No control.
Every code of Vakutan behavior screams at me to create distance. To sever connection. To fortify. But nothing works.
She has saturated the architecture of my thought.
This is not just a bond. This is a breach.
Jalshagar is supposed to be a slow awakening—subtle, ritualized. Mutual.
This is something else.
It is not worship.
But it is not far.
I tell myself I’ve found my center again. That all the disorder in my blood, all the breach in my thoughts, has been restored to silence.
I’m lying.
I sit in stillness. I monitor. I track thermal fluctuations, listen for power surges in the conduits, measure everything that can be measured. But none of it holds. The precision is performative. Beneath it, something breaks formation.
The scent of her skin still lingers in the fabric of my sleeve.
It isn’t supposed to matter. Vakutan neural training suppresses scent-memory. Recollection is a tool, not a comfort. But I can feel the echo of her too vividly now. The low note of her voice when she leaned close. The cadence of her breath when she focused. She is no longer just a person I guard or follow or watch. She’s inside the perimeter.
And she isn’t leaving.
The door to the room slides open before I can force the thought away.
Mara enters fast. Not rushed.Focused.
I’m already standing by the time she looks up. There’s a tightness around her eyes I don’t like. Her mouth is drawn into a flat line, shoulders squared against something.
She doesn’t speak right away.
She tosses a portable corepad onto the table. It spins once on the slick surface before settling. The screen’s still dim.
“I found something,” she says.
That voice. Low. Steady. Like she’s holding the weight of her own pulse in check.
I step forward. “What kind of something?”
“A breach. In their internal relay systems. It's not wide—maybe three minutes of unsupervised cross-sector channel access—but it’s enough.”
My mind shifts into tactic-mode without hesitation. “Access to what?”
“Docking node Delta-9. On the old civilian wing. It hasn’t been fully integrated into the command circuit yet. They’re running it on legacy firewalls.”
I blink.
“Legacy,” I repeat.
“Pre-optimization. Before the Coalition started embedding biometric tracking into the access loops.”
That’s not just good news.
That’s nearlyimpossible.
