"If you're going to kill me, just do it. I don't have time for whatever this is."
I laugh.
The sound escapes before I can catch it, before I can analyze or suppress or control it. A genuine laugh, surprised out of me by this girl with her borrowed ship clothes and her calculating eyes and her defiance built into her bones.
I can't remember the last time I laughed. Can't remember the last time anything surprised me enough to break through the walls I've maintained since childhood.
She's going to be a problem.
I can't wait.
Chapter 2
Talia
The corridor is white.Not the white of clean things, the white of things designed to make you feel dirty by comparison.
Two guards flank me, their grips unnecessary on my upper arms because where exactly would I go. We left the labor processing queue three turns ago. Through a door that required a retinal scan from the guard on my left. The air changed when we crossed that threshold, like it's warmer or filtered differently. It smells like nothing at all, which is somehow worse than the recycled staleness of the processing bay, because nothing is not a smell that occurs in nature.
Nothing is engineered.
Nothing costs money.
They bring me to a room with an examination table, the kind with stirrups folded neatly against its sides. Medical-grade lighting hums above, casting everything in a brightness that eliminates shadows. No shadow means no hiding. Even my own body can't produce a sliver of dark to crawl into.
I don't understand why I'm here instead of the labor queue, which is somehow worse than understanding.
The guards release me, take positions by the door, and a woman walks in.
She's human. That's the first thing I notice, and I hate that it registers as relief. She's younger than I expect, with sharp green eyes that see through everything. It's hard to tell with military types. They age in angles, not softness. Her red hair is piled into a neat bun, and she wears the scars all over her body with pride, in the same matte-black tactical gear as the guards but without insignia.
No rank. No name.
She's above both.
Her eyes move over me the way a butcher assesses a carcass.: professional and disinterested.
"Talia St. Laurent." Not a question. She's reading something on a holo-tab, the blue light reflecting off her jaw. "Daughter of Marcus St. Laurent, formerly courier, formerly in debt." She looks up. "The boss pulled you personally. Do you know what that means?"
I don't answer because my mouth is dry. My wrists still burn from the processing cuffs, and I can feel the indentation they left, grooved into my skin like the start of something permanent.
Her smile is cold, the kind of cold that lives at the bottom of oceans, where pressure crushes everything soft.
"It means you're either very lucky or very fucked." She sets the holo-tab down on the counter, and the sound of it is precise, deliberate in my silence. A period at the end of a sentence. "Probably both."
"Who are you?" I ask.
"Astra Venn. Head of security for Zane Torrence's direct operations. I manage personnel." She says his name theway people say the name of a weather system. Something you prepare for and endure. "Which now includes you."
I hold her gaze. It costs me something, but I hold it. "I'm not personnel. I'm a debt marker. There's a difference."
Astra's eyebrow, the scarred one, lifts a fraction. "There's really not." She pulls a chair from somewhere, sits across from me, and crosses her legs. "But the fact that you think there is tells me why he picked you." She pauses. "You'll catch his interest, for a while."
The implication lands where she aimed it.
"Here's what's going to happen. Medical processing. Full scan. Then the mark. Then you get assigned quarters and told the rules. Break the rules and I handle you, not him. You do not want me to handle you. He has limits when it comes to you. I don't."
"Limits." The word tastes like a lie on my lips.
