CHAPTER 6 TOUCH HER AND DIE #3
“Corsine sent him,” I said. My chin rested on top of her head. The position was protective, instinctive, the posture of a Zethrani male shielding what he would not survive losing. “She is accelerating. She wants you in her lab.”
“I know. He told me before I broke his nose.”
A stillness. I pulled back enough to look at her face. Her lip was split, but the blood was drying. And Harrick’s nose, now that I considered it, had been at an angle inconsistent with its original geometry.
“You struck him.”
“He grabbed me. I headbutted him. Then he hit me back and shoved me into the desk, and that’s when you arrived.
” She said it with the same flat factual delivery she used to describe corroded sensor arrays.
“I was handling it. And Raeth. My door was locked. I locked it. He keyed it open like he owned the room. She did more than send him. She handed him a security override.”
The override registry would show nothing. Corsine controlled the registry. I added it to the ledger of things she would answer for.
“You were.”
“I was. But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t feel you coming.” She pressed her hand against my sternum where the bond anchored. “Through here. Like a wall of fire moving through the corridors. I knew you were coming before I heard you.”
The red in my scales faded to blue. The combat response released its grip on my physiology, and what replaced it was exhaustion and a tenderness so acute it ached.
I had shown her the monster, and she had not run. She had pressed her hand against the damage the monster had taken to protect her, and she had diagnosed the injuries with the same competence she applied to broken ventilation systems, and she had held me.
I did not deserve this. The calculus did not balance.
I had spent three years enabling the woman who had sent the guard to this room, and Kira had paid for my complicity with a split lip and a terror that had screamed through the bond loudly enough to dismantle every structure I had built to contain what I was.
“We need to move faster,” I said. “The plan to reach the communication tower. We need to accelerate.”
She pulled back. Looked at me with those sharp eyes. The bleeding had stopped. The anger had not.
“Then let’s accelerate.”
“We cannot run blind,” I said before she could reach the terminals.
“Corsine controls the station’s external comm array.
If we escape without first transmitting the evidence, she purges her files, relocates Sera, and restarts the operation at another facility.
I have seen her contingency protocols. She has done this before. ”
Kira paused. The anger in her face did not recede, but I watched it restructure itself into something more dangerous. Calculation.
“How long does the comm bypass need?” she asked.
“You would know better than I.”
“Two days. Maybe three if the secondary relay is locked down the way I think it is.” She turned back to the terminals. “Three days. We stay, finish the reroute, transmit, and then run. If Corsine sends anyone else through that door before then, I’ll break more than a nose.”
She turned to the scattered terminals and began righting them, her movements economical, her hands steady.
“I mapped two more maintenance tunnels yesterday. One of them connects to a junction that feeds the tower’s secondary power grid.
If I can access it, I can reroute a signal through the tower’s backup transmitter without touching the primary array. ”
She tapped the tunnel map she had sketched from memory.
“And here’s the part you’ll like. The backup transmitter shares infrastructure with the dome’s emergency atmospheric vents.
Same manual relay panel. Whoever designed this station ran their emergency systems through a single access point. Sloppy, but useful.”
I filed it the way I filed everything she handed me. Like ammunition.
“One more thing,” I said. “When this breaks, two of us will not be enough hands. There are two on this station I have measured for three years and never risked. A combat medic who has been quietly counting the disappeared since her cellmate became one of them. And a Felarii pilot who maps patrol gaps for the joy of it and has crossed the Forgotten Corridors twice without tripping a sensor. I will brief the medic tonight. The medic can reach the pilot in places I cannot go.”
“Nia.” Steady hands and a half-empty tray, my first night. “If you’re going to trust anyone on this rock, make it her.”
“I trust no one.” The scales along my forearms dimmed. “I am choosing to arm two people anyway. The distinction used to matter to me.”
She was already working. Already solving. While the burn on my shoulder pulsed with residual charge and the taste of Harrick’s fear still coated the back of my throat, she was reconfiguring the plan with the focus of someone who had decided that the best revenge was operational success.
I watched her work, and I felt the scales along my forearms settle, the heat of combat fading to something steadier, and the thrum in my chest resonated at the frequency it had found two nights ago in the dark of my sleeping chamber.
The frequency that meant hers.