Only the promise I made on the floor beside her bunk while she slept like the world hadn’t already begun to erase her.
Not tonight.
Not yet.
Not ever.
CHAPTER 21
MARA
The ping is soft. Too soft for Coalition alert systems. Not even a vibration—just a whisper of heat across the skin at my wrist, like a breath against a nerve ending. It pulls me from sleep more effectively than any alarm.
I blink, disoriented. For a moment I can’t tell if it was real or some residual echo from a dream I don’t remember. My breath catches in my throat as I sit up, slow, careful not to jostle the thin mattress. The room’s still dim, cast in muted blue from the overheads. Tatek’s silhouette sits motionless across the room, boots braced on the floor, head resting against the bulkhead. Asleep. Or something close.
I turn my arm inward.
There it is again.
A faint pulse beneath the skin, right where the implant's buried—nota Coalition signal. Not even standard Alliance echo. This is older. Slippery. Custom.
My heartbeat skips, and my fingers move on instinct. Tap-tap-hold. The interface flickers into view across the underside of my forearm, dim enough not to cast light into the room.
ID: JX-RN.
Signal: ACTIVE.
I exhale through my teeth, slow and thin, because if I breathe wrong I might wake him—and I’m not ready for that yet.
Jax Ren.
That code should’ve been dead months ago. I ghosted it after everything went sideways on Virel Station. Buried it under three layers of encryption and a timed decay. No one was supposed to find it, let alone reactivate it. Not unless?—
The message unfurls in a single narrow line:
“Mara. I’ve got it. The override key. Full network control. Obol. It’s real. But I need out. Now. Only you can guarantee it. —JR”
My fingers tighten into a fist before I even realize they’re moving. The air tastes metallic. Cold.
He’s alive.
He’s alive andhe found it.
The key.
I try to swallow but my mouth’s gone dry. My brain's already flipping through memory partitions, trying to line up what this means. The override isn’t just some backdoor access node—it’s the root. The command structure that lets Obol rewrite people at the neurological level. Personality suppression. Behavioral loop imprints. Thought compliance down to instinctual reactions. It was theoretical. Itwas.
Until now.
And Jax has it?
Or says he does.
I glance across the room again. Tatek hasn’t moved. His head is tilted slightly to one side, eyes shut, the posture of a man trained to rest without ever really sleeping.
Good. Let him stay that way.
I press two fingers to my wrist and double-check the return address. It’s dirty but legit. Ghost-bounced from four outer shellpings, triangulated through an old merchant codebase last used on Maaren Prime. Itfeelslike Jax.
