Jessa
Vain asked about the data drive his team had taken off me. What it was built to do. What would unlock it.
I told him it was storage and looked politely blank. A man holding an open book doesn’t ask you to read it to him; whatever his technicians had tried, Deyric’s encryption was holding. I banked it next to the codes.
The second interrogation was shorter. He opened with the codes. “Whatever you pulled from the routing network at Meridian, don’t imagine it’s still live. Tal’s access is revoked.”
I kept my face flat. That closed the cleanest path, not the only one. Deyric had mirrored the Meridian traffic before we left; if anyone could reconstruct a fresh handshake from the traffic and the Consortium architecture around it, he could.
Vain watched for a reaction. I gave him none.
Then he wanted specifics about the crew. Ship capabilities, combat strength, intelligence sources. I gave him what he’d already known or could verify: the Raptor’s class designation, the number of crew, the general armament.
I understated everything. Gave him the weapons complement from before Maris upgraded the targeting array. Crew roles that were technically accurate but said nothing about what the bonded pairs could do together.
Nothing about the shadow-meld. Nothing about what was forming between Serak and me. Nothing that mattered.
He thanked me politely and sent me back to my cell.
I kept building.
It took time.
I’d started before Vain called me back. On the first day, I talked to the woman three doors down through the gap between our doors during the twenty-two-minute patrol gaps. Nothing dangerous if a guard overheard. Nothing about escape.
Just her.
She hadn’t spoken to anyone in weeks. I spent most of a day talking into silence before I got one word back.
“Narev.”
Just the name.
I took it like a gift and gave her one back. “That’s a coastal name. Tell me about the boats.”
The next time she answered, it was three words.
By the third day, it was whole sentences.
“Small boats. For the fishing cooperatives. Three-person hulls, shallow draft.”
“You designed them?”
“I built them. My mother designed them.” A pause. “The boats come in covered in ice in winter. Three months of storms. We’d haul them in and rebuild what the sea broke.”
“Sounds like hard work.”
“It was good work. You built something, it went out on the water and it came back with food.” Her voice was still rough from disuse, but it no longer sounded borrowed. “Here they take things apart. I’d rather build.”
Patel took longer.
He was the young guard who escorted me most often. At first his finger stayed inside the trigger guard. Then it moved outside. Then the barrel stopped tracking my spine every time I turned a corner.
Small things.
I waited through three escorts before I used his name.
“Patel.”
He glanced sideways.
“There’s a woman three cells down from mine. She hasn’t spoken to anyone in weeks.”
“I know.”
He said it before he could stop himself.
“You’ve noticed.”
“I’m not supposed to notice.”
“But you do.”
He kept walking.
“Her name is Narev,” I said. “She built boats.”
That got a look.
Not cooperation. Not yet.
On the next escort he asked me a question under his breath about the three-attempt lockout on the level junctions. He already knew the answer. He wanted to know whether I did.
I answered correctly.
Two meal cycles later, nothing happened.
Then nothing happened again.
On the sixth day, a folded piece of paper came through the slot with my tray.
Compounds. Dosage numbers. Careful handwriting copied from a medical log by somebody terrified of being caught.
He’d also confirmed one thing I’d only inferred from the hardware: the holding cells weren’t recorded inside. Door states and corridor feeds only.
Patel wasn’t an ally because of one piece of paper.
He was a crack in a wall.
That was enough to start.
Vain kept calling me back for interviews. Not every day. Often enough that I stopped pretending each one was new.
Same questions, shifted half a degree.
How many people had seen the Meridian traffic. What Deyric could reconstruct. What Serak’s abilities actually were. Whether the Raptor had other sources inside the Consortium.
I gave him the same useless edges and kept the center to myself.
Sometimes he stopped interrogating and tried to recruit me instead. He talked about scale and control, about how someone who understood diplomatic systems should understand why the work would survive him, as though competence were a moral argument.
He wanted me lucid because I was useful. He wanted me talking because I understood systems. And under every question about Serak sat the same assumption: he would come.
Then I went back to the cell and kept building.
Narev gave me the lab wing on the seventh day.
“The biological containment protocols,” she said through the door gap. Her voice was stronger now. “There’s an override panel on the eastern wall of the main lab. I’ve watched the technicians enter the code during medical assessments. Four digits. They don’t cover the keypad.”
“You memorized it?”
“I memorized everything. I’ve been sitting in a cell for eleven months with nothing to do but watch and count.” A pause. “I’m a boat builder, Jessa. I notice how things are put together. And I notice how to take them apart.”
I banked the code.
The other levels were harder.
Patel escorted prisoners to the medical bay between them. Medical paperwork moved with the prisoners. The paperwork moved farther than we could.
Narev knew a name.
“Rynn. Akaruun. She still fights. They had to sedate her twice in the first month. Her mate is on the level above us. Kovac. They can hear each other through the vents sometimes.”
“Can you get a message to her?”
A long pause. “What kind?”
“The kind that tells her somebody is counting with her.”
The first message vanished.
Maybe the orderly dropped it. Maybe Rynn never saw it. Maybe she saw it and decided it was a trap.
We tried again.
The second message came back two medical rotations later.
A list of security-feed junction points on the holding level. A note that Kovac had an unsealed maintenance terminal behind his vent grate, left open after a repair call.
Rynn hadn’t been sedated twice because she was desperate.
She’d been testing the system.
By the end of the first week, I had people.
I did not have a plan.
That took the second week.
Narev’s containment code could pull staff toward the research wing, but only if someone could enter it when the station went into emergency mode.
Kovac’s maintenance terminal sat on the same eastern service subnet. In emergency mode it could reach the lab containment circuit as well as the eastern camera feeds. He could do both, but only once before the faults drew attention.
Patel could make the junction fail open with three bad codes, but he needed a patrol slot where the error looked like incompetence rather than sabotage.
Rynn could carry timing through the medical chain, but every message took hours and every extra message increased the chance somebody noticed there was a chain at all.
So we tested pieces without firing them.
A folded form went up a level and came back marked in the corner.
A medical rotation shifted by six minutes because Patel asked for a scanner recalibration.
Kovac touched the maintenance terminal long enough to confirm that the lab containment circuit and the eastern camera feeds both ran through the eastern junction, then put everything back exactly as he found it.
Slow. Complicated.
Logistics.
By the tenth day, the network could move information from my cell to the lab wing and up through the holding tiers.
By the twelfth, everybody knew only the piece they needed.
Narev: containment code.
Kovac: trigger the containment alarm, then ninety seconds of camera blindness when the station attack began.
Patel: the junction door open on a failure that looked accidental.
Rynn: timing and message route between levels.
Nobody had the whole map except me.
That mattered if one of us broke.
Vain interviewed me again on the twelfth day.
He still wanted Serak’s shadow mechanics.
He still wanted the details of what had been forming between us.
He got neither.
I came back to the cell and counted the next patrol.
Sometime during the thirteenth day, the air changed.
Not literally.
Something in me went taut.
Close.
Not a direction anymore. A location.
Here.
I stood so fast the edge of the bunk caught the back of my knees.
My hand went to the wall.
Cold metal first.
Then warmth.
Specific. Immediate. On the other side.
“Serak,” I whispered.
The warmth pressed back.
My hands had been trembling on and off since Meridian. I’d learned how to hide it by curling my fingers into my palms, by moving before anyone could look too closely, by giving my body another job.
The tremor stopped under my hands.
Not because I controlled it.
Because for the first time in nearly two weeks, something held me back.
The thing he wouldn’t name. The connection we’d been building through years of late watches and silence and every moment we’d both pretended was ordinary.
I stood there until my head cleared.
Then I stepped away and looked at the plan again.
Four guards between my cell and the comm hub. Three routes through the service corridors.
Narev’s containment code. Rynn’s security-feed map and message route. Kovac with the maintenance terminal. Patel with one door he could make fail open.
Serak was here.
Which meant the Raptor was close enough that the waiting had become a clock again.
Patel would come for the next escort in nineteen minutes.