Jordan curses, fingers still working. “We’re losing power on the left thruster!”
“I can feel it,” I growl.
“Then stop flying like you’re mad at the universe!”
“Iammad at the universe!”
She makes a sound that might be laughter if it weren’t edged with panic. “Okay. Okay. I’m rerouting power from life support to thrusters.”
“You do that and we’ll suffocate.”
“We won’t suffocate before we get out of atmosphere, relax.”
“Relax,” I repeat, incredulous, as another chunk of debris spins past the viewport close enough to make my scales prickle.
Jordan’s hands are steady despite everything. The way she moves—focused, sharp—does something strange to my chest. I hate noticing it. I hate anything that feels like admiration when I’m supposed to be surviving.
But there it is.
She saves our lives with wires and stubbornness.
The shuttle clears the worst of the debris field, and the station falls away beneath us, still burning, still being carved apart by ordinance like someone erasing a mistake.
Jordan exhales, face pale, then taps her compad against the nav console. “Set course for IHC space. Now. We have to get to an IHC node—any node—and dump this archive.”
I keep my hands on the controls, eyes on the nav.
“No.”
She turns sharply. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no,” I say, voice flat.
“Lonari—” she starts, and her voice has that edge of disbelief people get when they think the world should obey common sense.
“IHC space is where this gets buried,” I tell her. “Or where you get buried.”
Her eyes flash. “You don’t know that.”
“I know institutions,” I say, and I punch the nav override, shifting our trajectory. “And I know politics. Whoever staged this wants a war. If you run home with evidence, you don’t get a medal. You get contained.”
Jordan lunges toward the nav panel like she might physically stop me. “Contained by who? The IHC is?—”
“Is an empire with paperwork,” I cut in. “And you’re a contractor with inconvenient truth.”
Her breathing is fast, her hands shaking now not from fear but rage.
“Where are you taking us?” she demands.
I input the coordinates I’ve kept memorized like a prayer I never wanted to say out loud, a place I haven’t seen in five years, a place that smells like money and blood and family.
“Gur,” I say.
Jordan stares at me like I just told her I’m flying us into a sun. “Gur? That’s Coalition-adjacent.”
“It’s League-protected,” I correct. “And it’s not IHC. And it’s not Alliance.”
“It’s a criminal world,” she snaps.
