She lets out a breath that’s half-speech, half-laugh. “You make him sound like a janitor with a badge.”
“He’s better than that,” I say. “He owes the truth. He owes the Centuries War something. Besides, you don’t get to hand the Alliance a smoking gun and expect them to let Helios keep selling weapons with a side order of genocide.”
Rhea’s laugh breaks into a cough. “Genocide is a heavy word, Vakutan.”
“It’s accurate when you’re killing entire settlements under the guise of safety,” I answer. “When you take children out of their beds because a contractor needed a cover story for a failed implant test, that is not maintenance. That is murder.”
A silence falls. The scrambler at my back pings low and steady. I can feel the spectrum shift in the air, the way the weaveof electromagnetic noise tightens and then relaxes. Small things—the thermostat’s whisper, the soft hum of the holo-frame—tell me when a net is being cast.
She looks at me with that reporter’s hunger again, the one I once loved and once feared. “Okay,” she says finally. “Say I believe you. Say I pack up and we go to Dowron. How do we get there? I’m a flashy person and the galaxy likes making examples of flashy people.”
“You lie low,” I say. “You go with me. No interviews. No social media. We move to a secure relay and hand the crystal to a decryption team. We get a clean print. Then we take it to Dowron.”
She shakes her head. “My drives. My backups. I can’t leave them.”
I feel the old reflex—warrior, protector—kick into gear. “They’re already in your compad, sweetheart.”
Her eyes harden. “No. Not everything. I have backup drives. Redundant. Offsite. I can’t leave without them.”
I take a breath. I remember corners of her apartment—hidden places, a hollowed book she keeps on the shelf with a hair tie and a tiny lipstick tube. She has follow-up habits: extra copies, burn drives, two-factor token chips in false bottoms. Smart. Safe. Stubborn as an oak.
“You risk staying,” I say. “You risk someone cutting you off from moving them later. Stay and they find the drives. Move and leave them, they come and make sure you can’t talk. This isn’t negotiable.”
Her mouth twists. “You always were diplomatic.”
“Shut up,” I mutter, softer, but the point holds. “We move now, or you die. You pick.”
She stares at me like I said a swear word in the wrong language. The baton trembles in her hand. She’s weighingoptions—journalist instinct against maternal instinct against survival.
Then she says the one thing I nearly hate more than any other I’ve heard in my lifetime.
“My friend,” she says. “I have to check on Kiera. She lives two blocks away. If I leave her there, she’s dead.”
Kiera. A name snaps in my bones. “She’s your producer? Your friend?”
“My best friend. Old college roommate. She’s the one who saved my ass in the network. She knows things. She keeps my backups sometimes. I can’t just…”
“You can’t stand still because you’re noble,” I cut in sharply. “You can’t think a friend promises a future if she stays in a rubble of a targeted apartment.”
Rhea’s face collapses for a second. Her shoulders slump. “I can’t just abandon people.”
“You also can’t be stupid.” The words are harder than I mean them to be. The caveat—the one that nobody likes to say—is that I have broken my share of rules for the people I care about. I have lied and run and killed for them. But right now, with hunters on the grid and Helios’s men sniffing around, one mistake is all it takes for both of us to be finished.
She looks away. There’s a tremble in her lower lip I recognize, but I don’t know if I’ve ever been allowed to see it before.
“Do it quick,” I say. “Two minutes. In and out. No confrontation. If you find anything, signal me with the holo code—three blips, pause, two blips. I will be outside—across the street. I’ll wait. No heroics. You nod?”
She stares at me. Then nods once. Slow. Like she’s bracing herself. “Two minutes.”
I step out to the balcony, the air like a slap to the lungs—metal rain on the glass, the city's ozone tang, a hint of diesel and burned out wiring. Below, the streetlights hum and cheapvendors fry plankfish. A taxi whirs past. I move like I always move: quiet, scanning, muscles tuned for motion. I watch the shadows below. My nose catches scents—oil and old cigarettes, a sweet sticky aroma of sugarfruit from a late-night stall, and under all of it, the metallic tang that means nothing good: unfamiliar DNA—new, layered, laced with sedatives and ozone.
My body tightens. The Vakutan sense for danger is a muscle I can’t turn off. It sends signals—hair-raising, heart-lashing. I close my eyes and let the world reduce to a single horizon, a thin line of possibility. Hunters are patient. They wait for a name to blink, for a pattern to reveal itself. They are snakes. They wait for movement.
Rhea moves like a wraith. She slips into the stairwell two floors down, a small curving blur of pale human skin. I watch the walkway, watching for heat signatures, listening for the shift in pressure. Two minutes.
Fifty-seven seconds in, my nose pinches—something wrong with the air. A scent like sulfur and burnt plastic. A note that thrusts through the sugarfruit and oil and city grime and says:arrival.
I pivot, fast.
