The journey from Hyperion Deep to the Imperial outpost in the Varkesh system was going to take us roughly two weeks if we pushed it, closer to three if we took the scenic route. And we were definitely taking the scenic route.

  I'd plotted our course along minor hyperlanes, a network of old trade routes that had fallen out of favor centuries ago. The plan was to follow these ghost roads until they merged with a high-traffic route for the final leg, letting us blend in with regular commercial traffic before arrival.

  "Fewer than twelve ships per standard month along most of this stretch," I explained, pulling up the three-dimensional star map in the cockpit. Glittering waypoints traced a winding path through the holographic starfield. "That's practically a ghost road."

  Rosalia studied the route with her typical analytical focus, one finger tracing the trajectory. "The reduced traffic serves multiple purposes. Less chance of encountering Kingdom search parties. And anyone we do encounter will be equally wary. Legitimate travelers on poorly-patrolled routes tend to be cautious of strangers."

  "Exactly. Everyone's suspicious of everyone, so nobody asks too many questions." I highlighted the final segment where our route merged with a major hyperlane. "Then we join the crowd for the last leg. Two more travelers in a stream of hundreds. Nothing remarkable."

  "The logic is sound." She nodded approvingly. "And I must admit to being enthused by your 'security detours' that happen to pass remarkably close to entries in that tourist guide you've been reading."

  "Pure coincidence," I deadpaned.

  "Of course." She was grinning from ear to ear.

  We'd been using Cheatlight for the past two days to reach the entry point of the first hyperlane. Short hops at roughly three light-years per day, the Mahkkra's warp bubble bending space around us like a protective cocoon. The view was strange but manageable: stars stretching into luminous lines, the visible universe compressing into a horizontal oval like looking through a rugby ball made of glass. Everything beyond that narrow cone was absolute blackness. Not the darkness of space with its scattered stars, but true black. The absence of anything.

  I found it fascinating, actually. The way reality just... stopped at the edges of our bubble. All that emptiness leaving so much room for imagination about what might be out there, just beyond perception.

  Hyperspace, though. That was going to be different.

  In Life Among the Stars, hyperspace was a light show. Psychedelic colors swirling across the cockpit canopy, maybe some wobble effects on the UI to simulate disorientation. The devs had even added this neat feature where distant objects would stretch and compress like you were looking through a funhouse mirror. Very immersive. Very atmospheric.

  I had logged thousands of hours watching that light show. I thought I knew what to expect.

  I know what I’m going into. What could go wrong?

  The first hypernode pulsed on our sensors as we approached. I ran through the pre-transition checklist one more time. Normality field generators at full power. Hyperdrive spooled and stable. Navigation locked to the beacon's frequency. Everything green across the board.

  "Ready?" Rosalia asked from the co-pilot's seat.

  I gripped the controls and took a breath. "Ready."

  The transition itself was smooth. Only a gentle lurch, like the moment an elevator starts to descend, if that elevator was simultaneously rotating through a dimension that shouldn't exist. The Mahkkra shuddered once, twice, and then the stars disappeared.

  In their place: everything else.

  The normality field held the interior of the ship stable. I could still see the cockpit, still feel the seat beneath me, still sense Rosalia's presence three feet to my right. That much was real. That much was solid.

  But my mind could perceive outside the bubble. And what it perceived...

  Colors that aren't colors. Emotions bleeding into the visual spectrum like oil on water. Fear was purple, bruised and throbbing. Curiosity sparked in electric gold. Somewhere beneath it all, a deep red hunger that I desperately hoped wasn't coming from inside me.

  Shapes moved in the chaos. Not ships, not creatures. Only concepts given geometry that hurt to comprehend. I watched something that might have been a spiral unfold into a cube, then refold into a spiral that was somehow facing the opposite direction while remaining perfectly still.

  Escher on acid, I thought, and immediately wished I hadn't, because the thought itself seemed to ripple outward into the madness.

  And distance. Well. Distance became taste. The hypernode beacon we'd left behind lingered on my tongue like copper and regret. The next beacon, the one that would guide us to our first waypoint, was somewhere ahead. Somewhere far. It tasted like longing. Like homesickness for a place I'd never been.

  Through all of it, I could sense Rosalia. Her presence was a fixed point in the swirling impossibility. Iron and silk, wrapped around an icy fire that burned without heat. It made no sense. It made perfect sense. It was the only thing that made any sense at all.

  What do I feel like to her? The thought surfaced unbidden. What am I, in this place?

  I didn't have time to wonder. My head was starting to pound.

  We'd been in hyperspace for maybe forty minutes when the colors began to bleed wrong. The bruised purple of fear darkened, thickened, started oozing something that looked horribly like black ichor. The golden curiosity curdled into a sickly yellow-green.

  Something's wrong. Something's really wrong…

  The space between my hands started singing. A high, clear note. B-sharp. I stared at my fingers, spread six inches apart over the control console, and I heard the distance between them.

  "Nico?" Rosalia's voice, sharp with concern. "Your vitals are…"

  "Out." The word came out strangled. "Need to get out. Now."

  I couldn't fly like this. I couldn't think like this. The mathematical precision required to navigate a hyperspace corridor had dissolved into chaos, and if I tried to make a course correction right now, I'd probably pilot us straight into a Cathedral.

  Rosalia didn't argue. Didn't question. Her hands moved across her console with the fluid efficiency of someone who'd trained for exactly this scenario, and I felt the shift procedure initiate, like a taste of resolution, a color of relief, a sound like coming home.

  The Mahkkra dropped back into realspace.

  The stars returned. Fixed points of light, behaving exactly as stars should behave, occupying exactly three dimensions like civilized celestial bodies.

  I barely made it to the head before I started throwing up.

  Ten minutes later, I emerged from the lavatory feeling like something the recycler had rejected. My legs were unsteady. My head throbbed with a residual ache that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I'd splashed water on my face, but the pallor staring back from the mirror had been... memorable.

  Rosalia was waiting in the mess, two mugs on the small table. She took one look at me.

  And laughed.

  Not a polite chuckle. Not a restrained smile. Full, unrestrained laughter, the kind that made her shoulders shake and her eyes water.

  "I'm." she managed, between gasps, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't… your face…"

  Rude.

  I collapsed onto the opposite seat and tried to muster some dignity. It was a losing battle. "Glad my suffering amuses you."

  "It's not…" She pressed a hand to her mouth, visibly struggling to compose herself. Failed. Another thirty seconds of laughter. "It's not suffering, it's… you looked like a ghost. A very green ghost."

  "Hilarious."

  "Genuinely, yes." She finally managed to school her expression into something approaching sympathy, though the corners of her mouth kept twitching. "Here. Drink."

  The mug contained something that looked like gray sludge and smelled like nothing at all. I eyed it with deep suspicion.

  "It's a recovery porridge," she explained. "Traditional remedy for hyperspace disorientation. It will settle your stomach."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "It looks like tooth paste, without the flavoring."

  "It tastes worse. Drink it anyway."

  I drank it. She was right. It tasted like cardboard. But within minutes, the nausea began to fade, the throbbing in my skull retreating to a manageable ache.

  "So," I said, setting down the empty mug. "That was hyperspace."

  "That was hyperspace." Rosalia's amusement had softened into something warmer, more sympathetic. "The experience is overwhelming for most people. The human mind isn't designed to process that reality. The normality field protects us from the worst of it, but some perception always bleeds through."

  "Some perception." I laughed, hollow. "I could taste distance. I could hear the space between my hands."

  "Synesthetic bleed. It’s common. Especially for a first time experience." She tilted her head, studying me with genuine concern beneath her composed expression. "What's uncommon is experiencing it for the first time as a pilot."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Most people travel through hyperspace dozens of times before they ever sit in a pilot's chair. Passengers. Cargo handlers. Station workers taking transit between systems. The normality field provides much more complete protection when you're not actively interfacing with the ship's navigation systems." She paused. "You essentially jumped into the deep end without learning to swim."

  Great. Another item for the list of things I should have known.

  "So it gets easier?"

  "With exposure, yes. Your mind will learn to filter the noise, to focus on the useful sensory data while ignoring the rest." A ghost of a smile, but her eyes held understanding.

  "Wonderful."

  We sat in companionable silence for a moment. The stars outside the viewport were steady and calm, utterly indifferent to my ordeal.

  "Full night's sleep," Rosalia said finally, rising. "We'll try again tomorrow. Slower this time."

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. The exhaustion was hitting hard now, crashing over me like a wave.

  The second attempt went better. Not well, exactly, but better.

  Rosalia took the pilot's seat this time, handling the navigation while I sat in the co-pilot's chair and tried not to perceive anything. It was harder than it sounded. Like trying not to think about elephants. But without the focus requirement of actual piloting, my mind had more bandwidth to process the chaos.

  Two hours. We managed two hours before the synesthetic bleed became overwhelming and I signaled for an exit.

  Progress.

  We fell into a rhythm after that. Mornings: hyperspace transit, pushing my tolerance a little further each day. Afternoons: rest and recovery. Evenings: the mundane business of cohabitation on a ship that offered limited privacy and one shared bathroom.

  The Mahkkra was a combat ship, not a luxury liner. The cockpit was cozy for two or three, cramped for anything more. The mess was small, doubling as common area and conference room depending on how you configured the seating. We each had our own sleeping quarters, spacious enough by ship standards, but the single toilet and shower required coordination.

  "Your skincare routine," I announced one morning after an extended wait, "is a war crime."

  "Proper hydration protocols are essential in recycled atmospheres," she replied without a trace of apology. "Perhaps you should wake earlier."

  "Perhaps you should moisturize faster."

  We established boundaries. Rotations for common spaces. Clear communication about meals. My rule: don't touch the tool drawer without asking. Rosalia's rule: no littering the table with meal wraps once done eating, no exceptions.

  Small frictions emerged and were negotiated away. She hated how I left calibration equipment scattered across the cockpit. I found her rigid adherence to a schedule that tracked Imperial Standard Time to the minute mildly pathological.

  "Sometimes," I pointed out after one particularly tense morning, "you have to go to the bathroom when you have to go, not when scheduled."

  "Discipline promotes efficiency," she countered.

  "Discipline promotes embarrassing incidents."

  But we made it work. Found our corners. Learned when to talk and when to let silence fill the space between us.

  Day three: three hours in hyperspace. Day five: six hours. Day six: eight. Each session, I got better at filtering the noise and focusing on the useful data while letting the synesthetic chaos blur to background static.

  On the third day, after our morning transit, Rosalia raised a topic I'd been avoiding.

  "We should begin your psy-blocking training."

  I looked up from my post-hyperspace recovery tea. "Now?"

  "We discussed this weeks ago but never found the time. Now we have time." She settled across from me, her expression serious but not unkind. "You're broadcasting your emotions and some of your thoughts openly. Anyone with sensitivity can read you like a book."

  "Still that bad?"

  "Yes. Still that bad. And considering you need to keep your origin secret, we cannot afford to only hope and do nothing." She tilted her head. "Additionally, learning to control your mental permeability may help with your hyperspace adaptation. And hyperspace itself might accelerate your training. The heightened sensory state could make it easier to identify your own mental boundaries."

  "Alright," I said. "Let's do it."

  She guided me through breathing exercises first. Four counts in, hold for four, four counts out. Simple. Meditative. It reminded me of the techniques Claire had taught me for calming anxiety. I felt a quick rush of nostalgia and sadness, but brushed it aside and started to focus again on the exercise.

  Then she moved to visualization. "Imagine a barrier around your mind. A membrane that filters what you allow in and what you project outward."

  I tried. Eyes closed, breathing steady.

  "Feel the boundary of your perception," she instructed. "Where does your awareness end and the external world begin?"

  I reached for... something. The edge of myself. The line between Nico and not-Nico.

  Where is the boundary? Somewhere between my skull and infinity?

  The instructions felt abstract. Untethered from anything I could measure or quantify. With piloting or engineering, there were readouts. Metrics. Feedback loops. This was just... sitting. And reaching. For something I couldn't see or measure.

  Was there supposed to be a sound effect? A notification popup?

  Achievement Unlocked: Found Your Mental Edge!

  No such luck.

  I opened my eyes. "I don't... I'm not sure what I'm reaching for."

  Rosalia nodded, unsurprised. "It takes time for most people. The concepts are difficult to grasp without direct experience. We'll continue practicing."

  "There's no rush," she added, and her tone was patient rather than disappointed.

  Maybe it'll click eventually, I told myself as she rose to check our navigation status. Just need more reps. More practice. That's how it always works.

  I hoped I was right.

  The gym helped.

  And I use the term "gym" loosely. It was really just a converted crew quarter, cramped and utilitarian, with some resistance equipment, a multi-function cardio unit, and a mat barely large enough for stretching. Nothing like the state-of-the-art equipment I enjoyed at Hyperion Deep.

  But it was something physical. Something measurable. Something my gaming brain could track and quantify.

  Rosalia and I started working out together in the afternoons, and because we were who we were, it immediately became a competition.

  "Forty-three seconds," I announced, collapsing out of my plank hold. "Beat that."

  She assumed the position with fluid grace. She made it look effortless. Forty-seven seconds. She didn't even tremble at the end.

  Of course.

  We tracked everything. Plank holds. Resistance levels on the weight modules. Sprint intervals on the cardio unit. Neither of us acknowledged out loud that we were competing. Both of us knew exactly what we were doing.

  The scores came out roughly even. Rosalia had better endurance. She could maintain a pace long after I'd burned through my reserves. But I had explosive power on my side, raw strength from years of neglecting cardio in favor of maximum-effort bursts.

  She's specced for sustained DPS, I thought during one particularly grueling session. I'm built for burst damage.

  But even as I tracked my progress, I couldn't shake the awareness of what I was missing. Pilot-specific training. The disorientation chambers that would spin you through random orientations until your vestibular system adapted. Hypoxic training, forcing your body to function on minimal oxygen to prepare for high-G maneuvers. Proprioceptive conditioning, knowing exactly where your limbs were in three-dimensional space without visual confirmation.

  I could do basic fitness. I could maintain the body.

  But I felt like I was losing my edge.

  One more thing to worry about later, I told myself, and added another five pounds to the resistance module.

  The breakthrough came at the end of the first week.

  We'd been pushing my hyperspace tolerance gradually. Three hours, then six, then eight. Each session, I got a little better at filtering the chaos. At focusing on the useful data while letting the rest blur into background noise.

  On day seven, I sat in the pilot's chair and flew the Mahkkra through hyperspace for a full day.

  Twelve hours of cognitive assault. Perception bleeding across senses that shouldn't touch. Distance as taste. Emotion as color. Shapes that violated every law of geometry I'd ever learned. Twelve hours of navigating between hypernodes, making course corrections, trusting my instruments when my eyes told me lies.

  Physical state at the end: exhausted. Wrung out. Hollowed.

  But when we dropped back into realspace at our scheduled waypoint, stars returning to their proper fixed positions, I took stock of my body.

  Tired. Headache. Mild disorientation.

  I didn't throw up.

  Rosalia looked at me across the cockpit. For a moment, she didn't speak, just studied me with that analytical focus I'd come to recognize. Then something shifted in her expression. Not quite a smile, but close. Warmer.

  She reached across the console and squeezed my shoulder briefly. A simple gesture, but from Rosalia, it spoke volumes.

  "Well done," she said quietly.

  That was all. But the way she said it. The genuine respect underneath the measured words. It all meant more than any elaborate praise.

  Proud as a peacock. I let myself feel it, unashamed. The impossible was becoming routine. I was adapting.

  If I could conquer hyperspace, surely the psy-training would click eventually too.

  I just need more practice.

  I leaned back in my chair, watching the stars through the viewport. Fixed points of light, steady and calm, marking our progress through the vast dark.

  And tomorrow, we would see the first of the wonders I'd marked on our route.