Novels by Nyra Vale

NOVAShe looked at him for a long moment before she answered.The room was still. The lamp threw light across the desk and his face and the unopened folder, and she thought about everything she had been carrying since the morning she walked out of her father's house with one bag and her mother's voice in her chest."You want the truth," she said."That's what I asked for."She looked past him at the stone wall. Not avoiding his eyes. Just putting enough distance between herself and the memory to say it without her voice doing something she would regret.********************************The training yard had smelled like wet dirt and blood and the specific confidence of men who had already decided how the morning would end.She had fought seven of them. One after another. The way her mother taught her before the illness came and stripped everything away piece by piece. Don't fight angry. Angry wolves make noise. Quiet wolves win.She had been quiet. She had won.She had stood over the

NOVAShe moved before she finished deciding to.The training blade came off her hip in one motion, and she had the edge at his throat before he registered she had reached for it. Close. She felt him go still under it, that complete immediate stillness of someone who had been in enough dangerous situations to know that moving was the wrong answer.He did not step back. Did not flinch. Just looked at her over the blade with those dark eyes that gave away nothing she hadn't already seen."Why are you investigating me?" Low. Direct. "What did you find? Tell me right now.""You won't cut me," he said."What makes you certain of that?""Because you've had better chances than this and walked away from every one of them." His voice was completely even. Not performing calm. Just actually calm, which was more unsettling than anger would have been. "And because I haven't read the report."She held the blade steady."Soren brought it," she said. "I heard him.""He brought it. I haven't opened it.

NOVASoren left without looking back.She listened to his footsteps move down the corridor and turn the corner and fade, and she stood behind the door in Caden's hidden office with her heart going loud and her hands completely still and her brain running very fast through everything she had just heard.He had her file.He had pulled her file. Used his channels, his access, his position, whatever that position was, to dig into the identity she had spent three months building from nothing with Cass in a cold cottage kitchen. And he had found it thin. Three months old at most.He knew.She ran it back. Soren's voice. She. He had said 'she', and Caden had not corrected it, had not asked what he meant, and had simply said, 'Keep this between us.' Which meant the pronoun was not new information. Which meant Caden had already known; had known before the file; had known and said nothing and sat across from her this morning in that chair by the window and said, 'No, you just passed out; you're

NOVAShe could not do this alone anymore.That was the thought she kept circling back to, standing at the edge of the training ground watching Zion and Rhen almost come to blows over who got to spot her during the overhead press sequence. Both of them stepped forward at the same time. Both stopped. Both looked at each other with the specific tension of two people who had been performing civility for days and were running low on the performance."I've got her," Zion said."I'm her training partner," Rhen said. "I've got this."She looked at the bar. Looked at both of them."I'll spot myself," she said.Neither of them moved.She sat down on the bench, stared at the ceiling and thought seriously about walking off the ground entirely. Everyone around her was fighting over her like she was something to be won, and meanwhile, she was still the person who had ended up with her back against a locker room wall two days ago because she was not strong enough to make Bren think twice before he t

CADENHe saw it from across the training ground and told himself he was not going to walk over there.He walked over there.Zion and Rhen at the east wall. The body language of two people running a conversation was performing casually while being something else entirely underneath. He had watched Zion work rooms and negotiations and training dynamics for two years and he knew exactly what Zion looked like when he was invested in an outcome, and he was invested in this one.That was the part Caden could not let sit.He crossed the ground at a pace that was not hurrying. Both of them saw him coming with enough time to decide how to handle it, and neither of them moved, which told him the conversation had already reached a natural stopping point and they had each arrived at their own position on his arrival."Walk with me," he said to Zion.Not a question. Zion heard that and fell into step beside him without comment, and they moved away from the wall and Rhen and the rest of the trainin

NOVAShe finished the run in thirty-four minutes, which was four minutes slower than her usual pace and four minutes faster than her shoulder wanted.She slowed at the east wall, hands on her knees, breathing it out properly. The morning was cold and clear, frost still sitting in the shadow of the north block, where the sun hadn't reached yet. She had been running since before dawn because she had not slept properly since the locker room and running was the one thing that reliably cleared her head enough to function.It had not cleared her head today. But at least her legs were tired, which was something.She straightened. Rolled her shoulder once, checking the joint. Reached for her water bottle.Someone held one out before she got there.Zion. Coming off the track from the opposite direction, barely breathing hard the way he never barely breathed hard, holding a sealed bottle at arm's length with that easy manner he had, like the offer was genuine and refusal would be equally fine.

She wrote it in April.On a piece of physics paper, the same kind she'd always used. At the kitchen table, in the Edinburgh morning, with the castle visible through the south window and the March ring on her finger catching the light when she moved her hand.The city was doing its ordinary things outside. Someone was walking past on the street below. A bus. The sound of the coffee shop two streets over that she could sometimes hear if the window were open, which it was, because April had decided to be warm this week without warning.She wrote, 'He asked on a Tuesday.' The Tuesday was not special. That's the point. The most real things happen on ordinary Tuesdays in kitchens that belong to both of you.She stopped.She looked at what she'd written.She thought about all the ordinary Tuesdays. The problem sets and the Proxima dashboards and the morning tea and the coffee from two streets over and the physics notes and the research questions and the pasta and the wine and the Edinburgh e

He asked on a Tuesday. Just a Tuesday. March. The kind of day that doesn't announce itself. The Edinburgh spring had come in without warning that week, the way it always did. One day cold, the next something had shifted, and the air through the south window smelt different, and that was that. She was at the kitchen table with her research. Her own questions now, the ones she'd been working toward since the autumn. They were moving properly at last, and she didn't want to stop. He sat across from her. Laptop open. Coffee going cold. They'd been working in silence for close to an hour. "I have a question," he said. "Go on," she said. Still looking at her notes. "A significant one," he said. She looked up. His face was different. She knew most of his faces by now. This wasn't any of them. Stiller than all of them. The face of someone who had been holding something for a long time and had, just now, put it down. She set her pencil on the table. He reached into his

Third year. Fourth year.The physics degree finished in June, a Wednesday afternoon in the university's main hall, with her mother in the fourth row, Adrian beside her and Simon holding a phone at the wrong angle trying to take a photograph. The degree itself was a piece of paper in a frame, but the thing it represented was the four years of work behind it: the quantum mechanics module, the wave propagation problems and the research project she'd started in September of her third year and finished in May of her fourth year with results her supervisor had called, in his careful, understated way, genuinely interesting.She'd known since November of third year what came next. Her supervisor had asked, after a particularly long session going through the project data, whether she'd considered postgraduate study. She'd said she'd been thinking about it. He'd said he'd been thinking about it too. They'd agreed it was worth talking about properly. They'd talked about it properly in January. B

Two years since October.She hadn't written it down anywhere. She just woke up on the fourteenth, and it was already there, the way some dates sit in the body rather than the head. The ones attached to something that shifted the ground underneath everything that followed.She lay in the grey of the Edinburgh bedroom and thought about Birchwood. The dark room. Her phone lit up in her hand, the photograph already open, her thumb not moving for a long time.It hadn't felt like bravery. More like her brain had run out of reasons to wait and her thumb had moved before she could find new ones.The soft ding.Then bury her face in the pillow. That specific feeling of having done something that was already gone from her, already travelling.She got up. Made tea without thinking about the steps anymore. Brought it to the table.He was already there.Coffee half-finished beside his laptop. The Proxima dashboard was open on the screen, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking at the photograp

The second award ceremony was in October.She wasn't receiving it this time.Lilly had asked her in August, on the phone, in the direct way Lilly asked things, which left room for refusal but not for vagueness. She'd initially said she'd think about it, which was as close as she got to refusing, and Lilly had said she'd call back on Thursday. On Thursday she'd said: the prize is named after you. That means it doesn't end with the first award. You're part of it going forward. That's how things last.She'd thought about that for two days.She'd said yes.The recipient this year was Dara Okafor. Twenty years old, a law student at a university in Birmingham. She'd spent three weeks reading seventeen years of board minutes from a hospital trust's procurement committee, which was the kind of reading that required a specific quality of attention: the kind that didn't give up when the reading was unremarkable, the kind that understood that the unremarkable was where the things were hidden.Sh

It was a Saturday in September.Third year had started the previous Monday. The physics project she'd been building toward since October of her second year had begun in earnest, which meant she now had three weeks of reading behind her and a clear question in front of her and the specific feeling of standing at the beginning of something large, where you can see the shape of it but not all the steps.The Proxima platform had crossed six hundred clubs that week. The crossing had happened on a Wednesday, which Adrian had noted at the kitchen table with the particular tone of someone who had decided not to make too much of it and was making a little of it anyway.None of that was why it was an important Saturday.It was an important Saturday because she finally found the right wall.She'd been carrying the photograph since March, when Lilly had given it to her in the box. Not the framed one; she'd had that on the shelf since the first week in Edinburgh. A different one. The unframed phot