Chapter 12 #2
He grinned, and the expression had a dangerous edge.
“For anyone else, yeah. But if someone won it, if I won it, the unmasking would happen on the biggest screen in the Empire. It’s a live feed, with millions watching.
I enter as the wildcard and win. Then I unmask and tell them everything on live feed. ”
She froze with her hands still inside the panel. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“I’m the highest-rated player in three generations.”
“You’ve been in exile for months.”
He shrugged. “I’m a warball player. The warball player. Just because they took me off the pitch doesn’t take that away.”
She shook her head and closed the panel, wiping her hands on a rag. “Even if you could pull it off—”
She pulled up one of the files they’d lifted from the Healer’s Hall and showed it on the screen in front of them. “Look at this. This player, Vaasiik T’Sevv, was set up to take a fall like you were. But he fought back. Filed formal complaints. Compiled evidence. He was going to testify.”
The file showed medical images, trajectory calculations, and security footage.
“He never made it to the tribunal,” she continued. “He died on the pitch mid-match. The official story was equipment failure during a tackle, but the file shows the angles are all wrong. Now look at this footage, taken by a fan.”
She played a quick clip, obviously taken from the stadium stands. It showed the moments just before T’Sevv fell, and a flash from the opposite stand just a second before.
“This was buried as well, but Fred found it,” she said. “The kill shot came from the stands. A sniper dressed up as a game-day accident.”
She folded her arms.
“This is what happens to the ones who try to talk. The moment you unmask and open your mouth on that live feed, they’ll put you down the same way they put T’Sevv down.
A shot from the stands, lost in the crowd noise, pinned on whoever’s convenient…
Purists, Terra First, take your pick. You’ll be dead before the cameras cut away. ”
Raaze’s jaw worked. “Then we need a different plan.”
“No, we need to adapt the plan,” she replied, thinking on her feet. There was a way to make this work. Just one.
“We need two halves,” she said. “Your half is the field. You enter as the wildcard and win. You unmask, but you don’t spill the evidence on the feed.
That’s just the hook that makes them all pay attention because you shouldn’t be there.
The evidence is the hammer, but it doesn’t get swung from the pitch. ”
She pulled up the Summer League database. “The R'Tev will be there. Their son is playing. While you’re on the field, I go to their box.”
His expression set, and he shook his head. “No, absolutely not.”
“Shut up and listen.” She told him, her voice sharp. “I make it clear that the evidence is on a dead man’s switch. If you don’t walk off that field alive, it plays on every screen in the stadium and every broadcast in the Empire. That’s what keeps you breathing.”
She leaned forward. “And while I have them in the room, I put terms to them. We don’t want silence, we want protection and compensation for the other players they’ve framed, the witnesses they’ve silenced, and all the families they’ve threatened.
If they agree, then we don’t talk. We don’t expose them in front of the entire galaxy.
If they refuse, the evidence plays and they’re ruined. ”
“No,” Raaze stood, towering over her. “You’re not going anywhere near the R’Tev. You stay on the ship. Non-negotiable.”
“The plan doesn’t work without both halves,” she insisted, glaring up at him. “Without me in that box, that wildcard entry is a suicide slot. You’ll die on that pitch. And without you on the pitch, they have no incentive to take my terms seriously.”
His expression hardened. “No. You stay on the ship. Nowhere near their box. Find another way.”
“There isn’t one.”
“I won’t put you in a room with them. You have no idea what they’re capable of.”
“I have a pretty good idea after what we found in those files.” She didn’t back up. She couldn’t. Not when every cell in her body remembered how he’d felt moving inside her less than an hour ago. “This is the only play that gives us leverage. You know I’m right. You hate it, but you know it.”
They glared at each other, the air between them almost crackling with tension. She could see the moment he realized she was right. His jaw clenched, his eyes darkening with frustration.
“I don’t like it,” he said finally.
“I know.”
“If anything happens to you—”
“It won’t.”
But even as she said it, her mind kept circling back to that moment when Fred had announced the security inquiry. The look on Raaze’s face. He’d known they were coming, and he hadn’t told her.
She set it aside again. They’d deal with that later, when this was over.
When there was time.
If there was time.
The station smelled like recycled air, rust, and… Cait frowned as she took a tentative sniff… Yeah, the lingering odor of wet socks.
She followed Raaze through the cramped corridors of KT-Seventeen, a frontier trading post that clung to the edge of legitimate space like a barnacle with commitment issues.
The lighting flickered in patterns that suggested either faulty wiring or a deliberate aesthetic choice, and she wasn’t sure which option was worse.
The station concourse opened up like a wound in the station’s belly, stalls jammed together under jury-rigged awnings that dripped condensation from the ceiling pipes.
Voices bounced off metal walls in a dozen languages, not one of them bothering to lower the volume.
An argument erupted near a parts stall, something about a cracked fuel coil, but nobody turned their heads.
She didn’t expect them to, deliberately keeping her gaze locked ahead.
Eye contact here meant you cared, and caring got you marked.
Raaze moved past her, his shoulder brushing her arm. She bit her lip as the contact sent a spark up her nerves that had nothing to do with the static charge in the air.
Heart rate elevated, Fred noted. Cortisol levels suggest you have slept four hours in the last cycle. Recommend immediate rest.
She sidestepped a Bretvikian merchant hauling a crate of something that clicked. I’m fine.
Logging that under Optimistic Inaccuracies. Also, the male two stalls back has been tracking you for the past seventy seconds. Probability of pickpocket: sixty-three percent. Probability of something worse: twelve percent.
And the other twenty-five?
He might just like redheads.
She snorted, drawing a glance from Raaze. He’d stopped at a stall selling secondhand clothing, the kind of place where everything came pre-stained, and nobody asked where it had been before. Casting an eye over the offerings, she decided that was probably for the best.
“Problem?” he asked.
“Nope,” she shook her head, but turned to glare at the potential pickpocket. He suddenly decided that there were other places far more interesting to be. “Just Fred being Fred.”
“Ah.”
He reached for the first jacket that didn’t look like it had been owned by a corpse. Testing the seams with thick fingers, he tugged at a reinforced shoulder.
She eyed the price tag. “You have a budget, remember?”
“I have taste,” he shot back, lips quirking. He flicked the tag and picked up a different jacket. It was more flamboyant, but the leather was cheaper and stiffer. Turning it inside out, he checked the lining. “This’ll do.”
He found some dark pants and held them up to his waist.
“Those will fall apart in a week,” she said.
“They’ll last three days. I only need two.” He didn’t glance at her. “We’re not moving in.”
He picked up a pair of boots, frowning as he turned them over and ran his thumb along the seam.
She’d expected… something else. Celebrity helplessness, maybe. The kind of performative indifference that said I’m too important to care about prices, and I want everyone to know it.
Rich people did that. Her father did that. Kian definitely did that.
But Raaze didn’t.
He moved like someone who’d learned to shop cheap long before he’d learned to shop expensive, and that caught her off guard more than it should have.
The vendor, a Heltarri with scales that shimmered between green and gold, took one look at the little pile and named an outrageous price.
Raaze shook his head. “Half that.”
“Seventy percent.”
“Sixty, and I don’t mention that the stitching on your ‘genuine kretaavic leather’ boots is clearly done by machine.”
The vendor’s scales rippled, either in annoyance or amusement; she couldn’t tell. “Done.”
He paid with credits she’d fronted him because he had literally nothing and moved on to the next stall.
The male following you has lost interest, Fred reported. He’s now tracking a couple on your left with visible jewelry. Amateurs.
“You look familiar,” the vendor said, frowning at Raaze, and her heart almost stopped.
Raaze just smiled, all easy charm with nothing behind it. “I get that a lot. Just got one of those faces, I guess.”
They moved on before the vendor could push it.
“That surprised me,” she murmured. “You got a good price for those.”
He glanced over, one eyebrow winged up. “Wasn’t always rolling in sponsor credits. Spent my first season eating protein paste and sleeping in hostels that charged by the hour. No spare credits, so I had to make things last. Learned to check seams a long time before I learned to check labels.”
He steered her toward a stall selling ration packs and basic supplies. She waited as he haggled with the vendor for supplies, trying to ignore the way he filled out the new leather jacket.
Heads up, Fred murmured. Four men in the far corner, leaning against a closed bay door, are running a sequential gaze pattern. You and Raaze. Then the door. Then you. I do not believe they are not in the market for noodles.
She didn’t look. “Armed?”
Two definitely. More than likely.
Shifting her weight, she let her jacket fall open enough to show the pistol grip and made eye contact with all four in sequence when Fred highlighted them in her lens.
There was something to be said for keeping your eyes to yourself, but there was also an argument for looking the bastards in the eye and saying, bring it on.
Raaze handed her one of the bags without comment. Their fingers brushed, and tingles washed over her skin. She tucked the protein bars into her bag and followed Raaze deeper into the market until he stopped at a display of secondhand data-pads.
“The price point on that one’s ridiculous,” she said, nodding toward a sleek model he’d picked up. “The processor’s two generations old, and the screen resolution is crap.”
He set it down without argument. “This one?”
Cheaper. Uglier. Probably more reliable.
“Better.”
He bought it.
They moved through three more stalls and picked up basic toiletries, a compact medical kit, and a multi-tool that Raaze tested before nodding approval. Everything he picked was efficient and practical.
“Do we have everything yet?” she asked finally, as they paused near a food vendor selling something that smelled like grilled meat and onions. At least she hoped they were onions…
Incoming data packet, Fred interrupted. Background processing complete on the Parac’Norr supply logistics.
She blinked in surprise. Have you been running that since we left?
I run many processes simultaneously. It’s one of my more charming qualities. The results are… irregular.
He pushed the data to her, and she flicked it up over her lens as Raaze haggled for their dinner.
Her frown deepened as she read. This was weird.
There were delivery windows that didn’t match standard scheduling and missed runs that nobody had followed up on.
She dug deeper and found supply manifests with gaps that suggested either incompetence or deliberate interference.
Someone was making it harder for supplies to reach Parac’Norr. Not impossible, just harder and slower. Which made it more expensive.
She filed it without mentioning it to Raaze.
Are you not going to tell him?
Not yet. I don’t know what it means.
It means someone with resources is deliberately constraining supply lines to a prison planet full of exiled Izaean. The implications are—
I said, not yet.
She folded her arms and thought over what she’d read as Raaze handed her a packet. It turned out to be some sort of bread wrap filled with grilled meat and, thank heavens, actual fried onions.
She was still thinking when they headed back to the ship.
If the plan worked… if Raaze won the Summer League wildcard match … if she successfully leveraged the R'Tev in their private box… if the evidence held and the dead man’s switch kept them both breathing.
And… that was a lot of ifs. But if they did all that, then his name got cleared. He got his life back. His career, fame, money… everything.
And she got… what?
A cleared registration and a ship that wasn’t flagged for harboring a fugitive. She’d go home, where Kian would be waiting with that smug expression he wore whenever she failed, and her father would shake his head with disappointment. Again.
Nothing would have changed.
Your silence has a specific quality, Fred said as they reached the ship. Would you like to discuss it?
No.
Would you like me to pretend I haven’t noticed it?
Yes.