3. Kalev
KALEV
Spuel is just how I remember it. As in, I wish I didn’t, but I digress.
The access logs don’t lie.
They never do. People lie. Systems can be made to. But the logs—the real ones, the ones buried three layers beneath the clearance you think is enough—those are honest in the way that dying men are. Blunt. Ugly. Unavoidable.
And what they’re telling me now, as I sit alone in the crawlspace of Spuel’s off-grid surveillance node, knee-deep in heat exhaust and static noise, is that the leak’s been whispering from inside the Earthling enclave for weeks. Maybe longer.
One terminal. Human enclave. ID tag rerouting with just enough finesse to avoid red flags but just enough sloppiness to leave a trail, like a kid covering their eyes and pretending no one can see them.
But I see you.
I highlight the signature fragment again. Trace its staggered rhythm. It doesn’t behave like enemy ops—there’s no greed in the data being funneled out. No coordinates sold. No military pings. It’s dust. Shipping anomalies. Door access codes. Stuff even smugglers would call boring.
This isn’t sabotage.
It’s protection.
I lean back on my heels, shoulder scraping the cold panel behind me, and exhale slow.
The smell in here’s a cocktail of fried circuits and synthetic lubricant, bitter and biting like the inside of a burned-out mech suit.
It fits. Everything here’s on the edge of collapse, but held together by stubborn will.
Just like her.
I start tailing her two days later.
Not officially. Command doesn’t know. I flagged the leak in the system, then buried it again. A dead-end note filed under “logistics anomaly” with a timestamp that predates my arrival.
They’ll see nothing. Hear nothing. Because I’m not writing reports anymore—I’m writing history.
The woman at Terminal 12-B isn’t a traitor. She’s not some deep plant for the Ataxian Coalition or a naive civilian playing spy games with military-grade fire.
She’s a survivor.
And I know the look of one.
The first time I see her in person, I’m crammed between two half-drunk dockhands in a customs queue, sweat soaking the back of my collar despite the chill in the station. She stands in front of her terminal, boots braced wide like she’s daring the floor to shift beneath her.
Leah Monroe.
Earth-born. Compact build. Sharp eyes. And a mouth that moves even when her voice doesn’t. I watch her reroute cargo on the fly, override bot pathways like she’s been in their guts before. Efficient. Clean.
But what strikes me isn’t her precision—it’s her restraint.
She flirts with the edge of what the system will allow, pulling just enough to keep herself and her enclave protected, but never tipping over. Never greed. Never panic. It’s surgical.
She reroutes water purifiers away from the League's preferred vendors toward an enclave-sanctioned clinic. She tags two crates of synthetic protein for “reinspection,” and those crates? They go missing later that cycle. I check. They end up redistributed among civilian shelters.
She’s covering people.
Even when it costs her.
I spend four days in Spuel’s underbelly. Civilian layers. Cafés, queue lines, transit nodes. I ditch the operative posture. Dial myself down from razor-edged Vakutan agent to worn-in, off-duty port tech. Slouch more. Smile less like it’s carved in granite.
She doesn’t notice me. At least, not as a threat.
But I notice everything.
The way she snarks at the scanner drones like they can hear her. The way she takes her stim-caf black and bitter from the same vendor stall every morning. The way she flinches—not visibly, but internally—every time armored boots echo near her station.
One afternoon, a sanitation drone sparks and drops from its rail above. She’s the only one who moves before the warning chime hits. One hand yanks a coworker back by the collar, the other grabs a crate support to keep it from tipping.
Fast reflexes. Faster instincts.
You don’t learn that. You survive it.
Alliance protocol says I should report her. Feed the data upstream. Let higher-ups decide if she’s a problem to be fixed or an asset to be flipped.
But protocol doesn’t know what it’s like to wake up soaked in blood you barely remember spilling. Protocol doesn’t dream in screams.
I’ve followed too many orders. Left too many bodies cold because someone said “greater good” like it was a cleansing prayer.
No.
This time, I make the call.
I won’t report her.
I’ll recruit her.
Which is, of course, going to be a bastard of a job. She’s smart. Guarded. Carries herself like someone who’s learned the cost of trust and pays in silence now.
So I need subtle.
I engineer a run-in at the Vakutan coffee shop two corridors from her terminal. Not the closer one—the one she uses when she’s dodging a headache and needs real caffeine. The barista knows her by name, but mispronounces it every time.
I show up twenty minutes before shift change. Civilian clothes. No badge. A datapad with half-real numbers and a forged inquiry from the maintenance division. I take a seat near the back, let the light catch just enough of my profile to make me memorable, but not threatening.
She walks in, scowling at her own boots like they’ve offended her.
The barista fumbles her name again.
“Laya? Tall cav-synth, no sweetener?”
“It’s Leah,” she says dryly, without missing a beat. “But sure, let’s make it weird. Again.”
I smirk behind my cup.
She notices me.
And just like that, her body language shifts. Not a freeze, not a flinch. Just a recalibration. Eyes scan. Shoulders tighten. She logs me like a file she might need later.
Good.
When she walks past, I glance up. Meet her eyes.
“Rough day?” I ask, casual. Not too curious.
She looks at me like I’m a malfunction she didn’t request.
“Does it look like I want conversation, or is this just your mating ritual?”
I blink, then laugh—genuine, sharp.
She doesn’t smile. But something in her posture uncoils a fraction.
“That bad?” I prod.
She shrugs. “I work logistics. The day they stop being bad is the day I check for signs I’ve died.”
I raise my cup. “To mutual suffering.”
“Cheers,” she mutters, and takes the seat across from me without asking. Like she’s daring me to flinch.
She sips her drink. Makes a face.
“Too hot?”
“No,” she says. “Too much existential dread. Burned the flavor right out of it.”
I laugh again. This woman’s all edges. But not in the way most people wield them—defensive, or performative. Leah wears her barbs like a second skin. They’re not decoration. They’re warning signs.
I like that.
“Let me guess,” she says, nodding to my pad. “Freight analytics. You’ve got the posture of someone who’s been elbow-deep in cargo algorithms all week.”
“Close,” I reply. “Station ops audit.”
“Yikes. Who’d you piss off?”
“Everyone.”
“Solid. Keep it up.”
We fall quiet for a moment, and I let it sit. Let her study me the way I’ve been studying her.
Her eyes are calculating. But tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t sleep off.
She finally says, “You from off-world?”
“Vakutan sector.”
“Figures. You’ve got that look.”
“What look?”
“The ‘I came here voluntarily and now I regret every life choice’ look.”
I grin. “You don’t even know my name.”
“Don’t need to. Regret’s universal.”
And just like that, we’re talking.
Not deeply. Not honestly. But the rhythm builds—back and forth, tension wrapped in sarcasm, wit hiding nerves neither of us wants to admit. She doesn’t trust me. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But she didn’t walk away.
That’s a start.
I don’t feel like I’m wearing someone else’s skin.
Just mine.
And hers?
Hers fits the space beside me far too well.