2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
MIRO
The identity scrub comes back clean, and Percy’s processors hum as he routes the data through a chain of proxy nodes while I bounce the output to a dead-end server three sectors away. It’s excessive for a job this small, but excessive is what keeps me breathing.
“Come on, Perce.” I tap the side of his casing. “Don’t stall on me now.”
The holographic display flickers, a brief stutter I’ve chosen to interpret as annoyance, and then the routing completes. Green confirmations scroll down the screen.
I close the client’s file without saving a copy.
No copies. No evidence. No trail.
The room is eight feet by ten. I measured it the day I moved in because knowing exactly how little space I was paying for felt important at the time. Now it’s just depressing.
It’s not safe. Not mine. Not…home.
My narrow bed is pushed against the far wall to maximize space.
Three screens are wired into a salvaged processing unit that complains whenever I push it too hard.
Cables snake across the floor in routes I’ve memorized so I can navigate them in the dark.
The overhead light died three weeks ago, but replacing it costs credits, and credits are currently reserved for more important things.
Like oxygen.
The atmospheric modifier clicks through another cycle on the shelf above my workstation. Eight credits a day disappear just keeping the air breathable enough for a human body to function.
Technically, Vahiri’s atmosphere can support human life without assistance. Technically, it can also support a person living on nutrient paste and recycled water. The distinction between surviving and functioning matters more in practice than it does on paper.
Without the modifier, symptoms start slowly.
Fatigue settles into my muscles first, turning every movement into work.
Then come the headaches, a steady pressure behind the eyes that builds until concentration becomes impossible.
Eventually the oxygen deficit catches up with everything else, and the problem stops being productivity and starts being consciousness.
There are six cartridges left in the storage compartment beneath the shelf. Each will last four days. I have twenty-four days of breathing, if I want to be honest with myself. I turn my attention to Percy’s display, reading the 312 credits I have in my account.
There were 340 yesterday.
I sigh and look away. The Splits earns its name. Corridors carved into rock branch and divide until the layout feels more accidental than planned. Housing units have been partitioned and subdivided so many times that the original floor plans might as well be mythology.
Someone argues in Terran Standard laced with Korvathi loanwords. A baby cries somewhere below. The ventilation rattles overhead, a system designed for a mining outpost and now expected to support thousands of humans packed into a space built for a fraction of that number.
The whole district exists in a state of managed collapse. Nobody here is comfortable. Most of us are one bad month away from disaster. Some of us are considerably closer than that.
Percy beeps — his completed-task tone — and the payment notification of forty credits appears a second later. Forty credits buys two days of protein packs from the dispensary on Level Six. Or half a cartridge of respiratory supplement.
I push my glasses up my nose and reach for the mug balanced on the edge of the workstation. It’s the only piece of ceramic I still own, and somehow it’s survived four identities and two assassination attempts. The tea inside has gone cold.
I drink it anyway.
“Good work, Perce.”
I rest my palm against his casing. Warmth radiates through the housing, evidence of the workload I just put him through. I leave my hand there for a moment longer than necessary. Percy is worth more than everything else in this room combined.
If someone put a gun to my head and told me to choose between Percy and my kidneys, they’d be getting a pair of slightly dehydrated organs.
A low hum answers as his casing settles into a lower power state. I pat the casing once and turn to the next item on a task list that never seems to get any shorter.
The security sweep takes longer than it should.
It always does.
The extra time is the price of staying alive.
For two years I’ve been checking and rechecking every system, every access point, every possible route someone might use to find me. At some point caution stopped being a choice and became instinct.
Today’s connection runs through Node Seven. Yesterday was Node Twelve. Tomorrow will be Node Three. Percy tracks the rotation schedule with an attention to detail that borders on obsession, which is one of the many reasons I love him.
Every node is another borrowed corner of the Splits’ network, another place to disappear for a few hours.
Asking permission isn’t an option. Permission requires paperwork. Paperwork requires a name. A name is how Helix Corp finds me again.
The proximity alerts glow green on the secondary screen.
Nothing outside my door.
Nothing in the ventilation duct above the stairwell except the maintenance drone that rattled through earlier. No unusual communication traffic within two hundred meters. Most people would call it uneventful. I call it perfect.
I check it all twice. Once because discipline keeps me alive. The second time because there’s a baseline hum of adrenaline in my system that never fully dissipates, shaped by two occasions when the alerts failed to warn me in time.
The first: second week in The Splits. A drunk neighbor tripped the motion sensor outside my door, and I had a knife drawn and my spine pressed flat against the wall before my conscious brain caught up.
The footsteps were uneven. The air beyond the door reeked of cheap stimulants.
Not the measured approach of a corporate extraction team.
The second: a maintenance drone running diagnostics on the corridor’s power grid at three in the morning.
I sat in the dark with Percy clutched against my chest and every escape route mapped three different ways before I finally confirmed the drone was legitimate.
By then my pulse was racing hard enough that sleep was a lost cause.
The alerts were wrong both times. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that one day they won’t be. Halfway through the scanner’s secondary log, my attention drifts. Not to the screen, but to the encrypted channel buried three directories deep where nobody would think to look.
I built it two years ago. The encryption is strong enough to survive a corporate audit. Every cipher, every authentication layer, every redundancy protocol represents a piece of knowledge I wasn’t supposed to walk away with. I’ve tested it dozens of times. The channel is secure.
I’ve never sent a single message through it.
Mom, Dad, I’m
The words stare back at me. I delete them. Close the window.
Then bury it again, directory by directory, until the screen shows nothing but green confirmations and system diagnostics.
Percy gives a soft chirp. The sound lands somewhere between an alert and a question. I press my thumb against his display.
“I’m fine.”
The same sound again, identical. That channel connects me to two people on a planet seventeen jump points from Vahiri. The code works. That’s never been the problem. The problem is what happens the moment I use it.
Helix Corp monitors everything. Communication traffic. Routing anomalies. Encryption signatures. The message itself wouldn’t matter. The signal would.
The instant it appeared on their network, they’d follow it.
And if they followed it, the two people at the other end of that channel would stop being my parents and start being leverage.
I built the channel because I needed it to exist. I keep it silent for the same reason. The ache behind my sternum folds itself into a compartment I don’t open during working hours. I turn back to the keyboard, and another face surfaces before I can stop it.
Younger than me. Wide brown eyes fixed on mine. The last expression she ever gave me frozen somewhere between confusion and trust, still believing someone would fix what was happening.
I shove the memory down. It goes, but not quietly. The guilt never does. Neither do the bills.
I open the client queue and scroll through the jobs I’ve been tracking, the ones that might pay enough for me to eat and breathe.
An identity build for a Korvathi trader who wanted a clean background check has been sitting at the top for four days, and I pull up the details again.
Hoping the listing has changed is the closest I come to recreational activity.
It’s gone. Awarded to someone else, cancelled, or never real in the first place. The queue refreshes, and the gap where the listing sat feels like a hole punched through a budget that can’t absorb another loss.
I lean back, and the chair frame protests beneath me. Cheap metal creaks in sympathy with the ache in my lower back from too many hours in the same position. I refresh the client queue again.
Nothing.
No new jobs. No new credits.
On Percy’s tertiary display, I pull up the files I’ve assembled over the last two weeks. The ones I’ve been calling research, because research sounds professional and deliberate. It sounds a lot better than admitting I’ve been building a final list of options and trying not to think about why.
House Sethrak’s network architecture spreads across the screen in layers I’ve mapped during the hours between client jobs.
Most of what I’ve uncovered sits beneath the public-facing infrastructure, buried in the framework that supports the real operation underneath.
The Sethrai build gorgeous networks. Their encryption shifts configuration in real time, adapting to traffic patterns and user behavior, and whoever designed the system has an aesthetic sense that borders on artistic.
I’ve spent enough time inside corporate architectures to appreciate good work when I see it.
They’re good.
Just not good enough.
A vulnerability sits three tiers below the operational layer, buried inside a junction where an automated sweep-and-flag cycle hands off to manual monitoring. The transition creates a processing delay measured in fractions of a second. Most systems compensate for it. This one doesn’t.
I sit closer to the screen, suddenly alert. The gap is tiny, but it’s there.
And beyond it sits intelligence data valuable enough that rival houses would pay more credits than I’ve seen in years. Enough to buy six months of respiratory supplements. Enough to stop counting cartridges.
Enough to give Vahiri Prime the middle finger and never come back.
Percy flashes an amber caution alert, the warning pulse bright against the blue glow of the credit display.
“I hear you.” I rest my fingers on the keyboard without pressing a key. “I’m doing it anyway.”
I tap his casing in the spot that means trust me, part of the strange language we’ve built over four years together.
I’m prepared for an opportunity like this.
The proxy chain is in place. The handoff delay is mapped.
I’ve timed the opening within a margin of twelve milliseconds.
If my calculations are right, I’ll be in and out before their monitoring systems register anything unusual, and I’ll be off-planet before the day is through.
If I’m wrong, House Sethrak will trace the intrusion to The Splits, to this corridor, to this room. After that, my credit balance won’t matter very much.
It’s a gamble, but I’m desperate enough to roll the dice. “Okay, Perce. Let’s go rob a crime lord and prove exactly how valuable I am.”