She was in the holding cell with me. I remember her face. Older, maybe forty, with the kind of bone structure that suggested she'd been beautiful before whatever brought her here stripped it away. She looks up at the mezzanine like she can feel me watching. Our eyes meet across sixty feet of recycled air and human misery.
She mouths a single word.
Lucky.
I taste bile at the back of my throat. Metallic and sour, like I've bitten through my own cheek. Lucky. Because a crime lord decided my mouth was worth more forming words than screaming over a plasma torch. Because my father's ghost carries enough currency in this world that my body got rerouted from the labor line to a bedroom suite with real sheets and filtered water.
Lucky.
I grip the railing until my knuckles ache and I make myself watch for another ten minutes. I owe them that. The people down there, breaking themselves apart for someone else's profit. I owe them the discomfort of witnessing, because three days ago I was one of them, and the only thing that separates us is the bruise-colored mark on my throat and the random calculus of a monster's interest.
"You're his, aren't you?"
The voice comes from my left. I'm in a corridor junction on the way back from the labor pools, trying to memorize the route, and I almost miss her. She's sitting against the wall in a maintenance alcove, legs stretched out, boots unlaced. Her hair is cropped close to her skull, dark brown, and there's a healing cut above her right eyebrow held together with adhesive strips instead of proper medgel.
"Excuse me?"
She nods at my throat. "The mark. That's Torrence ink.I've seen it on cargo, on doors, on the necks of people who belong to the family." She saysbelong towithout flinching, like it's just vocabulary here. A descriptor. A fact. "You're the new one. His."
"I have a name."
"I'm sure you do." She stands. She's my height, maybe an inch shorter, with the kind of lean muscle that comes from the labor line. Her forearms are mapped with small burns, the constellation pattern of someone who works too close to smelting equipment. "Kira. Three months in. Mechanical reclamation, line four."
"Talia."
"I know." She falls into step beside me like we've been walking together for years. Like this is normal. "Everyone knows. You're the only human in the residential ring who isn't staff or family. Word travels fast when there's nothing else to talk about."
We walk in silence for a few paces. The corridor hums. Gravity generators, I've learned, run on a slightly different frequency in the lower levels. You feel it in your teeth, a faint vibration that never quite resolves.
"How bad is it?" I ask, and I mean the labor pools, and she knows I mean the labor pools.
"Depends on your definition." She flexes her burned hands, examines them like she's reading a text she's memorized. "The work won't kill you fast. It's not designed to. Dead debtors can't pay off their contracts. So they keep you alive. Just. The food is enough to function. The sleep is enough to not collapse. The medical care is enough to patch you up and send you back. It's not cruelty for cruelty's sake. It's efficiency." She pauses. "That's worse, actually. Cruelty you can hate. Efficiency just grinds you down until you forget you were ever anything else."
"How long is your contract?"
"Five years." The number sits between us like a stone. "I had a business on Meridian Station. Took a loan from the wrong people. The wrong people turned out to be a front for Torrence operations. When I defaulted, they didn't send collectors. They sent a ship." She shrugs. The gesture is practiced, casual. The kind of shrug you build like a wall. "Three months down. Fifty-seven to go. If the terms don't change. They like to change the terms."
We reach another junction. She stops, leans against the wall, and looks at me with eyes that are too sharp for someone who should be broken.
"You're different, Talia. You know that. You're in his quarters. That means you have access to things the rest of us never see. Schedules. Codes. The layout of the upper levels. Who comes and goes."
The implication hangs in the corridor's recycled air.
"I'm not a spy."
"No," she agrees. "You're a debtor with a better cage. But cages have doors, and doors have locks, and locks have patterns. I'm just saying." She pushes off the wall. "If you ever feel like sharing what you see up there, there are people down here who could use the information. To survive. That's all. Just to survive."
She walks away before I can answer. Her boots make almost no sound on the metal grating. Three months on this station and she already moves like she was born to it. Like the place has gotten into her bones.
I watch her go and I think: she's using me. She spotted an opportunity and she's working it. I don't blame her. I'd do the same.
I am doing the same. Just in a different direction.
There's a balcony on the level above, a transitionalspace between the public areas and the residential ring. A young woman stands at the railing, looking down at me. She's maybe nineteen, twenty at most, with pale skin and pale eyes. No blue undertones. No bioluminescence. No Empri markers at all.
Human.
She's human, and she's standing in the residential ring of an Empri-controlled station like she belongs there. Her clothes are expensive, real fabric, not the synthetic blend the rest of us wear. Her hair falls past her shoulders, dark brown and wild, and she holds herself with the careful posture of someone who was taught to be watched.
