EPILOGUE #2
Corsine’s name appeared once, in a sealed-status line that did not say where they were holding her, or whether the Consortium’s advocates had reached her first. The remaining prisoners were being processed for release or repatriation, and the three names on Corsine’s final extraction order were on the release manifests.
The GA had flagged Kira’s conviction for review as part of the broader investigation; her captain’s smuggling operation was now evidence in a trafficking case, and her exoneration was a matter of time rather than doubt.
Sera’s facility had been raided six days after the transmission.
The GA strike team found the holding levels stripped and the cells empty.
The Consortium had moved its assets within days of losing Vexar-6, and the coordinates I had traded three years of my life to learn were a cold trail before anyone could act on them.
The one mercy lived in a recovered transfer manifest: no termination order beside her designation.
My sister was alive, somewhere, in inventory that had learned to keep moving.
The grief of that had hit me with a force the bond amplified, until Kira had woken from a dead sleep, pressed her hand against my chest, and held it there until my breathing evened.
We would find her. The list had taught us how the Consortium catalogs its holdings.
Now we would learn how it moves what it hides.
Tessara had never reached the rendezvous.
Do not wait past six days, she had said.
We had waited eleven, then left a coded beacon in the refueling shadow and listened on the smuggler bands every cycle since.
No wreckage report. No prisoner manifest with a Felarii on it.
Nothing. The silence where her signal should have been was a debt none of us spoke about over meals.
But the data core contained more than the evidence we had transmitted.
It contained the Target List.
I opened the file. The screen filled with entries, and I read them with the same focused intensity I had once applied to prisoner intake reports, except these were not prisoners.
These were targets. Five hundred names, most of them human women, not all of them human, every one a carrier of the dormant mutation the ancient builders’ scanner had been built to find.
Corsine’s notes rendered the builders’ glyph in plain script: the Star-Gene.
One birth in a hundred thousand, across a dozen species.
The Consortium had spent years compiling a catalog of every carrier its net could reach.
Approximately one hundred entries were readable.
Names, last known locations, compatibility matches.
The remaining four hundred sat behind Consortium-grade encryption that my access could not touch.
Kira had not cracked them either. Yet. She fell asleep most nights with the cipher structures open on her tablet, and twice she had murmured, half dreaming, that the encryption looked like a schematic viewed from the wrong angle.
Knowing now what her gene did with patterns, I believed her.
One hundred names. One hundred carriers who did not know they were on a list. Who did not know a shadow organization had tagged them for capture and forced bonding.
Who were living their lives in colony stations and cargo ships and frontier settlements, unaware someone had identified them as inventory.
I scrolled through the readable entries. Each name was a person. Each location was a place she could be found. Each compatibility marker matched a specific alien species, a bond waiting to be triggered by Corsine’s catalyst or its next iteration.
One entry stopped me.
The image was a Consortium custody scan. Amber eyes with vertical pupils, the tawny markings at her shoulder gone dark with stress, her chin up as though she were already planning the theft of the camera.
Tessara. Designation: Felarii, courier-class. Star-Gene carrier, navigational expression confirmed. Detained with restricted star-charts, Sectors Seven, Twelve, and Nineteen. Escaped Vexar-6. Recovery directive: active.
And in the column where other entries listed buyers, hers listed a compatibility match.
Kallaran. The registry named him only by surname and assignment code: Vane, retrieval-class operative, current status unknown.
Not a prisoner. Not a buyer. Something worse, perhaps.
A weapon the Consortium had not yet decided how to use.
I sat with it for a long moment. Our pilot. The female who had flown a broken ship into a picket line so the rest of us could run dark, cataloged twice over: once for the Gene in her blood, once for the charts in her head.
Then, when the second file finished decoding, it got worse.
Kira’s relay had been skimming Velori enforcement traffic for a month.
Buried in the routine noise sat a retrieval flag, opened nine days ago.
An untagged Felarii fugitive, registered by a station scanner sweep.
Sector designation: Aethel-Sky. The floating cloud station.
Consortium-controlled. The flag was countersigned with a buyer code I had seen once before, in Corsine’s registry: VHC.
Whoever sat above her had survived her fall.
They had found her before we had. And if their own registry meant anything, the male they would send to collect her was the one her blood was matched to.
Aethel-Sky. Tessara’s stolen charts were still loaded in the hauler’s nav core, and Sector Twelve was one of hers. She had given us the route to reach her without knowing she would be standing at the end of it.
I closed the file. Stood. Crossed the small quarters to the bunk where Kira slept.
She stirred when I sat beside her. The bond carried my emotional state to her, and I did not suppress it.
I let her feel what I felt: the weight of one hundred names, the urgency of a mission that had grown larger than a prison break, and underneath it, the bedrock certainty that the woman beside me was the foundation on which everything else would be built.
Her eyes opened. Brown. Sharp. Even half-asleep, she read me the way she read a failing system: with focus and an immediate instinct to fix what was broken.
“What did you find?”
“A list.” I took her hand. Her fingers were small inside mine, cool against my heat.
“Five hundred carriers of the gene Corsine flagged in your intake file. One hundred names we can read. Locations. Compatibility matches. The Consortium was going to take them all.” I let the bond carry the rest for a breath before my voice did.
“Tessara is on it, Kira. And a Velori retrieval flag went up nine days ago. They know where she is.”
She sat up. The sleep cleared from her face, replaced by the focused intelligence that had dismantled a prison station with a diagnostic tablet and a cascading failure simulation.
“Show me.”
I brought the terminal to the bunk. She scrolled through the entries.
I watched her process them, one hundred lives rendered as data points, and I felt, through the bond, the exact moment her resolution crystallized.
The determination of a woman who had been on a list herself and understood what it meant to be reduced to a compatibility score and a buyer assignment.
She stopped at the same entry that had stopped me. The custody scan. The amber eyes.
“She flew the decoy so the rest of us could run dark,” Kira said. Her thumb dented the housing of the terminal. “She’s been alone on a Consortium station for a month, thinking she missed the rendezvous, and they’ve already flagged her. We are not letting their retrieval male reach her first.”
“Her charts know the route,” I said. “Sector Twelve was hers.”
Kira looked at me. Through the bond, I felt the question before she asked it.
“We’re going after them?”
The same tone she had used when she told me she was choosing the bond, not following it. The voice of a woman who made her own decisions, even when those decisions meant flying toward danger in a stolen ship with a cracked fuel coupling.
“We are going after them,” I confirmed. “All of them. Every name on that list.”
She turned back to the screen. Tessara’s custody scan glowed in the terminal light. Not a stranger on a floating station. Our pilot was waiting for no one, because she did not know anyone was coming.
Kira pressed her hand against the screen. A gesture that was not technical. That served no operational function. That was, I understood, the gesture of a woman laying her hand on a promise.
“Then we start with her,” she said.
I covered her hand with mine. The size difference was a contrast I would never tire of, her human fingers disappearing beneath the span of my palm. The bond hummed between us, warm and golden and permanent.
Outside the viewport, the stars burned. Tessara’s stolen charts were loaded in the nav core. Nia was asleep in the medical bay, which she had claimed as her own. The Star-Seeker was fueled and ready, and the galaxy spread before us like a system waiting to be repaired.
We had a ship. We had a list. We had a crewmate to bring home. And we had each other.
The mission had begun.
Preview: Fugitive and Claimed on Aethel-Sky
Bonded By The Star-Gene (Book 2)
Chapter 1: The Soot Docks
Tess
The fence was cheating me, and we both knew it.
His name was Darro, or at least the name stitched into the collar of his grease-stained coveralls said, Darro.
He was Felarii, like me, which meant he had the same amber eyes, the same retractable claws, the same instinct to rob anyone who stood still long enough.
Unlike me, he'd made that instinct into a career.
His shop was a narrow slot carved into the belly of Aethel-Sky's Soot Docks, wedged between a coolant recycler and a dead-drop freight locker, and every surface was coated in the kind of black grime that never came off. Not off your hands. Not off your conscience.