NAY_Wedge
PROLOGUE // Before Nay
She took down four of them before they got her arms.
The fifth came from behind - a neck lock, the kind that reads resistance and tightens to match it - and Ruby went to her knees on the corridor floor with two agents flanking her, weapons raised, and a silencer plate pressed across her mouth before she could spend her breath on the girl's name.
Two agents had Hani by the arms.
They dragged her toward the pre-chamber hatch with the speed of people finishing a task. Hani did not struggle. She looked back down the corridor the entire way - her whole face fixed on Ruby, only Ruby - and her expression was not fear. It was the specific concern of someone far more worried about the person watching than about what was happening to herself.
The hatch opened.
They threw her through it like something with no further use and sealed it behind her.
The dark was total. The cold came all at once.
Hani drifted in the weightless black, untethered, the pressure already working at the thin skin of her face and her hands. There was no up. There was no floor to find.
She looked in the direction of Ruby - the direction she had last seen her, through the hatch, through the corridor, through everything between them now. Ruby on her knees. Ruby who conquered all, who had never in Hani's life been on her knees, making that sound behind the silencer plate.
She will be okay, Hani thought. Ruby is always okay.
The cold reached her fingers. Then her face. Then the edges of her thinking.
She felt it then - warmth with no source, pressing in from every side at once, deliberate, enclosing her. Something in the pre-chamber had decided, without asking her, that she would not be cold.
Below the ship, turning slowly in light that belonged to a different sun, a blue planet waited.
It did not know what was coming.