JESSA

The second interrogation was shorter. Vain wanted specifics about the crew. Ship capabilities, combat strength, intelligence sources. I gave him what he’d already known or could verify: the Raptor’s class designation, the number of crew, the general armament. I understated everything. Gave him the weapons complement from before Maris upgraded the targeting array. Crew roles that were technically accurate but said nothing about what the bonded pairs could do together. Nothing about the shadow-meld. Nothing about the proto-bond. Nothing that mattered.

He thanked me politely and sent me back to my cell.

I kept building.

The young guard, Patel, escorted me. He’d moved his finger outside the trigger guard. The barrel drift was better. Not good, but better.

“Patel.” He glanced sideways. “There’s a woman three cells down from mine. Tsekai. Gray traceries. She hasn’t spoken to anyone in weeks.”

“I know.” He said it before he could stop himself, then pressed his mouth shut.

“You’ve noticed.”

“I’m not supposed to notice.”

“But you do.”

He walked. Didn’t answer. His jaw worked the way young people’s jaws work when they’re holding back something they know they shouldn’t say.

“Her name is Narev,” I said. “She built boats.”

“How do you know that?”

“I talked to her.”

He stopped walking. Looked at me. Not with the blank face of a guard. With the face of a twenty-year-old who’d been watching people suffer in silence for four months and had never heard anyone try to learn their names.

“The Tsekai prisoners are being given bond-suppressants in their food,” I said. “Specific compounds that flatten their pheromonal systems and kill the tracery response. If I knew which compounds and what dosage, I might be able to help her.”

“I can’t give you that information.”

“You can’t give it to me officially.”

He locked me in my cell without answering.

Two rotations later, a folded piece of paper came through the meal slot with my tray. A list of compounds with dosage numbers, written in the careful handwriting of someone who’d copied it from a medical log and was terrified of being caught.

Patel wasn’t an ally. Not yet. But every wall had cracks, and I’d spent years on the Raptor learning how to find them.

I talked to Narev through the gap between our cell doors during the twenty-two-minute patrol gaps. Nothing that would get either of us killed if a guard overheard. About her.

“Narev. The coastal name. Tell me about the boats.”

Silence. Three conversations in, she’d graduated to single-word answers. Four conversations in, she gave me sentences.

“Small boats. For the fishing cooperatives. Three-person hulls, shallow draft.”

“You designed them?”

“I built them. My mother designed them.” A long pause. “The boats come in covered in ice in winter. Three months of storms. We’d haul them in and rebuild what the sea broke.”

“Sounds like hard work.”

“It was good work. You built something and it went out on the water and it came back with food.” Her voice was raw from weeks of disuse, but the words were coming easier now. “Here they take things apart. I’d rather build.”

Five conversations in, she started asking questions back.

“The lab wing. The biological containment protocols.” Her voice was different now. Sharper. “There’s an override panel on the eastern wall of the main lab. I’ve watched the technicians enter the code during my medical assessments. Four digits. They don’t cover the keypad.”

I went still. “You memorized the code?”

“I memorized everything. I’ve been sitting in a cell for eleven months with nothing to do but watch and count.” A pause. “I’m a boat builder, Jessa. I notice how things are put together. And I notice how to take them apart.”

I filed that away. Not for someday. For soon.

The Akaruun pair was harder to reach. Separated across two levels, different guard rotations, different escort schedules. But Patel escorted prisoners to the medical bay on the level between them. If I could get a message to Rynn on the lower level through the medical rotation, she could pass it to her mate Kovac through the ventilation grate that connected the medical bay to the upper holding level.

I asked Narev. “There’s an Akaruun woman on the lower level. Do you know her name?”

“Rynn.” Narev’s voice was stronger now, three days in. “She still fights. They had to sedate her twice in the first month. Her mate is on the level above us. Kovac. They can hear each other through the vents sometimes. There’s a maintenance terminal on his level, behind a ventilation grate that a guard left unsealed after a repair call.”

“Can you get a message to Rynn through the medical rotation?”

A long pause. “What kind of message?”

“The kind that tells her she’s not forgotten.”

“I can try.”

The chain worked. Narev passed a message during her next medical assessment. The orderly who moved between levels carried it without knowing, folded into the standard paperwork that accompanied every prisoner transfer. Rynn received it. Rynn’s response came back through the same chain two rotations later: a list of security feed junction points on the holding level, with notes on which ones she could reach from her cell’s ventilation access.

She hadn’t been sedated twice because she was desperate. She’d been sedated twice because she’d been testing the system. Finding the gaps. Waiting for someone to tell her the gaps mattered.

Slow. Complicated. The kind of logistics I’d been running for years on the Raptor. Except instead of supply chains and fuel projections, I was building a network out of broken people. A guard who couldn’t look away. A Tsekai shipwright. Another woman who’d spent her captivity mapping security vulnerabilities.

It was the most important inventory I’d ever managed.

Late in the second day, I felt it.

Not the diffuse warmth I’d been carrying since the cell. Something sharp. Something close. The warmth spiked so suddenly I flinched. It was specific now, not a direction somewhere in the void but a location. Here. On this station. Close enough that my skin prickled and the hair on my arms stood up.

I stood from the bench. My hands were shaking. The tremor I’d been hiding since the sedative wore off, the one that came when I was tired or scared or both. The constant low vibration I’d been clenching out of my fingers every time I needed to look steady for a guard, for Vain, for myself. Two days of holding the shaking down through force of will, because the people around me needed to see someone who wasn’t afraid.

I put my hand flat against the cell wall. The metal was cold.

Under the cold, warmth. Coming from the other side.

“Serak,” I whispered.

The warmth pulsed. A presence. Specific and real and pressed against the same metal.

The tremor stopped.

My hands went steady. Not because I’d controlled it. Not through willpower. Not because I’d clenched harder or breathed deeper or done any of the things I’d been doing for two days to keep the shaking out of sight. Something else steadied me. Something warm and specific and coming through two centimeters of metal from a man who shouldn’t have been able to find me in a facility in deep void.

The bond. The thing he wouldn’t name. The thing I’d felt building for years in the mugs and the late watches and the silence that was more comfortable than talking, the quiet that had always said more than words. It was already working, already doing what it was built to do. Anchoring me. The way I’d been anchoring the crew for years, except nobody had ever anchored me back.

I pressed both palms flat against the wall. Steady hands. Clear head. The map of the facility, sharp and complete behind my eyes. Four guards between my cell and the comm hub. Three routes through the service corridors. Narev with her containment override code. Rynn with her security feed map. Patel cracking open one decision at a time.

He was here. The Raptor was coming. And I had a job to do.

I sat back down on the bench. My hands didn’t shake. My head was clear. The warmth stayed, constant and steady, the bond working before either of us had named it, the same way the mugs had been a ritual before we’d called it one, the same way the late watches had been a relationship before we’d admitted it. I started planning the assault from the inside.