Jessa
Nobody said anything as the briefing broke up. That was worse than shouting.
Deyric set up the workstation without looking at me. Three displays, a secure partition, the encrypted files queued and ready. He pointed at the chair, tapped the screen, and left.
Professional. Not one word that wasn’t about the work.
I sat down and started on the first encryption layer.
The patterns came back faster than I expected.
My fingers remembered before my brain caught up, the muscle memory of a sixteen-year-old watching over her father’s shoulder as he demonstrated the key rotation sequences.
Deyric already had the cipher material; what he lacked was the institutional map that told him which apparently meaningless fields were key references.
I hadn’t touched diplomatic encryption in over a decade. My hands didn’t care. They knew.
That was the thing about the past. You could walk away from it, change your name, build a new life on a ship full of people who didn’t ask where you came from.
But your hands remembered.
The rest of me was shaking. I kept my fingers moving on the console and didn’t let the tremor reach them.
Zevik found me twenty minutes in. He leaned in the doorway, feather crest flat, arms crossed. He stood there long enough that I knew he was working up to something, which for Zevik meant about four seconds.
“Consortium,” he said.
“Diplomatic corps. Not military.”
“There’s a difference?”
“To the people inside it, yes.” I kept my eyes on the display. “To the people it hurts, probably not.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You know, I crashed a transport on Velik Prime. Killed three of my squadron because I was showing off.” He shifted in the doorway, the iridescent feathers on his crest catching the light as he moved. “Everyone’s got something they carry. You’re not special.”
He pushed off the doorframe and walked away. His boots were loud in the corridor. Zevik didn’t do quiet exits.
I stared at the encryption and breathed.
The others came through over the next few hours. Not all at once, not coordinated, but steady enough that I knew the crew had talked among themselves before finding me separately.
Ressh sat on the edge of the table and told me names didn’t matter and to eat something.
Alix pulled up a chair, watched me work for a full minute, asked two questions about whether the Corren identity had any active trace to the Raptor, and left when I said no.
Solren appeared at my elbow between the second and third layers, checked the scrape on my forearm without a word, and walked out.
Deyric came back when I was between the first and second layers. He leaned over my shoulder, looked at the progress, and adjusted a data pathway I’d been routing around.
“The last system I built this clean was for a Consortium signals division,” he said. “They used it to find people who didn’t want to be found.”
He didn’t look at me. “Better that you’re the one taking this apart.”
He left. That was the most personal thing Deyric had ever said to me.
The second encryption layer was harder. Someone had modified the standard authentication, buried a private channel underneath the government system. My father’s department had never used anything this layered.
Whoever built this wanted it hidden from the diplomatic corps itself.
When I went to use the refresher, there was a protein bar on my bunk. The expensive kind, from the stash Maris kept in their quarters.
No note. Thoryn didn’t do notes.
Palm down on the table in the briefing. Protein bar on the bunk.
I went back to the encryption. Third layer.
It was late when I felt him in the doorway. Not heard. Felt.
The particular weight of Serak’s attention, the way the air in a room shifted when he was watching.
I kept working. He didn’t speak. The silence stretched past comfortable into something that had edges. I let it sit because I didn’t have the energy to be the one who broke it.
Not today.
“You haven’t said anything,” I said to my screen.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. That you’re angry. That you understand. Something.”
He came into the briefing room and sat at the table behind me. The chair scraped. He settled.
I didn’t turn around.
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the encryption blurred on my display and I stopped pretending to read it. Long enough that I started running the options for what his silence might mean, discarding the ones that didn’t fit, circling the ones that did.
“I’m not angry,” he said.
“But.”
“No but.” A pause that said otherwise. “Torrin checked out clean when you joined. I had no reason to dig further. And you did the work. You kept this crew running.”
“I should have been ready sooner.”
“Maybe.”
I turned around. He was sitting with his hands on the table. Dark at the knuckles.
I made myself look at his eyes. Black, pupil-less.
Nothing to hold onto. Never had been.
“Are we alright?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. The silence held, and this time it was a different kind from the comfortable ones we’d built between us at the late watch, different from the operational quiet during briefings. This one had a decision inside it, and I couldn’t tell which way it would break.
I waited. He looked at me and I held it.
The encryption hummed on the display behind me. Down the corridor the Raptor’s ventilation cycled, the ship doing the thing it always did, carrying us.
And I sat there with my whole future hanging on the next sentence out of his mouth.
“You and I are fine,” he said. Each word landed separately, spaced apart, as if he’d had to find them one at a time and wasn’t certain of any of them until he heard them out loud. “Get some sleep. You can finish the decryption in the morning.”
I almost said something. About the way he’d looked at me when the room was waiting for his verdict and he’d chosen to ask about the protocol instead of the secret. About what it had cost me to sit here all day absorbing everyone’s kindness while his was the only one I needed.
I went to my quarters and closed the door behind me.