SERAK

She should have slept. Instead she’d been at the workstation since before daycycle, and by the time I found her in the briefing room, she’d broken through the third encryption layer and was deep in the data underneath.
“I need Deyric,” she said without looking up.
I sent for him. He arrived with his own mug, took one look at her screen, and pulled a chair next to hers. They worked side by side for an hour, her reading the communications, him running the analysis. I sat at the table and let them work.
Jessa stopped first. She leaned back and pressed her hands against her eyes.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“The conspiracy isn’t just Vain’s operation,” Deyric said. “There’s a political layer above it. Someone in the Consortium’s diplomatic corps has been providing cover. Shipping authorizations that make the trafficking look like sanctioned cargo. Diplomatic immunity tags for certain vessels.”
“That’s why we can’t make the evidence stick,” Jessa said. “Every time we try to expose the operational side, the political layer shuts it down.”
“Three weeks of raids and all I needed was someone who grew up reading diplomatic mail,” Deyric said, without looking up from his console. “I’m not bitter.”
Deyric was already pulling the data apart, running traces on the communication chains. He’d be at it for hours. I left him to it.
I found Jessa in the mess hall that evening, eating with one hand and scrolling through files with the other. She’d changed out of the clothes she’d been wearing since the raid. The scrape on her forearm had a clean bandage. Solren’s work.
I sat across from her.
“Deyric mapped the communication patterns,” she said, eyes still on the data. “I recognized a name.” She turned the datapad toward me. “Devan Tal. Senior diplomatic liaison. I met him at embassy functions when I was a teenager. He’s not the architect. He’s the go-between, connecting Vain’s operation with the political protection.”
“How well did you know him?”
She pushed her plate aside and stretched her legs out under the table. One of her boots bumped mine. Neither of us moved.
“I met him when I was thirteen. Embassy reception on Larian Prime. He was handling security protocols for a trade delegation. Remembered my name six months later at a different function on a different station.”
“And?”
“And he was at every function after that. Everyone trusted him. He was the kind of man who kept the machinery running without anyone noticing he was there.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
It was out before I’d decided to say it. I stared at the data scrolling on the screen.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “About your family. Not today. Before.”
“Because you hate the Consortium.”
“I hate the parts of it that tried to kill my crew and experimented on three thousand people.”
“That’s most of it.”
“Not the part you came from.”
Her boot pressed against mine under the table. I was aware of the contact. Completely. Against my will.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “And by the time I’d been here long enough to trust that it wouldn’t matter, I’d been hiding it long enough that the hiding was the problem.”
“The crew doesn’t care where you come from. Ressh was Vain’s tool. Alix was a criminal. Maris ran a smuggling empire. Thoryn spent eight years as a test subject. Zevik carries three dead from a stunt gone wrong. Deyric walked away from a weapons program. Solren abandoned a biowarfare lab. Everyone here left something behind.” I looked at her. “You fit.”
She didn’t say anything for a while.
“The plan,” I said, pulling us back. “Tal. Where is he now?”
“Attending a diplomatic conference at Meridian Station. Nine days.”
“And you want to go.”
Her chin lifted. “I can get in. Clean credentials, no connection to the Raptor, and I know Tal’s face. Nobody else on this ship can say all three.”
“Jessa.”
She turned back to me. Her hair had come loose again, one strand falling along the side of her face. I wanted to push it back. I shut that down so hard the skin across my knuckles went black.
The Khavai don’t bond casually. My people believe the capacity comes once. One person. One chance. Miss it, refuse it, and it doesn’t come again. My mother told me that when I was young enough to think it was romantic. I’d spent the years since learning it was a warning.
I was spending mine on a woman with loose hair and a plan to walk into the enemy’s den.
“We’ll brief the crew,” I said. “Full plan. Tomorrow.”
She glanced at my fists on the table. I hadn’t realized they were fists.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
She stood, collected her datapad and her plate, and left. Her boots faded down the corridor.
I looked down at my hands. The dark was fading. Not because I’d controlled it. Because she was gone, and my biology was going quiet without her.
That was worse than the dark.
I sat there for a while longer in the empty mess hall. Then I made two mugs. Left one at my usual spot and one across from it, where she’d sit in the morning.
Hers would be cold by then. She’d drink it anyway. She’d know who left it and she wouldn’t say anything, the same way I never said anything about the ones she left for me.