Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Only Water
The thunder came first.
Nova stopped cutting. Her fingers, raw and cracked, tightened around the sickle as she straightened and looked up. The sky over Verath Nul was a blazing, impossible blue — the one luxury this world afforded, the atmosphere rich enough that the air tasted almost sweet when the wind came in from the sea. She had learned to love that sky in twenty years. It was the only beautiful thing that could not be taken from her.
A dark speck broke through the clouds, trailing a thin line of fire.
Her body began to tremble before her mind caught up.
Inquisitor.
The word moved through her like ice water. She looked around — at the bent backs of the workers on either side, men and women and others who had long stopped being people and become numbers, hunched over the wheat with their hand-sickles because the machines never reached this far. The machines were elsewhere, tending the fields that mattered, the ones whose yield went to the Astra Militarum and the high-ranking officials. Not here. Not to them. They cut by hand, they ate what they were told was wheat gruel but might have been corpse starch, and they drank the water from the natural springs because that, at least, was clean.
Nobody else looked up. Nobody else cared. Ships came and went. What difference did it make?
But Nova knew. She had always known, with a certainty that lived in her bones, that one day a ship would come for her.
* * *
The overseer found her before the hour was up.
Gresk — a broad, heavy man whose voice sounded like gravel scraped across metal — kicked her in the thigh without warning. "Come. You're on cleaning duty."
She looked at him. "I understand. I'm coming."
He led her back toward the colony — a cluster of flat ferrocrete buildings that passed for a settlement. The lowest tier, where workers like her lived in cells that contained a bed, a table, a chair, a sink, and a toilet with no partition. No privacy. No dignity. Just function.
Gresk talked as they walked. Not to her — past her, the way one talks past furniture. About the visitor. About preparations. About the room that needed to be spotless because someone important had arrived.
"Who is it?" Nova asked, very quietly.
The slap came hard enough to whip her hair across her face. Then his hand was on her jaw, squeezing until her lips puckered grotesquely, and his face was close, and his breath was sour.
"That's none of your business. None of it. Just do what you're told, you — whatever you are. Man, woman, who knows what you are."
He let go. She swallowed. Said nothing.
Twenty years. She had been here twenty years. Before, she had been hidden in the back fields, maintaining the machines, invisible. Occasionally beaten. Occasionally grabbed by guards who wanted to see, who pawed at her body to determine what she was and then left her on the ground, laughing. But mostly invisible. Mostly safe in the way that things are safe when no one remembers they exist.
Now she was on her knees in a small room, scrubbing the floor with water that burned. The cleaning solution was industrial — designed to kill everything biological it touched, and it did not distinguish between bacteria and skin. It seeped into the cracks in her hands, into the cuts between her fingers, and the pain was a bright, living thing that pulsed with every heartbeat. Her feet were bare. Her clothes — a black pair of trousers and a top so torn it barely held together — were soaked at the knees.
Gresk stood in the doorway. "Scrub faster, you she-man." He laughed, then left.
She was alone.
She breathed. Scrubbed. Tried not to cry. Tried not to think about who was coming, and whether this was how it ended — on her knees, with bleeding hands, in a room she had made clean for the person who would kill her.
* * *
The door opened again forty minutes later, and the woman in grey walked in.
* * *
Sevra Kael saw the room first, then the figure inside it.
The overseer — Gresk, he had insisted she know his name, as if that mattered — had talked the entire way from the landing pad. About crop yields, about broken machinery, about supply shipments that hadn't arrived in two years. He talked because he was nervous. An Administratum Lexikantin meant scrutiny. Scrutiny meant questions. Questions meant trouble.
Sevra listened. She always listened. It was her gift — to listen, and to wear a face that revealed nothing.
The colony was functional. Nothing more. Grey ferrocrete, grey walls, a faded Aquila shrine where no one prayed with conviction. People prayed here because they were afraid not to.
"We've prepared quarters for you, Lexikantin. Clean, as befitting your station."
Clean. Yes. She could smell the cleaning solution before they turned the corner. Sharp, chemical, cheap. It didn't mask anything — it just layered itself over the older smells of sweat and fear that lived in these walls like ghosts.
Gresk opened the door.
The room was small but larger than what the workers had — a real bed with a thin mattress, a table, a chair, a window. Luxury on Verath Nul. Everything gleamed wet from scrubbing.
Sevra stepped inside.
And stopped.
There — on the floor. On hands and knees, barefoot, hair falling in a dark curtain across the face. Wet, tangled strands of brown clinging to cheeks. A torn top that revealed bruises on the arms — fresh and old, layered like paint on a wall. And the hands. The hands were in a bucket, and the water in the bucket had a pink shimmer.
Blood.
The figure looked up.
And for half a heartbeat, Sevra's trained, controlled, meticulously disciplined mind went blank.
The face was — not what she had expected. Not from an agricultural labourer on a world that ground human beings into numbers. The features were fine, almost delicate — long lashes over brown eyes that held both exhaustion and alertness. But underneath the softness lay strength. The jaw, the shoulders, the lean musculature that spoke of twenty years of physical labour. This person was both. Or neither. Something the Imperium could not press into its neat categories.
And in those brown eyes: terror. Absolute, animal terror. The grey robe, the Administratum seal — the figure on the floor saw all of it and was already writing the ending in their head.
Gresk rumbled behind her. "That's 33. Handles the cleaning. No trouble." He said it the way one speaks about a piece of equipment. Then, quieter, leaning toward Sevra as though the person on the floor couldn't hear: "Somewhat peculiar, the creature, but useful. Don't let it bother you."
Creature.
Something in Sevra's stomach tightened. Not compassion — she had trained compassion out of herself years ago, it had no place in her work. But something. Something she could not name.
She set her face. The cold, empty Administratum face.
"Thank you, Overseer. You may leave. I need the yield registers on my desk by morning."
Gresk left. The door closed.
They were alone.
Sevra looked at the figure still kneeling on the floor. Hands still in the water. Breathing fast, shallow, shaking. Waiting — for a blow, a command, a verdict. That was all this person knew.
Sevra said nothing. Not immediately.
She walked to the window instead. Looked out at the wheat fields that stretched to the horizon, golden in the afternoon light, and somewhere beyond them, the glint of the sea.
"You can stop," she said, without turning around. Her voice was quieter than it should have been. "The floor is clean enough."
* * *
Nova couldn't move.
The woman stood at the window with her back turned — grey robe, dark hair cut short and practical, a posture that spoke of absolute control. Every line of her body said authority. Every syllable she had spoken said Imperium.
And yet.
You can stop.
Three words, spoken to the air, to the window, to the fields outside. Not an order. Something softer than an order, dressed up as one.
Nova's hands were still in the bucket. The solution burned. Her fingers had gone from pain to a strange numbness that was worse than pain, because it meant the nerves were giving up. She pulled them out, slowly, and held them in her lap. They dripped pink onto her trousers.
She stood. Kept her face down, her eyes on the floor. Her hair fell forward like a curtain she could hide behind.
"Thank you, Mistress."
Her voice was barely a whisper. Twenty years had taught her to take up as little space as possible — as little sound, as little presence. As little being. The safest version of her was the smallest version.
The woman at the window didn't turn around.
Nova looked at her own hands. Shaking. Bleeding. Ruined. And somewhere behind her ribs, a question pressed against her teeth, dangerous and desperate, and she tried to swallow it but it was already falling out —
"I don't want to die."
The words hung in the air like something broken.
"I don't want to die. I don't want to die yet." Her voice cracked. Her teeth began to chatter. Her whole body trembled — not from cold, but from the effort of having said the most honest thing she had ever said to another human being. "Are you here to kill me?"
* * *
I don't want to die.
So simple. So naked. No plea to the Emperor, no begging for mercy, no submission formulas. Just that — the rawest, most honest sentence a human being could speak.
She turned from the window.
And went to her travel bag beside the bed. Opened it. Between data-slates and documents and things no one should see, there was a small medikit. Standard Administratum issue. Nothing special. Disinfectant gel. Synthetic wound strips. Basics.
She placed it on the table. Opened it.
"Sit down."
It wasn't a command. Not really. But she didn't know how else to say it. Kindness was a language she hadn't spoken in years. It felt foreign in her mouth, like a word from a dead tongue.
The figure by the door didn't move. Of course not. Every kindness this person had ever received had probably come with a price.
"Your hands," Sevra said. Clinical. Neutral. Like an observation in a report. "If they get infected, you can't work. If you can't work, you're a problem. I don't want problems."
A lie. At least partly. But it was a lie that made sense in this world — a cold, logical justification that had nothing to do with compassion. A safe reason.
She pulled the chair out from the table. Waited.
"Sit down. Hands on the table. This isn't an offer, 33. Damaged labour capacity is a waste of Imperial resources."
The words of the Imperium. Cold, bureaucratic, inhuman. But her hands — as she opened the disinfectant gel — her hands were more careful than they needed to be.
Much more careful.
* * *
Nova sat.
She placed her hands on the table and watched through a veil of tears as the woman in grey began to work.
The gel was cool. Not like the cleaning solution — not like acid. It soothed where the other had burned, and the difference was so stark that Nova's breath hitched. She stared at the woman's fingers as they moved over her skin. Precise. Methodical. Applying gel to each crack, each split, each raw place where the flesh had opened. Laying wound strips over the worst of it with the focus of someone disarming a bomb.
No one had touched her like this. Not in twenty years. Not ever, perhaps. Touch had always meant violence — fists, boots, hands grabbing at her body to determine what she was. This was something else entirely. This was careful. This was gentle.
And the woman's face betrayed nothing. No expression, no emotion, no crack in the grey mask. She might have been filling out a requisition form.
But her hands told a different story.
Nova watched. And trembled. And tears rolled down her cheeks because she couldn't wipe them, because her hands were on the table being held by someone who touched them as though they mattered.
* * *
Sevra didn't look up. She couldn't.
Because if she looked up, she would see the tears. And if she saw the tears, she would have to acknowledge what she was doing — not treating damaged Imperial property, but holding a human being's hands and trying to undo some small fraction of the harm that had been done to them.
She placed the last wound strip on the left palm. Pressed it down gently.
And then — against every protocol, every instinct — she looked up.
Brown eyes, wet and wide. Tears tracking down cheeks that couldn't be wiped. Hair falling across a face that was trying so hard to be invisible. A mouth that trembled.
Something shifted behind Sevra's eyes. A softening. A fracture in the grey facade, barely visible — like a hairline crack in ferrocrete. There for an instant. Then gone.
She released the hands. Closed the medikit. Returned it to the bag.
"Keep your hands out of water tonight. Change the bandages in the morning."
She turned away. Walked to the window. Stared at the fields burning gold in the evening sun.
"You can go."
* * *
Nova stood. Walked to the door. Stopped.
She turned back. Tears still flowing, unstoppable now. She wanted to speak but didn't know what to say, didn't know if speaking would ruin this fragile, impossible moment where a woman in an Imperial robe had knelt beside her purpose and chosen something else.
"Mistress. Thank you."
The words fell from her mouth and with them, the tears fell from her face and hit the floor — tap, tap, tap — tiny dark spots on the freshly scrubbed ferrocrete.
Nova looked down. Saw the drops. And something inside her — something trained and beaten and broken into her over twenty years — detonated.
She threw herself onto her knees. "Oh no — the floor — I just cleaned it — it's — I'm making it dirty again —"
Her bandaged hands pressed against the wet spots. She rubbed at them with her knees, with the fabric of her ruined trousers, desperately trying to erase the evidence of her own grief from the floor. As if tears were a crime. As if the most human thing a body could do was something that needed to be scrubbed away.
* * *
Sevra heard it behind her. Knees hitting wet floor. The frantic, panicked rubbing. The broken murmuring.
She turned.
And the sight —
The person from the fields, from the reports, from the file she was meant to fill with observations and recommendations. On their knees again. Hair over their face. Fresh bandages already darkening as they pressed against the floor, trying to wipe away their own tears with their body. Apologising. For crying. For being human on a clean floor.
Something broke.
Not loud. Not visible. Somewhere deep in Sevra's chest, behind the robe, behind the armour, behind the years, behind everything the Ordo had made of her. A quiet crack, like a bone giving way under pressure.
She crossed the room. Her boots stopped in front of those knees.
"Stop."
It came out harder than she meant. Old habit. She corrected herself — internally, where no one could see — and knelt down. In front of the figure on the floor. On the wet tiles, on the tears, on the mess that wasn't a mess at all. Her grey robe soaked up the moisture. She didn't care.
They were at the same height now. Brown eyes and grey eyes. Level.
Sevra reached for the trembling wrists. Not hard. Not like Gresk, not like the overseers, not like any of the hands that had ever touched this person before. She simply held them. Stopped them. Stopped the desperate rubbing that was ruining the fresh bandages she had just applied.
"Stop," she said again. Quieter this time. So quiet it barely filled the room.
She held the wrists. The trembling came through the bones, through the skin, through the thin barrier between two people who had no business being this close.
And then Sevra said something she should not have said. Something that appeared in no briefing, no protocol, no set of instructions. Something that violated every rule that had been burned into her.
"It's only water."
Three words. Meaningless, really. But the way she said them — calm, without edge, without contempt — was perhaps the most dangerous thing she could have done. For both of them.
"It's only water on a floor. That's all."
She let go of the wrists. Slowly. And stayed where she was. On her knees, on the wet ground, in her grey robe that now had dark patches spreading across the fabric.
She did not stand. She did not return to the window.
She stayed.
And somewhere in her mind — in that space that was no longer entirely hers, where sometimes a wind blew from nowhere — something whispered: Careful, Sevra. Careful. What you're doing has a price.
She knew.
She stayed anyway.