Someone on the inside. That's what I keep coming back to, standing here outside her door at something past midnight. The assassin knew my schedule. Knew I'd be in the fabrication bay. Knew the route I take when I want to walk alone. Someone in my house told a stranger where to find me, and that stranger almost opened my throat with a blade that doesn't show up on standard weapons scans.
I should be in the security hub. Should be with Astra, tearing through footage, locking sections, running the kind of protocols that make people disappear into interrogation rooms and come out cooperative or not at all.
Instead I'm standing outside her door.
I tell myself it's because she might have information. Her father's connections. Marcus St. Laurent ran routes through contested space, knew people who dealt in the kind of weapons that don't appear on manifests. The component in that blade looked station-manufactured. If someone's building assassination tools on my station, in my manufacturing bays, there's a supply chain I can't see, and she might know something that helps me find it.
That's what I tell myself.
The truth is smaller and worse. I wanted to see her. Wanted to stand in front of someone who would look at me without the careful blankness my people wear like armor, that practiced deference that means they're calculating how much danger they're in at any given moment. I wanted eyes on me that held something other than fear.
The maintenance corridoris sealed when we arrive. Two of Astra's people stand at the entry, armed, faces blank. They look at Talia and their blankness tightens into something harder.
A debtor. With the boss.
At the crime scene.
I don't explain. I don't have to.
The body is where I left it, crumpled against the junction box where I'd pinned him. Blood sprayed across the metal wall in an arc that maps the trajectory of the killing blow. Under the corridor lights, it looks black. Blue-black. The same color as the mark on Talia's wrist, and I hate that I notice that, hate the way my brain makes the connection without my permission.
She stops two steps inside the sealed area. Her breathing changes. Not fear.
I watch her eyes move over the scene the way mine did eleven minutes ago, but she's looking at different things. I looked for threats. She's looking at construction.
"The weapon," I say. I've placed it on a evidence tray near the body, the matte-black blade and its grip. "I need to know where it came from."
She crosses the space and crouches beside the tray. Doesn't touch. Studies. Her head tilts, and I see her fingers twitch, the instinct to pick it up and turn it competing with the awareness that this is evidence.
"Can I?"
I nod.
She picks up the blade with her fingertips along the spine, the way someone handles a tool, not a weapon.Turns it. Examines the join between blade and grip. Brings it close to her eyes, and then I see it happen.
The shift. Mechanic's eyes. She's not looking at a murder weapon anymore. She's looking at a piece of engineering.
"The alloy's standard enough," she says, mostly to herself. "Composite laminate over a carbide core. You can buy this grade from any arms dealer in the sector." She rotates it again. "But this."
Her fingernail taps a small component set into the grip. A power cell, barely visible, wired into the blade's edge. I'd seen it, assumed it was some kind of vibration emitter. Standard for military knives.
"This isn't a vibration emitter," she says, confirming my assumption was wrong. "It's a resonance disruptor. Tuned to interfere with personal shield harmonics. This blade was designed to cut through station-grade body armor."
"I know what it does. I need to know where it came from."
She pulls the component free with a twist, holds it up to the light. A small cylinder, no bigger than the tip of her little finger. She turns it between her thumb and forefinger, and her expression changes.
"This wasn't smuggled in." She says it with absolute certainty. "The casing is injection-molded. See this seam line? That's characteristic of the compression molds you use. Series 40 or higher. And this micro-stamp." She angles it so I can see a series of tiny marks along the edge of the casing. "That's a batch identifier. Standard practice for quality control in station manufacturing. Someone was sloppy, didn't have the tools to file it off probably."
The cold that moves through me has nothing to do with the corridor temperature.
"That's impossible. We control manufacturing."
She looks up from the component and meets my eyes. "Clearly you don't."
The words sit in the air between us. Not an accusation. Not a challenge. Just a fact, delivered with the precision of someone who reads machines better than people. Someone who has no reason to soften the truth because she has nothing to gain from my comfort.
I look at the body. The dead man wears nondescript clothes, no station affiliation visible, but I've already found the marks. Subtle scarification along the inside of his left forearm, a pattern of raised lines that looks decorative to anyone who hasn't spent years learning the visual language of syndicate branding.
