Lean against it in the dark.
The metal is cold against my spine. The station hums around me—life support, artificial gravity, the mechanical heartbeat of Veridian-7 continuing like nothing's wrong.
Everything's wrong.
Through the wall, I can still feel her. The jagged, broken rhythm of someone who's crying and furious about it.
I close my eyes.
Count to ninety.
The same ninety seconds I had on Sigma-9. The window that closed. The choice that can't be unmade.
Somewhere on the other side of this wall, Astra is breaking.
And I'm doing the only thing I know how to do.
I'm letting her.
Chapter 7
Astra
The logistics handler'sname is Petrov, and he's bleeding from a cut above his left eye where Lieutenant Kesh got a little enthusiastic during the grab.
He sits in the metal chair like a man who's been in metal chairs before. Hands zip-tied behind his back, chin up, jaw set. The kind of composure that comes from working for people who kill you for talking. Gamma-7's unofficial holding cells are exactly what they sound like: a storage bay with the shelving ripped out, bolted chairs where the cargo racks used to be, drainage grates in the floor that nobody asks about. The lights are industrial fluorescents, the kind that hum at a frequency that crawls inside your skull and sets up residence.
He knows where Webb went. I can see it in the way his eyes flick to the door every few seconds, calculating escape routes he'll never reach. He's got information locked behind his teeth like a cyanide capsule, and he thinks if he holds out long enough, someone will come for him.
Nobody's coming.
"Let me handle this." Dexter's voice comes from behind me. Low, professional. The voice of a man offering a service. "I can feel his pressure points. Emotional ones. I can have what we need in fifteen minutes without anyone getting their hands dirty."
I watch Petrov's face when Dexter speaks. The man's pupils dilate. He doesn't know what Dexter is, not specifically, but he can feel it. Everyone can. That low hum of wrongness that Dexter carries like cologne.
"My prisoner." I don't look at Dexter. I'm already pulling a chair to face Petrov, its legs scraping against the grated floor. "My methods."
Silence from behind me. Then the soft sound of Dexter stepping back, finding the far wall, leaning against it. Giving me the room.
Torres hovers near the door. I catch her eye and jerk my chin. She leaves. Kesh follows without being asked. The door seals behind them with a pressurized hiss that sounds like an airlock, and maybe that's intentional. Maybe whoever designed these cells wanted the occupant to feel like they were being locked into vacuum.
Now it's three of us. Me. Petrov. And Dexter, silent against the wall, his bioluminescent marks casting faint blue-white light across the stained metal behind him.
I sit down across from Petrov. Close enough that our knees almost touch.
"You ran supply lines for a man named Webb," I say. "Cargo manifests, docking schedules, fuel allocations. You're his logistics backbone in this sector."
Petrov stares at a point above my head. Classic resistance posture. "I want a lawyer."
"We're in contested space aboard an unregisteredstation with no judicial oversight within three parsecs. What you want is irrelevant." I let that settle. "What matters is what I want, and what I'm willing to do to get it."
"I don't know anyone named Webb."
I nod like that's a reasonable position. Then I reach forward and press my thumb into the cut above his eye. Not hard. Not yet. Just enough to remind him it's there, that the skin is split, that nerve endings are exposed and raw.
He flinches but doesn't make a sound.
"That's your one lie," I tell him. "I'm not a patient person, Petrov. I used to be. Used to believe in process, in building rapport, in all that elegant psychological maneuvering they teach you at the Academy." I increase the pressure. A thin line of blood runs down the bridge of his nose. "I'm not that person anymore."
