I should be concerned about that. I am concerned about that. But he's also the only person on this station whose counsel I haven't found fault with, and that makes him indispensable, and indispensable people are the most dangerous kind.
I sit with it for exactly thirty seconds. Then I turn to the surveillance feeds.
I tell myself I'm doing a routine security sweep.
I tell myself that for about four minutes, cycling through dock feeds, corridor angles, the mess hall, the lower-level market where off-duty crew trade in petty contraband I allow because it keeps them busy. Everything nominal. Everything humming along in the controlled chaos that passes for order on a station built by criminals for criminals.
Then my fingers find her feed. Like they were always going to.
She's in the corridor outside her quarters, the permitted zone I designated, a section of Level Twelve that gives her access to a small library, a hygiene station, and a viewing lounge with a view port that faces the wrong direction to be useful for navigation. Enough space to feel like freedom.
Not enough to be.
She's walking. Not aimlessly, nothing about Talia St. Laurent is aimless, I'm learning. She moves with the particular attention of someone cataloging their cage. Her hand trails the wall as she walks, fingers brushing junction panels, pausing at intersections. She glances up at the ceiling, at the ventilation grates, I realize. Measuring their size. Filing the information.
She passes a maintenance alcove and slows. Doesn't stop, she's too smart to stop, too aware that stopping would telegraph interest. But her pace changes for exactlytwo strides, long enough for her eyes to sweep the tool storage behind the half-open panel. Then she's moving again, pace normal, expression bored.
I replay those two strides. Watch her eyes. The micro-expression that crosses her face: not greed, not desperation.Calculation.She's building a map in her head. Entry points, tool access, traffic patterns, blind spots.
She won't find blind spots. I made sure of that when I assigned her quarters. Every angle is covered, every corridor monitored. She's swimming in a fishbowl and she doesn't know it.
But the methodology, thepatienceof it. She's not panicking. She's not breaking down. She's been my prisoner for two days and she's already conducting reconnaissance with the discipline of someone trained for it. She's treating captivity as a problem to be solved, not a fate to be mourned.
I should be concerned by this. A smart prisoner is a dangerous prisoner, and a dangerous prisoner requires countermeasures: restricted movement, increased surveillance, perhaps the kind of chemical compliance my father favored for high-value acquisitions who didn't cooperate quickly enough.
I'm not concerned.
I'mdelighted.
The word sits in my chest like something warm and wrong, and I don't examine it too closely because I know what I'll find. I know what it means that I'm watching her outsmart a cage I built and feeling something that isn't anger. I know what it means that when she pauses at the view port lounge and stands in the blue-white wash of starlight, I zoom the feed to see her face more clearly. The set of her jaw, the tension in her throat, the way her eyestrack the stars with the expression of someone cataloging an escape route and grieving simultaneously.
I know what all of this means. I watch her for twenty-three more minutes anyway.
She orders a station-standard coffee, bitter and flat, nothing like the real beans I keep in my quarters, despite what's available to her. She wraps both hands around the cup and I watch her fingers, the fine bones of her wrists, the way the warmth loosens something in her shoulders that's been locked since I first saw her in that cargo hold.
She drinks it slowly. Watching the corridor over the rim. Counting footsteps. Timing patrol rotations.
Good girl,I think, and immediately want to break something for thinking it.
I kill the feed.
I pull it back up.
I kill it again.
I keep my hands on the desk and breathe through the particular hell of wanting something I've decided I'm not allowed to take.
Astra arrives at fourteen hundred hours, which means she arrives at thirteen fifty-eight because Astra Venn has never been merely on time for anything in her life. She enters my office, efficient, purposeful, every movement stripped of excess.
"Security report," she says, and doesn't sit. She never sits in here. I've offered but she prefers to stand, weight balanced, sight lines to both doors. Old habits from a career that predates her employment with my family, details of which she has never shared and I have never asked about. We have an understanding, Astra and I: she keeps me alive, I don't dig into whatever she was before she started keeping me alive.
"The new acquisition," she begins, and I note her word choice.Acquisition, notprisoner, notguest, not her name. Astra categorizes everything by threat level, and she hasn't determined Talia's yet. That bothers her. "She's watching everything. Learning the patterns. Traffic flow on Level Twelve, maintenance schedules, patrol intervals. She clocked the shift change within four hours of being given corridor access."
"Impressive."
"Concerning." Astra's jaw tightens by a millimeter. Invisible on anyone else; on Astra, a shout. "She's not broken yet. The ones who aren't broken plan. The ones who plan cause problems. The ones who cause problems on this station…"
"Don't finish that sentence."
