6. Leah
LEAH
I’ve had nightmares like this.
Narrow corridor. Harsh light. Dead air. Boots in the distance.
The only difference is I’m not nine this time, and there’s no closet to hide in.
Not that hiding worked, anyway.
I press my shoulder against the bulkhead, heartbeat doing double-time under my ribs. The corridor's just wide enough for two bodies to pass without brushing—if one of them doesn’t breathe.
I breathe anyway.
Because I have to. Because I know what happens when you lock yourself inside your own panic.
My palms are slick inside the gloves. The panel at my side clicks once, twice, as the terminal spools up to link. Its dull glow flickers across the seam of my boot. I can smell ozone, coolant, and whatever passed for a cleaning solvent here—a mix of citrus and denial.
“Kalev,” I whisper, just loud enough for the comm.
“I see you,” his voice comes through, low and level. “Hold position. Two guards crossing behind the G-row crate stack. You’re in their shadow line. Don’t move until I say.”
The air feels tighter.
I nod, like he can see me, even though I know he can’t.
Movement up the hall. Clipped boots on steel grates. Heavy gait. Grolgath? No, too even. Not heavy enough. Human patrol, probably League-aligned. Still a problem.
I inhale through my nose. Count five seconds. Exhale through parted lips.
Don’t lock up.
Don’t go back.
Don’t be nine years old with blood under the door and your father’s scream echoing through carbon-fiber walls.
You’re Leah Monroe.
You’re alive.
You’re trained.
Sort of.
And you have exactly eighty-four seconds before the window slams shut.
The patrol slows.
One of them pauses to key something into the central access panel—ten meters up, behind the floodlight.
I can see the edge of his sleeve from my angle.
I know this uniform. Know how the elbow creases when someone’s fidgeting.
Know what it means when someone’s just wasting time instead of doing their damn job.
He’s bored.
Good.
“Kalev,” I say again, quiet. “New position. Panel check at central. If he turns?—”
“Noted. Give me three seconds.”
The comm goes silent.
Three full seconds of white-noise buzzing and boot taps and the edge of my own breath like a war drum in my skull.
Then—
“You’re clear. They’re rerouting to deck six.”
“How?”
“Diverted a coolant alarm. Subtle enough. Go now.”
I move.
Three steps to the terminal. Patch in. Fingers fly—muscle memory and months of paranoia lining up into something smooth. Beautiful, even.
The encryption handshake kicks in. One blink of the screen, then the access layer starts spooling through my bypass.
Kalev talked me through this already. But now that I’m doing it—actually doing it—my brain’s running ahead of the checklist, finding shortcuts, redundancies, burn points.
I’m not freezing.
I’m working.
And it’s kind of addicting.
“Seventy seconds,” Kalev says in my ear. “How’s it look?”
“Like someone designed this thing while drunk.”
“Welcome to Alliance architecture.”
I grin.
The feed splits—three-thread packet. Primary node marked for rotation. I yank the timestamp, reroute the checksum trace, then anchor the map overlay to a dummy ping ID I coded this morning during lunch break.
They’ll think it’s a broken toilet sensor.
“Forty seconds.”
“Almost there. You ever think about how many lives we stake on bad wiring and caffeine?”
“Only every damn day.”
The final fragment pulses green.
I breathe once. Tap the extraction key. The screen goes dark.
Done.
“All clear,” I whisper.
“Beautiful,” Kalev says. “Exit route two. Hold position another ten for good measure.”
I lean back against the panel. Let my eyes close.
Not all the way. Just enough.
The air’s still cold, still electric. But it’s mine now.
My fingers aren’t shaking.
My knees didn’t buckle.
No one died.
For the first time since I was nine years old, I don’t feel lucky.
I feel capable.
The exit’s as smooth as it ever gets.
I slip down the secondary tunnel, keep to the shadows, and don’t look back. There’s a lull in foot traffic. No sweepers. No alarms. No reason for anyone to notice me.
Kalev meets me outside a derelict freight lift, still wearing that neutral expression like he’s just waiting for someone to challenge him so he can destroy them with good manners.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
I hold up the data wafer between two fingers.
“Like butter.”
His mouth twitches. Not quite a smile.
“Nice work.”
That’s it.
No praise. No applause. No long-winded monologue about how I “proved myself.”
Just two words.
Nice work.
And weirdly?
That hits harder than anything else would’ve.
We stand there for a second.
Just existing in the same air.
I should say something. Joke, maybe. Break the tension.
But the tension’s not bad.
It’s... charged. Like a cable that hasn’t been plugged in yet but knows it’s close.
He looks at me like he’s seeing something he didn’t expect.
And I look at him like I can’t decide if I want to punch him or kiss him.
Which is annoying.
I hate when men are useful and hot. It’s unfair.
“I’ll process the data and send a dummy confirmation to your terminal by morning,” he says.
I nod. “You still planning to keep Oversight off our backs?”
“Working on it.”
“If you need help, I can forge a sensor de-sync report. Make it look like they glitched on their last tap.”
He tilts his head.
“Clever.”
“I’m not just a pretty face.”
“No,” he says, eyes lingering for a beat too long. “You’re really not.”
The air tightens.
I’m hyperaware of every inch between us.
Too much space. Not enough.
I cross my arms. “You trying to flirt or give me a heart attack?”
“Would one work better than the other?”
I narrow my eyes. “Get out of here before I upgrade my opinion of you.”
He turns, but there’s a grin tucked at the corner of his mouth.
And me?
I’m still standing there with my pulse in my throat and the distinct, dizzying feeling that this was never just about data.