5. Nyra
NYRA
Sealing shut, the door makes a heavy, terrifying sound that I feel all the way in my teeth.
A slam would be honest. Slams are what doors do when someone's angry, and angry I could work with; angry I've negotiated with my whole life.
This is worse. Secure stasis fields emit a low, satisfied whisper as they merge across the seam of a panel that refuses, quietly and without my consent, to open.
Standing in the middle of the room with clenched fists and ragged breath, the violet mark sears through the thin fabric of my tunic. I scream exactly once, loud enough to draw blood from my throat, purging the sheer panic so I can finally think.
The scream dies in the warm, ozone-sweet air of the ward. And nothing answers. I wipe my mouth with my shaking hand. "Right. Okay. Think, Nyx. Think."
I turn in place. Slow. Measured. I have done a hundred salvage jobs, and the first thing you learn, the very first lesson anybody bothers to teach you, is that a sealed room is only sealed until you find the seam.
Every room has a seam. Every room. Air gets in.
Power gets in. Water gets in. Find the feed, find the feed's housing, find the housing's access panel, crack the panel, and you're halfway home.
I take stock.
The tactical ward, or holding wing, or whatever the hell the big bronze-plated monster called it, is bigger than my entire bunk on the Harrow.
The floor is that soft bio-mat he stepped on, and it gives slightly under my bare feet, a faint breathing yield against the soles of the shoes.
My skin crawls. It feels like walking on something alive, but my eyes automatically catalog the sheer wealth of it.
The bio-mat alone would fetch fifty thousand credits on the Mid-Rim markets.
The walls match the ship’s curving obsidian alloy, polished to a black so deep it drinks my reflection, ribbed with heavy titanium supports.
Polished walls seal the box tight. Of course they do.
But it's a box built of high-grade Hegemony materials I could strip and sell for enough fuel to jump three systems over, if only I had a plasma torch.
I need a way out, and I need a way to carry what I can pry loose when I finally get out of here.
Against the far wall, a low platform offers the vague silhouette of a bed. It matches the obsidian of the walls, forming a shallow, curved depression, while a living bio-mat layer replaces blankets across its surface. It looks about as comfortable as sleeping on the back of a whale.
To my left, an alcove. The reclamation alcove he promised me. Pale mist curls out of the archway in leisurely, deliberate wreaths. I can hear water running softly behind it. Near the opening, something clean and floral and wrong lingers—like a flower I’ve never met had a child with an antiseptic.
To my right, another archway, smaller, curtained with what looks like a cascade of dark liquid glass that ripples when I catch eye of it.
And directly opposite the sealed door, a low shelf with folded fabric sitting on it, neat, dark, and unfamiliar in cut, the color of charcoal after a long burn.
Clothes.
His clothes, I correct myself viciously. Whatever the hell these are, they are clothes he wants me in, so they are the last clothes I will put on. Over my dead, cold, salvager body.
I do, however, notice a pair of soft-soled shoes on the shelf beside the folded fabric. I examine my bare feet and then the shoes.
I focus on the bio-mat and think about the fact that I might be running soon, and running barefoot on an unfamiliar alien warship easily becomes a great way to shred the bottoms of my feet and bleed myself into compliance in about twenty minutes.
"Don't even think I'm grateful," I mutter at the ceiling, at whatever is listening.
Crossing the room to shove my feet into the shoes, they fit so perfectly my skin prickles, because a fit like this screams a measurement, and a measurement can only mean a study, and the ship has been studying me.
I have no time right now to spiral about what else on my body it might have cataloged.
Ignoring the folded fabric, I set straight to work, walking the room's perimeter to press my palms against the walls, palms flat, pressing every inch of obsidian I can reach.
Some panels in my life have been triggered by heat.
Some by pressure. Some by a specific sequence of taps that a good salvager can pattern out of the residual grease on the surface.
I try them all. Nothing responds. The wall stays as cool and polished and indifferent under my palm as the stars outside it.
"Come on!" I press harder. "Come on, come on. You're a wall. You're a wall with wiring. Give me something."
Nothing.
Moving to the sealed door, I examine the flush, seamless rectangle of slightly lighter alloy.
I crouch to run my fingers along where the base should be.
Smooth. I stand and run them along the top.
Smooth. I put my ear against it, breath held, listening for the faintest whine of a servo, the tiny whisper of a lock mechanism I might be able to trick.
What I hear instead is my own heartbeat, composed and too loud in my ears, and under it, threading through the floor and up through the soles of the alien shoes, is the patient cycle of the ship itself. The ship that locked me in here. The ship that answers to him.
I shove away from the door. "K-Seven," I hiss at the empty air. "K-Seven, if you're near enough to hear me, report."
Silence.
Of course, silence. K-Seven is in a storage alcove, he said.
Adjacent to my quarters. Close enough to feel, far enough to be useless.
The ship has tucked my drone somewhere close enough to torment me with yet distant enough to render it useless.
The big armored brute's specific attention to that detail makes me want to put a fist through the impenetrable wall.
I march to the smaller archway with the liquid-glass curtain. The curtain parts at my approach. Like it was waiting for me.
"Oh, you polite little nightmare," I breathe at the ship and step through.
The space beyond is small. A private alcove, unmistakably.
Against the far wall, a low basin set into a pedestal contains a slow-swirling clear liquid that only partially resembles water.
Beside it, a wall-mounted tray holds a row of small implements unfamiliar to me, sleek and obsidian-handled.
A single round disc in the wall above the basin catches my reflection back at me, softened and flattering, the ship's version of a mirror.
Sealed obsidian everywhere else. Smooth walls, smooth floor, smooth ceiling. An alien bathroom, as private and as trapped as the rest of this place.
"Naturally," I snarl, turning on my heel and marching back through the curtain.
The reclamation alcove is next. I pause at the archway and frown at it.
It gives off a pale mist, ionized cleansing agents, and floral antiseptic.
The sunken chamber shimmers under the domed ceiling where gentle jets of warm vapor and sonic mist are already cycling in deliberate arcs across empty air, waiting to scrub the grime from a body yet to arrive. Waiting for mine.
The sight of it stops me cold.
That is where he wants me. Under warm, inviting, floral-smelling water, stripping the grease of my life off my skin and handing me back to him washed and compliant.
Over my dead body. I snap back from the archway and keep moving.
The ceiling is the only surface left. I tilt my head back.
My heart sinks. It arches high above me, beyond any reach a body my size could manage without a tool I lack, and the seams I can make out up there are purely decorative, part of the ribbing.
A sealed architectural flourish. If a maintenance shaft exists above this room, its entry lies somewhere else in the ship.
"Okay," I whisper, turning one more full circle. My voice is shaking now. I hate that it is shaking. "Okay, okay, okay. You're smarter than this. Think. Think."
I go to the bed.
I drop to my knees beside it and run my fingertips under the lip.
The obsidian runs as a single molded piece, fusing directly into the floor.
There is no space underneath. Checking the edges and the join at the wall, I probe the bio-mat layer on top with my fingernail to see if it peels, if there lies a seam in the underside, if there is anything. Nothing.
I sit back on my heels.
The bite of panic I have been shoving down my whole life is creeping up my tight throat, demanding release.
I suppress it entirely. I have survived worse places than this.
I have been locked in the freight hold of the Kestrel with three dead men and a cooling plasma leak, and I got out of that, and I got out of the labor broker’s office on Halvek Four at seventeen with a split lip and a chit I was never meant to have, and I got out, and I got out, and I will get out.
Except there is a mark on my chest.
An interlocking, geometric mark that sits right over a scar I earned the hard way at twenty-one, and every time my heart beats, the mark twitches with it, a warm pull under my skin that says we are in rhythm, you and me, we are in rhythm now, whether you agreed to it or not.
I claw at the neck of the tunic and yank it down enough to look.
The lines of the glyph are thinner than they felt when they were burning into me.
Almost delicate. A tight cluster of angular strokes folding into each other like a lock, or a knot, or a cage, and within the cluster, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, a tiny beaming focus of violet ticks frequently on a beat that is exactly, exactly, the beat of my heart.
Two beats. Because of course there are two.