Chapter 13
MARA
I’ve never run with my whole heart before.
It’s a stupid thought to have while ducking through a crumbling corridor of a half-abandoned medical deck, but it hits me anyway.
I’ve run before, sure. Away from assignments.
Away from bad calls and worse lovers. Away from that dark void in the back of my skull that sometimes whispers maybe this is all you’ll ever be.
But this—this is different.
I’m not just running from something now.
I’m running with someone.
“Tactical bypass up ahead,” I shout behind me, breath catching in my throat. “Left vent shaft—twenty meters!”
Tatek doesn’t question. Just follows. Heavy boots pounding against the metal as I swing low under a collapsed structural brace and slide sideways into the breach. My fingers scrape against the edge of the hatch. Blood smears the panel when I shove it open, but I barely register it.
Pain is background noise now.
The shaft’s narrow, barely a crawlspace. A drip in the ceiling has been leaking some kind of fluid that smells like burned plastic and regret. I shove through it anyway, wiping my palm against my thigh, and keep crawling.
“You sure this is the right way?” Tatek’s voice is close behind. Clipped. Controlled.
I snort. “Would I have dragged us through melted sewage if I wasn’t sure?”
A beat.
“I like that your definition of sure still includes melted sewage.”
We keep moving.
The shaft dumps out into a side corridor beneath the station’s data vault—a place only system engineers and audit enforcers ever really access. The kind of place where ‘security sweep’ doesn’t mean guards. It means algorithms. Sentries. Infrared. Pressure pads.
Good.
People are easier to lie to than machines.
But I know these systems.
I spent three years designing audit routes before they transferred me to civilian compliance. I know how the logic trees think. I know where they lag. Where the firewalls aren’t actually walls. Where the sensors don’t reach.
And for the first time since the alarms started, I feel like we might actually make it.
I stop at the corridor’s mouth and pull out the chip spike I built back when I still thought I’d be using it to impress a couple of rogue technarchs. Turns out it’s better for survival.
Tatek crouches beside me, eyes scanning everything.
“You’ve done this before,” he murmurs.
I don’t look at him. “Didn’t think I’d be doing it with a warborn looking over my shoulder.”
“Regret it?”
I pause.
Let myself feel the weight of the question.
“No,” I say. “Not for a second.”
I slide the spike into the access port. The lights along the corridor flicker, then dim—just enough for me to know the sensor grid has gone passive. I smirk.
“Go.”
We move in tandem now.
No more me trailing him like some reluctant sidekick.
I’m leading. Tatek moves like he’s ready to tear apart anything that gets between us and freedom, but he doesn’t question me.
Not once. Not when I reroute us through an abandoned sleep block.
Not when I halt at a junction that looks clear but feels wrong.
I can feel him behind me—heat, presence, the low, steady hum of a body prepared for war—and it’s not pressure. It’s certainty.
The corridor tilts left into a sealed audit hall. I tap a command into my wristpad, fingers flying. The code hits a snag, then slides through.
We’re in.
Doors hiss open.
Tatek’s breath is right behind me.
“I’ve seen agents choke on less complicated locks,” he says.
I glance back. “That’s because agents think rules are holy.”
“And you?”
“I think rules are suggestions with bad social skills.”
He laughs, quiet but real.
And something inside me stretches. Warms.
We slip into the vault. The air is cooler here, thinner. Recycled too many times without replacement. The silence isn’t just quiet—it’s deliberate. Designed to remind you this is where secrets come to sleep.
I move fast.
I know the layout—two terminals near the back, one control panel wired directly into the surveillance ring.
If I can loop the secondary feed for forty-five seconds, we’ll have a gap long enough to drop down into the waste processing line.
Crude. Dangerous. But it bypasses three whole sectors of surveillance and dumps us two decks from the drone bay.
I plug in.
Tatek paces, scanning the shadows.
As my fingers fly, I feel it creeping back in.
Not fear.
Memory.
Of last night.
Of his mouth against my shoulder. His breath on my skin. The way he said my name like it hurt. Like he was afraid of what it meant and still couldn’t stop.
It wasn’t just sex.
It wasn’t just tension finally boiling over.
It was a door opening.
I didn’t want it to.
I thought I’d closed those doors forever.
But then there he was. Brutal and beautiful and so damn careful, like I was something worth breaking himself for.
He hasn’t said it. Not in words.
But I know.
He won’t betray me.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
And that’s… terrifying.
The last time I trusted someone like this, I woke up with a tracking chip in my spine and a reassignment order with my name spelled wrong.
But Tatek—he doesn’t flinch from danger. He walks into it for me. With me.
I glance up.
He’s watching me.
Not just the way someone on alert watches a corridor.
He’s watching me.
Like I’m the only thing in the room that matters.
The system pings.
Access granted.
“I’ve got it,” I whisper.
He nods once, stepping in beside me. We move to the chute that leads into waste routing. It smells worse than the shaft from earlier. Chemical decay. Burned oil. Rust and heat.
He lowers himself first, then reaches up.
I hesitate.
Just for a second.
Then take his hand.
He doesn’t pull.
He guides.
And I follow.
I follow him down into the chute, boots sliding against curved alloy slick with condensation and something I don’t want to think about.
My weight catches at the elbow of the pipe, and I brace with one hand, wincing as metal scrapes skin.
No time to bleed. We land hard in a maintenance access tunnel, low-ceilinged and thrumming faintly with static discharge.
Tatek checks the corner first, then looks back at me. “Straight shot through this tunnel. Should feed us out near the subgrid relay hub.”
“Where the emergency bypass ports are,” I add, breathless.
He nods. “Exactly.”
We move fast. Faster than the rumble in the pipes above us says we should. The station’s not screaming yet, but it’s clearing its throat. Surveillance density’s rising. I can feel it in the way the walls seem to buzz. Like they’re watching.
We’re halfway through the access crawl when it hits—a deep, blaring siren echoing through the vent shafts above our heads. Not an alert. Not a general lockdown. Something else.
Fire.
We both freeze.
“That’s three decks up,” he says, voice low.
I swipe to my pad, call up the overlay. “Containment unit in Sector Six just pinged with an active ignition flag. Heat spike. Might be accidental, might be cover.”
“Either way, patrols will divert.”
He turns to me, jaw tight. “We split.”
“No.”
“It’s temporary. I’ll loop back. You hit the data cluster, plant the false trail. I’ll keep their eyes on me.”
I hate it.
Every muscle in my body rebels at the thought of being apart from him, even for a second. Not because I don’t trust him to come back—but because I trust him too much to let me go if things go sideways.
But he’s right.
I’ve worked these systems. The data cluster's firewalls are ten levels deep and slippery. If I’m going to inject a false path into Obol’s trace algorithm, I need every second the diversion can buy us. I won’t get a second shot.
“Two minutes,” I whisper.
His nod is solemn. “Less if I can help it.”
And just like that, he slips into the shadows of a cross-tunnel and vanishes like smoke.
My chest contracts the second he’s gone.
I run.
The cluster is located on the mezzanine above the reactor shell, tucked behind a disused gravity modulator that's been humming wrong for years. Most engineers avoid it. That works in my favor.
I vault a guard rail, land on a grated platform that vibrates under my weight. The room smells like ionized metal and dying power—burnt circuits and cold air.
I reach the terminal.
Fingers fly.
The code fights me.
Of course it does. Obol doesn't make this easy. Each level I pass throws back echoes of my own identity logs, timestamps of interactions they’ve already flagged. I dig deep, rerouting command strings through a dead handler profile I buried in the system months ago.
Ninety seconds.
Come on, come on.
The fake path begins compiling—my biometric trail, altered. Shifted. It’ll show me bypassing containment, rerouting through a maintenance scaffold in a completely different wing.
It’ll buy us time.
Maybe enough.
I’m halfway through the overwrite when the sound hits me.
Boots.
Two sets.
Close.
Too close.
I turn just as they round the bulkhead—fully armored, visors lit, Coalition insignia glinting in the low light.
“Hands where I can see them,” one barks.
My fingers twitch.
I could reach for the blade in my boot. I could dive. Scramble. Claw.
But they’d expect that.
So I don’t fight.
I lift my hands, slowly. Step away from the terminal.
“Easy,” I say, keeping my voice light. “I’m just here to recalibrate relay logs. You know how fussy they get.”
The taller one sneers. “This relay’s been off-grid for cycles.”
“Well,” I quip, “maybe that’s the problem.”
They move in.
I take a step back, letting them think they’ve got me cornered. One circles left, the other right, trying to box me in against the rail.
Just a little more time.
The file transfer is still active. I can’t let them shut it down yet.
I stall.
“How’d you two pull cluster duty?” I ask. “Lose a bet?”
“Shut up,” the short one snaps.
Touchy.
I keep talking. “Because I’ve seen where the rest of the squads are headed. Emergency routes, active sweep zones. And they stuck you in the dead wing?”
I see the flicker of doubt pass between them.
I’m winning. Slowly.
But not fast enough.
Because the tall one taps his comm.
“Control, we’ve got a breach—”
The words don’t finish.
The world shifts.
It’s like gravity forgets what direction is. The floor yanks sideways, then up, then in, warping around us like a badly rendered sim. The guards stumble, caught off balance. One slams into the bulkhead. The other flails, tries to catch himself—and goes over the rail.
I grab the console to stay upright.
And then I see him.
Tatek, at the far end of the mezzanine, crouched beside an exposed grav-field coil with one hand still on the disruptor feed.
Of course.
Of course he didn’t come back with guns.
He came back with strategy.
He meets my eyes.
No words.
None needed.
He’s already moving.
He crosses the space between us in three strides, catches my arm just as the system begins to stabilize and pulls me back toward the vent corridor we came through.
“You alright?” he asks, voice low and clipped.
“Fine,” I manage.
But I’m not.
Not really.
Not because of the guards. Not because of the brush with danger. Not even because the file injection didn’t finish—it did.
I’m shaken because the moment he was gone, I felt it. Really felt it. That split-second absence where the world felt half-lit and off-center.
It was two minutes.
Maybe less.
But I missed him like I’d lost something vital.
I don’t say that.
I just walk beside him, fast and quiet, until we reach the lower tunnel again. He ducks in first. I follow.
And when he pauses at a junction to check the sweep vector, I grip his sleeve.
Just for a second.
Longer than I need to.
His eyes flick to mine.
He says nothing.
But he doesn’t pull away either.