SERAK

The second security layer wasn’t watching for infiltrators. They were watching for Jessa.

I’d been tracking their movements for eighteen hours. The original six had been here when we arrived. A monitoring team deployed the moment Jessa Corren’s dormant credentials flagged at conference registration. They’d been waiting to see what she’d do.

Now she’d done it. When she authenticated the routing network from inside the station, it triggered something else. An alert, a tripwire, a protocol buried in the system she’d just accessed. The additional six arrived forty minutes later on a transport with civilian registration and a military engine signature. Not monitors. A capture team.

Two triggers. Registration told them she was here. The authentication told them what she was after.

She’d gotten everything they needed. And the act of getting it had closed the trap.

I was on the level below the conference floors, moving through a maintenance corridor toward extraction route two. Side room 14-B was directly above me. Voices filtered through the floor. Jessa’s. Tal’s. And then others.

“Jessa.” I keyed the comm. “Get out. Now.”

“Working on it.” Her voice was focused. Not scared. Working the problem the way she always worked problems, with her brain running three steps ahead of the situation.

I reached the service stairs. Took them three at a time. The conference level was thirty seconds above me.

I let the dark come.

Not the surface version. Not the controlled burst I’d used at the relay to make three soldiers back up. I let it go deeper than I had in years. My skin went black. The corridor lights dimmed as the shadows pulled toward me. The edges of myself started to blur, the line between my body and the darkness around me getting thinner.

I moved through the conference level’s service corridor. Two of the second security team were at the junction ahead. They were looking right at me.

Their eyes slid past. One of them frowned, searched the corridor again. Saw nothing.

I was past them before they turned back.

Side room 14-B. The door was open. Two people in conference staff uniforms inside. Tal pressed against the far wall, breathing hard. A medpatch on the table, the kind that delivered sedatives on contact.

No Jessa.

I grabbed Tal by the front of his jacket and pulled him into the corridor.

“Where?”

“They took her.” His voice was shaking. “Two of them. Staff uniforms. They sedated her. She fought. She grabbed the table edge and kicked one of them into the wall and it took both of them to hold her down. But the sedative was fast.”

“How long ago?”

“Three minutes. Maybe four.”

“Which direction?”

He pointed toward the station’s interior docking ring. Not the commercial level where the Ghost was berthed. The interior ring, where the military transport had docked forty minutes ago.

I moved. Full shadow-meld, burning through reserves I’d been saving for years. The corridors bent around me. Security cameras tracked nothing. Staff members stepped aside without knowing why.

I reached the interior docking ring in ninety seconds. The transport’s loading ramp was cycling closed. Through the narrowing gap I saw her. Jessa, unconscious, carried between two operatives. Her hair was loose. One of her shoes was missing. She’d fought. She’d fought hard and they’d taken her anyway.

The gap narrowed. I ran.

Ten meters. Five.

The ramp sealed.

I hit the hull with my open palm. The metal rang and the sound echoed through the docking bay and nobody heard it because there was nobody there. The transport’s engines came online. The docking clamps released. The ship pulled away from the station.

I stood in the docking bay and watched it go. The woman I’d kissed six hours ago, the woman I’d been refusing to need for years, the woman who made two mugs at the late watch and put sweetness in mine because I’d never add it myself. On a transport heading for deep void.

The shadow-meld was still on me, thick and heavy, pulling at the edges of who I was. I should have let it go. Locked it down. Pulled back.

Instead, I reached.

Not with my hands. With the connection my conscious mind had denied and my biology had mapped anyway. The proto-bond, wired into me one late watch at a time without my permission.

The transport was gone. But she was there, faint, moving, pulling away from me toward deep void.

I held onto that thread until I knew the direction. Then I let the shadow-meld drop.

My knees hit the deck. My hands were shaking. The corridor lights came back in a rush that hurt my eyes. Solren’s medkit was still in my jacket pocket. Nothing in it for what was wrong with me.

Tal was behind me, breathing hard. He’d followed.

“Where are they taking her?” I asked.

“Nexus Station. It’s the only place they’d go.”

I already knew that. I’d felt the direction. Deep void. The same coordinates Maris’s data had pinpointed weeks ago.

I braced against the wall and pulled myself up. My legs shook. My vision was wrong at the edges, too bright, too sharp, the aftereffect of pushing the meld past anything I’d tried in years.

“Can you walk?” I asked Tal.

“Can you?”

Fair question. I took a breath. Then another. The shaking settled. Not gone, but manageable.

“We’re going to the commercial docking level. Service corridors. I mapped the route.”

Eighteen hours of crawling through the station’s infrastructure was paying for itself. I led Tal down through the maintenance levels, through the routes I’d mapped that avoided the second security layer. Two junctions, a vertical shaft with a maintenance ladder, and a lateral corridor that came out behind the commercial berthing offices.

Nobody stopped us. A tired-looking man and a scared diplomat in the service corridors were invisible. The station’s security was focused on the conference levels, searching for the woman they’d already taken.

The Ghost was still at the commercial docking port.

“You’re coming with me,” I told Tal. “You have access codes and you’re going to use them.”

He didn’t argue. Smart man.

I keyed the comm to the Raptor’s frequency.

“Maris.”

“I’m here.” No delay. She’d been monitoring.

“Jessa’s been taken. Military transport. Heading for Nexus Station.”

“How long?”

“Left six minutes ago.”

Silence. Then: “The Raptor can be at Meridian in eleven hours. Nexus Station is another fourteen from there at maximum burn.”

Twenty-five hours. More than a day before the crew could reach Nexus.

The Ghost was faster than the Raptor. Smaller, lighter, Maris had built the engines hot.

“I’m not waiting,” I said. “I’m taking the Ghost and following the transport. Rendezvous at Nexus Station.”

“Serak.” Maris’s voice was careful. “One ship. One person. Against a fortified station.”

“I’m not assaulting the station. I’m staying close enough to find her.”

“How?”

I looked at my hands. They were dark. Still dark. The proto-bond was still open, still tracking, still pulling me toward deep void.

“I can find her,” I said. “Get the crew moving.”

I cut the comm, strapped Tal into the copilot’s seat, and brought the Ghost’s engines online.

The direction was clear. Deep void. My hands hadn’t faded. I didn’t try to make them.