“Luna.” The correction came with a smile she couldn’t suppress. “Apparently there’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“I’m still figuring that out.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not much—Rowan didn’t deal in large emotional gestures—but enough. The line of his jaw softened. The guarded assessment gave way to something warmer, something that looked like the specific brand of respect one professional extended to another when the job had been done well under impossible conditions.
He didn’t hug her. Rowan wasn’t built for hugs. But he reached out and gripped her forearm—the navigator’s clasp, the one they’d used aboard theStardancerwhen a handshake was too formal and a salute was too military and the situation demanded acknowledgment without ceremony.
His scarred fingers closed around her arm, where her bracer remained. Held for three seconds. Released.
It was enough. It said everything.
Milo hung back behind Rowan’s shoulder, and the distance wasn’t shyness. Elsa recognized the positioning—the way a person arranged themselves when they weren’t sure their presence was welcome in the new geometry of someone else’s life. She’d seen it in port-town reunions when crew members returned to partners who’d moved on, in station corridors when reassigned personnel encountered old shipmates wearing new insignias. The math of belonging recalculated, and not everyone trusted the updated figures.
She closed the gap herself.
“Milo.”
He looked up. Thinner than she’d known him—the fortress hadn’t replaced the weight theStardancer’sexplosion had burned away—but his eyes were clear. Present in a way they hadn’t been during the worst days in captivity, when the pain in his hands had pushed everything else behind a wall of endurance and Elsa had watched the light in him dim by increments she couldn’t stop.
“Hi, Captain.” The old joke. He’d never called her captain—she wasn’t one—but he’d started the bit their second week aboard theStardancerand never let it die. The familiarity of it cracked something open behind her sternum.
“How are your hands?”
He looked down at them. The bandages were clean—Yarx’s work, precise, medicinal, the kind of care that came from ahealer who understood tissue at a level human medicine was still theorizing about. Milo turned his hands over with the slow attention of someone relearning the geography of their own body.
“The burns will scar.” Quiet. Matter-of-fact. The voice of a man who’d already grieved the loss and was now negotiating terms with what remained. “But I can feel again. Yarx has me assisting in the medical wing—the Tear Domes, the healing pools. Their techniques are...” He paused, searching for the word. “Different. They rebuild tissue instead of patching it. I’m learning.”
He didn’t mention Vask. None of them would. The name occupied the same space as the crash itself—a shared scar they’d agreed without discussion to leave undisturbed.
“You’re good at learning.” Elsa kept her voice steady. “Always were.”
His smile was small and lopsided and real. “The healer’s not bad either. Patient. For someone with claws the size of kitchen knives.”
Mia, who’d drifted back to the low stone wall where she’d been sitting, made a sound that could have been a cough. Could have been something else.
Elsa turned to her. “And you?”
“Me?” Mia tucked her legs beneath her on the stone, chin lifting with the particular defiance of someone preemptively defending a position they hadn’t been asked to defend. “I’m fine. Yarx has been—” She stopped. Color crept up her neck. “He’s...gentle. For a seven-foot wolf creature who could tear me in half.”
The blush deepened. Mia’s gaze cut sideways to where Yarx stood at a respectful distance—close enough to intervene, far enough to give her space, the geometry of his positioning so precisely calibrated that Elsa recognized it as the sameprotective calculation she’d seen him apply in the medical wing. The healer’s brown fur caught the crystal-light in warm tones, his amber eyes tracking the conversation without inserting himself into it.
Elsa filed the observation away. The way Mia’s voice softened around his name. The way Yarx’s attention never quite released her, even when he wasn’t looking. The careful distance between them that felt less like separation and more like a held breath.
Interesting.
“And the chambers?” Elsa pressed, gently.
“Clean. Safe. He gave me my own room with a lock that works from the inside.” Mia said it like it was nothing. Like it wasn’t the most revolutionary act of kindness anyone had offered a captive human on this planet. “He doesn’t—” Another pause. The blush had reached her ears. “He doesn’t ask for anything. Just makes sure I eat and sleep and don’t freeze. It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird,” Elsa said.
Mia looked at her. Really looked—past the mantle and the silver chains and the marks of a Luna’s station—and whatever she found in Elsa’s expression made her swallow hard.
“No,” she agreed quietly. “I guess it’s not.”
Ari waited.