The kind of place where the silence is loud enough you can hear your own blood moving.
My maintenance shuttle docks with a gentle thump that rattles through the seat into my ribs. I don’t move right away. I let my eyes track the bay cameras—three obvious, maybe two hidden—then the crew, then the exit.
Nobody’s looking at me.
Which is either good…
Or very bad.
I force myself to breathe slowly, tasting the thin recycled air, and I do a quick internal inventory like I’m counting limbs after an accident.
Evidence kit: strapped under my jacket, heat-resistant strips sealed tight.
Two drives: one in my bag, one taped inside the lining of my boot.
Dead-man release: timer running.
Emergency beacon: offline, pocketed, only Lonari can decode it if I ping.
I swing my legs out of the seat and step onto the docking deck. My boots make a soft sound on the polished floor—too clean, too neat. The lighting reflects off the deck like it’s proud of itself.
I keep walking.
Clint told me the beacon pattern: three short pulses, one long. Repeat. Medical freight band. Boring enough to hide in.
I don’t broadcast. Not yet. I listen.
And then I catch it—a faint, almost subliminal signal fluttering across a maintenance console near a wall panel. Three short. One long. Again.
My throat tightens.
I follow the signal to a dull gray door labeled MEDICAL ROUTING — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, which is a fancy way of sayingeverybody ignores this unless someone’s dying.
The door doesn’t open when I palm it. Of course it doesn’t.
I wait anyway, because waiting is sometimes the smartest violence you can do.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
My skin prickles with that old instinct, the orphanage instinct: if you’re left alone in a clean hallway long enough, somebody’s about to decide what you are.
Then the door cracks open from the inside.
A hand appears first—gloved, rough, not medical. Then Clint’s face, half-shadowed, eyes scanning the corridor like he expects a squad to appear out of the walls.
“Jordan,” he says, voice low.
Relief hits me like a weak-kneed punch. My eyes sting and I hate it, so I cover it with irritation.
“Took you long enough,” I whisper.
Clint’s mouth twitches. “Yeah, well, I was busy not getting arrested.”
He opens the door wider, and I slip through. The air changes immediately—cooler, more metallic, smelling faintly of antiseptic and rubber seals. The passage is narrow, lined with stacked medical cargo containers stamped with bland inventory codes and tiny warning labels.
Clint shuts the door behind me and locks it with a physical latch.
