Seeds

'He... he's asking me to design a starship weapon?'

Elena's mind spun as a sharp intoxicating thrill detonated straight through her chest.

'Not just crawl in the dirt and turn his bolts... Design it... From scratch... An original ordnance array on a Tier-2 combat frame...'

She had spent three years at the Institute listening to stuffy old professors lecture her about how women of her standing were meant to sit on boards and inspect ledgers, not draft structural ballistics. 

Her father had laughed when she handed him a theoretical rail-coupling schematic for his private yacht... laughed and patted her head.

And here was this common infuriating stray, the boy who had muzzled her on the bridge, who had cooked her flatbread, who held seven lives in his hands... looking straight at her and saying I need an engineer and that's you.

…It made her feel a bit fulfilled.

She tried desperately to keep her face frozen in disdain.