JESSA

The Raptor dropped out of transit hard and fast.

The bond registered it before the station’s hull did. A shift in Serak’s attention, sharp and sudden, the way he appeared when his crew was close. The bond gave me his emotion in high fidelity: relief, focus, readiness. Not joy. Something fiercer. The feeling of a man who’d been holding a line alone for hours and just heard reinforcements arrive.

Then the klaxons started.

Nexus Station’s external defenses engaged. The deck vibrated under my feet. Somewhere above us, weapons fire, the deep thrum of station cannons and the higher pitch of ship-mounted energy arrays. The Raptor was drawing fire. Drawing attention. Drawing every guard on the station toward the external threat.

My cell door opened.

Serak was on the other side. Not shadow-melded. Visible. Dark-skinned, silver-traced. Furious and in control of every bit of it.

“Time to go,” he said.

I was already moving. Through the door, left, into the service corridor behind the holding level. The route I’d mapped, the one that ran through the spine of the station to the command level. I’d walked it in my mind a hundred times in two days. Now my feet followed the path my head had laid down.

Behind us, alarms. Boots on metal. Guards mobilizing toward the external breach, running up the spine corridor toward the upper levels. Away from us.

“Narev,” I said.

I’d told her what to do. When the alarms start, trigger the biological containment protocol in the lab wing. She knew which panel. She’d memorized the four-digit code from eleven months of watching the technicians enter it without covering the keypad. A boat builder who noticed how things were put together and how to take them apart.

The biological alarm triggered. A second set of klaxons, different tone, layered over the first. Containment breach alert. False, but the response protocols didn’t know that and didn’t care. Lab security diverted to contain. Six guards pulled off the internal rotation, running toward the research wing.

“Rynn,” I said.

Rynn’s mate, Kovac, was on the holding level’s upper tier. He had access to a maintenance terminal through a ventilation grate that Patel had neglected to seal after a repair call. At Rynn’s signal, passed through the medical bay vent, Kovac pulled the security feed cables on the holding level’s eastern corridor. The same junction points Rynn had identified during her months of testing the system. She’d been sedated twice not because she was desperate but because she’d been mapping the vulnerabilities, waiting for someone to put the map to use.

The cameras went dark. Ninety seconds of blindness. Long enough for us to clear the level junction and enter the spine corridor without being recorded.

“Patel.”

We reached the junction door between the holding level and the spine corridor. It was unlocked. Patel had disengaged the electronic lock during his patrol thirty minutes ago and walked away. He’d done it by entering the wrong access code three times, triggering a lockout that reset the door to its default unlocked state. A system error, not sabotage. If anyone checked, it would look like a malfunction.

He was nineteen years old and he’d found a way to open a door that couldn’t be traced back to him. I’d underestimated him.

I sent him a silent thank-you I’d never be able to deliver. Then I moved.

The spine corridor was narrow, poorly lit, designed for maintenance access rather than foot traffic. Serak moved beside me and the bond made us something I’d never experienced before. We didn’t speak. We didn’t signal. We didn’t need to. I turned left and felt him already covering the right. I stopped at a junction and his attention swept the corridor ahead, feeding me the assessment through the bond: two people, maintenance staff, not armed, not a threat. I started moving again and he was already in step.

This was what Ressh and Alix had. What Thoryn and Maris had. Two people moving as one, two sets of instincts fused into a single system by the bond running between them. I’d watched the bonded pairs on the Raptor move in sync for years and thought it was trust, training, familiarity. It wasn’t. It was this. The bond fulfilling its design, turning two people into something that couldn’t be separated.

We climbed through the spine. One level. Two. The comm hub was on the command level, two rings above the holding area. Service corridor access behind the room, the maintenance panel Serak had identified during his mapping.

Maris’s voice on the comm, relayed from the Raptor: “Zevik has their external array occupied. Ressh and Alix are boarding through the military docking ring. Thoryn and I are hitting the main hangar in thirty seconds.”

“Acknowledged,” Serak said. “Jessa and I are in the spine corridor. Two levels below the comm hub.”

“Deyric’s ready. Data package is queued. The moment Jessa opens the channel, he pushes the upload from the Raptor.”

“And the worm?”

“Separate trigger. Jessa activates it from the comm hub console after the broadcast completes. It needs to run through the facility’s own systems to reach the research databases.”

Two objectives. Broadcast the evidence, then burn the source.

We reached the command level service passage. The maintenance panel was where Serak had marked it. He pressed his hand flat against the surface, feeling for vibration, for movement on the other side. The bond gave me what he was sensing: two people in the corridor beyond, guard post, armed, standing between us and the comm hub door.

Two more inside the hub itself. Four total.

Serak looked at me. Those black eyes, silver-traced, steady.

“I’ll handle the door,” he said.

“I know.”

He shadow-melded. His skin went dark, his body dissolving into the space between the lights until the corridor was empty and I was standing alone.

I heard the panel open from the other side. I heard footsteps in the corridor beyond, soft, the kind of steps that didn’t belong to anyone. I heard the guards at the comm hub door stop talking. A sound from one of them, sharp, surprised, cut short. A body hitting the floor. A second body hitting the floor.

Silence.

Serak’s voice, from the darkness: “Clear.”

The comm hub’s main door was palm-print locked. The maintenance panel behind the room was not.

Serak shadow-melded through the maintenance panel into the comm hub. I heard two sounds from inside. Short. Final. Then the main door opened from the inside and he was there, the meld receding from his skin. Two interior guards on the floor behind him.

Inside: circular room, antenna relays lining the walls, transmission equipment humming, a central console with six displays.

Two guards down, one breathing, one not. I stepped over them and sat at the console. Tal’s access codes were in my head, every character memorized from the session inside room 14-B at Meridian Station. I entered them. The diplomatic routing network opened. Authentication confirmed. Channels available.

“Deyric,” I said into the comm. “Connection established.”

“Receiving. Starting upload now.” His voice was focused, all the dry humor stripped away. This was the moment three weeks of raids and years of investigation had been building toward. “Twenty minutes for full broadcast. GalacNet first, then military frequencies, then diplomatic channels. Each one authenticates separately.”

I watched the first channel open. Data streaming out. Shipping manifests, facility communications, prisoner records, financial transactions. The conspiracy’s own files, authenticated by the conspiracy’s own systems, broadcast from the conspiracy’s own communications hub. Undeniable. Self-authenticating. Proof.

“Twenty minutes,” I said to Serak.

He took position at the door. The corridor beyond was dark and getting darker.

“Twenty minutes,” he said.