Chapter 5 Zane
Zane
My hands won't stop shaking.
I killed a man eleven minutes ago and my hands won't stop, this fine tremor running through my fingers like current through a bad wire.
I watch them under the corridor lights, turning my palms up, studying the blood caught in the creases of my knuckles.
His blood. Blue-black under the overheads, already oxidizing to something darker where it dries against my skin.
I flex my fists closed. Open. Closed again.
The tremor doesn't stop.
The assassin had been waiting in the maintenance crawl between decks four and five. A stretch of corridor I shouldn't have been walking, except I'd taken the back route from the fabrication bay because I wanted three minutes alone with my own thoughts.
Three minutes without someone watching me for weakness.
Without Astra's security detail breathing down my collar.
Three minutes nearly got me killed.
He came from behind a junction box. Fast. Faster than he should have been, which told me stims, maybe military-grade neural acceleration.
The blade caught the light first, a matte-black edge that ate the glare instead of throwing it back, and then it was at my throat.
Would have opened me from ear to ear if I hadn't turned my head at the sound of his boot on the grating.
A sound so small it shouldn't have mattered.
Half an inch of metal flex under seventy kilos of killer, and that was the margin between me breathing and me bleeding out against the wall.
I got my forearm up. The blade bit through my jacket sleeve and into muscle, a hot line of nothing that would become agony in about thirty seconds when the adrenaline ebbed.
I didn't have thirty seconds. I had the half-breath between his backswing and my counter, and I used it the way my father taught me: dirty.
Thumbs in the eyes. The heel of my palm up into the cartilage of his nose.
The wet crunch of it giving way, and then my hand was on his wrist, twisting until something snapped, and the blade fell, and I caught it.
Caught it and put it through the soft space under his jaw.
He died looking surprised.
They always look surprised, the ones who come for you expecting the heir, the boy playing at power. Not expecting the thing Malachar Torrence built out of a boy across twenty-three years of lessons that left marks.
I pulled the blade free. Wiped it on his jacket. Checked the body for identification I knew I wouldn't find. Then I stood there in the corridor with a dead man at my feet and blood on my hands and the shaking started.
Not fear.
I know what fear feels like in my body and this isn't it. This is the aftermath of the machine winding down, combat chemistry bleeding out of my system, leaving me standing in the wreckage of my own biology.
The body doing its housekeeping while the mind is still three seconds behind, still in the fight, still feeling the blade's edge against the skin of my throat.
Someone on the inside. That's what I keep coming back to, standing here outside her door at something past midnight.
The assassin knew my schedule. Knew I'd be in the fabrication bay.
Knew the route I take when I want to walk alone.
Someone in my house told a stranger where to find me, and that stranger almost opened my throat with a blade that doesn't show up on standard weapons scans.
I should be in the security hub. Should be with Astra, tearing through footage, locking sections, running the kind of protocols that make people disappear into interrogation rooms and come out cooperative or not at all.
Instead I'm standing outside her door.
I tell myself it's because she might have information.
Her father's connections. Marcus St. Laurent ran routes through contested space, knew people who dealt in the kind of weapons that don't appear on manifests.
The component in that blade looked station-manufactured.
If someone's building assassination tools on my station, in my manufacturing bays, there's a supply chain I can't see, and she might know something that helps me find it.
That's what I tell myself.
The truth is smaller and worse. I wanted to see her.
Wanted to stand in front of someone who would look at me without the careful blankness my people wear like armor, that practiced deference that means they're calculating how much danger they're in at any given moment.
I wanted eyes on me that held something other than fear.
The maintenance corridor is sealed when we arrive. Two of Astra's people stand at the entry, armed, faces blank. They look at Talia and their blankness tightens into something harder.
A debtor. With the boss.
At the crime scene.
I don't explain. I don't have to.
The body is where I left it, crumpled against the junction box where I'd pinned him.
Blood sprayed across the metal wall in an arc that maps the trajectory of the killing blow.
Under the corridor lights, it looks black.
Blue-black. The same color as the mark on Talia's wrist, and I hate that I notice that, hate the way my brain makes the connection without my permission.
She stops two steps inside the sealed area. Her breathing changes. Not fear.
I watch her eyes move over the scene the way mine did eleven minutes ago, but she's looking at different things. I looked for threats. She's looking at construction.
"The weapon," I say. I've placed it on a evidence tray near the body, the matte-black blade and its grip. "I need to know where it came from."
She crosses the space and crouches beside the tray. Doesn't touch. Studies. Her head tilts, and I see her fingers twitch, the instinct to pick it up and turn it competing with the awareness that this is evidence.
"Can I?"
I nod.
She picks up the blade with her fingertips along the spine, the way someone handles a tool, not a weapon. Turns it. Examines the join between blade and grip. Brings it close to her eyes, and then I see it happen.
The shift. Mechanic's eyes. She's not looking at a murder weapon anymore. She's looking at a piece of engineering.
"The alloy's standard enough," she says, mostly to herself. "Composite laminate over a carbide core. You can buy this grade from any arms dealer in the sector." She rotates it again. "But this."
Her fingernail taps a small component set into the grip. A power cell, barely visible, wired into the blade's edge. I'd seen it, assumed it was some kind of vibration emitter. Standard for military knives.
"This isn't a vibration emitter," she says, confirming my assumption was wrong. "It's a resonance disruptor. Tuned to interfere with personal shield harmonics. This blade was designed to cut through station-grade body armor."
"I know what it does. I need to know where it came from."
She pulls the component free with a twist, holds it up to the light. A small cylinder, no bigger than the tip of her little finger. She turns it between her thumb and forefinger, and her expression changes.
"This wasn't smuggled in." She says it with absolute certainty.
"The casing is injection-molded. See this seam line?
That's characteristic of the compression molds you use.
Series 40 or higher. And this micro-stamp.
" She angles it so I can see a series of tiny marks along the edge of the casing.
"That's a batch identifier. Standard practice for quality control in station manufacturing.
Someone was sloppy, didn't have the tools to file it off probably. "
The cold that moves through me has nothing to do with the corridor temperature.
"That's impossible. We control manufacturing."
She looks up from the component and meets my eyes. "Clearly you don't."
The words sit in the air between us. Not an accusation. Not a challenge. Just a fact, delivered with the precision of someone who reads machines better than people. Someone who has no reason to soften the truth because she has nothing to gain from my comfort.
I look at the body. The dead man wears nondescript clothes, no station affiliation visible, but I've already found the marks.
Subtle scarification along the inside of his left forearm, a pattern of raised lines that looks decorative to anyone who hasn't spent years learning the visual language of syndicate branding.
Zalt Consortium.
Low-level operative, probably contract. Expendable enough to send on a suicide run, valuable enough to arm with a purpose-built weapon.
"They're testing whether I can hold what I inherited," I say, and I don't know why I'm saying it to her. To the debtor girl crouched beside a dead man's weapon in a maintenance corridor at midnight. But the words come out and they taste like the truth.
"Can you?" she asks.
I look at my hands. The shaking has stopped. The blood is drying in the creases.
Astra stands at the central console with her arms crossed and her jaw set, and the fury coming off her is almost visible.
A shimmer in the air, heat haze off a reactor core.
Two of her lieutenants flank her, both of them working terminals, running the kind of systematic lockdown that will make the station feel like a closed fist by morning.
She sees me and her expression shifts. Relief, then rage, then control, layered over each other in the space of a second.
"You should have waited for the escort detail," she says.
"Noted."
"You should have commed me the second it happened."
"Also noted."
"You're hurt."
"Handled."
Her eyes slide past me to Talia, and the control she's been wearing cracks into something colder. Her body goes still in the way that means she's assessing a threat, running the math on danger versus utility, and the result is written on her face before she speaks.
"She's a security risk."
"She just spotted something your team missed."