I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t understand the static discharge, or the distance migraine, or the way my body had surrendered to his heat like a system finding its calibration point. I didn’t understand why a Warden was giving a prisoner the lock code to her own door, or why astone from a dead homeworld sat on a shelf in a room that held nothing else personal.
But I understood systems. I understood that when a system activates, it does so for a reason, and the reason is built into the design. Something in this station, or in his biology, or in mine, had flipped a switch I hadn’t known existed.
I would find out what it was. I would find out what Corsine had done.
And I would decide, for myself, what happened next.
I pressed my palms against my thighs, breathed in the residual warmth he’d left on my skin, and began to plan.
Corsine first.
CHAPTER 4: CRACKS IN THE ARMOR
POV: Raeth | Days 6–10
She was dismantling my environmental controls, and I could not stop watching her.
Kira had been in the adjacent chamber for four days. During that time, she had repaired the water recycler in my quarters, recalibrated the atmospheric monitors that had been reporting inaccurate carbon levels for the past eight months, and identified a power drain in the office terminal array that three station technicians had failed to locate over two years. Now she was on her back beneath the ventilation panel in the main office, her legs bent at the knees, her calloused fingers working inside a junction housing with the focused skill of a surgeon.
I was supposed to be reviewing prisoner transfer reports on my data pad. I had been reading the same line for eleven minutes.
“Your airflow regulator is cross-wired.” Her voice rose from beneath the panel, muffled by metal. “Someone connected the intake sensor to the exhaust loop, so the system thinks it’s pulling fresh air when it’s actually recirculating the same staleoutput. That’s why your quarters are ten degrees warmer than the rest of the station.”
“I assumed the temperature was a structural limitation.”
“No, it’s incompetence.” A pause. The sound of a connector being unseated. “Whoever did this wiring couldn’t tell an intake feed from an exhaust return. Basic climate engineering. First-year coursework.”
She slid out from under the panel. A streak of lubricant crossed her left cheekbone, and her short dark curls were pressed flat on one side where they had been compressed against the floor. She held up a handful of wiring, color-coded conduits that had been spliced in the wrong configuration.
“I need about twenty minutes to reroute this. You’ll drop to standard station temperature, which means your quarters will actually feel cold to you instead of…” She gestured at the room. “This.”
“This?”
“Like a furnace. How do you sleep in this?”
“Zethrani baseline operates at a higher thermal set point than the human standard. This temperature is not uncomfortable for me.”
She studied me with an expression I had come to recognize over the past four days. The look of an engineer presented with a system she intended to understand, whether the system cooperated or not.
“Your species runs hot,” she said. It was not a question.
“Approximately one hundred and ten degrees by your measurement.”
“That’s twelve degrees above human normal. That’s…” She stopped herself, and something in her face shifted. I watched the connection form. The realization that the temperature shehad felt when I carried her through the corridor, the heat that had soaked through her clothing and silenced the pain, was not environmental. It was biological. It was me.
She looked away first. Slid back under the panel and resumed working.
I returned my attention to the data pad. Read the same line for the twelfth time.
The problem, filed with the clinical detachment I applied to all self-assessments, was this: she was brilliant. Not in the abstract, theoretical way of the researchers Corsine employed. Kira saw a broken system, and her hands moved to fix it before her mouth finished diagnosing it. She carried no wasted motion, no hesitation, and the confidence with which she handled machinery was a confidence earned through repetition, not granted by authority.
I had overseen hundreds of prisoners assigned to technical work details. Most performed tasks. A few solved problems. Kira Merritt redesigned systems.
And something in my chest responded to that competence with an intensity that had nothing to do with the bond.
The thrum was constant now, a low-frequency vibration beneath my sternum that pulsed in time with her proximity. Door sealed, it settled to background. Same room, it amplified. With her beneath my ventilation panel, forearms exposed, her scar catching the blue light of my monitors, it became a sound I actively suppressed before it bled into my vocal register.
I had spent three days researching Corsine’s access logs. What I had found confirmed my suspicion and deepened my fury. Corsine had isolated a synthetic compound from the ancient station’s compatibility scanning infrastructure. Anairborne catalyst that could activate latent bonding genetics in individuals the scanner had flagged as biologically compatible.
