“It’s always sealed,” I reply. “Open it.”
She pulls a slim tool from her pocket—of course she has one—and wedges it into the seam, twisting with careful pressure. The metal groans. Dust shakes loose. The latch gives.
Jordan’s face tightens with effort as she tugs. The panel swings inward with a reluctant squeal.
Cold air rushes out, smelling of oil, old coolant, and stale recycled breath.
I push the drugged inmate forward. “In.”
He stumbles inside, whining.
Jordan hesitates, then slips in after him.
I follow, ducking hard, shoulders scraping the frame because whoever designed this hatch hated large bodies.
Inside, the corridor is narrow and dim, lit by intermittent emergency strips that pulse red, then white, then red again. The soundscape changes—the station’s hum is louder here, layered with distant gunfire reverberating through metal bones.
Jordan leans close. “If they find us?—”
“They won’t,” I say, but I don’t fully believe it.
We move fast, guided by memory and the drugged inmate’s halting nods when I shove him and growl questions. He leads us to a vertical shaft with a ladder descending into deeper maintenance space.
Jordan peers down. “That’s a long drop.”
“Welcome to the glamorous life,” I mutter.
We climb down.
Halfway, the station shudders with a force that makes the ladder vibrate. Dust rains down. Jordan gasps, knuckles whitening on the rung.
“What was that?” she whispers.
I don’t answer immediately because my body recognizes it before my mind puts words to it.
A deep, rolling concussion that travels through every piece of metal like the station is being struck by something larger than itself.
Orbital bombardment.
“They’re hitting the station,” I say grimly.
Jordan’s face goes pale in the pulsing red light. “They’re blowing it up.”
“Yeah,” I say. “They’re cleaning the crime scene.”
Jordan swallows hard and continues downward, faster now.
We drop into a wider maintenance bay where the air is warmer and tastes faintly of burning insulation. The emergency lights flicker. Somewhere above us, something collapses with a grinding scream.
“Shuttle bay?” Jordan asks, breath tight.
I point toward a sealed door marked with faded maintenance symbols. “That.”
She rushes it, presses her ear to the panel, then looks at me. “How do we open it?”
I gesture toward a narrow access crawlspace to the right—barely wide enough for a human to squeeze through, lined with cables and sharp edges.
“Through there,” I say. “Manual override controls sit behind the interior panel. I can’t fit. You can.”
