Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World-Chapter 234

They cleaned up without much talking. The rain outside picked up again, heavier now, drumming against the windows.

By the time they were all dried off and dressed, the rain had shifted again. Lighter now. Almost lazy. Zaeryn pulled on a loose shirt and glanced out the window. The garden was glistening, everything washed clean, the cherry tree swaying gently.

Even the stone fountain Ravena had never quite forgiven him for denting looked decent in the grey light.

"It’s clearing up," he said, mostly to himself.

Ingrid appeared at his shoulder, pulling her damp hair into a messy knot. She smelled like his soap now, which was a weird thing to notice and an even weirder thing to enjoy. She followed his gaze outside.

"It’s nice out there," she said.

Ravena emerged from the bathroom, looking composed and put-together in a way that shouldn’t have been possible given what they’d been doing twenty minutes ago. She caught the two of them staring out the window and paused.

"Are the three of us going somewhere?" she asked.

"Yeah, let’s go outside," Ingrid said. "I want fresh air."

Zaeryn looked between them and nodded in agreement. There was something appealing about just being out there with no agenda, no training schedule.

They found a spot near the edge of the garden where the stone path curved around a low wall overlooking the rest of the grounds.

The rain had left everything slick and shining, and the air still carried the smell of wet stone and blooming jasmine.

Ingrid sat on the wall with one leg pulled up, chin resting on her knee. She twisted a strand of still-damp yellow hair around her finger, the silver bars through her nipples pressing faint outlines against the thin fabric of her top. Ravena took the bench nearby, crossing her legs and settling into it like she’d reserved it in advance.

Zaeryn dropped onto the grass between them because the wall was soaked and the bench was clearly Ravena’s, and he wasn’t in the mood to negotiate seating.

The clouds were still breaking apart overhead, golden light sliding through in slow patches that drifted across the garden like spotlights with nowhere to be.

For a while, nobody talked. It was the good kind of quiet.

Zaeryn pulled at a blade of grass and watched the cherry tree drip. This was nice. Just existing without anyone needing something from him. No system notifications, no training, no Viora kicking him into the dirt to teach him form. Just wet grass and two women who, against all odds, seemed comfortable sharing the same silence.

Ingrid kept watching Ravena with that open, curious stare she got when something actually interested her.

"What?" Ravena finally asked, one eyebrow lifting. "If you want to say something, say it."

Ingrid nodded toward Ravena’s left arm, where the blackwork tattoos ran from shoulder to wrist. Vines and thorns winding over lean muscle, the ink dark against her pale skin. "When did you get those done?"

Ravena glanced down at her own arm, almost like she’d forgotten it was there. "I got them last year."

"I like them."

"Thanks."

Ingrid leaned forward slightly, studying the designs with open appreciation. "It’s good work. The linework is clean." She traced the air near Ravena’s forearm without touching. "Is that thorn pattern custom, or is it from a traditional set?"

"Custom." Something loosened in Ravena’s posture. Not a lot, but enough to notice. Apparently, her tattoos were a topic she didn’t mind. "I designed the layout myself. The artist handled the execution."

"Of course you did," Zaeryn muttered from the grass. "Most people just pick something off the wall. You turned it into a homework assignment."

Ravena ignored him. "The thorns follow the same branching pattern as the Tribunal’s seal. Most people don’t notice it."

"I noticed," Ingrid said. Not bragging. Just a fact.

Ravena looked at her for a beat longer than usual. The kind of look she gave things she was recategorizing.

"You have good eyes," Ravena said.

"I have great eyes," Ingrid corrected, grinning. "How do you think I spotted this one at school?" She jerked her thumb at Zaeryn without looking at him.

"Spotted him doing what, exactly?"

"Staring at my ass."

"That tracks."

"I wasn’t staring," Zaeryn said to nobody in particular, because both of them had already moved on.

Ingrid stretched her arms overhead, rolling her neck. "So how long have you two lived in this house? It feels old. Not in a bad way. It has character."

"Me? I only visit here. Him? Since he was a child," Ravena said.

—-

Down in the lab, Sage’s brain was too busy chewing on something more interesting than social hierarchy.

Right now, the interesting thing was Vorthak body in it’s containment.

She’d been at the Aegis Division for three days.

And that was three days of biometric clearances, facility orientations, security briefings that all said the same thing in slightly different fonts, and exactly one deeply uncomfortable lunch in the division cafeteria where everyone stared at her like she was a new species. Which, in a way, she was.

She was not just some scientist. She was a Stellan, working under a princess, in a military black site. The gossip wrote itself.

But the bureaucracy was finally behind her, and today was the first day she actually got to work.

The containment lab was cold. Sage breathed out. "This cold creeps into your joints if you stand still for too long." She glancec over at Dr Illara Veyne who was herself busy with something. Sage now understood, probably why Illara Veyne never seemed to stop moving. The woman was a blur of nervous energy, shuffling between workstations with her arms full of tablets, her messy brown hair escaping its clip in every direction, her glasses perpetually sliding down her nose.

Sage had been watching her for the better part of an hour. Not obviously, but enough to get a read. And the read was... complicated.

On the surface, Illara looked like a disaster. She mumbled when she talked to her. She apologized for things that weren’t her fault, like the temperature of the lab, the flickering light above station three, and the fact that the coffee machine only produced something that tasted like burnt regret.

But underneath all that, the data told a different story.

Sage pulled up Illara’s lab logs on the main console and started scrolling. The woman had been meticulous. Every tissue sample cataloged, every energy reading timestamped and cross-referenced. Hundreds of entries, organized with the kind of precision that spoke to someone who found comfort in structure when everything else felt chaotic.

The margin notes were where it got interesting.

Little observations, scribbled in rushed shorthand between official entries. Questions she’d asked herself and never followed up on. Hypotheses that got three lines of development before being cut short by a notation like ’Priority shifted per directive from PA’ or ’Analysis suspended, new parameters requested.’

PA. Princess Athea.

Sage had seen this pattern before. At Stellan Innovations, when her mother’s executives would micromanage a research team into paralysis. You couldn’t do breakthrough science when someone kept yanking the steering wheel every time you started picking up speed.

"Dr. Veyne," Sage said.

Illara turned towards her. She nearly dropped her tablet in the process. She caught it against her chest with both hands and spun around, eyes wide. "Yes? Sorry, did you need something? I was just calibrating the secondary array. The readings have been drifting since last week and I keep telling maintenance that the induction coils need replacing but they never listen to me because apparently I don’t fill out the right form, and there’s a form for the form, which is just..." 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

She trailed off, realizing she was rambling. Her cheeks flushed. "Sorry. What did you need?"

Sage didn’t laugh. Although in all honesty she wanted to, not at Illara, but at the sheer volume of words that had just erupted from someone who could barely manage a sentence during yesterday’s team briefing.

"I need you to come look at something," Sage said, keeping her voice easy and level. "Your cellular analysis from week three. You flagged an anomaly in the metabolic decay pattern but never followed up. Why is that?"

Illara’s flush deepened. She set the tablet down and walked over, "That was... Princess Athea redirected us to focus on the scale composition. She wanted a weaponization pathway. Not a..." She searched for the right word.

"Not a question," Sage finished.

"Right." Illara nodded, pushing her glasses up. "She wanted answers. Specific answers to specific questions. And the anomaly didn’t fit any of the questions she was asking."

"So you shelved it."

"I flagged it in the log," Illara said, a trace of defensiveness creeping into her voice. It was the first time Sage had heard anything close to backbone from her. "I documented everything. I just... wasn’t given clearance to pursue it."

Sage held up both hands, palms out. "I’m not criticizing you. I’m telling you I read the flag. And I think you were right to mark it." She turned back to the console and pulled up the data. The holographic display came to life, projecting a three-dimensional model of Subject Nine’s internal energy network. Glowing lines traced through the carcass like a circulatory system, except instead of blood, they carried Vitae. Or something very close to it.

"Walk me through this," Sage said. "Off the record. No princesses listening. Just you and me and the Big ugly."

A tiny smile flickered across Illara’s face at the nickname she remembered from their first meeting. She pushed her glasses up again, and this time the gesture looked less like anxiety and more like the reflex that preceded real thinking.

"Okay, so..." She pulled up a secondary dataset with a few quick taps, overlaying it onto the energy model.

_____________

Meanwhile, Athea’s private study was one of the few places in the palace where silence actually meant something.

No aides. No holographic briefings. No Councillors waiting outside the door with urgent reports that were never as urgent as they claimed. Just the soft hum of the climate system and the slow rotation of the star-charts on the far wall, their pale blue light casting the room in something that almost passed for calm.

She was halfway through a tactical assessment on deployments when the door opened without so much as a knock.

Athea didn’t look up. She didn’t need to because she already knew who it was. Only one person in the palace entered her study without announcing themselves, and only one person had the audacity to believe that was acceptable.

"If you’re here to ask me something regarding Zaeryn, the answer is no," Athea said, turning a page on her data-slate.

Calyra strolled in like the study belonged to her, with a grin on her face as soon as she saw that Athea had her so figured.

"How did you know I was thinking about him? I haven’t even said anything yet," Calyra said, settling herself onto the chaise near the window with the kind of practiced grace that made sitting down look like a diplomatic event.

"You don’t need to. You have a specific walk when you want something. It’s slower than usual. You’ve been doing it since we were children."

Calyra crossed one leg over the other, looking thoroughly entertained. "You’ve been cataloging my walks?"

"I’ve been cataloging everything about you since the day I was old enough to pay attention," Athea replied, still not looking up. "Which was early."

"Fair enough." Calyra leaned back into the chaise, her eyes drifting to the star-charts on the wall. She watched them rotate for a few seconds, letting the silence stretch in the way she always did when she wanted Athea to know she was being patient. It was a performance, obviously. Calyra didn’t have a patient bone in her body. But she was very good at pretending she did.

"I want to visit Sector 7," she said.

Athea’s stylus paused mid-stroke. Just for a beat. Then it resumed. "No."

"You didn’t let me finish."

"You want to visit Sector 7 to see Zaeryn. The answer is no."

Calyra tilted her head, that familiar slow smile curling at the edges of her lips. "Viora got to see him."

Athea’s eyes narrowed as she looked at Calyra. She wasn’t surprised. This was the card that she knew Carlyra would pull. She set the data-slate down and finally looked at her sister.

"Viora is different," Athea said. Her voice was level, measured, and carried the kind of quiet authority that made generals sit up straighter. On Calyra, it had roughly the same effect as a gentle breeze.

"Different how? Because she’s your daughter? Because she’s a Warlady? Or because she figured it out on her own and you had no choice?"

"All three."

"At least you’re honest about it." Calyra examined her nails, a gesture so deliberately casual it might as well have been a weapon. "But I figured it out before she did, Athea. I’ve known longer than anyone outside of you and Ysmeine. I’ve kept your secret for eighteen years. I’ve lied to our mother’s face for you, so many times I should be getting paid for it."

"And I’m grateful."

"Then be generous." Calyra’s smile faded, not into anger, but into something quieter. Something she didn’t wear often. "I was there when you gave him up, Athea. I’ve earned more than gratitude."