SERAK

Nexus Station filled the viewport. Built into an asteroid, or constructed around one, the rock and metal fused together until the distinction didn’t matter. Military-grade construction. No civilian markings. No navigation beacons. Deep void coordinates that didn’t appear on any chart in any database the Consortium published.

Cargo ships on the lower docking ring, four of them, standard freighters running supplies. Military vessels on the upper ring, sleek and armed, including the transport that had taken Jessa. It was still docked, engines cold. They’d arrived hours ahead of us.

“Tal.” I turned to the copilot’s seat. He was awake, staring at the station through the viewport with the expression of a man seeing the thing he’d been helping build for years and understanding it for the first time.

“It’s bigger than the schematics,” he said.

“They expanded.”

“They expanded a lot.”

I brought the Ghost in on a cargo approach, matching the trajectory of the freighters on the lower ring. Tal’s diplomatic codes authenticated us as a courier vessel on the routing network. We docked at a cargo berth between two supply freighters without drawing a second look.

“Stay on the ship,” I said. “Monitor the Raptor’s frequency. When they arrive, you relay docking coordinates, facility schematics, and everything you know about the internal layout. They’ll need all of it.”

“And if someone inspects the ship?”

“Use Maris’s transponder codes. The Ghost’s registration changes. You become a different ship.”

“And if they inspect the ship and find me sitting in the cockpit?”

“You’re a diplomatic courier waiting for a pickup. Your codes support the cover.”

“I’m a terrible liar.”

“Then don’t lie. Answer questions with other questions. Diplomats are good at that.”

He almost smiled. “When does the Raptor arrive?”

“Fifteen hours.”

“And you’re going inside now.”

“Yes.”

“Alone.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me. I looked like something between a man and a warning.

“Be careful,” he said.

“I’ll be something.”

I left the Ghost.

The cargo level was industrial. Crates stacked on automated pallets, loading equipment running on tracks, staff in work coveralls moving between berths with the bored rhythm of people who’d been doing the same job in the same place for months. Nobody looked at me. Civilian clothes, skin locked down as much as I could manage.

I found the access point behind a cargo processing terminal. Electronic lock, standard Consortium hardware, the same type as every other government installation I’d been inside in eight years. Twenty seconds with the bypass tool Alix had given me and the panel opened.

I stepped into the service corridor and let the dark come.

Sustained. Full. The kind my people called walking the dark road, the kind the elders spoke about in terms that made children understand this was not a gift but a warning. My skin went black. All of it. The corridor lights bent around me, the shadows pooled and climbed, and I became the space between the light fixtures, the dark that your eyes skipped over, the gap in the room your brain refused to process.

It hurt. Not sharply. A deep ache, cellular, the cost of holding the body in a state it wasn’t meant to sustain. Every minute on the dark road burned something. Focus. Memory. The edges of self. I’d been warned about this since childhood.

I moved through the service corridors mapping as I went. Same layout I’d memorized from Tal’s schematics. Spine corridor, lateral branches, three connected sections. Junction boxes at every intersection, the same Consortium hardware I’d catalogued on my first pass. The terminal displays hadn’t changed. Neither had the blind spots.

Tal’s schematics were mostly accurate. The lower level matched. The spine corridors matched. The holding area in the middle ring was bigger than the layout showed. New sections, recently built, the metal still bright at the welds, the conduit runs freshly bolted. They’d added an entire wing on the eastern side. More cells. More capacity. More people.

Guard rotations on the holding level. Two per post, three posts on the eastern corridor, twenty-two-minute patrol cycles. The guards were professional, armed, alert. These weren’t conscripts. Real soldiers.

I moved past a maintenance grating and looked down into the holding area below. Rows of cells. Dozens of them, stretching down the corridor in both directions. Through the narrow windows I saw the people inside. A Tsekai woman sitting against a wall, her traceries gray and lifeless, staring at nothing. A Tamzari male with dull scales curled in the corner of his cell, his massive body compressed into a space too small for him. An Akaruun pair in adjacent cells, their hands pressed against the shared wall between them, separated by ten centimeters of metal.

Four thousand people. In boxes. In the dark. In deep void where nobody would hear them.

The proto-bond pulled.

Down and east. Two levels below. The pull was physical now, not just directional. My body wanted to go. Every muscle, every nerve, every cell leaning toward one woman in one cell. The shadow-meld wanted to go too, the darkness pulling in the same direction, the shadows themselves pointing at her.

I braced my hand against the corridor wall. The dark on my skin was deep enough that my hand was indistinguishable from the metal. Silver threads traced under the surface where my palm pressed flat. The bond responding to proximity. She was close and getting closer and the thing my conscious mind had denied for years was trying to drag me through the floor.

I forced myself to turn away.

The comm hub. I needed to map the route to the comm hub. I forced myself upward through the service corridors, away from the pull, toward the command level. Each step cost me. Not physically. The shadow-meld didn’t make it harder to climb. It made it harder to remember why I was climbing instead of going to her.

Command level. The service corridor ran behind the main passage. Through a grating I saw polished floors, indirect lighting, the corporate aesthetic Vain had built around his atrocity. Conference rooms. Offices. Two guards posted at a door at the end of the corridor.

The comm hub. A circular room, visible through a viewport from the main corridor, antenna arrays lining the walls, transmission equipment, a central console with multiple displays. Two guards at the door, two more inside. The service corridor behind the room had a maintenance access panel. The guards watched the main approach. Nobody watched the back.

I marked it. Route one: holding level through the spine to command level, direct but guarded. Route two: ventilation system, narrow, unmonitored, vertical. Route three: lateral maintenance shaft from the holding level to the command level service corridor, emerging at the panel behind the comm hub.

Three routes. Contingencies. The operational planning was automatic, the part of my brain that had been running missions for eight years doing its job while the rest of me.

While the rest of me.

I’d been standing in the command level service corridor. How long had I been standing here?

Focus. The word came from somewhere deep, somewhere the shadow-meld hadn’t reached yet. I fixed the routes in my memory. Spine. Ventilation. Lateral shaft. Three ways in, three ways out.

I went back down. The pull grew stronger with every level. By the time I reached the holding area’s eastern corridor, my hands were shaking and the shadow was fracturing, silver threads splitting through from beneath, the shadow-meld and the proto-bond fighting for the same biology. Both of them ran on the same system. Both of them demanded everything I had. And the bond was winning.

I found her cell.

I felt her on the other side of the wall. Awake. Focused. Angry and thinking and alive. The proto-bond gave me her emotional state in high fidelity now, close enough that I got the texture of her thoughts. Not the content. The quality. She was planning. Running logistics. Building something inside her head the way she built supply chains on the Raptor.

I pressed my hand flat against the metal. Silver bled outward from my fingers, following the veins in the metal. Light in the dark. The bond’s fingerprint, visible only here, only this close, only when the connection had nowhere left to hide.

She was right there. Two centimeters of metal between my palm and her cell. The bond was screaming. Six hours until the Raptor arrived. I couldn’t go to her yet. The guard rotation was wrong. Three patrols converging on the eastern corridor every twenty-two minutes. If I opened that door now and an alarm triggered, every guard on the level would be here in under a minute.

I pulled my hand away from the wall. The light faded. The warmth didn’t.

I settled into the dark corridor and waited. The shadow-meld held me. The bond held me to her. The edges of myself were thinner than they’d been an hour ago, and I wasn’t sure if the hour had been an hour or two hours or ten minutes. Time was getting unreliable.

But Jessa’s presence through the bond was not. Steady. Warm. Working.

I waited for my crew.