I extend my hand. He takes it, his palm dry and cool, skin texture wrong. Synthetic grafts, probably. Designed to never age, never scar. His thumb brushes across my knuckles, lingering.
"A pleasure," he says, still holding on. "I manage the agricultural contracts for the Outer Reach colonies. Perhaps we could discuss potential collaborations. Over dinner?"
His gaze drops to the neckline of my dress.
Mother's laugh sparkles like breaking glass. "How thoughtful. Ksara would be delighted."
No, I wouldn't.
But I smile wider, nod, and extract my hand with careful politeness. "Of course."
He lingers, saying something about irrigation systems and crop rotation, but the words blur into noise. My attentionfractures, scattering across the hall. I am barely tethering myself to this conversation, to this body.
Then I see it.
Past the Councilor's shoulder, shoved into a corner near the waste reclamation panel. A potted fern. Real, not a holo-projection. Its fronds droop, edges brown, soil cracked and pale. Someone brought it as decoration and forgot it. Left it to die under these screaming lights, choked by recycled air.
Something in my chest pulls tight.
The Councilor is still talking. Mother makes an interested sound, encouraging him. I let my awareness split, a skill I learned young. Part of me stays here, nodding at the right moments. The rest reaches out.
The fern's distress shivers through me the moment I connect. Thirsty. Starved for real light. Roots cramped in a container too small, desperate for space to spread. I can feel its slow collapse, the way its cells are giving up one by one.
Not on my watch.
I send it a pulse. Gentle. Just enough to remind it how to drink, how to photosynthesize even under artificial spectrum. The energy leaves my fingertips, invisible, a whisper of encouragement threaded through the space between us. The fern's fronds lift. Color floods back into the edges. Its roots flex, testing the boundaries of their prison.
Better.
"Ksara?"
I blink. Mother is staring at me, one eyebrow raised in warning. The Councilor looks confused.
"I'm sorry," I say, voice soft, demure. "Could you repeat that?"
He does. Something about export quotas. I murmur agreement, let Mother navigate the rest. She is a master atthis, spinning promises from air, selling hope without ever committing to anything solid.
Three more suitors after that. A security magnate with chrome embedded in his jawline. A terraforming executive who keeps adjusting his neural interface mid-sentence. A diplomat from the Core Systems who speaks in careful euphemisms and never stops assessing me with cold, calculating eyes.
They all want the same thing. Access. To my mother's research. To the biotech that keeps the colonies fed. To me, the proof that her genius runs in the bloodline.
I am a resource to be extracted.
By the time the fourth conversation ends, my face aches from smiling. My chest feels too tight, lungs struggling against the dress and the stale air and the weight of every gaze tracking my movement through the hall.
I can't.
I can't stay in that room one more second. I can't smile at one more man who looks at me like I'm a contract to be signed. I can't breathe in there. I can't pretend this suffocating charade is normal, that this is what my life is supposed to be. I can't keep being the perfect daughter, the living proof of concept, the prize they're all negotiating over while pretending they care about anything beyond what I represent.
I can't do this anymore.
Mother is drawn into a debate with the Agricultural Council, her attention finally, blessedly elsewhere. I take one step back. Then another. No one stops me. I am furniture here, decoration, easily overlooked once the real power players start talking.
I slip between bodies, keeping my head down, and make for the eastern corridor. Past the refreshment alcoves. Past the guards stationed at the primary exits. There is a maintenance access point near the reactor housing, one I found during last year's ball when I also needed to escape. The lock is biometric,but someone propped it open with a cleaning drone's charging cable.
I slip through.
The corridor beyond is dim, functional. No gold here. Just bare metal walls and the low thrum of the station's life support systems. I follow the passage until it dead ends at another door, this one marked with hazard warnings and a faded sign:STAR DECK - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
