The evidence package on the diagnostic tablet, which I had hidden in the false panel beneath my desk on Day 17, the tablet Corsine’s guards had not found because they had been looking for weapons, not data.
Kira was telling me where to go. She was telling me the plan was still alive. If I could get out. If I could reach the Hub. If I could complete the transmission she had built.
I pressed my palms flat against the cell wall. The Dampener screamed in my skull. The bond was dark. The manacles were rated for three times my strength.
But Kira was on this station. Alive. Thinking. Fighting.
And Zethrani males did not have a strength rating when the thing they were fighting for was their mate.
I gripped the chain connecting my manacles. Tested the tension. The alloy was rated for three times my standard output.
But standard output was a measurement taken from unbonded males, males whose physiology operated within the normal parameters of a species that had been bred for war and then domesticated.
I was not unbonded. I was not operating within normal parameters. I was a Zethrani male whose mate was being loaded into a transport pod by the woman who had stolen our consent and sold forty-seven people before us, and the rage that flooded my musculature was not the combat response of a soldier.
It was the rage of a bonded male in full Phase Four, severed from his Link by a technology that blocked the signal but could not destroy the source.
The bond was dark. But the love was not the bond. Kira had taught me that.
I began to pull.
CHAPTER 9: THE BREAKOUT
POV: Kira | Day 21
Three days in a holding cell teach you what you’re made of.
It teaches you that the human body can run on four hours of sleep per cycle when the alternative is unconsciousness in a room monitored by a woman who trades people like machine parts. It teaches you that a Comm-Bead, pressed to a cell wall long enough, will give up the signal patterns of a station’s security grid. And it teaches you that an engineer with eleven years of taking systems apart can design the destruction of one from inside a two-by-three-meter cage.
Corsine had not sedated me. That was her mistake.
Twice a cycle, a ration brick and a water bulb came through the slot, and I finished every crumb and every drop, because a furnace-blooded voice in my head kept saying the response burns through reserves, and I intended to have reserves.
She had cuffed my hands, walked me to a holding cell adjacent to the transport bay in the Forgotten Corridors, and sealed the door. She had posted two guards on rotation. She had not, however, accounted for the fact that her transport ship had been delayed by a docking malfunction in the hidden bay.
Three days of delay. Three days where I sat in a cell and Raeth sat in another, somewhere in her lab on the other side of the station, and the silence where the bond had been was a hollow ache that I used as fuel because the alternative was letting it consume me.
The bond was dark. The Dampener field centered on Corsine’s lab severed the Link and left a void where Raeth’s emotional signature had lived. But my holding cell sat at the edge of the Forgotten Corridors, far enough from the epicenter that the silence came incomplete. A flicker. A ghost that said he was alive, on the other end of a line someone had cut but could not destroy.
I held onto that flicker the way I’d held onto the stone floor of my cell on Day One. With my fingernails. With my teeth.
On Day 20, the guard rotation changed, and Nia appeared.
I recognized her instantly, the combat medic from my first night in the common area, the one who’d sat down across from me with a half-empty tray and steady hands and told me the food got worse. Two years on Vexar-6. The woman who’d warned me about Corsine before I even knew what Corsine was.
She came through the transport corridor carrying a medical kit, her braided hair pulled back, her warm brown eyes holding the flat expression of a prisoner performing assigned duties. Corsine used her medical skills for pre-transport health assessments on outgoing “inventory.”
“Kira.” She kept her voice clinical, pitching it beneath the guard’s attention as she pressed a diagnostic tool against my wrist. “Raeth briefed me four days before they took you both. I’d been ready for two years without knowing what I was ready for. Pre-transport assessments, schedules, guard rotations, and the layout of these corridors.”
Her eyes flicked to the guard, then back. “My cellmate disappeared six months ago. I’ve been gathering information about the trafficking operation since.”
“Hold still.” She angled the readout toward the observation port for the guard’s benefit. Under her breath, barely moving her lips: “Tessara’s in the tunnels. She’s been watching the hidden bay for three days. Two ships in there. Corsine’s transport came in with a cracked fuel coupling, and it won’t be fixed until tomorrow. The supply hauler behind it is fueled and whole.”
“I don’t need tomorrow. I need tonight, and four unwatched minutes in the Hub.”
Nia’s fingers tightened on my wrist. She held the diagnostic tool against my pulse point and looked at the readout display with the expression of a medic processing vital signs. The guard behind her saw nothing unusual.
“The Hub is unguarded during the third shift rotation,” she said. “Twenty-two hundred to oh-two hundred. Garrick doesn’t post anyone because he trusts the automated systems. And the jammer that’s keeping your bond dark? She calls it the Dampener. Field’s centered on her lab, forty meters, and it drinks off the primary grid like everything else she bolted up in a hurry.”
