I glance at her. “So? You already met a criminal today. I saved your ass. Try not to faint.”
She looks like she might actually hit me.
Instead she grips the edge of the console until her knuckles whiten, then forces out, “You’re kidnapping me.”
I snort. “Kidnapping implies you had options.”
“I had IHC space!”
“You had a fantasy,” I say, and my voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, because her stubbornness is going to get her killed and I can’t decide whether that bothers me because it’s inefficient or because it’s her.
Jordan’s gaze flicks to my mouth, then away, like she hates that she noticed anything about me besides threat.
“This is insane,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I agree, steadying the shuttle as we punch toward open space. “Welcome to my week.”
Behind us, the Ops station burns and fractures, a dying monument to somebody else’s plan.
In front of us, the stars spread wide and cold, and the nav line points toward Gur like a knife aimed at my own past.
Jordan swallows hard, voice raw. “If you’re wrong…”
I keep my eyes on the void, hands firm on the controls. “If I’m wrong, we die.”
She stares at me, and in the dim cockpit light her fear looks a lot like fury, and her fury looks a lot like life.
“Great,” she says hoarsely. “Love that for us.”
I can’t help it—something like a laugh rumbles out of my chest, low and brief.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Me too.”
CHAPTER 5
JORDAN
Space always looks clean from the inside of a cockpit.
No smell. No grit in your teeth. No blood on the floor you can’t stop seeing when you blink. Just a smooth black expanse threaded with starlight, the kind of quiet that feels almost insulting after a place like Yatori—like the universe is pretending nothing happened because it didn’t happento it.
The shuttle vibrates beneath me in a steady, irritated way, as if it’s personally offended Lonari woke it up after years of neglect. The air inside smells like old plastic and scorched dust from the station, and the faint tang of overheated circuitry keeps bleeding out of the vent seams. Every time the hull creaks, my shoulders tense like I’m expecting another orbital strike to punch through.
Lonari sits in the pilot seat like he was born there, hands on the controls with a casual steadiness that makes me want to both throttle him and cling to him, which is a completely unacceptable emotional pairing and I refuse to unpack it. The dim cockpit light catches along the ridges of his scales and turns the scarlet striping on his arms into something almost luminous, like embers under ash.
I sit in the co-pilot chair with my external drive hooked into the console via a jury-rigged cable, my compad projecting holo panels that jitter slightly with the shuttle’s imperfect stabilization. The stolen archive hangs in the air between us like a ghost—timestamps, docking clearances, biometric packets, encrypted header strings—proof that people died for a lie.
I keep expecting the drive to be empty, like the universe will pull the rug out at the last second just to be consistent.
It isn’t.
It’s heavy with data.
Heavy with truth.
And Lonari is flying away from IHC space like truth is a liability.
“Just so we’re clear,” I say, voice too sharp because if I soften even a little, I might start shaking, “if you’re wrong about this, I am personally haunting you.”
