Chapter 4
LONARI
The wilderness has a way of making introductions honest.
No titles. No handshakes. No bullshit. You meet somebody out here and you get the raw version—fear sweat, shaking hands, breath that tastes like copper, eyes that either track threats or don’t.
Jordan’s eyes track. Even when she’s terrified, they keep moving, skimming the ridgelines, the wash walls, my hands, my throat, the pinned inmate under my boot like she’s building a math problem she intends to survive.
She’s got grit. I respect grit. I also don’t trust it.
“Move,” I tell her, because the longer we stand still, the more likely those quiet “Vakutans” send a sweep team outside the station and turn this wash into a grave.
She shifts her weight and clutches her compad like it’s a talisman. “Where?”
“Not here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I look at her—small human, wiry, dust in her hair, eyes too bright in the thin light—and I feel something ugly in my chest that I haven’t felt in a long time.
Not pity. Not softness. Something like… irritation at the universe for dropping her into my lap right now, like I don’t already have enough problems.
“You want an answer?” I say, keeping my voice low. “We go sideways. We get out of sight. Then we talk. Otherwise you can stand here and argue while the next patrol finds us and you get shot for being conversational.”
Her mouth tightens, but she nods. Smart enough to choose survival over pride.
I shift my foot off the pinned inmate’s back and he tries to crawl. I let him crawl for exactly one heartbeat, then I grab his ankle and yank him flat again. His face smears in the dust and he makes a sound like a dying engine.
Jordan flinches.
I clock it. The flinch isn’t disgust. It’s something closer to alarm—like she’s recalibrating the kind of monster I am and trying to decide whether I’m the kind that eats her next.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” she asks, voice tight.
“Because he’s useful,” I say, and the inmate whimpers like he understands the word.
Jordan’s eyes narrow. “How?”
I crouch, grab the inmate’s jaw, and tilt his face up. His pupils are blown so wide they swallow the iris; there’s a faint chemical stink on his breath that burns the inside of my nose.
“Hey,” I say to him, conversational, like we’re two guys at a bar and he’s not half out of his mind. “You know the vent routes?”
He blinks slowly, drool cutting a line through dust on his chin.
“Listen to me,” I say, sharper now. “Do you know the vent routes to the station maintenance bays? Nod if you do. Shake your head if you don’t. This is the part where you pretend you’re still human.”
He stares.
Then—barely—he nods.
Jordan sucks in a breath. “You’re kidding.”
“No,” I say, and I stand, hauling the inmate up by the collar like he weighs nothing. He’s all bones and chemical hunger, light in my grip, and he shakes as I drag him along.
Jordan stares at my hand on his collar. “You’re… bringing him?”
“Yeah,” I say. “He’s our map. Also our decoy, if we need one.”
Her expression hardens. “That’s—”
“Practical,” I finish for her. “Welcome to Yatori.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it again, jaw flexing like she’s chewing on words she doesn’t want to swallow. Finally she says, “Fine. But if he tries anything—”
“I already killed two,” I remind her, and my voice comes out flatter than I mean it to. “He knows the rules.”
We move.
I keep us in the wash for a few minutes, then angle up through a narrow cut where the rock walls squeeze close enough to block line of sight from above.
The stone here is warmer, sun-baked, rough under my palms when I brace to climb; it scrapes at my scales and drags dust into the grooves.
The air tastes like minerals and blood and that lingering ozone from the field, and every so often the wind shifts and carries the distant, amplified broadcast again—declaring execution, declaring righteousness, declaring a war it wants to start.
Jordan keeps glancing back toward the station like she expects it to follow her.
“Stop looking,” I tell her.
She shoots me a glare. “Excuse me for wanting to know if the murder building is still murdering.”
“It is,” I say. “Looking won’t change it.”
“It might change what I do next.”
I pause long enough to face her fully, letting the inmate sag against the rock behind me. Jordan’s chest rises and falls fast; her cheeks are flushed from running, her lips dry and cracked, eyes bright with anger trying to cover fear.
“You want to do something next?” I ask. “Good. Then you stay alive long enough to do it. That’s the deal.”
She holds my gaze. For a second she looks like she wants to spit in my face.
Instead she asks, quieter, “Why are you helping me?”
I could lie. I’ve lied to survive. I’ve lied to win. But out here the air strips lies down to bone.
“Because you’ve got something they want,” I say. “And because you’re not drooling on yourself like everybody else. Those are my two reasons. Don’t make it poetic.”
Jordan’s mouth twitches, like she hates that she almost smiled. “Fair.”
I nod once. “Now talk. What did you pull?”
She shifts her bag strap and presses her palm to her chest where something hard sits under fabric. “Partial archive. Docking logs, biometric scans, encrypted transmissions. Some of it was still downloading when they blew the door.”
“How much is partial?”
“Eighty-three percent,” she says immediately, like she memorized the number to keep herself from screaming.
I whistle softly. “That’s a lot of truth for somebody with a tier-three clearance.”
She glares. “I’m good at my job.”
“Yeah,” I say, and there’s something in my voice that makes her eyes flick away for half a second. “I noticed.”
We crest a ridge and the station comes back into view, smaller now but still glaring against the bleak landscape. Smoke threads from vents. Tiny flashes of light bloom and vanish along its exterior where dropships have docked. The open field is chaos—bodies, movement, dust, gunfire.
And above it all, that cruiser hangs like a judge.
Jordan lifts her compad and taps at it again, like stubbornness will force the universe to cooperate.
“Any luck?” I ask.
She shakes her head, furious. “Holonet’s dead. Entanglement relay won’t handshake. Emergency transponders aren’t even pretending. They’re suppressing outbound traffic with signal masking.”
“Military kit,” I say.
“Yeah,” she snaps. “Which means whoever’s doing this came prepared. Which means—”
“Means you can’t call for help,” I finish. “Means you’re on your own.”
Her jaw clenches. “I hate being on my own.”
I glance at her. “No you don’t.”
She looks startled. “What?”
“You hate being forced,” I say. “You’re fine alone. You just want it to be your decision.”
Her eyes narrow, like she doesn’t like being seen that clearly.
“Okay, Freud,” she mutters.
I almost laugh. Almost.
Instead I point toward the station’s lower flank, where a narrow band of shadow marks a service corridor that runs under the hangar level. “We go in there.”
Jordan’s eyes widen. “Back in?”
“Not the front,” I say, like she’s insulting my intelligence. “There’s a maintenance route that feeds into an old shuttle bay.”
She stares. “There’s an old shuttle bay and you didn’t use it to escape five years ago?”
“I couldn’t,” I say, and the words come out harder than I expect.
Jordan’s brows lift. “Why not?”
I gesture at my body like it’s obvious. “Because the access is built for human-sized techs crawling through vents and sticking their hands in places they shouldn’t.
Because the manual controls are behind a panel that requires a hand small enough to fit.
Because the door is keyed to maintenance clearance and the keypad’s set at a height that assumes you’re not… this.”
I spread my arms slightly.
Jordan stares at me for a beat, then her expression shifts into something infuriatingly close to amusement. “So you’ve been sitting on a getaway car for five years and you couldn’t reach the keys.”
I lean toward her, voice low. “You wanna keep breathing, you don’t laugh at me right now.”
She presses her lips together, clearly trying not to smile. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s just—”
“It’s just what?” I ask.
“It’s just the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” she says, then immediately sobers as another explosion rattles the horizon. “But okay. Fine. Shuttle bay. How do we get there without getting shot?”
Now we’re talking.
I pull Jordan closer to the ridge edge and point out the terrain like I’m giving a tour of hell.
“Turrets sweep the approaches in arcs. They’ll still shoot if the control system isn’t fully compromised.
But their range has dead pockets—shadows cast by the station’s own structural supports. We stay inside those pockets.”
Jordan squints. “How do you know the turret pattern?”
I give her a look. “I’ve been alive out here, haven’t I?”
She swallows. “Right.”
“And those troops,” I continue, nodding toward the station’s lower doors where armored figures move in and out, “they’ll start patrol sweeps once they finish inside. They’ll work in pairs or threes. They’ll loop clockwise because that’s how soldiers are trained to clear perimeter structures.”
Jordan glances at the troops, eyes sharp. “They’re not soldiers,” she says, almost to herself. “They’re moving like—like contractors.”
“Like professionals who don’t care about glory,” I agree. “Which means they care about efficiency. Which means their patrols will be predictable.”
She looks at me. “You’re… good at this.”
I shrug like I don’t care. “You get good or you get dead.”
The drugged inmate starts to sag harder, muttering nonsense. I squeeze his collar. “Stay awake,” I tell him. “You fall asleep, you die.”
He whimpers.
Jordan watches, her expression troubled, then she shakes it off like she’s slapping herself awake.
“Okay,” she says. “We go in through maintenance. We find the bay. I can fit where you can’t.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Now you see why I’m helping you.”