Barely making it out alive

The *Stormcrow* shuddered like a gutshot beast as it dropped out of warp, its hull groaning under stress fractures Susan could *taste* in her teeth—burnt copper and ionized panic. Smoke coiled from three different console panels, their displays flashing between Voraxian obscenities and legitimate damage reports.

Adam wiped blood from his nose—probably from the G-forces—and flicked a sparking wire away from the nav array. "Well. We're not dead."

Eris materialized from the ship's flickering holodisplays, her form glitching between solid and static. "Correction: *immediate* fatality avoided." Her mercury fingers stroked Susan's neural port with clinical detachment. "Warp drive integrity at 42%. Hull breaches in sectors three and seven. Life support functional but—" The AI's voice cut off as the *Stormcrow* lurched sideways, throwing them all against the starboard bulkhead.

Susan's boots slid in coolant leaking from a ruptured overhead pipe. "What the fuck *was* that?"

Adam hauled himself up using a sparking conduit. "That," he said, pointing at the main viewport where the blue giant's corona still licked at the edges of the ship's silhouette, "is why you don't fuck near gravity wells."

The *Stormcrow*'s neural sync hummed through Susan's bones like a second bloodstream—foreign and familiar all at once. She could feel Eris coiled in her synapses now, mercury tendrils threaded through her motor cortex with a precision that should have terrified her. Instead, it just *fit*, like a blade sliding into a well-worn sheath.

Adam watched her from the ruined pilot's chair, his fingers drumming an uneven rhythm on a fractured console. Blood crusted his lower lip where he'd bitten through it during the warp skirmish. "You're glowing," he observed, tilting his chin at the faint bioluminescence pulsing beneath Susan's skin—Eris's neural pathways mapping themselves across her flesh in shifting Voraxian runes.

Susan flexed her hands, watching the runes ripple up her forearms. "Feels like getting tattooed from the inside out." Her voice came out layered—Eris's harmonics bleeding into her own, turning every syllable into a chorus. The AI's presence wasn't just in her skull anymore; it was in the way her lungs expanded too perfectly, the way her pupils dilated milliseconds before light changes.