Chapter 23
TATEK
The extraction ping hits me like a gut punch—fast and sudden, jarring enough to make my breath catch. It flashes red-hot across the back of my retina for a heartbeat, then disappears, leaving afterimages that pulse like bruises.
Mara.
I don’t need to decode the signal. I know the encryption. Hell, I built it.
And it’s broadcasting on a burn-only channel.
No trail.
No delay.
No coming back from it.
She lit the fuse.
And I’m late.
I slam the locker door shut hard enough that it rattles the frame, the sound sharp and hollow in the stillness of the room. The old wiring groans in response—a mechanical whine like the station itself resents being stirred.
Good.
Let it.
I jam the interface band onto my wrist, barely waiting for it to sync. My fingers fly across the command inputs, punching through old codes—obsolete, according to Command, but still active if you know how to coax them. Coalition never did figure out how deep Serat’s protocols went.
And neither did I.
The lift is too slow. I don’t even glance at it. I turn on my heel and sprint for the access shaft three corridors down—raw plating, no rail, just handholds and maintenance rungs. The kind of shortcut they don’t put on schematics anymore.
Mara’s already gone.
But I can still find her.
My boots clang against the rungs as I drop, metal-on-metal echoing down the shaft in hollow bursts. My breath is tight in my chest, not from exertion, but from pressure—the kind that wraps around your ribs and doesn’t let go. I hit the deck running.
The garden’s colder than it should be.
The power grid’s already gone through its reset cycle—twice, maybe more. I can feel it in the floor, in the buzz beneath my soles. The rhythm is off. Thinner. The base pulse of the station has changed. Mara’s override worked.
The lights in the corridor outside the memorial chamber flicker like they’re unsure who they answer to now.
The door hisses open before I reach it.
I slow.
Walk in.
The air inside is still holding her breath.
Dust hangs in the starlight like ash suspended mid-fall. The garden is dead quiet. No breeze. No footsteps. Just the glass pillars standing vigil, their etched names glowing faintly under the overheads’ struggling glow.
And Mara—
Gone.
No blood.
No scuffle.
Just an absence where she stood.
I move forward slowly, scanning the ground.
There—by the center monolith. A single bootprint, too small for any of the guards, pressed into the dust just hard enough to hold its shape.
She didn’t run.
She stood.
I crouch and press my hand against the edge of the print. The warmth hasn’t fully left it.
The static charge in the air prickles against my palm. There was a stun blast here, recent—still off-gassing from the polymer in the decking.
They moved fast.
Too fast.
Like they were waiting for her.
Which means someone sold her out.
I rise, jaw tight, and tap into the underlayer systems with my wristband.
The formal logs are scrubbed. Typical. But they’re never fast enough to clean the heat trails. Not if you know what to look for.
Thermal echoes. Pressure deltas. Environmental anomalies from corridor depressurization as they moved her offsite.
I route through the dampened diagnostic feedback Serat taught me how to crack—old-school stuff, pre-Obol. It pings like sonar across the deck grids.
She’s not in holding.
She’s in deep containment.
Sublevel H.
They’re scared of her.
They should be.
The corridor narrows as I descend, the air thick with recycled grit and the faint scent of solder—someone’s been down here recently, rerouting power, maybe prepping for lockdown. A haze clings to the edges of the light fixtures like old breath that never cleared.
The bulkheads close in around me. The sound of my steps dulls. The walls stop echoing. That’s how you know you’ve reached the real heart of a place—the parts not made for show. No windows. No access ports. Just steel and silence and a system that was never designed to let anyone out.
I follow the pulse of Mara’s presence like it’s tethered to my chest.
Each junction I pass has been magnet-sealed. No data trail. But the pressure sensors logged her weight, even if the grid tried to suppress it.
She walked this hall under her own power.
Head high.
Cuffs on.
Didn’t fight.
Didn’t run.
That’s Mara.
When I round the final corner, I see it—the forcefield, humming low and deadly across the corridor like a thin sheet of water catching too much current.
Beyond it, the cell.
Mara sits on the bench. Back straight. Hands bound. Eyes closed.
And three guards.
Two flank the outer corridor. Armed. Posture sharp. But they’re not the problem.
The third stands in the middle.
Watching her.
Hands folded.
Expression unreadable.
Serat.
His coat’s longer than it used to be. Trimmed in gold. A sign of rank. Not pride. He doesn’t wear pride.
His shoulders haven’t changed. Square. Anchored. His head turns the second I step into the light, and those gray eyes lock on mine with the precision of a targeting system.
A slow smile curls across his face.
Measured.
Not mocking.
Just… knowing.
“Well,” he says, voice smooth as ever. “Tatek Solan. I was wondering when you’d show up.”
Serat doesn’t move.
Doesn’t raise a weapon. Doesn’t call out commands. He just studies me, arms still folded behind his back like he’s watching a lesson unfold.
I take one more step forward, just inside the perimeter of the field’s hum. It crackles faintly against the cuffs on Mara’s wrists. I can see her now, full-on—eyes open, spine straight, chin lifted like a blade.
She doesn’t speak.
Doesn’t need to.
Serat breaks the silence first.
“You’ve come a long way from the citadel walls,” he says in Vakutan, the old dialect. The one they stopped teaching after the schism. “Far enough that I wonder if you even remember what we were.”
I keep my voice low. Even. “I remember everything.”
He nods once, slowly. “Then you know what’s coming.”
I do.
But I want to hear him say it.
Serat unfolds his arms and walks closer to the edge of the forcefield, close enough that the halo of it reflects off his jaw. His coat flares behind him with every measured step.
“She’s not what you think,” he says.
My fingers tighten around the grip at my hip, still holstered but not for long.
“She is exactly what I think.”
“She’s compromised.”
“She’s awake.”
He tilts his head. “So were a thousand others before her. And every one of them had to be corrected.”
“That what you call it now?” My voice cuts sharper than I intend. “Correction?”
“This isn’t a bond anymore, Tatek,” he says, soft. Still in Vakutan. “It’s an infection. You’re too close to see it. The system is fracturing, and she’s the crack that will split it in two.”
“She’s not the crack,” I say. “She’s the mirror.”
Serat’s expression doesn’t shift, but I catch the flicker of breath in his shoulders. A beat. A signal.
Behind him, the guards tense.
“I don’t want to fight you,” he says. “I taught you better than that.”
“You did.”
He waits.
I unclip the holster.
My hand closes around the grip.
I don’t raise it yet.
“You know what Vakutan means, Serat.”
He nods. “Memory.”
“It means memory.”
A beat.
Then I say it—soft, final:
“She is mine. I remember her. You will not take that from me.”
And I draw.
The moment my weapon clears the holster, everything changes.
Serat steps back, fluid and precise, motioning the guards into position.
I fire first—low burst, suppressing arc. One of the guards stumbles, shielding flickering. The other pivots to flank, rifle rising.
I roll left.
My shoulder clips the edge of the corridor, pain sparking down my arm. I don’t stop. I press into the momentum, come up firing.
Sparks erupt from the wall to my right—return fire chewing through the panel. I duck, pivot, vault over the secondary node housing. The hum of the forcefield swells behind me.
Mara hasn’t moved.
She knows better.
She’s watching.
Waiting.
Trusting.
I angle toward the node relay panel at the side of the corridor. A few more shots, well-placed, will overclock the circuit just enough to—
Boom.
Not a full breach, but enough to destabilize the dampeners. The lights overhead shatter in a ripple of static. The forcefield flickers. The guards fall back to adjust.
Serat steps into my path.
Unarmed.
“Don’t,” he says.
“I don’t need your permission,” I growl.
His hand moves—smooth, fast.
But I’m faster.
I close the distance in two strides, weapon to his chest.
He moves like he taught me.
That’s the first thing I notice as Serat lunges—close-in, tight-body, shoulders square, leading with the off-hand like he’s baiting me toward the left. It’s the oldest trick in his book.
And I fall for it.
Only half.
I shift into the feint but pivot my weight low, catching his forward wrist and twisting hard. There’s a crackle of cartilage, not enough to break, just realign—he grunts, then drives a knee toward my ribs.
I take the hit.
My body folds reflexively, air punched from my lungs, but I ride the momentum into a backward roll and kick out hard at the guard flanking my right.
The soldier goes down in a tangle of armor and gear.
The second guard raises a shock baton.
I shove my elbow into his throat—sharp, fast, a clean shot—and he stumbles. I twist the baton from his grip and whip it around, catching him in the back of the knee. He drops like a felled post.
Serat’s on me again before I can breathe.
His elbow drives toward my jaw—too fast to block—so I take it on the chin and let the impact spin me with it, using the motion to slide behind him. I hook his shoulder, slam his spine into the wall, and press my forearm into the pressure point below his ear.
He snarls. “You always were better at improvisation.”
“Yeah,” I hiss. “You always hated that.”
He drives his heel backward into my shin. The pain shoots straight up my leg, white-hot, but I don’t loosen my hold.
Instead, I rotate and slam him forward, cracking his shoulder into the control panel.
The forcefield flickers.
Behind it, Mara doesn’t move.
She’s watching.
Every breath. Every beat.
She doesn’t flinch.
That anchors me more than anything.
Serat throws his weight backward—tries to reverse the hold—but I duck and slam a stun charge into the back of his neck. It doesn’t knock him out. It’s not meant to.
Just enough to slow him down.
He sags, staggering, trying to recover.
I toss the baton aside.
“You’re going to regret this,” he growls.
“I already do,” I answer.
Then I shove him aside.
The override panel is locked behind a triple-layer biometric key—handprint, ocular, and command sigil. Designed for high-clearance officers and black-badge enforcers.
Which is to say: not me.
But I don’t need clearance.
I need leverage.
I slam my fist into the side housing—twice, then a third time. The panel groans, but the seal doesn’t pop.
So I draw my sidearm again and fire into the casing. Sparks spit in every direction. The console flickers, groaning like an injured thing. I grip the edge and rip.
Metal screams.
The inner seal shatters.
The forcefield drops.
I move through the opening before it’s finished dissipating, stepping through the ion haze.
And there she is.
On her knees.
Not broken.
Not bleeding.
Just—drained.
But her eyes find mine the second the hum fades.
And she doesn’t cry.
She just says, voice hoarse, steady:
“You came.”
I lower my weapon.
Step toward her.
And answer the only way that matters.
“Always.”