“Nia.” I caught her arm. “When we transmit, the GA will have everything. Names, formulas, buyer lists. Every prisoner who disappeared. If we get out of here, that evidence will reach the people who can act on it.”
Something moved behind her eyes. The cellmate who had disappeared six months ago. The reason she’d been gathering information in the first place.
“Then make sure you get out of here,” she said. Her voice was steady. The combat medic, the woman who’d triaged wounded soldiers under fire and kept her hands still while the world exploded around her, was back. “Both of you.”
She turned toward the junction. “Now move. Before Corsine locks down what’s left of the security grid.”
We moved. Through the corridors, toward the tower, toward the transmission that would end everything Corsine had built. The alarms screamed. The red lights pulsed. The station shook around us.
And for the first time in twenty-one days, I was not surviving.
I was fighting.
CHAPTER 10: JUSTICE & FREEDOM
POV: Kira | Day 21
The Communication Tower was the highest point on Vexar-6, and by the time we reached it, the station was tearing itself apart below us.
The tower extended above the moon’s surface in a sealed dome, pressurized against the toxic atmosphere, the transmitter array rising from its center like a spine. The access corridor was narrow and steep, angled hard enough to burn my calves, the air thin in my lungs. Red emergency light pulsed on the walls, and the alarms I’d triggered were muffled by rock but present, a vibration climbing through the soles of my boots.
Raeth moved ahead of me, his body filling the corridor, his scales throwing red and violet light against the stone. The bond pulsed between us, a constant stream of awareness that told me his pain levels were high, his adrenaline was higher, and underneath both, a focused determination that had the weight of three years behind it.
Two guards waited at the tower entrance. They saw Raeth coming and raised their Prods. He didn’t slow.
He closed the distance in three strides, caught the first guard’s weapon arm and twisted, and the Prod clattered to the floor. The second guard fired. The charge caught Raeth in the ribs, the same ribs that had taken two Prods already in the last three days, and through the bond, I felt the pain lance through him like a blade.
He didn’t stop. His free hand closed on the second guard’s chest plate and shoved, and the guard hit the wall hard enough to leave an impression in the stone. Both guards were down in four seconds.
I stepped over them and hit the tower door’s manual release. The door unsealed with a hiss of pressurized air, and the dome opened before us.
The transmitter array filled the space, antennae and relay dishes aimed skyward through the dome’s transparent ceiling. Above us, the gas giant that Vexar-6 orbited dominated the view, a swirl of ochre and rust-colored bands that filled half the sky. Stars beyond it. The first stars I’d seen in twenty-one days, and they were cold and distant and the most beautiful thing I’d ever looked at.
I didn’t have time for beautiful.
The main transmitter console sat at the base of the array. I pulled the diagnostic tablet from inside my suit and connected it to the console’s data port. The interface was military-grade, encrypted, and locked behind Corsine’s access protocols. I’d spent five days mapping the backup transmitter’s power grid through the maintenance tunnels. I knew every junction, every relay, every bypass point in the system.
My fingers moved across the console. Bypassed the primary encryption using the maintenance codes I’d memorized from the Hub’s shared infrastructure. Routed the signal throughthe backup transmitter, the one Corsine’s monitoring protocols didn’t cover because it was designated for emergency use only.
Loaded the evidence package. Every file from the hidden server node. The catalyst formula. The triggered pairs registry. The scanner protocols. The names of forty-seven people who had been sold.
“Kira.”
Raeth’s voice. Low. Warning.
I turned. Corsine stood in the tower doorway.
Of course. Her cameras were dead, and her guards were drowning in a riot three levels down, but the tower was the one room on Vexar-6 she would have wired to wake her personally. You do not run a trafficking empire through a transmitter and leave the transmitter unwatched.
She was not composed. For the first time since I’d met her, the clinical composure was fractured. Her white coat was stained with something dark along the hem. Her gray hair had come loose from its surgical bun. She held a pulse-blaster in one hand, standard issue, aimed at my chest, and her pale eyes were wide with something I recognized from my own reflection in the Processing Room mirror twenty-one days ago.
Fear. Dr.Sabel Corsine was afraid.
“Step away from the console.” Her voice held, but the modulation was gone. “That data belongs to the Consortium. You have no idea what you are interfering with.”
“I know exactly what I’m interfering with.” I kept my hands on the console. The transmission upload was at forty-two percent. “Forty-seven people. Sold. And us. Entry forty-eight. Pending.”
“You are a research subject. You do not get to decide what happens to the research.”
