EPILOGUE #4
A stolen terminal I used to monitor Consortium comm traffic. And the star-charts. The ones I'd memorized, and the ones I'd stolen, and the ones I'd earned by flying routes no sane pilot would touch.
The charts were the reason I was still alive.
The reason the Consortium wanted me back.
The reason Kira and Raeth had needed me on Vexar-6 in the first place.
I knew the routes. The restricted corridors, the unmonitored shipping lanes, the gaps in the Consortium's patrol grid that opened and closed like valves on a pressurized system.
Those routes were the only way to reach the women on the Target List, five hundred names pulled from a Consortium database during the Vexar-6 breakout, most of them still encrypted, without tripping every alarm in Consortium space.
I was halfway up the maintenance shaft, my claws gripping the interior rungs, when the air changed.
The shift was so abrupt that my whole body locked against the rungs. The air shifted suddenly from damp and metallic, the standard recycled atmosphere of the lower docks to extreme cold.
This cold had teeth.
It sank through my flight suit and into the muscles of my back, wrapped around my ribs, and settled into the hollow of my chest like something alive had crawled inside and curled up against my lungs.
My breath condensed in front of my face.
My spots prickled, the tiny muscles beneath the skin contracting the way they did when my body registered a predator nearby.
Something older than danger. Something my Felarii instincts didn't have a name for.
The smell hit next. Ozone. Sharp and mineral, the way the air tasted after a lightning strike. It cut through the grease and recycled staleness of the shaft and filled my sinuses with a chemical brightness that made my teeth ache.
My claws tightened on the rungs. The metal groaned under the pressure.
I scanned the shaft above me. Below me. Nothing. No movement.
No sound except the drone of the processors and the distant, industrial heartbeat of the station. But my ears were pinned flat against my skull, and my tail had gone rigid beneath my suit, and every strand of hair on my arms was standing straight up like the static charge before a hull breach.
Something was wrong. Something was wrong in a way my body understood before my brain caught up, and my body was screaming at me to climb faster, to find a sealed space, to put walls and locked doors between me and whatever was generating that cold.
I climbed. Hand over hand, claws biting metal, the capacitor banging against my ribs with every reach. The cold followed. It didn't intensify as I moved, didn't localize to one direction. It was everywhere. In the walls. In the air. In me.
I reached the vent panel and slammed it open with the heel of my hand. Rolled into the crawlspace. Pulled the panel shut behind me and crouched in the dark, my pupils dilating wide to capture every photon of ambient light, my breathing ragged and my skin prickling from scalp to tail-tip.
The cold retreated. Slowly, like a tide pulling back. The ozone thinned. The static charge faded from my arms. My spots relaxed. My tail uncurled from its rigid line and dropped into a low, restless sweep behind me.
I pressed my back against the wall of the crawlspace and made myself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Count the exhale.
Ground yourself. You're a pilot. You've handled decompression alarms and engine fires and the moment a fuel coupling cracks mid-jump and the stars stretch wrong outside the cockpit. You handle things. That's what you do.
But my hands were shaking when I pulled the capacitor from inside my jacket, and the hair on my arms was still raised, and deep in my chest, in the place where my heartbeat lived, something had shifted. Something new. Something I'd never carried before.
A pull. Faint. Directional.
Pointing down.
Toward the lower docks. Toward wherever the footsteps had gone.
I curled my tail around my own ankle, the way I did when I was trying to hold myself together, and stared at the dark wall of the crawlspace, and tried to convince myself the cold had been a malfunction.
A glitch in the atmospheric processors. A pocket of unfiltered gas from the planet below, leaking through a bad seal in the station's hull.
I didn't believe it.
Six weeks of hiding, and something had found me. Not the Consortium. Not a patrol or a scanner or a bounty tracker with my face on a datapad.
Something worse.
Something my blood already knows.