I step back.
Heart pounding.
“I—can’t,” I murmur, voice catching.
Not yet.
Not now.
He doesn’t chase the space I put between us.
He just nods, once. Barely.
But the air?
The air remembers.
CHAPTER 6
TATEK
Iknow something is wrong before I have language for it.
It starts as pressure—low, constant, like the station’s artificial gravity has been dialed a fraction too high. My awareness stretches ahead of me without conscious intent, mapping corridors before we reach them, cataloging sounds that haven’t yet occurred. I register a raised voice two levels down, a lift arriving late, the subtle harmonic distortion in the lighting grid that tells me maintenance rerouted power less than an hour ago.
None of that is unusual.
What is unusual is that I feel her react to it too.
Mara doesn’t stop walking, doesn’t even glance up, but her shoulders tighten a breath before a group of civilians spills out of a side passage, loud and careless and too close. She shifts left automatically, and I shift with her, our steps syncing without discussion. The sensation hits me like a physical thing—recognition, mirrored and instantaneous.
I do not like it.
Vakutan discipline teaches us to separate instinct from emotion, to interrogate impulse before allowing it authority. This—whatever this is—doesn’t ask permission. It movesthrough me like a current, anticipatory and intimate, and it is accelerating.
That is not possible.
Jalshagar forms slowly. Years of proximity. Ritual acknowledgment. Mutual alignment under controlled conditions. It does not ignite in days. It does not sharpen perception to the point where I can taste the copper of Mara’s anxiety before she names it herself.
I slow my pace deliberately.
She notices immediately.
“You’re brooding again,” she says, glancing back over her shoulder. “Try not to look like you’re calculating the structural weaknesses of the floor. People get nervous.”
“I am not brooding.”
She snorts. “Sure. And I’m not being escorted through a civilian district by an Alliance commander who looks like he’s one inconvenience away from starting a war.”
“That is inaccurate.”
“Uh-huh.” She gestures ahead with two fingers. “Market’s through here. If Jax is still on-station, he’ll be nearby.”
My focus snaps to the name before I can stop it.
“Jax,” I repeat.
She nods, distracted, scanning the crowd. “Jax Ren. Used to run procurement audits for off-books humanitarian shipments. He knows how to make things disappear without actually losing them. Or how to find things people have tried very hard to erase.”
