She hated metal.

Quaritch learned that fast—not from a lecture or a warning, but from the way her jaw tightened every time human steel entered her space. Guns. Knives. Crates. The sharp stink of oil and machine heat. Her eyes followed each piece like it was a living threat, something that did not belong and never would.

He noticed the way she kept her distance when he cleaned his weapons. How her hands stilled when metal scraped metal. How she relaxed only when it was gone—replaced by bone, wood, things that had once been alive.

“You look at it like it’s poison,” he said once, turning a blade slowly in his hand, watching her reaction.

To her, it was.

Metal had torn through her world. Burned forests. Broken bodies. Made killing efficient and impersonal. It was cold. Unfeeling. Everything her people were not.

Quaritch understood weapons. Understood what they did and why they worked. But standing there, watching the quiet fury in her eyes, he realized something uncomfortable:

Metal was power to him.

To her, it was a promise of loss.

And for the first time since Pandora had reshaped his bones and instincts, he wondered what it meant to carry the very thing the woman he wanted despised most.