“Valtron?” My voice cracks like a broken synth key.
He nods once.
My knees nearly give out. I press the baton tighter against my palm to keep myself upright.
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “I get that a lot.”
I laugh, sharp and brittle. “You broke into my home. You’re dressed like a bounty hunter. And you're tossing out cliches like we’re in a soap opera. What the actual hell is going on?”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. Just moves toward the wall by my entertainment hub and slaps a black hexagonal disk against it. It emits a pulse—like a low-frequency thump—and the lights dim for half a second.
“What the hell was that?”
“Signal scrambler. Ten-meter suppression radius. No surveillance, no transmissions, no tracking.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
I point the baton at him again. “Then start talking. And keep your claws where I can see ’em.”
He glances at the weapon. “That thing won’t work on me.”
“Try me.”
For the first time, something twitches at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. More like... appreciation.
“I’m not here to fight, Rhea. I’m here because the file you intercepted painted a target on your back the size of a space freighter.”
My stomach sinks. “That thing scrambled my compad. It hijacked my archive. And then it summonedyou?”
“No. I was already tracking the signal. When the whistleblower sent the package, he encoded a trace key. Only a few agents could follow it.”
“You’re still Alliance?” I ask, my voice sharper now. “You’reworkingfor them?”
“Not exactly.” He steps back from the wall, now fully in the center of my living room. “I’m working for someone inside the Alliance. One of the last people I trust.”
“You trustsomeone?”
“Don’t start.”
I lower the baton an inch.
He exhales. “The man who sent that file—Argus—he wasn’t just a mid-level analyst. He was embedded. Deep. He tried to leak data on Helios Combine operations a year ago. Got shut down. Blacklisted. Transferred. Then executed.”
“I saw the images.”
Valtron’s voice drops, raw. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Well, maybe don’t let your space-spook network beam death files into my morning show segment next time.”
He growls low in his throat, not at me—but at the whole situation. The sound vibrates the air.
“They weren’t supposed to route it through broadcast nodes. Something must’ve gone wrong. The original receiver was—” he pauses, and there’s a flicker in his eyes “—terminated before the packet arrived. You were next on the trace hop.”
“So I got ghost mail from a dead man.”
