The door seals with a whisper. I press my forehead to the cool paneling and allow myself the luxury of one breath—just one—that isn’t built on protocol.
And I think of her.
Mara.
She’s in that stasis room, probably pacing. Probably cursing. Probably analyzing every signal spike and pattern delay in the station systems like it’s a puzzle to solve instead of a death sentence. She’s too smart not to feel it coming. She won’t know what it is—but she’ll feel it. The air’s changed.
I move to the desk and pull up a classified grid of movement patterns logged over the last six hours. Cross-reference it withknown patrol routes. There—two nodes offline at once. One civilian, one medical. That’s not standard.
They’re preparing a swap. A bait run. They'll sedate her under the guise of recalibration stress—maybe say it’s for her own safety. Then they'll move her off-site. She won't even be aware of the transfer.
And once she's gone, they’ll install a construct in her place.
Same face. Same voice. Different soul.
I know, because I’ve seen it.
I was ordered to escort one of the replacements once. Young man. Data analyst. Quiet. Compliant. Not unusual. Until his mother showed up.
She screamed his name.
He didn’t recognize it.
Didn’t blink. Just looked at her like she was a stranger begging for credits.
The comm panel chimes.
I don’t answer. Not directly.
It’s a coded ring—Civil Affairs. They’re checking to make sure I’m still in my quarters. That I haven’t “gone active.” That I haven’t broken pattern.
They’re afraid of me.
Good.
I let the signal loop once, then twice. On the third, I send back a null response: passive assignment status, emotional indicators green.
It’s a lie.
Every metric in my biometrics is spiking—but the metrics they’re seeing are decoys. Loopbacks. Ghosted signals rerouted through a proxy.
Serat’s been busy.
I pace once, twice. Then lock everything down and head for the door.
I can’t stay in this room while they dismantle her.
I have hours.
No—less than that now.
I need a plan.
Extraction’s out of the question. She’s flagged. That means tracking chips in her blood, neural trace overlays in the room, auto-tag pings keyed to her bio-sig.
But I can’t let them take her.
I won’t.
