She pauses.
“Name?”
I hesitate. Then: “Not mine.”
Another pause.
“I’ll find what I can. You owe me.”
“I know.”
I hang up before she can say more. My fingers twitch toward the pulse emitter. Not to use it. Just to feel it. To remember I’m not just some dockhand with old scars and steady hands.
I’m a weapon. And someone just triggered me.
I don’t go to her place tonight.
I can’t. Not with everything crawling under my skin like I’m wearing someone else’s blood. The city feels wrong—too quiet in the places that should scream, too loud in the corners that should stay dark. I feel eyes on me that don’t blink.
I sit on a crate behind the scrapyard, fingers curled around my comm, staring at the message I’ve typed three times and deleted twice.
She’s going to think I’m pulling away. She’s going to think this silence is about distance.
But it’s not. It’s about protection. It’s about fire, and the fact that she doesn’t know how close her name is to being burned off the map.
At last, I type:
Don’t leave. I’m fixing it.
I stare at it. Let it sit. Then I send it.
No encryption. No ghosts. Just plain and real.
The streetlights stutter as I move. Broken pulses above me, flickering over puddles and old wire coils. I know this part of Jark better than I should—where the rust eats fast, where the cameras were never repaired after the last blackout. I don’t stop walking until the sky starts to pale at the edges and the back of my throat tastes like copper and old regrets.
She doesn’t message back.
But I didn’t ask her to.
I lean against the bulkhead of my room, the edges of the cot cold against my legs, and stare at the ceiling until it’s just lines and dark.
I want to be near her. I want to explain.
But what would I even say?
That she’s not just being hunted, she’s being sold?
That someone in this rotten sector marked her name like a price tag and passed it up the chain in exchange for favor or credits or power?
I can’t give her that.
Not yet.
Because the last time someone did this to me, I buried three friends and lost every scrap of hope I had in the system.
And I’m not about to let that happen again.
Not with her.
