They arrived nearly to the second Mia had calcuted. A precision she executed with instinct, drawn from years of speaking ship, though he didn't grasp the nuance of that yet.

  He couldn't appreciate the science, the subtle adjustments, the math behind the nding window. But he did appreciate the result. And he had gotten it right as well.

  The Queen's vessel was precisely where he expected it—nestled in the quiet orbit of a dead star, hidden but not concealed. Grand in every sense, a ship the size of a pnet, radiant and smooth. Its surface gleamed in pale metallics, seamless and sterile, structured in ways no Terran engineer would dare. Not welcoming. By design.

  Mia was quiet, letting him have the reins. He wanted to respect it—but she was a criminal. A Terran convict. Her only real value had been her legs to get them out of the pit, and her brain to get them here. That was it.

  Soon the ordeal would be over. The Queen would have a solution. He guided the shuttle forward. The Queen's vessel hailed them the moment they were within range.

  A cold, mechanical voice crackled through the shuttle's systems, sterile and clipped: "Unidentified vessel, you are entering Vassreln Regime space. Cease movement immediately or you will be considered a threat and removed. Identify."

  He complied at once, transmitting the sequence—personal, encrypted, genetic. Proof of who he was. Of who he had been. The silence that followed grated on him. Seconds dragged. He loathed every tick of the dey. Eventually, the systems responded. Identity confirmed. Sequence verified.

  While they waited, Mia startled. "Is the air breathable?"

  He checked. "Yes. Pressurized for humanoids. Oxygen-banced." Of course it was. The Queen tolerated many. Until she didn't.

  He felt Mia rex her spine. He didn't know why she cared. She still gave off the emotional equivalent of a shrug when it came to living or dying. That confused him. Every creature—every intelligent organism he'd ever known—fought for life. But she didn't. Not really. Perhaps it was guilt. Shame for whatever crime had gotten her locked away. He didn't know. And, for now, he didn't ask.

  Simultaneously, as the mechanical voice confirmed his credentials—identity verified, sequence authenticated—they felt the magnetic cmps engage. Silent. Nearly imperceptible. The shuttle lurched only slightly, then glided forward into the gaping mouth of the beast.

  The docking was smooth. Seamless. Gravity shifted incrementally as they were pulled deeper into the vessel. He noticed Mia flinch—not from fear, but discomfort. The gravity here was slightly heavier than what her body was used to. Her vitals were steady, so he dismissed it. If he were a kinder symbiote, he might have asked if she was alright. But he wasn't. And he didn't care.

  The doors opened. He felt something akin to relief, maybe even excitement. This long, horrible ordeal would finally be over. He urged Mia to stand, to move. Her limbs were heavy—more so than usual—but she obeyed, sensing his need to go faster. She made her way to the back of the shuttle and hit the panel to lower the shuttle bay ramp. As the doors folded open and the ramp descended, he expected to see calm faces. Familiarity. Home. Instead, they were met with weapons.

  Dozens of them. The guards stood at the ready, weapons aimed—not holstered, not passive. Their weapons were raised and ready to fire. Gleaming armor shimmered with embedded tech—adaptive, capable of cloaking, reflecting light, hiding in pin sight. But now, fully visible. They stood tall, cold, and at the moment unmoving.

  In the center of them, the Queen.

  The Queen came in person. She stood on the nding deck in her ceremonial attire—regal and minimal. Pale robes wrapped around a lean frame, opalescent skin catching the docking bay lights.

  Her eyes swirled like gaxies—bright, unblinking, cold. She did not speak to him directly. Not at first. The Queen, in her regal glory—millennia old—the symbiote who had led their kind from the sludge of their primitive origins to the empire they now ruled. She had guided their species from crawling mollusks to architects of bodies, masters of form, independent of all biological limitations. She was strength. Legacy. Power.

  And she stared at him like he was the lowest form of life she'd ever seen. Her eyes burned with a cold, ancient fury that chilled him to the core. He didn't understand. After that long, searing look, she turned from him with a sharp, dismissive motion.

  The weapons at the bottom of the ramp kept him still. Kept him silent. He could feel the weight of the guards' gazes, heavy and unforgiving, daring him to make a wrong move.

  Slowly, deliberately, she faced the gathered room. "Whatever remains in that flesh is not my son." Her voice rang out with finality, each word a hammer blow shattering any lingering hope. He flinched, feeling the impact deep in his soul.

  He had heard that tone before—when she ended wars, closed negotiations, condemned enemies. But never directed at him. Never with such utter disdain and rejection. Then she turned. And walked away. From him. Leaving him adrift, severed from the only family he had ever known.

  His brother, that smug smear of a thing—like the greasy trail left by something slow and spineless—turned slower. Savoring the moment, reveling in his triumph. Never breaking eye contact until the st possible moment, when his gaze slid away with contemptuous ease.

  The look on his face: calm, measured, and crowned with the faintest smirk. It sent a spark of fury through him—and through Mia. Her fists clenched without command, nails biting into her palms as she shared his rage, his humiliation.

  "My Queen—" he tried again, stepping forward, desperate for her to just hear him out. To understand. But the guards surged forward, weapons raised in silent threat. Firm hands gripped the Terran shell, restraining him with brutal efficiency.

  The command was clear. He was to be escorted inside. Wherever they were taking him—it would not be pleasant. And it would not be home. Not welcomed. Not anymore. A stranger in the halls of his ancestors, an outcast among his own kind.

  They took him through the towering entrance of the ship-pace—halls gleaming with purpose, corridors humming with power. He could feel the weight of centuries pressing down upon him, the weight of tradition and expectation that he had so thoroughly shattered.

  He could feel Mia looking, taking it in, but not with the awe he would have expected from someone in her position. There was no wonder, no fascination. Only a sense of detachment—as though she were simply there because he was. She wasn't invested. Not really. Just along for the ride, an unwilling passenger in his downfall.

  Whatever happened next, happened. The corridors stretched long, lit in the pale, cool hues his people preferred. A long-forgotten home. But this wasn't a return. It was a reckoning. A judgment he could no longer avoid.

  They took him to a chamber lit in cold, sterile light. Waiting inside stood his mother's longest-serving advisor. Therin-Vahl.

  Bulkier than most of their kind, built like a relic of wartime. He wore a short ceremonial cape that barely moved as he turned, his presence as solid and immovable as the mountains themselves. A warrior. Now in a time when warriors were no longer needed. And he looked furious, his red luminous eyes burning with an intensity that made Asrell's breath catch in his throat.

  His hair was the color of polished starlight—silvery, styled in long braids that marked his seniority. Silver clips and pearls traced the length, gleaming with rank.

  He stared at Asrell in his Terran shell with unmistakable disdain as the guards forced him into position before the advisor.

  Then he hissed—sharp, yered, resonant. A sound with enough command in it to make lesser symbiotes quake. "You were dead," Therin-Vahl hissed. "They told us it was an overdose. That you had wandered into a den and swallowed poison."

  "And worse," Therin added. "You bonded with a Terran. A criminal." He turned to Mia's reflection—seen in a mirror behind them.

  Her eyes, his voice. Her body, his mind.

  "Do you have any idea what you've done?" Therin-Vahl turned his full weight of presence toward him. "You were dead," he hissed, voice like a bde. "Your mother had to decre it. We couldn't find your body, but she was forced to view images—of you, intoxicated. Drugged. For your memory, she spared the court the truth. But the whispers remained. You, Asrell, overdosed. You wandered into a den and swallowed poison."

  Asrell tried to speak, but Therin-Vahl hissed again, silencing him. "She lost a son. And she cannot even fully mourn because the court is still trembling over the scandal. We do not die to something as disgraceful as poison, Asrell. We die on battlefields."

  Asrell looked down. He couldn't hold the advisor's gaze. Therin's centuries of life bore down on him with the weight of w and legacy. "And then you come back. Out of nowhere. In a Terran shell. A TERRAN shell! Our enemies—"

  He tried again, but in a voice so small in the face of Therin-Vahl's fury. "Commander, Prince Ravelon, he—"

  Asrell clicked his jaw shut when Therin-Vahl sliced the air with his hand. Therin sneered. "Hallucinations," he said coolly. "Born of your poisoned mind."

  Asrell opened his mouth again, but Therin turned his back. Reflected in the ship's polished walls, Asrell saw Mia's body—small, Terran, female. And in front of her, the hard, immovable shape of Therin's presence.

  "The shell you wear is a criminal. Escaped from a prison bcksite. Do you want to know her crimes, Asrell?" He tensed. So did Mia. "She is a terrorist. She set deadly explosives in her birth town. Damaged a water treatment facility. Poisoned the source. Nearly a hundred innocents dead." Therin stepped closer. "And she killed two of her friends. Murdered them on the same bridge she destroyed."

  Asrell felt Mia's emotions—tight, silent, guilt-streaked. Shame. He mistook it for confirmation.

  "This is your mess," Therin said. "You bonded with her. The Queen has ordered you stripped of title, nd, legacy. She will not kill you. But you are no longer one of us."

  Asrell would have cried if he still could.

  "In a few centuries," Therin added, tone dismissive, "she may cool. Perhaps then, if you shed this shell and return in proper form, the Queen will let you back."

  Their kind had long abandoned natural flesh. They printed bodies now. Elegant. Controlled. Eternal. "For now," Therin-Vahl intoned with the full weight of judgment, "former prince of the Symbiote Regime—you are officially stripped of your titles. All nd you have been gifted or cimed. And you no longer have a legacy."

  Therin turned his full, powerful gaze onto Asrell. His knees shook. He hated that. This stupid, weak body. "Leave. And know that from this moment forward, you are a Symbiote without a home."

  Therin dismissed him and turned his back on him with a finality that left Asrell cold. With a swiftness known to their kind, the guards picked up his shell and dragged it along, the slick surface scraping against the hard floor. Before he could form a counterargument, anything to save what remained of his life, they hurled him into the shuttle with little ceremony.

  He nded hard on Mia's knees, the impact rattling through the entire body they shared. Weapons trained on him. Faces cold. No words exchanged. Mia pulled herself up from the floor, wincing at the jarring sensation, and hit the control to close the shuttle doors with a hiss of hydraulics.

  As she stood, watching the guards disappear behind the raising ramp, she muttered quietly, "Well. That could've gone better." He didn't reply, stunned into silence by the abrupt turn of events.

  Slowly, she moved forward to the pilot seat, her boots leaving scuff marks on the immacute floor. Her fingers danced across the controls, lifting them out of the Queen's vessel and into the dark, empty void of space. He waited, tense. For any signal. A recall. A change of heart. None came. The Queen's ship was silent, already receding into the distance.

  In an act of defiance, because he could, he leaned forward and activated the comms unit, his mind interfacing with the technology seamlessly. On a private channel, encoded in a dialect no longer in use by his kind, a single call went out. Another vessel responded. Larger. Sleeker. Faster. Mia wouldn't recognize it—but it was his. His personal ship. They had taken his titles. His nd. His legacy. But they weren't taking his ship. It followed them silently through the void, a ghostly shadow.

  They sat in silence. Two criminals—free of the prison, but not free of anything else. Not their reputations. Not their bodies. Not each other. The silence stretched, acknowledged by both and broken only when Mia whispered, her voice strained, "Now what?"

  "We're going to a pnet," he said, his tone clipped. "Abandoned. Habitable. Dangerous. No one will find us there." She didn't argue. Just leaned forward, eyes tired and rimmed with dark circles, and asked softly, "Give me the rough coordinates." He did, transmitting the data directly into the nav system. They were going to VLX-41, also known as Vulx.

  Two strangers. Sharing a body. Knowing something awful about each other. She entered the coordinates, her brow furrowed in concentration. They wouldn't even need the warp drives—just sublight and a little time.

  Then she sagged into the pilot chair, the kind of exhaustion that had nothing to do with muscle or bone weighing heavily upon her. Sleep wasn't what she called it. But he kept his promise. No nightmares. No dreams. Just silence, punctuated only by the soft hum of the engines.

  A soft chime woke her sometime ter. Outside the viewport, a pnet hung—pleasant in appearance. Rolling atmosphere. Blue-green terrain. Inviting, if one ignored the circumstances that brought them there.

  She stared for a long moment, her expression unreadable. "So why is it abandoned?" she asked finally, voice dry and ced with weary sarcasm. He didn't hesitate. "Big predators." That was all he said, letting the ominous words hang in the air between them.

  They nded in the hills—high above the ground creatures, hidden from the sky predators. The air was thin but breathable. The view was raw. Wild. Everything about the pnet seemed oversized—an ecosystem evolved with the volume turned up. Trees towered like living skyscrapers, their trunks wide enough to house shelters, their leaves broad and waxy, fluttering like sails in the breeze. Grass stretched high around the ship, tall enough to brush the hull, swaying in shades of silver-green under a faint vender sky. Clusters of bulbous fruit clung to thick vines, pulsing faintly like they breathed. Mountains loomed in the distance, jagged and dark, the edges unnaturally sharp, like tectonic knives frozen mid-slice. Wind howled through the ravines, but even that had a weight to it—as if sound here carried more gravity.

  The sky shifted in hue every few minutes, cycling between periwinkle, violet, and a muted gold. And just on the horizon, massive winged shadows glided, slow and predatory. Mia didn't ask again. She just stood at the edge of the ramp, absorbing the scale of it. The wildness. The hair on her arms lifted as she heard something in the distance—a low, echoing roar that sent a shiver down her spine. She wasn't sure she liked that ominous sound.

  Still, this oversized wilderness seemed decent enough. For now. She could sense Asrell wasn't giving up, not yet. And she didn't know what she wanted herself, but this was a pce to nd. To regroup. To breathe for a moment. A quiet sense lingered that it couldn't st—that the stillness here was merely borrowed time. And he felt it too, flickers of unrest moving through her body like aftershocks. They were calm, for now. But it wouldn't hold, not forever. Neither of them knew it yet, but this rugged alien world would become their home for awhile.