CHAPTER 8 THE BLACK MOMENT #2
“The Dampener field is localized to this section,” she said, not looking at me. “Your bond signature is suppressed within a forty-meter radius. Outside that radius, the Link would resume. Which is why you will remain here until transport arrives.” She turned.
Her pale eyes assessed me with the same clinical detachment she applied to her research specimens. “The Kethosi buyers are paying twelve million credits for a confirmed Phase Four pair. You should feel valued, Warden. That is the highest price I have ever negotiated.”
I said nothing. The words I wanted to say required a voice that worked, and the Dampener was still interfering with my vocal cords.
“Your sister’s status has been updated as well.” Corsine consulted her data pad. “Given that you are no longer useful as a cooperative asset, her protection status has been revoked. She will be transferred to the breeding program by the end of the cycle.”
The red surged. My muscles locked against the manacles, and the chain connecting my wrists groaned under a force the alloy was designed to contain.
The guards stepped back. Corsine did not.
She watched my body strain against the restraints with the same expression she used when measuring the output of one of her catalyst compounds.
“Fascinating,” she said. “The Phase Four bond produces a measurable strength increase even under Dampener suppression. I will add that to the data file.”
She turned away. Gestured to one of the holding cells. They shoved me inside, and the cell door sealed with a pressurized hiss, and the Dampener frequency resumed at close range from emitters embedded in the cell’s walls.
The silence deepened. I pressed my back against the cell wall, closed my eyes, and searched for any fragment of the bond, any residual signal, any trace of the warm golden thread that had connected us.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes. The Prod burns throbbed across my chest and back, the shoulder wound from Harrick’s encounter reopened by the fresh charge.
The manacles had cut into the skin of my wrists where I had strained against them, and the gray tissue was discolored with bruising that would darken over the next few hours.
The cell was two meters by three. Transparent front wall, opaque sides, and back. No fixtures. No surfaces except the floor. A cage designed for observation, not habitation.
Through the transparent front, I could see Corsine’s lab. The monitoring equipment. The ancient tech on the shelves. And beyond the lab, through a secondary door that led to the transport corridor, movement.
Guards. Three of them, escorting a figure in a gray work suit. Small. Human. Dark curled hair. A wrist-cuff that I had fitted myself in Processing Room 7 on the second day of her incarceration.
Kira.
She was conscious. Walking under her own power, which meant they had not sedated her. Her hands were cuffed in front of her, and she moved with the controlled rigidity of someone managing pain.
The Dampener would be affecting her, too.
Not with the neural disruption it produced in Zethrani physiology, but with the severance of the bond.
She looked up as they passed the lab entrance.
Through the transparent cell front, across twenty feet of sterile white floor, her eyes found mine.
The eyes of an engineer who had been processing the impossible since the day she arrived on this station and had not once stopped looking for the solution.
She was not broken. She was mapping. I could see it in the way her gaze swept the lab, the corridor, the guard positions, the transport route. Even now, even cuffed and surrounded and severed from the bond, she was mapping the system.
She mouthed a word. I could not hear her through the cell wall. But I had spent eighteen days learning the map of her face, the way her lips moved when she spoke, the specific shapes her mouth made around syllables that mattered.
She mouthed: Hub.
Then the guards moved her past the doorway, and she was gone.
Hub. The Life-Support Hub. Every lock, every camera, every emitter on this station hung off the primary grid, and the primary grid answered to the Hub, and she had spent sixteen days learning its failure modes.
She was not telling me where to go. She was telling me what she was going to do to this place.
The evidence package on the diagnostic tablet, which I had hidden in the false panel beneath my desk on Day 17, the tablet Corsine’s guards had not found because they had been looking for weapons, not data.
Kira was telling me where to go. She was telling me the plan was still alive. If I could get out. If I could reach the Hub. If I could complete the transmission she had built.
I pressed my palms flat against the cell wall. The Dampener screamed in my skull. The bond was dark. The manacles were rated for three times my strength.
But Kira was on this station. Alive. Thinking. Fighting.
And Zethrani males did not have a strength rating when the thing they were fighting for was their mate.
I gripped the chain connecting my manacles. Tested the tension. The alloy was rated for three times my standard output.
But standard output was a measurement taken from unbonded males, males whose physiology operated within the normal parameters of a species that had been bred for war and then domesticated.
I was not unbonded. I was not operating within normal parameters. I was a Zethrani male whose mate was being loaded into a transport pod by the woman who had stolen our consent and sold forty-seven people before us, and the rage that flooded my musculature was not the combat response of a soldier.
It was the rage of a bonded male in full Phase Four, severed from his Link by a technology that blocked the signal but could not destroy the source.
The bond was dark. But the love was not the bond. Kira had taught me that.
I began to pull.