She flinched. Her fingers flexed against my grip, and her breath caught, and her heartbeat surged from seventy-eight to one hundred and six in the span of a single second.
“What was that?” Her voice was tight. Controlled, but tight. She was looking at her wrist where my fingers still circled it, and her eyes were wide.
I released her.
The loss of contact produced a secondary shock. An absence so pronounced that my hand closed on empty air and my entire nervous system protested. Every sensory channel I possessed swung the wrong direction, searching for the signal that had been there a moment ago.
“Static discharge.” My voice came out lower than intended. Rougher. I heard the sub-harmonic bleeding through, so I shut it down. “The station’s environmental systems produce irregular electromagnetic fields. It is not uncommon.”
A lie. The first lie I had told a prisoner in three years of honest brutality.
“That wasn’t static.” She was flexing her fingers, staring at her own hand as though it had betrayed her. “Static doesn’t feel like that.”
“Extend your arm again. The calibration must be completed.”
She looked at me. Directly. With those sharp brown eyes that missed nothing, and I understood with a cold and absolute certainty that she was not going to forget this. She was an engineer. She had felt something that defied her understanding of physics, and she would turn it over in her mind until she had a schematic for it.
She extended her arm.
I fitted the cuff around her wrist. My movements were exact, deliberate, and slower than they needed to be because my hands were steady only through conscious will. Every point where my fingers brushed her skin sent a fresh wave of that thermal recognition through my nervous system. Cool and alive and foreign and mine.
Not mine. She was not mine. She was a prisoner in my facility. She was a human in a station run by a woman who trafficked bonded pairs for profit. She was a complication I could not afford in a situation where Sera’s life depended on my ability to maintain order.
The thrum in my chest disagreed with all of it.
“The cuff will monitor your vitals and location within the station.” I fastened the clasp and withdrew my hands. Placed them flat on the table where they could not reach for her again. “Tampering with the device will result in disciplinary action.”
“Is that what passes for a welcome speech around here?”
The humor of someone who used words the way a soldier used a shield. Beneath the sarcasm, her pulse was still elevated, and the Comm-Bead behind her right ear was inflamed, the skin aroundit flushed in response to the body’s immune response to the foreign object.
She should have been in the medical bay. The bead installation had been rough. I had reviewed the technician’s intake log. He had exceeded the regulation drilling speed because Corsine had pressured the processing team to move faster.
I did not say any of this.
“You are assigned to work detail in the Life-Support Hub beginning tomorrow,” I said instead. “Report to the Hub supervisor at 0600. Your engineering qualifications have been noted.”
“By who? That woman in the white coat?”
Sharp. She had connected Corsine’s presence at intake to her work assignment. Faster than I would have expected from someone twenty-four hours into incarceration.
“Your qualifications are in your transfer file. The assignment is standard.”
Another lie. Corsine had placed Kira Merritt near the Life-Support Hub for a reason, and the reason was almost certainly connected to whatever “markers” she had identified in the pre-arrival data. I needed to access Corsine’s research files. I needed to understand what the doctor had seen in this woman’s biometrics that had prompted a personal cell assignment and a work detail placement within the first hour of arrival.
I needed to stop breathing through my mouth because the scent of her was accumulating in the room, layering in the air, and with every inhalation, her chemical profile carved deeper into my memory.
“You may return to your block.” I kept my eyes on the data terminal. Not on her. “A guard will escort you.”
She stood. The chair scraped against the metal floor. She paused at the edge of the table, and her gaze pressed against the side of my face like a change in air pressure.
“Your hands,” she said.
I looked down. My claws had extended. Partially, the tips were visible past my fingertips, where they pressed against the table’s surface. An involuntary response. A loss of control I had not experienced since adolescence.
I retracted them. The keratin slid back into the sheaths with a faint click.
“Static discharge,” she said. An acknowledgment that I had lied, and she knew it.
