"That's an improvement."
"Significant improvement. My threat-assessment protocols have reduced your danger rating from 'extreme' to 'allied extreme.' The distinction is meaningful."
Krilly's laughter, bright and warm.
The station medical bay is quiet at midday. Radley, the med tech from our initial processing, looks up when we enter.
"Mr. Ka'reen. Courier Baxter." Her expression warms with recognition. "Right on time."
Mr. Ka'reen. The name still sends a jolt through me, and Krilly feels it, her thumb finding my pulse point in the gesture that has become our private language forI'm here.
"Mother Morrison forwarded the authorisation," Radley says, pulling up her datapad. "STI has approved tracker removal per the terms of your OOPS employment agreement. Standard procedure: magnetic locks disengage, minimal pressure, quick and clean."
Standard procedure. As if this is routine. As if every being who sits on this table has worn a lifetime of restraints and is about to feel the last one come off.
I sit on the exam table. Extend my leg. The motion is mechanical, the same compliance response I performed when the tracker was fitted, but Krilly catches the difference: my hands aren't fisted this time. My face isn't blank. I'm not dissociating into arena-stillness.
I'm present. Fully. The fear is there, but so is everything else.
Radley kneels to examine the tracker band. Professional, careful. "You might feel some pressure as the magnetic locks release."
"I am familiar with restraint removal."
The words come out harsher than I intend. Old memories: arena handlers removing combat collars between bouts. The relief that never lasted because removal meant the next fight was coming. The facility band that replaced the arena collar. The drones that replaced the facility band. The STI tracker that replaced the drones. Always something on my body that belonged to someone else's authority.
Radley pauses. Looks up. Meets my eyes directly, and her expression carries something that isn't professional detachment.
"This one's different," she says. "You're not escaping. You're being freed. Officially, legally, permanently." A beat. "Big difference, Mr. Ka'reen."
The color in my markings warms. She is correct.
"Activating release sequence."
A soft beep. Not the arena collar's aggressive warning tone, not the facility band's clinical chime. A soft, clean sound that meansfinished.
Magnetic hum. Pressure releasing. Weight lifting.
The tracker splits and falls away.
My ankle. Bare skin, pale where the band sat, a slight indentation from weeks of wear. No device. No monitoring hardware. No blinking indicator confirming that someone, somewhere, knows exactly where I am.
For the first time in decades, no one is tracking me.
The realisation doesn't arrive as relief. It arrives as vertigo. The specific disorientation of a nervous system that has been monitored for so long that the absence of monitoring feels like freefall. My body keeps waiting for the next restraint, the next collar, the next band, the next device that confirms I belong to someone else's system.
Nothing comes.
Krilly feels all of it. The vertigo, the freefall, the body searching for chains that aren't there.
She moves. Her hand touches my ankle, fingers tracing where the tracker sat, the faint indentation in the skin. The same hands that removed my harness in a jungle cave. The same hands that grabbed my horns at oh-three-forty-seven. The same hands that have been reframing every piece of technology on my body from a chain into a choice.
"How does it feel?" she asks.
"Light." The word is inadequate. "Strange."
"Strange good?"
I flex my ankle. Test the range of motion. No weight, no drag, no slight pull of metal against skin. Just muscle and bone and the phantom sensation of something missing.
