The math is ugly and it doesn't lie.
The best chance I have, the only chance that carries survival odds above single digits, is playing along. Stay in his quarters. Stay useful. Stay alive long enough to find out what happened to my father, because that's the thread. That's the only thread. My father worked for this syndicate. His last assignment was Malachar. Both of them vanished. Zane wants answers, and he thinks I'm connected to those answers, or he wouldn't have pulled me off the block.
I'm either the key or the bait.
If I'm the key, I have value. Value keeps me alive.
If I'm the bait, someone is going to come for me. And when they do, I need to be ready.
I press my palm flat against the mirror. The glass is cold. My reflection stares back, and she looks different than she did four days ago. Not thinner, not harder. Something subtler. The eyes. There's a new calculation behind themthat wasn't there when I boarded the transport in restraints.
You're adapting,I tell myself.That's all this is. Survival adaptation.
The reflection doesn't argue, but she doesn't agree either.
I can't sleep.
The bed is too soft. That's the thing about luxury you haven't earned, it doesn't comfort. Every thread in these sheets represents someone on the labor line who's sleeping on a polymer mat, and my body knows it, and it won't let me forget. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and I listen to the station breathe.
Veridian-7 is never silent. There's always something. The hum of the gravity generators, a low constant tone that lives just below conscious hearing. The whisper of air circulation, filtered and re-filtered until it carries no scent at all. Occasional footsteps in the corridor outside, soft, purposeful, guards or staff moving through the night cycle like blood through veins.
I should be afraid.
I wait for the fear, but it doesn't come. Not the way it did three days ago, when it was a living thing in my chest, clawing, screaming, drowning out thought. That fear was animal. Reflexive. The terror of a creature snatched from its habitat and dropped into a predator's den.
This is different.
The terror hasn't vanished. It's compressed. Refined. Like carbon crushed into something harder. I'm not calm. I'm not at peace. But the screaming has stopped, and in thesilence left behind, I can hear myself think. I can plan. I can watch and file and calculate.
Three days ago, I was prey.
I'm still prey. Nothing about my situation has changed. I'm still marked, still owned, still locked in a cage with silk sheets and a view of the stars. But somewhere in the space between then and now, the prey started taking notes. Started watching the predator's patterns. Started testing the walls not to find the way out, but to find the weak spots.
I'm not a predator. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But I'm not just running anymore.
I close my eyes and I'm almost, almost at the edge of sleep when the door opens.
No chime. No knock. Just the soft hiss of the seal releasing and the shift of air pressure that means someone has entered the room. I'm on my back with my eyes closed, and every nerve I own fires at once. Not fear. Recognition. My body knows who it is before I open my eyes, because the air changes when he's in it. Temperature drops a fraction. The quality of silence shifts from empty to occupied. Watched.
I open my eyes.
Zane stands in the doorway. The corridor light behind him makes him a silhouette, tall, broad, haloed in the cold blue of the station's night-cycle illumination. Then my eyes adjust and I see the details.
His bioluminescence is wrong.
Usually it's controlled. Patterns that glow steady and even across his skin, the blue-violet light that marks all Empri but that he wears like a second language, deliberate, modulated, every flicker intentional. Right now, it's flickering. Arrhythmic. Stuttering across his jaw, his throat, hishands like a signal breaking up. Like his body is broadcasting something his mind hasn't authorized.
He steps into the room and the door closes behind him. His face is a mask, but the mask has a crack. I can see it in the set of his jaw, the way his shoulders carry tension differently than usual. Higher. Tighter.
Not the coiled readiness of a man perpetually prepared for violence. Something rawer.
"Someone tried to kill me tonight," he says.
His voice is flat. Stripped of inflection. The voice of a man reporting a fact, not processing an emotion.
I sit up in bed. The sheets pool at my waist. I'm wearing the sleep clothes that were provided for me, soft and thin, and I am suddenly, acutely aware of every point where the fabric touches my skin.
