Chapter 14
Talia
My hand goes to the comm unit clipped at my hip, but the channel is already flooded.
Voices overlapping, Dexter's security teams calling positions, someone screaming about hull integrity in sector nine.
Zane's voice cuts through once, a single command I can't fully parse before it's swallowed by static.
The mark on my wrist flares hot. His adrenaline or mine, I can't tell anymore. They bleed into each other the way ink bleeds into water, and what's left is just a color I don't have a name for.
I should find him. That's the smart play, the safe play, the play that the woman I was twenty-five days ago would make without thinking. Find the powerful man. Stand behind him. Survive.
But my feet are already moving in the other direction.
Toward the debtor quarters.
The corridors are chaos. Station personnel running with purpose or running blind, some armed, some just fleeing.
I flatten myself into a service alcove as a squad of Dexter's security forces pounds past, their boots hitting the deck plates in unison, weapons charged and humming that high-pitched whine that sets my jaw on edge.
None of them look at me. I'm furniture. I'm wallpaper.
I'm the boss's woman, which means I'm either untouchable or irrelevant depending on who's doing the math.
The debtor quarters sit in the lower ring of Veridian-7, where the artificial gravity runs a fraction heavier and the air recyclers work a fraction harder and everything costs a fraction more from your body just to exist. The walls here are thinner, and I can hear things through them that I couldn't hear in Zane's quarters: the grinding of the water reclamation system, the distant percussion of the station's core keeping its ugly heart beating.
I round the corner into the main throughway and stop.
There are people here. Dozens of them, maybe more, clustered in the open space where the corridor widens into what passes for a communal area.
Debtors. My people. But they don't look like the debtors I left behind when Zane pulled me into his orbit.
They look organized. They look armed, some of them, with makeshift weapons cobbled together from maintenance tools and stripped-down panel fixtures.
And they look angry with a specific, directed fury that tells me someone has been stoking this fire long before today.
Kira stands at the center of them.
She's changed. Not physically, not really, though her hair is pulled back tight and there's something sharp and unfamiliar in the set of her shoulders.
The change is in her face. The fear is gone.
The careful, calculating survival that kept her alive in these quarters for months has been replaced by something incandescent, something that burns behind her eyes like a reactor running too hot.
She sees me. And the look she gives me could strip paint from a bulkhead.
"Look who crawled back." Her voice carries. She wants everyone to hear. "The Torrence pet, come to check on the livestock."
The words land in the center of my chest. I keep my feet planted. "Kira. What is this?"
"This is what happens when people stop waiting to be saved by the people selling them.
" She steps forward, and the crowd shifts with her, a single organism responding to its nerve center.
"The Vex are here, Talia. And when they take this station, the debts go away.
All of them. Every contract, every bond, every leash. Gone."
The murmur that runs through the crowd is hungry. I hear it in voices I recognize, people I shared ration packs with, people whose names I know, whose children I've watched sleep in the corridors when the quarters were too crowded.
"That's not how this works," I say. "The Vex aren't liberators. They're a syndicate. They'll just put new collars on you with different branding."
Kira's smile is a wound. "You chose them over us. You let Torrence mark you, let him dress you up and fuck you in his penthouse while we rot down here. You don't get to come back now and pretend you know what we need."
I absorb that. Let it settle into me alongside the truth of it, which is the part that makes it hard to breathe. Because she's not entirely wrong. I did choose. I chose Zane over this, over them, and the reasons I told myself were complicated, but the result was simple. I left.
"Kira, listen to me. The Vex operatives on this station don't care about your debts. They're using you."
"You chose them over us." She says it again, quieter this time, and the quietness is worse than the shouting. "Now watch what happens."
An explosion rocks the deck beneath us. Not close, but close enough that the lights flicker and several people stumble.
The alarms shift pitch, a higher frequency now, urgent, and through the nearest view port I can see the flash of weapons fire against the station's exterior hull, bright and silent in the vacuum.
The crowd surges. Kira turns away from me and toward them, raising her voice, and they move with her like water finding its channel. Toward the upper corridors. Toward the security checkpoints.
Toward a fight they cannot win.
I stand there for three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough to feel the station shudder again, long enough to watch people I know disappear around the corner with murder in their eyes and hope in their throats, long enough to understand that this is the moment.
Not the moment I choose Zane over them, or them over Zane.
The moment I stop pretending those are the only options.
I follow.
The corridors above the debtor quarters are already a war zone.
Dexter's security forces have established a barricade at the junction of the east and central corridors, and the Vex breach teams are pressing from two directions, squeezing toward the security hub like fingers closing into a fist. The fighting is loud and ugly and nothing like the choreographed violence I've seen on feeds.
It's smoke and sparks and the wet sound of rounds hitting bodies and the screaming, god, the screaming doesn't stop, it just layers, voice on top of voice until it becomes its own kind of white noise.
And then I see what the Vex are actually doing with the debtors.
Kira's people have flooded into the corridor from below, driven by the promises she fed them, and the Vex operatives are letting them through.
Not fighting alongside them. Letting them through.
Using them as a moving wall of bodies between themselves and Dexter's barricade.
The debtors push forward, some with their makeshift weapons, some with nothing but their hands and their rage, and the Vex advance behind them, firing over their shoulders, through the gaps between them.
Meat shields. They're using Kira's people as meat shields.
A woman I recognize stumbles and falls and the crowd surges over her. I lose sight of her in two seconds. A man I shared a water ration with last week takes a round in the shoulder and spins, and the Vex operative behind him doesn't even break stride, just steps over him and keeps firing.
My mark pulses so hard I think the skin might split. Zane is somewhere on this station feeling what I'm feeling, and what I'm feeling is something cold and clean and sharp, something that cuts through the panic and the noise and the smoke like a blade through silk.
I'm moving before I decide to move.
The corridors branch here, and I know the layout better than the Vex do. There's a service corridor that runs parallel to the main throughway, maintenance access, cramped and unlit, and it comes out thirty meters ahead of the barricade, behind the Vex advance line.
I run.
The service corridor smells like coolant and the particular metallic tang of station infrastructure that never sees a cleaning cycle.
I keep my hand on the wall and count junctions by feel.
The fighting sounds are muffled here, transmitted through the walls as vibrations more than noise, and for a few seconds it's almost quiet, almost peaceful, and I can hear my own breathing and it's steady.
That should scare me. I
t doesn't.
I come out of the service corridor into the junction near the main airlock, and that's where I find Astra.
She's pinned behind a structural support column, firing from cover at a Vex operative who has her flanked from an alcove fifteen meters ahead.
There's blood on her left side, a dark spread soaking through her tactical vest, and her shooting arm is steady but her face is grey.
She's hurt worse than the wound looks, I can tell.
I've watched her train. I've watched her body move with that liquid precision that makes violence look like mathematics.
Right now her movements are jagged, economical in the wrong way, the way you move when you're rationing what's left.
The Vex operative advances on her position. He's big, armored, professional in a way the others aren't. Not a foot soldier. Someone who came here to kill specific people, and Astra is apparently on his list.
He fires. She rolls. The round takes a chunk out of the column where her head was, and the debris catches her face, and she goes down on one knee, and he's moving, closing the distance, and she brings her weapon up but she's a half-second slow and they both know it.
There's a body on the floor between us. Station security, killed in the initial breach, his sidearm still in its holster. I see the weapon the way Astra taught me to see weapons: grip angle, charge indicator, safety position. Green light. Charged. Safety off because he died reaching for it.
I pick it up.
It's warm in my hand. Residual heat from the body beneath it, from the man who carried it and will never carry anything again. The grip is slightly too large for my fingers and I adjust without thinking, the way Astra showed me, settling the web of my thumb high against the backstrap.