she got herself aboard without assistance.

“Power cells!” she called. “We take the last one and anything else we can carry. No hero shit.”

“Deeply disappointing,” Peter said as he scrambled toward the vehicle.

“Peter!”

“Moving!”

The sandcat lurched before everyone had fully climbed aboard, its treads tearing into the hardpan and throwing a boiling plume of dust behind them.

Jungkook vaulted onto the rear bed in one fluid motion and landed low and balanced, as though a moving vehicle were solid ground and everyone else had simply failed to understand it. Leo sprinted after them with his face set in fierce concentration. He caught the rear rail just as the sandcat struck a rut, and his feet flew out from under him.

Jungkook seized the back of his jacket and hauled him aboard as though he weighed nothing. Leo struck the bed hard and lost his breath.

“Thanks,” he gasped.

“Don’t fall off.”

“Great advice.”

Peter followed with considerably less grace. He caught the rail in both hands and produced a sound somewhere between outrage and prayer as the sandcat dragged him several stumbling steps through the dust. Yeonjun and Namjoon hooked their arms beneath his and pulled him aboard.

“I am not built for this!” Peter shouted.

“No one is!” Yeonjun shouted back.

Bindi drove hard, her jaw set and her eyes fixed on the path ahead.

“We stay together!” she called over the engine. “Nobody goes out of sight. Nobody tries to be brave. You see something move, scream first and never bother with questions.”

Lee came running from the direction of the private quarters with his shotgun slung across one shoulder and the pouch of red shells clattering against his hip. The sandcat swept past the incinerator without slowing, and Jungkook leaned out over the rear rail.

For one brief heartbeat, Y/N thought he might let Lee miss the vehicle. Instead, Jungkook caught him by the arm and hauled him aboard with one effortless pull.

Lee landed hard on the rear bed, one knee striking metal.

Jungkook’s mouth curved. “Wouldn’t want you missing the fun.”

Something dark lived beneath the words, something private enough that Lee gave him a tight look and said nothing.

The sandcat gained speed. Wind tore at them while dust stung Y/N’s eyes and filled her mouth with the taste of old stone.

The settlement disappeared more slowly than it should have. Each time the sandcat climbed a ridge, the patched roofs and cargo containers returned behind them, reduced but still visible beneath the enormous sky. Y/N found herself counting the structures as though memorizing an escape route they might need in darkness. The coring room stood at the far edge, its doorway a black mark against the pale wall. Even from this distance, she imagined wings shifting behind it.

No one spoke for the first several minutes. The engine punished conversation, but silence also served them. Each survivor seemed occupied by a private calculation: the distance to the wreck, the light remaining, and how much fear could be carried without becoming useless.

Namjoon sat beside Kai and Yeonjun with one arm braced across the rail behind them. He had washed Soobin's blood from his hands, but a dark line remained beneath one thumbnail. The broken prayer cord circled his wrist twice. He stared forward rather than at the boys, perhaps because watching them too closely would reveal how desperately he wanted to keep both within reach.

Peter clung to the frame with offended dignity. Every hard jolt forced a breath from him, and still he attempted to keep his coat from flapping into Yeonjun's face. Leo sat low near the rear axle, one hand wrapped around the rail and the other pressed to the cap on his head. His eyes moved constantly over the rocks and gullies.

Lee occupied the opposite corner from Jungkook. The separation looked accidental until one noticed how carefully both men maintained it. Lee kept the shotgun across his knees, muzzle down but ready. Jungkook appeared relaxed, though his body adjusted to every turn before the vehicle made it, as if he could feel the terrain through the metal.

Y/N sensed his attention touch her once and refused to look back.

Above them, the first sun narrowed to a bright crescent. The temperature fell enough to raise gooseflesh along her damp arms, an impossible relief that carried its own terror. For days the heat had been an enemy without pause. Now its retreat felt like the first symptom of something worse.

The desert responded before the humans did.

Small creatures emerged from cracks in the stone, pale segmented things no longer than a finger. They streamed across the ground in frantic lines, abandoning the deepening shadows for the strips of light that remained. Winged insects battered themselves against the sandcat's solar panels. Farther out, a herd of six-legged animals broke from behind a ridge and ran parallel to them, all narrow chests and translucent ears, until the growing planetary shadow crossed their path. The herd veered so violently that two collided and tumbled beneath the dust.

"Everything knows," Kai said.

No one asked what he meant.

The clicking beneath the earth came and went. At times it was faint enough to mistake for gravel striking the undercarriage. At others, it traveled alongside them in bursts, keeping pace below the hardpan before dropping away into silence.

Bindi pushed the sandcat faster. She braced one boot against the side of the bed to protect her injured calf from the worst of the jolts and kept her wounded arm close as the settlement fell behind them, shrinking into rust and shadow.

They raced toward the wreckage of the Hunter Gratzner and the final power cell that might still carry them off the planet.

“Look,” Leo breathed.

The sandcat crested a ridge, and the horizon opened before them.

A massive planet was rising. The curve of the world above filled the sky with an impossible dominance, too large for the mind to take in all at once. Muted greens and silvers moved beneath bands of cloud, while luminous rings spread outward in jagged arcs, catching the last sunlight and breaking it into fractured brilliance. Against that terrible scale, the suns appeared small and vulnerable.

The planet’s shadow stretched across the land like a black weight reaching for every warm and breathing thing.

Peter stared upward, his face gone slack. “If I were the sort of man who believed in omens, I would dislike that one very much.”

The sandcat plunged into the canyon. Sound struck the rock walls and returned doubled as the engine roared, loose stones cracked beneath the treads, and gravel spat away into the darkening gullies. The roll cage rattled around them.

Bones lined the route, vast bleached remains of creatures long dead, their rib cages arching overhead like bridges built by extinction. The sandcat scraped against one with a shriek of metal on bone, throwing sparks through the gathering dark.

Y/N looked up once.

The pale arch of light rippled overhead with an almost living shimmer while the giant planet climbed higher and consumed more of the sky. Shadows poured down the canyon walls and gathered in the hollows below, turning familiar shapes into deep, uncertain mouths.

From somewhere beneath them came a faint clicking sound. Or perhaps it came from the rock around them. Perhaps fear had remembered it so clearly that her mind had begun making the noise on its own.

Click. Click-click.

Y/N tightened her grip on the rail.

The wreck appeared at the base of the canyon. The Hunter Gratzner lay collapsed against the stone, stripped by heat, time, and whatever had waited beneath this world. Its torn hull caught the failing light in a dull metallic glow, panels sagged open like broken wings, and the ramp they had crossed before sat crooked in the dirt.

The ship looked smaller now. It no longer resembled shelter. It looked like the first place the planet had tried to devour them and failed.

Bindi hit the brakes, and the sandcat slewed sideways through dust and gravel before stopping hard enough to throw everyone against the rails. The jolt sent pain through Y/N’s calf and wrenched her injured arm against her body, but she held on and forced herself upright.

“Everybody move!”

No one hesitated. There was no argument left in them and no point in asking whether they had enough time. They already knew the answer.

Orders cracked through the dimming air as people leapt from the vehicle and split into pairs. Boots struck stone, hands reached for tools and weapons, and the last power cell waited somewhere inside the broken carcass of the ship while the Eclipse deepened overhead with every breath.

Y/N swung herself down with her good arm and landed carefully on her uninjured leg. Her calf tightened the moment her other boot touched the ground, leaving her stride uneven, but she pushed through the pain and began directing the others toward the ramp.

Peter remained beside the sandcat, staring toward the horizon as though he had forgotten how to move. The enormous planet had risen higher, its rings casting broad, shifting bands of shadow across the desert floor. It no longer looked like an object suspended in the sky. It felt present, something vast enough to swallow suns, land, and every fragile human hope moving beneath it.

“Peter!” Y/N shouted. “Move!”

He startled as though waking from a trance, tore his gaze away, and ran toward the wreck.

Above them, the luminous arch trembled across the darkening heavens while the canyon sank deeper into shadow. Pressure gathered in the air until the world itself seemed ready to split open.

The clicking came again, faint and distant beneath the scrape of boots and the metallic groan of the wreck. Whatever was coming had already begun to stir.

They were running out of light.