The rescue cruiser dropped out of the sky like something out of a war documentary, all sharp angles and matte black plating, engines screaming as it slowed hard enough to kick up a storm of loose dust and grit across the crash site, and Ren shielded his eyes with one arm while the surviving passengers around him scrambled back to give it room to land. It came down clean despite the terrain, landing struts unfolding at the last second and biting into rock, and before the engines had even finished cycling down the boarding ramp was already dropping open with a hiss of pressurized air.
Soldiers poured out first, a dozen of them in matching black-and-silver armor with visors that glowed faint blue from internal HUD displays, moving in the kind of practiced formation that told Ren this wasn’t their first crash site. Medics followed close behind, already fanning out toward the injured, portable scanners chirping as they swept over bodies checking vitals. Ren stood frozen near the boulder he’d used for cover, still catching his breath, still half convinced his arm was going to start glowing again on its own, and that was when he saw him.
Yegard came down the ramp last, and somehow that made it worse, because it meant everyone else had already cleared a path for him without needing to be told. He wasn’t in his ceremonial uniform anymore, just a stripped-down combat version of it, black plating over dark fabric, no medals, no decoration, nothing but function, and it made him look even more dangerous than he had in that receiving hall four hours ago. His eyes swept the wreckage once, cataloguing it the way Ren imagined a predator catalogued a room full of prey, and then those violet eyes landed on him and stopped.
Ren’s stomach dropped somewhere around his boots. ’Of all the moons in all the unclassified systems in the entire empire,’ he thought, ’his rescue fleet had to be the one that picked up this exact distress signal.’
Yegard crossed the distance between them without hurrying, which somehow felt worse than if he’d sprinted, every step deliberate, every step saying he already knew exactly how this conversation was going to go before he even opened his mouth. He stopped close enough that Ren had to tip his head back slightly to hold eye contact, and for a second neither of them said anything at all, the silence stretching out long enough that a few of the nearby soldiers actually slowed down to watch.
"You left the Capital four hours ago," Yegard finally said, voice flat, but there was something underneath it Ren couldn’t quite place, something that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite concern either, some third thing he didn’t have a name for. "And somehow I’m already pulling you out of a crash site on the edge of monster territory, which either means you have the worst luck of anyone I have ever met in my life, or you did something extremely stupid to end up on a transport routed anywhere near this system in the first place."
"It’s not luck and it’s not stupidity, it’s just bad timing," Ren said, crossing his arms because it gave his hands something to do besides shake. "The transport lost thrust and made an emergency stop, that’s it, that’s the whole story, I didn’t choose to land on a moon crawling with six-legged nightmares if that’s what you’re implying."
"I’m not implying anything, I’m telling you that a Sentinel activation was flagged on the emergency beacon before we even landed," Yegard said, and something shifted in his expression, subtle but real, like a piece of a puzzle sliding into a place it wasn’t supposed to fit. "Which is interesting, considering you’ve never once registered as an active Sentinel in any database in this empire, not as a child, not during your academy years, not ever, and I would know, because I checked your file myself before our engagement was finalized."
Ren’s mouth went dry. Right. Of course he checked. Of course a man like this wouldn’t enter an engagement without knowing exactly what he was getting into, and of course that meant he already knew Rafayal Miller had spent his entire life registered as a dormant, unranked nobody riding entirely on his family’s political weight. ’Great,’ Ren thought, ’so not only did I just accidentally reveal a superpower I didn’t know I had in front of a crowd of witnesses, I did it in front of the one guy in the whole galaxy with the authority to make me explain it.’
"Maybe your database is wrong," Ren said, which was possibly the weakest excuse he’d ever produced in either of his lives, and judging by the look on Yegard’s face, he knew it too.
"The Sentinel Corps database doesn’t make mistakes like that," Yegard said, and for the first time since Ren had met him, something that might have almost been the ghost of amusement crossed his face before disappearing again just as fast, gone so quickly Ren almost convinced himself he’d imagined it. "A dormant bloodline rank doesn’t just activate on its own out of nowhere, something has to trigger it, usually extreme stress or mortal danger, which tells me that whatever happened out here scared you badly enough to crack something open that’s apparently been sitting locked inside you your entire life."
"Fantastic, thank you for the diagnosis, very helpful," Ren muttered, and he meant it to sound sharper than it came out, but exhaustion was creeping back in now that the adrenaline had worn off, and his knees still felt vaguely unreliable underneath him.
Yegard’s gaze flicked down, taking in what Ren could only assume was a full accounting of every way he currently looked like he was about to fall over, and without a word he reached out and closed a hand around Ren’s upper arm, steady and firm, not gentle exactly but not rough either, just solid, like he expected Ren to need the support and had already decided to provide it before Ren could argue about wanting it. "Medical is going to want to run a full scan on you," Yegard said, already steering him toward the cruiser’s ramp, "and then Command is going to want a full statement, and I am going to want an explanation for how a supposedly unranked civilian just took down a Class-Three predator with a blade formation I have personally only seen a handful of active Sentinels manage without training."
"I don’t have an explanation, I barely remember doing it," Ren said, which was true, mostly, if he ignored the increasingly loud voice in the back of his head insisting this was somehow tied to Rafayal’s bloodline and the fact that apparently book villains occasionally came with hidden superpowers nobody bothered to mention on the page. "One second there was a monster trying to eat a twelve-year-old kid and the next second my arm was on fire and it wasn’t anymore, that’s the whole sequence of events, I promise I’m being as honest as I possibly can right now."
"I believe you," Yegard said, which surprised Ren enough that he actually looked up at him properly for the first time since the cruiser landed. "Untrained activations under extreme duress rarely come with clear memory of the event, it’s a documented phenomenon, the body reacts faster than the mind can process what it’s doing. What I don’t believe is that this is the end of it. A rank like that doesn’t stay quiet once it’s been triggered, it’s going to keep surfacing whether you want it to or not, and you’re going to need someone qualified to help you control it before it starts surfacing at worse times than this."
Ren felt something cold settle in his stomach, because he already knew exactly where this was going before Yegard even said it out loud, and he opened his mouth to object, to say absolutely not, to remind this man they’d broken off their entire relationship four hours ago specifically so their lives could stop being tangled together, but Yegard kept walking, kept pulling him steadily up the ramp toward the cruiser’s interior like the conversation was already settled and Ren’s objections were just background noise he intended to wait out.
"I’m not going back to the Capital," Ren said instead, because that felt like the more useful hill to die on. "I already told you my plan, I’m leaving, I’m not walking that back just because my arm did something weird under pressure."
"I’m not asking you to go back to the Capital," Yegard said, and something about the way he said it made Ren’s stomach do an uncomfortable little flip he refused to acknowledge. "There’s a Sentinel training outpost stationed at the edge of this exact sector, close enough to monster territory that dormant activations like yours are common enough to have protocols built around them, and far enough from the Capital that no one there is going to care about the political mess of a broken engagement following you around. You wanted distance. This gives you distance. It also gives you someone qualified to make sure that blade doesn’t take your whole arm off with you the next time it decides to activate on its own without permission."
Ren stared at him, trying to find the trap in it, because there had to be one, there was no version of this where the terrifying Grand Marshal he’d just dumped hours ago was doing him a genuine, uncomplicated favor with zero strings attached. "And you’re telling me this outpost has nothing to do with you specifically," Ren said slowly, "nothing at all, you just happen to know about it, purely as a professional courtesy."
For the second time that night, something close to amusement flickered across Yegard’s face, there and gone before Ren could be sure he hadn’t imagined it entirely. "I command it," Yegard said. "Among several other things. But I’m rarely stationed there myself, so if distance is genuinely what you want, you’ll have plenty of it most days." He paused at the top of the ramp, glancing back at Ren with an expression that had gone unreadable again, cold and flat and impossible to parse. "Unless that changes your mind."
’It absolutely does not change my mind,’ Ren told himself immediately, firmly, ignoring the small, traitorous part of his brain that had just perked up at the idea of an outpost this man commanded but rarely visited, because that sounded like exactly the kind of safe, controlled distance his whole plan had been built around from the very beginning. Stay alive. Stay rich. Stay away from Yegard. Nothing about a remote training outpost violated a single one of those rules, technically, probably, if he squinted at it the right way.
"Fine," Ren said, following him up the ramp because at this point what other option did he actually have, stranded on a crashed transport at the edge of monster territory with an arm that apparently turned into a weapon whenever it felt like it. "But this doesn’t change anything. I’m still leaving the Capital behind for good, I’m still not interested in getting dragged back into any of this, and the second I’ve got my rank under control, I’m gone."
"Understood," Yegard said, already turning to bark orders at the soldiers finishing up triage below, voice snapping back into full commander mode like the last five minutes hadn’t happened at all. And maybe it was exhaustion, or the adrenaline crash, or just the general disaster of the last several hours catching up with him all at once, but Ren could have sworn that just before Yegard turned away completely, something in his expression looked almost satisfied.
’This is fine,’ Ren told himself, settling into a jump seat as the cruiser’s engines began spinning back up beneath him. ’Totally fine. Completely under control. Nothing about this feels like the start of a very bad decision at all.’
He was still trying to convince himself of that when the ramp sealed shut behind them with a heavy mechanical hiss, and the cruiser lifted off the moon’s surface, carrying him straight toward the last place on the map he ever planned on going.