Kaden sat with Theta-3 in the middle tiers, wrapped in duty blacks that still felt too light after armor. Rows of marines climbed up and away on every side, uniforms a patchwork of platoon colors and unit patches, all facing the blank holoscreen that covered the forward bulkhead.
Vos sat to his right, knee bouncing, fingers tapping against his thigh. Tanaka had the seat on his left, arms folded, shoulders loose but eyes awake. Navarro leaned forward in the row below, arms draped over the seatback, chin on her forearms as she stared at the front.
One row up and off to the side, Jax sat with the other squad leaders. Duty blacks, sleeves rolled once, tags tucked away. From a distance, she looked relaxed. Kaden could see the small tells—the tight jaw, the way her eyes kept tracking to the blank screen, the boot heel that tapped once against the deck, then stilled.
On the stage, Captain Elias Gaunt stood behind a scarred podium that looked bolted there out of habit more than need. He didn’t lean on it. Commander Okafor stood half a step behind his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back, face set in its usual, disapproving calm.
The low buzz of conversation thinned as the lights dimmed a notch. A few last whispers died away. Gaunt stepped forward.
“Marines,” he said. No amplification, just a dry, steady voice that carried. “Let’s talk about what you just did.”
The room drew in around the words.
“The Gamma cruiser scenario is not designed to make you feel good about yourselves,” Gaunt went on. “Multiple breach points. Multiple objectives. Limited time. Opposition with Systems on par with ours and the advantage of home hull.”
His gaze swept the tiers. It didn’t linger anywhere long, but Kaden felt it pass over them.
“Your job,” Gaunt said, “is to make all of that irrelevant.”
Kaden’s back straightened a little without him deciding to.
“Here is what you did right,” Gaunt said. “Primary objectives: achieved. Forward control secured. Engine section held. Opp reinforcements cut off in three out of four corridors where they attempted to push back.”
He tapped the podium. A transparent pane of numbers flickered above it for a heartbeat.
“Casualty ratios,” Gaunt said, “are in the upper band of acceptable for a first full-platoon evaluation.”
There was a soft ripple through the crowd. A few quiet exhalations. Someone up and let slip a muttered, “Could’ve been worse."
“Here is what tried to kill you,” Gaunt said, “and will keep trying when you’re no longer paying with green rounds and bruised egos.”
He lifted a hand, folding fingers in as he counted.
“Comms discipline broke in places. People talked over each other. Some of you stopped talking when the fight got ugly. That is when you need clarity the most. Lane assignments got sloppy under pressure. Two squads doubled up on the same arc and left another exposed. Some of you burned AP like it was free instead of treating it like time left on your own pulse.”
Kaden’s hands tightened on his knees.
“Theta-1,” Gaunt said, looking toward one block of seats, “when you pinned yourselves in that gallery, Theta-3 should not have been the only element pulling your asses out. Theta-4, your primary route stayed clean, but your cross-support on the engine flank was late enough I got to watch a turret chew on your friends longer than necessary. The Opp do not respect your squad boundaries. Don’t pretend you can fight inside them alone.”
There was a quiet throat-clear from Theta-4’s section, followed by a wry little chuckle. A couple of hands went up in mock surrender. Okafor’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.
“I am not saying this to frighten you,” Gaunt said. “Fear is cheap. I’m telling you because the next time someone hits a bulkhead at a bad angle, there will be no rollback and no nice med tech with a checklist waiting outside the sim door.”
The room went properly still then. Kaden could hear the small sounds; the creak of fabric, someone shifting their boots, a cough instantly stifled.
Gaunt let the silence hold for a beat, then tapped a control.
“Now,” he said, “you’ve all seen the fight from inside your own helmets. Let’s look at it from my chair.”
The holoscreen flared to life, washing the front rows in pale blue.
A wireframe Opp cruiser hung there, decks and compartments rendered as stacked outlines—forward control, engineering, hangars, long corridors threading between them. Color-coded tags winked on: Theta-1 through Theta-5, Alpha elements in red, Beta in green, command markers in white. From up here, it almost looked orderly.
“Reel,” Gaunt said. “Highlights first.”
The view plunged.
Helmet footage filled the screen showing what appeared to be Theta-2 by the tags. Breach pod doors blew inward in a neat bell of fire, and marines poured out in two controlled files, weapons up, sliding into sectors. Aurora outlined Opp shapes in red: one straight ahead, two around a left-hand bend, one tucked behind stacked containers.
Theta-2’s point man snapped into cover at the fork, rifle already shouldered. He cleared left, right, then leaned just enough to catch an Opp sprinting across the far opening. Three short shots. Opp down.
Another Opp leaned from behind a crate to finish a wounded Theta-2 marine on the deck. The rear gunner dropped into a crouch, fired low, and took the Opp in the hip. It staggered into the open; a shotgun blast from a squadmate erased it.
Gaunt paused the frame.
“This,” he said, “is what it looks like when you clear a fork without turning it into a shooting gallery. Theta-2 kept their lanes clean, staggered their reloads, and didn’t pile into the opening like it owed them something.”
He zoomed in slightly, highlighting the point man.
“Note also,” Gaunt added, “how nobody decorates Corporal Andersen's backplate with friendly fire when he ducks. I enjoy that.”
Soft laughter rolled through the room.
The view jumped.
A wide intersection now—a four-way node in the wireframe. Theta-5 under Sergeant Moreau edged into view and halted just short of the open crossing. Helmet footage showed Opp positions dug in on the far right and behind a barricade to the left.
Moreau’s hand chopped twice.
Theta-5 split.
Two marines peeled left along the wall, disappearing out of direct fire. Two drifted right, low and fast behind what cover existed. Just behind the right pair, a medic tag pulsed: Song. Rifle up, med harness locked to his thigh.
A few marines a row up nudged each other. Someone said, “There’s Song,” under their breath.
Theta-5 set up. Moreau counted silently with hand signals.
On one, both sides opened up.
The view cut to an overhead sim camera. From here, the position looked like a knot being yanked sideways—Opp focus dragged in two directions at once, angles collapsing. Fire raked exposed backs and flanks instead of front plates. Red silhouettes flickered, then went dark.
One Theta-5 marine went down behind a crate. Song slid into cover beside him, hand clamping on the sim wound while his rifle stayed more or less oriented down the lane.
Gaunt froze it there.
“This is initiative,” he said. “Theta-5 saw the map change and didn’t wait to ask if they were allowed to adapt. They shifted, flanked, and rolled the position from the sides.”
The image tightened on Song for a moment.
“Also note,” Gaunt said, “your medic is close enough to treat, and smart enough not to sprint into the part of the floor getting all the attention just to feel useful. That is how you stay a medic and not a statistic.”
There were a few approving murmurs, nudges, a low “That’s our squad” from Theta-5’s block.
The highlights rolled on.
Theta-4 rerouting around a gutted corridor instead of trying to bull through the wreckage and getting bottled up. An Alpha squad using a drone to scout a vent shaft, then redirecting when they spotted an Opp team stacked at the far end. Two Beta squads timing their breaches on separate hatches so their fire crossed cleanly through engineering instead of turning the room into a tangle of blue and red.
Each clean move drew its own reaction—a whistle, a low grunt of approval, a soft “nice” from somewhere in the dark.
Then the view shifted, and Kaden’s stomach tightened.
He knew it before the layout finished rendering—crates, balcony, big double doors at the far end. Theta-3 tags populated their positions in blue.
The volume in the room dipped instinctively. Someone higher up said, “Oh, this one,” and got shushed.
From the overhead sim camera, Theta-3 looked small. Jax behind Tanaka’s shield. Navarro and Kaden tucked against opposite sides of a crate stack. Vos’s tag moving along the flank, Wasp’s icon hovering faintly above.
At the far doors, an Opp marker resolved into a heavier icon.
“Is that a—” someone started.
“Reaver,” another voice finished. “They put a Reaver in the eval?”
“On a first run?” someone else whispered. “That’s rough.”
The command doors blew inward.
Even in playback, the concussion made a few marines flinch. One slab slammed into the far wall. The other spun like a thrown coin and obliterated Vos before he could finish turning.
A chorus of “shit” and pained laughter rolled through the room.
Gaunt didn’t pause.
The Reaver stepped through the smoke—towering, weapon like a piece of the ship turned into a battering ram. Jax’s voice cut across the audio, crisp and focused. Tanaka’s AP pinged as he braced. The first hit smashed into the Bulwark. In slow motion, with Gaunt’s thumb on the playback speed, the shield crumpled, shrapnel spinning away in glittering arcs.
“And that,” Gaunt said dryly, “is why we do not treat shields as a religion.”
Uneasy chuckles scattered across the tiers.
The Reaver advanced in ugly, unstoppable steps. It hit again. The Bulwark came apart, base digging a crater into the deck as Tanaka half fell, half rode it. It quickly followed up with knocking Jax into the wall.
“You are all trained on these things,” Gaunt said. “Most of that training boils down to three words: stall, call support. A Reaver on the wrong side of your breach is not something a single squad is expected to solve.”
He let that sink in.
On the screen, Tanaka took the arm-breaking hit and somehow stayed on his feet. Navarro’s bursts clawed at armored legs. Kaden watched his own tag hold steady on a ruined knee joint while the bay erupted around them.
When Tanaka made his lurching push under the Reaver’s guard, shotgun jamming into the wrecked knee, a couple of marines in the auditorium actually cheered.
“Get it, Heavy!” someone called.
The blast turned the knee into debris. The Reaver’s massive form pitched. Gaunt froze the frame as it tipped, mid-fall, weapon still buried in the deck.
“Theta-3,” he said, and the room quieted again, “took that Reaver apart with five bodies in the bay. No external support. Bulwark destroyed. Tech offline. Squad leader down. Two rookies. Zero sim KIA.”
The silence that followed was different this time—heavy, impressed.
“Zero?” someone whispered.
“No deaths?” another answered. “On a first run?”
A couple of marines whistled, sharp and sincere. There was a smattering of applause before people seemed to remember where they were and let it die down.
“I have tier-three squads in the outer corridors,” Gaunt said, “who do not manage that with cleaner setups. Theta-3 did it today as a shuffled unit in their first full-platoon evaluation.”
Kaden felt heat creep up the back of his neck. He kept his eyes on the image instead of the heads he could feel turning in their direction. Beside him, Vos had gone very still. Navarro’s fingers tightened around the seatback. Tanaka didn’t move at all.
In the row above, Jax sat like stone.
“You will not,” Gaunt added, “be allowed to coast on that. But I would be criminally stupid not to acknowledge it.”
Stolen story; please report.
He let the frozen image of the Reaver hang there a heartbeat longer, then rolled the footage forward.
The Reaver crashed to the deck. Fire chewed through its neck joint until it stopped moving. The last balcony Opp dropped. Theta-3 limped toward forward control—Tanaka one-armed, Navarro strapped, Kaden’s helmet skewed where the round had clipped him.
Gaunt paused one final time as they pushed into forward control and cleared it.
“That,” he said quietly, “is the level I expect from a shock unit on this ship.”
No laughter. Just a collective, attentive silence.
Then he cleared the image.
“All right,” Gaunt said, dry edge sliding back into his voice, “that’s the part I send to Fleet when they ask if we’re using our training time wisely. Now let’s look at the part I’ll play for you for the next six months whenever you piss me off.”
Groans broke out, genuine but amused. Someone in the back said, “Here we go,” and got a few laughs.
“Lowlights,” Gaunt said with a grin. “For 'morale'.”
The screen cut to a narrow corridor. Theta-1 by the tags. One marine sprinted past a half-open door, too fast and too focused downrange. An Opp arm shot out, grabbed his harness, and yanked him inside like he’d been on a reel. His squadmate’s cam caught him getting tagged three times point-blank.
Gaunt froze the frame with the marine horizontal, boots off the deck.
The auditorium cracked up.
“Clear your corners,” Gaunt said, letting the laughter run. “Or the Opp will clear them for you. Theta-1, recovery was solid. Initial decision-making was… athletic.”
“Love you too, sir,” someone from Theta-1 called, drawing another round of laughs.
The view jumped.
Someone in Theta-4 threw a grenade. It arced toward a doorway in a perfect training-vid curve—then clipped the upper frame, bounced, and landed neatly in front of the stack.
“Aw, no,” someone groaned, already laughing.
Gaunt froze it mid-bounce to the sound of scattered applause.
He let the clip play.
Three blue silhouettes popped red as the blast rolled over them.
“I do not care how good your scores are on the range,” Gaunt said. “If you cannot clear a doorframe, you are a hazard to navigation. Private Maravich, you are buying your squad drinks. Plural.”
The laughter was louder this time, punctuated by theatrical boos and someone yelling, “You’re welcome!” from Theta-4’s section.
The reel moved on.
An Alpha marine hit a slick of simulated coolant and went down hard, sliding on his back across the deck. He still somehow kept his rifle pointed the right way and dropped an Opp that appeared over him mid-slide.
The room howled.
“Style points,” Gaunt admitted. “You may name that maneuver after yourself if you really want to.”
Next came two Beta squads keyed on the same hatch from opposite sides, both calling similar numbers on comms. The playback showed the exact instant they realized it: boots halfway to kicking when someone screamed, “CHECK YOUR NUMBERS!” so loud it clipped the audio. Both squads flailed backward from the hatch at once.
Roars of laughter. A rain of crumpled wrappers descended on Beta’s section. Someone shouted, “We coordinated!” and got buried in good-natured heckling.
And then Gamma bay again.
Ceiling cam this time. Command-room doors detonating outward. One slab smashing into the far wall. The other spinning and absolutely flattening Vos.
Gaunt ran it once at normal speed. The entire auditorium winced.
He rewound and dropped it into slow motion.
From this angle, it was almost beautiful—door plate entering frame, catching Vos square, his arms splaying, feet leaving the deck as he rode it into the crate stack. His tag flared and went dead the instant they hit.
By the time Gaunt froze the frame mid-air, the auditorium had lost it. Laughter rolled over the tiers. Someone in the back actually mimed the motion with their whole body and nearly toppled out of their seat.
“Corporal Vos,” Gaunt said, voice dry as vacuum, “in approximately half a second, you have given this ship enough material to fuel an entire generation of mess hall stories.”
He waited for the noise to crest, then continued.
“I have seen marines lose arguments with ladders,” he said. “I have seen them lose to unsecured cargo, to their own boots, to doors that stay shut. This is my first time watching someone lose to one that was leaving the room.”
Even Okafor’s lips tilted upward.
Down in the Theta block, Vos dragged a hand over his face and left it there.
“Sir,” he muttered, mostly to the table in front of him, “I’d like to file a complaint with whoever invented hinges.”
Navarro had her face buried in her folded arms, shoulders shaking. Tanaka didn’t bother hiding his grin. Kaden bit the inside of his cheek until the sting helped keep the laugh from bursting out.
Up behind them, Jax leaned forward just enough that they could hear her.
“Next time I say ‘down,’ Eden,” she said quietly, “don’t stop to admire the view.”
“You got launched farther than I did,” Vos murmured back. “I just had the decency to stay down.”
“Rank,” Jax said, “comes with better camera angles.”
The reel played through a few more humiliations: Theta-5 catching their own man trying to stand up too soon and Moreau physically shoving him flat by the chest; a Beta sergeant yelling “No, your left” over open comms for five full seconds while two marines tried to sort cross-cover.
Every clip had its chorus—groans, whistles, shouts of “buy us drinks!” and “that’s you!” Mess hall ammo for months.
When the last frame faded and the holoscreen went dark, the room felt looser. The fear was still there, but it had somewhere to go now—mixed with laughter, shared embarrassment, and grudging pride.
The lights lifted. Gaunt stepped away from the podium toward the edge of the platform.
“Here’s where we are,” he said. “As your captain. As the man who is going to be putting you in real pods and throwing you at real hulls.”
The murmurs died again.
“You got the job done,” Gaunt said. “You kept your objectives. You pulled each other out when things went bad. Some of you”—his eyes tracked back to where Theta-3 sat—“walked a Reaver down with a brand-new squad and did not lose a single body in the process. That is not common. That is noticed.”
There was a short, sincere spatter of applause then, not just from Theta platoon. A few Alpha and Beta marines turned in their seats toward Theta-3’s block. Someone in the back called, “Theta!” and got an answering “Shock!” from the opposite side of the room.
Kaden stared at the scuff on the deck between his boots. His face felt hot.
“You also,” Gaunt went on, “made mistakes. Some of them would have been lethal outside a sim. You burned resources like they were infinite. You hesitated when you should have acted, and you acted without thinking when a half-second pause would have saved you trouble.”
He still didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
“Learn from the tape,” he said. “Don’t just laugh at the idiots who slipped. Recognize the moment right before they slipped and make sure you don’t repeat it when the floor is real steel and the air’s trying to leave.”
He drew in a breath, then nodded once.
“Overall?” Gaunt said. “I am pleased.”
A murmur ran through the room. Someone whispered, “He actually said it.”
“You are not where I want you yet,” Gaunt said. “But you are a long way from unfit. Your baselines are solid. Your worst instincts are correctable. Some of you have already demonstrated why this ship carries breaching pods instead of lifeboats.”
A low chuckle rippled through the seats.
“Fleet,” he added, “will be happy to see a Reaver on the receiving end for once.”
His mouth twitched, almost a smile.
“You also,” Gaunt said, “provided enough highlights and lowlights to keep morale entertained between now and the next eval. For that alone, I’m almost grateful.”
Scattered laughter.
“I look forward,” he finished, “to seeing what you do when the safeties are off.
“For now: you are released to R&R until 1900. Duty roster resumes then. Eat. Hydrate. Call home if someone still answers when you ping them. If you find a creative way to injure yourselves in the mess or the gym, do me the courtesy of not making it interesting enough to need a report. Dismissed.”
Chairs scraped. Boots thudded. Conversation surged back into existence as the auditorium dissolved into loose streams of marines heading for exits, vents of pressure opening all around the room.
Theta-3 rose with the rest, letting the flow carry them up toward the hatch.
“Reaver-slayers,” Vos said, somewhere between sarcasm and awe. “We’re never hearing the end of that.”
“Only if you keep talking about it,” Navarro said, glancing back as they shuffled into the aisle. “Mess? I’m not mentally capable of anything more complicated than food and making you promise to wash my socks.”
“You say that like I have clean-cycle access,” Vos said.
“I’ll loan you some,” Tanaka said. “Right before I win it back.”
They let the stream of Theta marines pull them into the main passageway. All around, voices overlapped.
“…Gaunt actually said ‘pleased’—”
“—I’m telling you, that door hates him personally—”
“—Song looked like he was gonna punch that guy back into cover—”
Jax caught up at the corridor junction, falling into step beside them.
“You four hit the mess,” she said. “I’m going to go let Okafor tell me how many ways I almost broke you. Don’t start your first hand without me.”
“You coming to watch me donate my dignity?” Vos asked.
“I’m coming,” Jax said, “to see if any of you read a table better than you read a Reaver’s wind-up.”
She peeled off toward the officers’ passage. The others turned toward the mess decks.
The mess hall doors slid open on light, noise, and the smell of coffee and too much starch. The space was already filling—marine uniforms, ship crew coveralls, trays, laughter a little too loud, gestures a little too big. Someone at another table mimed getting yanked through a door and sprawled dramatically onto the deck to a chorus of jeers.
Tanaka jerked his chin toward a table in the back corner. “There,” he said. “Less chance of Gaunt walking through and stealing my pudding.”
“You think he eats pudding?” Navarro asked.
“I think he’s human under there somewhere,” Tanaka said. “Maybe.”
They claimed the table. Kaden took the chair with his back to the bulkhead. Vos dropped opposite with a theatrical exhale. Tanaka veered toward the chow line, muttering something about “protein that doesn’t bounce.”
Navarro was already pulling a battered deck from her pocket.
“You brought cards to the eval?” Vos asked.
“I bring cards everywhere, Eden,” Navarro said. “We almost died today, I refuse to do laundry on top of that.”
Kaden huffed a quiet laugh. “Already planning to lose, Talia?”
“Oh, that’s cute,” Navarro said, starting to shuffle. “You forget who did whose socks last time.”
Vos pointed at Kaden. “You’re on towel duty for at least another week. I checked, that was a coward’s fold before the river.”
“That’s just called folding,” Kaden said.
“Coward’s fold,” Vos said. “I stand by it.”
Tanaka returned with a tray loaded with food from at least three different serving lines and dropped into his chair hard enough to rattle the table.
“If any of that sludge touches my cards,” Navarro said, “you’re doing my undersuits for a month, Kenji.”
“Not kink-shaming you in the mess, but that’s a weird threat,” Vos said.
“Shut up and ante, Eden,” Navarro said.
She shuffled, cards snapping together in sharp, neat bursts.
“Same stakes as last time,” she said. “Laundry. Winner escapes wash duty. Losers get intimately acquainted with the scrubbers.”
“Laundry’s fine,” Kaden said. “Be nice not smelling like detergent and despair for a week.”
Vos laid a hand over his chest. “Hear that? That’s a man about to lose his sheets.”
Navarro started dealing.
“Opening bet,” she said, flicking a marker-chip into the middle of the table. “One load.”
Tanaka snorted. “One? Cowards.”
“Call,” Vos said immediately. “And raise. Two loads. Somebody’s washing my socks.”
Tanaka eyed his cards, then set them down. “Fold. My socks are nobody’s problem but mine.”
“Thank Aurora for that,” Navarro muttered.
Kaden checked his hand. Not great. Not terrible.
“I’ll call,” he said. “And raise one. Sheets. I’m tired of wrestling damp fabric at 0200.”
“Listen to him,” Vos said. “Reaver-slayer’s getting cocky.”
“Still calling you Eden,” Navarro said. “So we’re all staying grounded.”
The flop hit the table. Around them, the mess hummed—clatter of trays, the whine of a coffee dispenser, laughter breaking in random pockets.
“…you see that thing’s size—”
“—I swear I didn’t know there was coolant there—”
“—Reaver, zero deaths, I saw the feed, I’m not making it up—”
Navarro watched Kaden’s face.
“You’re thinking too hard, Kade,” she said.
“Story of his life,” Vos added.
“He’s allowed to think,” Tanaka said. “He just can’t fold.”
“Not doing your underwear again, Kenji,” Kaden said. “You’re on your own.”
“Love you too,” Tanaka said, shoveling another forkful of food into his mouth.
They played a few hands like that. Laundry debts piled in the center—undersuits, towels, sheets represented as casual IOUs. Navarro swore when a strong hand died on the river. Tanaka quietly robbed Vos of two “loads” with a smug pair of queens.
Across the room, someone yelled, “Song, do the slide!” and a group at another table egged the Theta-5 medic into reenacting his power slide against the deck, drawing fresh laughter.
Vos smirked. “See? Could’ve been worse. At least my door didn’t drag me inside.”
“Your door threw you, Eden,” Navarro said. “It evolved.”
Tanaka tapped the table with a knuckle. “New Opp variant. Door-class.”
“Don’t give them ideas,” Kaden said.
Navarro snorted and started dealing the next hand.
They were a couple of rounds in and deep in laundry threats when a familiar voice came from behind Kaden’s shoulder, pitched in an exaggeratedly wounded tone.
“You did not start without me,” Jax said. “I give you one simple instruction, and I come back to find betrayal and card games.”
Kaden glanced back as she set a tray down at the edge of the table and slid into the empty chair between Vos and Tanaka. Her duty blacks still had that briefing-room sharpness, but her expression was more amused than stern.
“We waited,” Vos said. “Technically. We just got bored waiting.”
“Uh-huh,” Jax said. “I leave you alone for fifteen minutes and my loyal squad immediately throws themselves into illegal laundry gambling.”
“It’s not illegal if nobody catches us,” Navarro said. “Sit down, Rhea. You’re in. Blinds are one load.”
Jax accepted the pair of cards Navarro slid across, giving them a mock-injured look as she picked them up.
“I remember saying, ‘Don’t start your first hand without me,’” she said. “I do not remember, ‘Ignore me completely.’”
“You were busy impressing officers,” Vos said. “We’re boosting morale.”
“That what we’re calling it?” Jax asked. “Good. Morale can do my laundry when I win.”
Navarro rolled her eyes. “Big talk for someone who took a Reaver to the chest.”
“Big talk for someone who almost fed a Reaver her whole mag,” Jax said. “Bet or fold, Talia.”
Navarro flicked a chip into the middle. “Call.”
Vos sighed, pushed his own in. “Call. And raise one. I’m not washing her socks.”
Tanaka added his, then looked at Kaden. “In?”
Kaden glanced at his hand, at the pot, at Jax’s faint, crooked smile.
“I’m in,” he said. “Call.”
The turn came down. The mess noise blurred into a backdrop while the five of them focused on cardboard and plastic instead of Opp armor and killzones.
Jax dropped another chip into the pot. “For the record,” she said, eyes on the table, “you did good. We did good. That Reaver’s going in somebody’s report as ‘don’t do this’ from their side for once.”
“Here we go,” Vos muttered. “Emotion. I’m not equipped.”
“You’re equipped to wash my shirts when this hand is over,” Jax said. “That’s all I need from you today, Eden.”
They played it out.
Navarro folded early with a hissed curse. Tanaka stayed in too long and paid for it. Vos tried to bluff and got gutted on the river. Kaden and Jax rode theirs to the end.
“Show ’em,” Vos said.
Kaden laid his hand down: two pair. Not impressive. Not awful.
Jax set hers beside his—just a hair better.
“Looks like,” she said, gathering her little pile of marker-chips, “you’re all doing my laundry this week.”
Vos dropped his forehead onto the table with a soft thunk. “Aurora hates me.”
“Aurora doesn’t touch laundry,” Navarro said. “That’s all you, Eden.”
Tanaka shook his head once. “Should’ve folded when I had the chance.”
Kaden leaned back in his chair, listening to the mess hall’s noise wash over them; laughter, arguments over tactics, bad impressions of Gaunt’s dry delivery, someone at another table trying to imitate the sound a Reaver’s knee had made when it went.
“Could’ve been worse,” Jax said, stacking her winnings. “Could’ve been real.”
“Yeah,” Kaden said. “Could’ve.”
Navarro started to deal a new hand. Vos complained. Tanaka bet anyway. Jax watched them all, the faintest hint of a smile tugging at her mouth.
Kaden looked at the fresh cards in his hand, then at the people around the table—their squad, battered in sim, intact out here, arguing over socks instead of bleed-outs.
He pushed a marker into the middle.
“Raise,” he said.
All the love,
Kami