And somewhere beneath the fear clawing at my ribs, one thought burns clear and defiant.
If this is a lie, I am taking the receipts with me.
CHAPTER 2
LONARI
The first warning isn’t visual.
It’s the taste.
Even out here—fifteen klicks from the Ops tower, tucked into the wind-scoured ribs of a canyon where the rock holds the day’s heat like a grudge—I catch the faint metallic bite that always rides ahead of something big coming through atmosphere. Ionized fuel, scorched air, a little electric bitterness on the back of the tongue, like I’ve been chewing coins.
I stop moving. I don’t do that often. On Yatori, motion is life. Stillness is what you do when you want to get shot.
But the wilderness has its own kind of listening. You learn to hear with your skin, to feel the way the ground hums when the containment grid cycles, the way the dust lifts when thrusters push air down hard enough to make the moon flinch.
I tilt my head and stare up through a slit of pale sky between jagged stone.
Nothing.
Then—there.
A shadow glides across the thin haze, dark and enormous, the kind of mass that changes the color of the day. It isn’t one ofthe contractor shuttles. It isn’t a supply pod. It’s too smooth, too heavy, too arrogant.
A cruiser.
My throat tightens without permission. My hand closes around the haft of the knife at my hip, not because a knife means anything against a cruiser, but because habit is a religion and I’m faithful.
“Well,” I murmur, voice rough from the dry air. “That’s not on the menu.”
The cruiser slips into low orbit, slow and deliberate, and even from this distance I can make out the light catching on its hull plating in hard, cold flashes. Markings along the flank—Alliance. Vakutan crest. A big red stamp that sayswe belong here.
Except… the approach is wrong.
Vakutans do a lot of things like they want to be seen doing them. They posture. They roar. They throw weight around because they can, because fear is currency and they’re always rich. A Vakutan cruiser doesn’t slide in quiet and careful like a thief easing a blade between ribs. They arrive like a sermon.
This one comes in on a shallow angle that keeps it out of the station’s direct sensor cone until the last possible moment, then corrects with a tight, efficient burn that tells me the pilot is either very good or very scared of making mistakes.
Good pilots don’t waste motion.
Neither do assassins.
I feel the containment field’s hum under my boots—the steady pressure that lives in the earth out here, always present, always reminding me where the leash is anchored. It’s a low vibration in the rock, an invisible hand pressing down on the perimeter, and I’ve learned to read its moods the way you read weather: stable hum means business as usual; a rising pitch means the system is about to flex; a sudden flutter means somebody’s messing with the switch.
I look toward the Ops plateau. It’s a distant gray spine against the lighter rock, a block of steel and light that never sleeps. Floodlights stab outward even at midday, harsh enough to make the air shimmer.
The cruiser hovers above that like a predator circling a watering hole.
I spit into the dust and the spit evaporates before it hits the ground.
“Alright,” I say to nobody. “You wanna dance, we dance.”
I start moving.
The trickwith Yatori is that everything has a line.
Turrets have a line. Sensors have a line. The containment field has a line. Most inmates don’t live long enough to learn those lines, because the rations keep them dull and angry and predictable, and predictable men die fast.
