The room is empty.
Completely, utterly empty in a way that makes the silence ring in my ears like a physical blow.
Her bed is made with that precise military efficiency she never quite shook from whatever life she led before, corners tucked, blanket smooth, pillow centred exactly. Her few possessions are still scattered where she left them, creating the illusion of occupancy that makes their owner's absence all the more jarring. Data-pad on the desk, its screen dark but still blinking with a standby notification light. Jacket draped over the back of the chair, the worn leather one she seems to favour despite the station's climate controls making outerwear unnecessary. A half-empty water container on the nightstand. A hair tie coiled beside it like a discarded promise.
Everything exactly as it should be, precisely where it belongs, creating a tableau of normal life interrupted.
Everything except for the one thing that matters.
She's gone.
13
Ksara
The basket weighs almost nothing in my arms, but it might as well contain the entire future of this forsaken place. Strawberries. Real, honest-to-stars strawberries, grown in actual soil under UV lamps that finally mimic something close to sunlight. Their scent rises in a sweet cloud that seems almost obscene in the recycled air of the lower decks, where everything usually smells like rust and desperation and the particular staleness that comes from breathing the same oxygen too many times.
I insisted on this. On bringing the first harvest down myself, to the people who need it most. The children in the lower residential blocks, the miners coming off triple shifts with hollow eyes and vitamin deficiencies that make their bones ache. Haid argued, of course. Told me to send Thanatos with an escort, to stay in the upper levels where it's safer, cleaner, more controlled.
I told him no.
His mouth had tightened, that muscle jumping in his jaw that I've learned means he's biting back about seventeendifferent arguments, cycling through them to find the one that might actually work. In the end, he'd just nodded once, sharp and reluctant, and ordered two guards to shadow me at a distance.
I lost them three levels ago.
Not on purpose, not exactly. But when I saw the cluster of children playing in one of the cramped communal spaces, their game involving nothing but scavenged wire and imagination, I couldn't help myself. Ducked in to give them strawberries warm from my own hands, to watch their faces transform from suspicion to wonder to pure, unguarded joy.
The guards were polite enough to wait in the corridor, and when I slipped out the back access panel the children showed me, their laughter still echoing in my ears like a benediction, the guards were nowhere to be seen.
I should feel guilty. I don't. This is what I'm here for. Not to hide in the upper levels like some fragile ornament, but to walk among the people my powers are supposed to save. To see their faces. To know exactly what I'm working for every time exhaustion makes me want to quit, every time using my abilities leaves me hollowed out and shaking.
The corridor I'm in now is narrow, dimly lit, the kind of place that probably wasn't meant for foot traffic at all. Maintenance access, maybe, or a forgotten remnant from when the station was first built. The walls press close on either side, and overhead, exposed pipes drip condensation in an irregular rhythm that echoes strangely in the confined space.
My footsteps sound too loud. The basket creaks. I'm suddenly, acutely aware that I'm alone in a way I haven't been since arriving on this station, since Haid's presence became a constant gravitational pull I couldn't escape even when he wasn't in the room.
The hair on the back of my neck prickles.
I slow. Stop. Listen to the silence that isn't quite silent, that hums with the ambient sounds of the station, the groan of metal and the hiss of ventilation and something else. Something that doesn't belong.
Breathing.
Not mine.
I turn slowly, carefully, keeping the basket between me and whoever is behind me like the ridiculous shield it isn't. My heart kicks into a rhythm that has nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the prey-animal instinct that evolution hardwired into human DNA millennia ago.
A man steps into the corridor. He's dressed like a miner, all rough canvas and reinforced patches, face smudged with the kind of grime that comes from real work. But something is wrong. The details are too perfect, the wear patterns on his clothes too uniform, and his hands are clean. Too clean for someone who supposedly just came off shift.
His eyes are cold. Calculating. Utterly devoid of the exhaustion every real miner on this station carries like a second skin.
"Ksara of House Genesis." His voice is smooth, educated, completely at odds with his appearance. "Your mother sends her regards."
The basket slips from my numb fingers. Strawberries scatter across the grated floor, bright red against the dark metal, little drops of colour and hope crushed under the weight of what's happening.
Mother.
Of course. Ofcourseshe wouldn't just let me go, wouldn't accept Haid's theft of her most valuable asset without a plan to retrieve me. I saw her smile on that monitor asThe Cerberuspulled away from the station. Saw the satisfaction in her eyes,the calculation, and I'd been too naive to understand what it meant.
She let Haid take me, allowed him to believe he'd won, that his audacious theft of her property had succeeded, but she always intended to take me back. This was just another move in whatever game she's playing, another calculated step in a strategy I can't fully see. Mother doesn't lose. She only pretends to, when it serves her purposes.
