I pressed my forehead against the cool metal wall of my quarters, trying to make my brain work properly again. The problem was that my brain seemed to have taken early retirement, leaving only a loop of that moment on repeat: me trembling against Vaxon's chest, the weight of his arms around me, the rumble of his voice when he'd saidyou could have diedlike it would've mattered to him.
Like I would've mattered.
"Stop it," I told myself. "Stop thinking about it."
My quarters didn't respond, which was probably for the best. The space felt cavernous now that Dana, Jalina, and Bea had all moved out to be with their bonded partners. Four beds reduced to one. Four personalities compressed into my single mess of cables, circuit boards, and half-finished projects scattered across every available surface.
I'd told myself I preferred it this way. Preferred the solitude, the ability to work without interruption, the freedom to obsess over my secret scanning project at three in the morning without anyone asking uncomfortable questions.
The lie tasted bitter.
I shoved away from the wall and stalked to my workstation, where three monitors displayed the data I'd been collecting for months. The Liberty signature pulsed on the screen, faint but unmistakable, a ghost of the ship that had carried us through a wormhole and spat us out in the wrong galaxy entirely.
My fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up the enhanced scans I'd run over the past seventy-two hours. Every time I looked at the data, my stomach did this complicated twist that felt like hope and dread having a knife fight in my intestines.
The signature was real. Not a sensor glitch, not wishful thinking, not some bizarre cosmic echo. A genuine piece of Liberty technology, broadcasting a power signature I'd helped design back when I was a twenty-three-year-old prodigy who thought she could engineer her way out of her family's low expectations.
I'd been so proud of those modifications to the escape pod power systems. So certain that my improvements would save lives if anything went wrong.
And then everything had gone catastrophically wrong, and I'd spent six months wondering if anyone else had survived. If my modifications had actually worked. If I'd done enough.
The data said maybe. The data said there was something out there in the debris field near the wormhole remnants, something that was still generating power signatures consistent with Liberty's emergency systems.
The data also said I was running out of time to decide what to do about it.
I pulled up the positional coordinates, cross-referencing them with Mothership's current trajectory. We were close, relatively speaking. In the vast emptiness of space,closemeant a two-day journey at standard warp. But Captain Tor'van would need a compelling reason to authorize a mission into what everyone called the Dead Zone.
The region where the wormhole had appeared was contested space. Three different factions claimed territorial rights, none of them friendly to Mothership's mission of rescuing stranded vessels. Pirates used the debris fields as hunting grounds. The wormhole's residual energy created sensor interference that made navigation treacherous.
And I wanted to fly straight into it because my scansmaybeshowed signs of life.
"You need more data," I muttered, opening another analysis window. "You need something irrefutable."
The problem was that irrefutable data required better sensors than I had access to through standard channels. Thekind of sensors that were restricted to senior Operations staff and Security personnel. The kind of sensors that required authorization codes I definitely didn't have.
I chewed my lip, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
Hacking into Mothership's long-range sensor array was illegal. Not just against regulations—actively illegal, the kind of thing that could get me confined to quarters or worse. Captain Tor'van ran a tight ship, and he didn't appreciate crew members who circumvented security protocols, even for potentially good reasons.
But if there were survivors in that derelict, if Will or any of the others from Section Seven had made it out alive, then every hour I delayed was another hour they spent drifting in the dark, hoping for rescue that might never come.
I thought about Will pushing me toward an escape pod during the chaos. Thought about his voice cutting through the alarms and screaming:Go, Elena! Don't wait for me!
I'd made it out. I'd survived. I'd spent six months building a new life on Mothership, making friends, learning Zandovian technology, carving out a place for myself among beings who'd rescued us despite having no obligation to do so.
And Will had maybe been out there the whole time, clinging to life in some damaged pod, waiting for someone to find him.
The guilt was a physical weight in my chest, pressing down until it was hard to breathe.
My fingers dropped to the keyboard. Started typing.
The first security layer was surprisingly easy to bypass, a simple encryption algorithm that I'd cracked weeks agowhile mapping Mothership's network architecture. The second layer required more finesse, a carefully constructed back door that let me slip past the authentication protocols without triggering alerts.
By the third layer, I was sweating. My fingers flew across the keys, muscle memory and mathematical intuition guiding me through security measures that would've taken most people days to breach. I'd always been good with systems, good with seeing the logical patterns that other people missed.
It was why Liberty had recruited me fresh out of university. Why my family had simultaneously been proud and terrified when I'd announced I was leaving Earth to help build colonies among the stars.
"Just data," I whispered as the final security layer fell away. "Just gathering data to make an informed decision."
