CHAPTER 9 THE BREAKOUT
Three days in a holding cell teach you what you’re made of.
It teaches you that the human body can run on four hours of sleep per cycle when the alternative is unconsciousness in a room monitored by a woman who trades people like machine parts.
It teaches you that a Comm-Bead, pressed to a cell wall long enough, will give up the signal patterns of a station’s security grid.
And it teaches you that an engineer with eleven years of taking systems apart can design the destruction of one from inside a two-by-three-meter cage.
Corsine had not sedated me. That was her mistake.
Twice a cycle, a ration brick and a water bulb came through the slot, and I finished every crumb and every drop, because a furnace-blooded voice in my head kept saying the response burns through reserves, and I intended to have reserves.
She had cuffed my hands, walked me to a holding cell adjacent to the transport bay in the Forgotten Corridors, and sealed the door.
She had posted two guards on rotation. She had not, however, accounted for the fact that her transport ship had been delayed by a docking malfunction in the hidden bay.
Three days of delay. Three days where I sat in a cell and Raeth sat in another, somewhere in her lab on the other side of the station, and the silence where the bond had been was a hollow ache that I used as fuel because the alternative was letting it consume me.
The bond was dark. The Dampener field centered on Corsine’s lab severed the Link and left a void where Raeth’s emotional signature had lived.
But my holding cell sat at the edge of the Forgotten Corridors, far enough from the epicenter that the silence came incomplete.
A flicker. A ghost that said he was alive, on the other end of a line someone had cut but could not destroy.
I held onto that flicker the way I’d held onto the stone floor of my cell on Day One. With my fingernails. With my teeth.
On Day 20, the guard rotation changed, and Nia appeared.
I recognized her instantly, the combat medic from my first night in the common area, the one who’d sat down across from me with a half-empty tray and steady hands and told me the food got worse. Two years on Vexar-6. The woman who’d warned me about Corsine before I even knew what Corsine was.
She came through the transport corridor carrying a medical kit, her braided hair pulled back, her warm brown eyes holding the flat expression of a prisoner performing assigned duties. Corsine used her medical skills for pre-transport health assessments on outgoing “inventory.”
“Kira.” She kept her voice clinical, pitching it beneath the guard’s attention as she pressed a diagnostic tool against my wrist. “Raeth briefed me four days before they took you both. I’d been ready for two years without knowing what I was ready for.
Pre-transport assessments, schedules, guard rotations, and the layout of these corridors. ”
Her eyes flicked to the guard, then back. “My cellmate disappeared six months ago. I’ve been gathering information about the trafficking operation since.”
“Hold still.” She angled the readout toward the observation port for the guard’s benefit.
Under her breath, barely moving her lips: “Tessara’s in the tunnels.
She’s been watching the hidden bay for three days.
Two ships in there. Corsine’s transport came in with a cracked fuel coupling, and it won’t be fixed until tomorrow.
The supply hauler behind it is fueled and whole. ”
“I don’t need tomorrow. I need tonight, and four unwatched minutes in the Hub.”
Nia’s fingers tightened on my wrist. She held the diagnostic tool against my pulse point and looked at the readout display with the expression of a medic processing vital signs. The guard behind her saw nothing unusual.
“The Hub is unguarded during the third shift rotation,” she said.
“Twenty-two hundred to oh-two hundred. Garrick doesn’t post anyone because he trusts the automated systems. And the jammer that’s keeping your bond dark?
She calls it the Dampener. Field’s centered on her lab, forty meters, and it drinks off the primary grid like everything else she bolted up in a hurry. ”
“Garrick trusts the automated systems because nobody’s ever given him a reason not to.” I met her eyes. “Can you get this door open?”
“I can disable the lock with the medical override. Her own pre-transport protocol requires medical access to the merchandise, and nobody told the door I’d stopped being loyal. But once it opens, you have six minutes before the security grid registers the breach.”
“I need four.”
Nia held my gaze. Two years at this station. A cellmate who disappeared. Six months of quiet investigation into an operation she couldn’t fight alone. The combat medic who’d been waiting for a reason to move.
“I’ll disable the lock at twenty-two fifteen,” she said. “Tessara will meet you at the Hub entrance. She knows the tunnels better than anyone on this station.”
She packed her medical kit, knocked on the cell door to have the guard release her, and walked out. The guard sealed the door behind her and returned to his post.
I sat on the floor of my cell and built the plan.
***
At twenty-two fifteen, the cell lock disengaged with a soft click.
I was already on my feet. I pressed the door open and checked the corridor. The guard assigned to the transport holding area was forty meters down the passage, his back turned, monitoring a comm feed on his wrist display.
The Forgotten Corridors lived up to their name. Dark, abandoned mining tunnels, condensation dripping from overhead pipes. I moved across the uneven stone in soft-soled work boots, making no more noise than the dripping.
I reached the junction where the Forgotten Corridors connected to the main station infrastructure.
The transition was marked by a change in the walls: rough stone giving way to bolted metal sheeting.
The overhead lighting shifted from the tunnels’ intermittent emergency bulbs to the station’s standard amber.
A shadow detached from the wall.
Tessara. Small, lithe, smooth tawny skin with darker spots that blended into the dim corridor like camouflage.
Her large amber eyes caught the light with vertical pupils that saw in the dark better than any surveillance camera.
Her pointed ears swiveled toward the main corridor, tracking sound.
Her long tail curled behind her, balanced and still.
I recognized her. The spotted Felarii from the common area on my first night, the one who’d sat alone, watching every exit with the focus of someone who always knew where the doors were.
Up close, the darker spots on her skin blended into the shadows like natural camouflage, and her amber eyes held the bright, calculating energy of someone who’d been waiting for this moment longer than I had.
“Two guards between here and the Hub,” she said. Her voice was a low, clipped murmur. “One at the D-Block junction, one at the Hub entrance. Both on standard patrol. They swap positions every twelve minutes.”
“When’s the next swap?”
“Four minutes. They’ll both be in the D-Block junction for about ninety seconds during the handoff.”
It matched the rotation I’d mapped through my cell wall, tone for tone. Trust, but verify.
“That’s my window.”
Tessara’s mouth curved. The expression on her feline features was less a smile and more the look of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of chaos. “Try to keep up.”
She moved. I followed. The Felarii were silent in a way that made my own careful footfalls sound like hammer strikes.
She flowed through the corridor with her tail low and her body close to the wall, and when she reached the junction, she paused, ears forward, listening to the guards’ conversation with the acuity of a species built for hunting.
She raised one clawed hand. Held up three fingers. Counted down.
I ran.
The corridor between the junction and the Hub entrance was sixty meters of open ground.
I covered it in the ninety-second window with my heart hammering and my work boots eating the grated floor, and when I reached the Hub door, I keyed the access code Garrick had never thought to change because Garrick trusted the automated systems and the automated systems trusted me.
The door opened. I was inside. Tessara appeared behind me three seconds later, having moved the same sixty meters in half my time.
“Four minutes,” she said. “Before the next patrol cycle.”
I only needed two.
The Life-Support Hub was dark during third shift, the equipment running on automated protocols, the workbenches empty.
The hum of the air processor filled the space with its familiar stuttering rhythm.
Fifty-four to sixty-seven hertz. I’d spent sixteen days listening to that sound.
I knew its patterns the way I knew my own heartbeat.
I went to the main control console. Keyed in the maintenance access code I’d memorized during my first week on work detail.
The system accepted it because I was still on the maintenance roster.
Corsine had kept me there on purpose; the station had to keep breathing while she packed her lab, and registered-technician credentials were how her own pre-transport health checks cleared the medical wing.
She’d weighed the risk of a working prisoner against the cost of a dying station and bet on her locks. She should have bet on the wiring.
My fingers moved across the console. The plan was simple. The Life-Support Hub controlled atmospheric processing, heating, water recycling, and primary power distribution for the entire station. It also controlled the emergency shutdown protocols that activated during a catastrophic system failure.
I didn’t need to destroy the Hub. I needed to convince it that it was already destroyed.