CHAPTER 12
VAEL
The medbay lights flicker as I slide the port connector into the diagnostics terminal.
Standard interface. Obsolete encryption. I crack it in under three minutes.
They’ve never had to protect anything frommebefore. That’s their first mistake.
The second is thinking a recovering patient can’t bypass a bio-secured sublayer. They should’ve taken my clearance off the grid completely. Instead, someone just demoted it. Forgot to burn the root access.
Or maybe they never meant to erase it at all.
Either way—I’m in.
Rynn’s personnel file pulls up like a ghost from the deep archive. I’ve already been through the surface-level data: degrees, placements, reassignment orders, a clean, tight career wrapped in Alliance protocol.
But now I see it—the redacted line I hadn’t been able to touch before.
Six months after my disappearance.
Medical emergency. Personal leave. Classified destination.
Followed by a blank.
No logs.
No reports.
No communications for nearly acycle.
And when she resurfaces? She’s on Corven-7. Off-path. Low-threat sector. Assigned to sub-tier recovery ops.
It’s a burial. They buried her. Just like they buriedme.
But shechoseit.
She left the central systems. Walked away. Vanished into silence.
My throat tightens. My claws twitch. I slam the port closed, yank the line, and lock the panel with a crack of knuckle to console.
Rynn.
What did yourunfrom?
It takesme less than an hour to find her.
She’s in the secondary supply corridor, checking calibrators from a requisition crate. Her hair’s loose, brushing against her neck, catching glimmers from the overhead strip light. She doesn’t hear me approach.
Good.
She doesn’t deserve a warning.
“You lied to me,” I say.
Her spine stiffens. She turns slowly, eyes guarded. “Vael?—”
“Six months. You vanished from every system in the Core. Your medical leave was a smokescreen.”
