“I don’t want to,” I reply, voice steady. “But I’ve run the variables. There’s no way we vanish clean—not with Tarek crawling through our comms. We’ve got one shot. And it has to be dirty.”
She turns her back to me, palms braced on the edge of her console. The glow of her holoscreen bleeds across her fingers, casting her in a cold blue shimmer.
She’s silent for a long beat.
“Why now?” she whispers.
“Because if we wait, he’ll come for her.” I don’t say her name. I don’t have to. It’s carved behind my teeth like prayer. “And because I’m tired of hiding.”
That makes her whip around, eyes gleaming with a thousand unshed truths.
“And you think I’m not?” she snaps. “I’ve lived like this for five cycles. Looking over my shoulder, rewriting registry logs, fabricating DNA data. I’ve slept in clothes so I could run if the wrong knock came. You think I like hiding?”
“No,” I answer. “But I think it’s all you’ve known since me.”
That hits.
She sucks in a breath, sharp as a blade.
I walk toward her. Slow. Deliberate.
“I’m not asking you to trust me,” I say. “I’m asking you to trust the man who bled for this family even before he knew it existed.”
Her voice breaks. “I can’t lose you again.”
“You won’t,” I swear. “Because this time, I choose the fall.”
We plan through the night.
Rynn pulls up escape charts and local sector drift patterns. She’s better at logistics than I am, always was. I work the blackout routes—deep grid tunnels where even Alliance sensors glitch. Drel feeds us archival access codes—some forged, some stolen.
Kael brings the wildcard.
“You owe me two field sim points for this,” he mutters, dropping a burner compad on the table.
“I’ll owe you a dozen,” I say.
“Damn right.”
The plan takes shape like a wound: ugly, but necessary.
The sim run will be broadcast in the morning. Tactical drills, fast evac scenarios. Perfect cover. During the maneuver, my evacharness will trigger a surge spike—looks like a core overload. Enough to fake telemetry loss. Enough to let me slip.
Rynn’s job is harder.
She has to lie.
To her coworkers. To the station. To Nessa.
She has to play the grieving partner while she sets fire to every trace of our existence.
She doesn’t flinch when I ask.
But she doesn’t agree out loud, either.
The night before the run,I find her standing by Nessa’s bed.
She’s not touching her.
