Page 12 of Claimed By the Wraiths

“Tomorrow,” she agreed.

She stood, collected her datapad and her plate, and left. Her boots faded down the corridor.

I looked down at my hands. The dark was fading back to the pale I’d worn since childhood, the low-level meld that lived in my pores, the resting surface most Khavai carried without thinking about it. I didn’t remember the color underneath.

That was a lie.

I’d seen it once, when I was five or six, before the meld had settled in. My mother’s hands had been deep brown. Mine had been the same.

I sat there for a while longer in the empty mess hall. Then I made two mugs. Left one at my usual spot and one across from it, where she’d sit in the morning.

Hers would be cold by then. She’d drink it anyway. She’d know who left it and she wouldn’t say anything, the same way I never said anything about the ones she left for me.

JESSA

Ifound the cold mug in the morning. My usual spot. Hours old.

I drank it and started on the briefing materials.

The crew filed in to find everything laid out on the briefing room table.

Station schematics on hardstock sheets. Conference schedule with Tal’s sessions highlighted. His itinerary cross-referenced with the public registration database.

Check-in protocols. Three separate extraction routes, color-coded. The rigid display sheets were for Serak; he preferred something he could mark up by hand.

I’d been building mission plans for this crew. Supply runs, intelligence operations, the relay raids.

This was the same work. The same logistics.

The fact that I’d be on the other end of them this time didn’t change the process.

“Meridian Station,” I said. “The full diplomatic conference runs nine days. Tal chairs the trade subcommittee on day three. That’s where I need to be.”

I walked them through it. The approach through his aide, who I’d identified from the public delegate registry. The cover was built around my real name: Jessa Corren, with a private-trade-consultant history for the past decade, working out of the outer colonies, back in Consortium space because she’d seen things her father’s circle ought to know about.

Anyone who checked would find a thin paper trail. The shallowness was the point.

The colonies didn’t keep clean records. Tal knew that as well as anyone.

“The pitch isn’t rescue,” I said. “He’s not going to flip out of conscience. People like Tal don’t. The pitch is exposure. I tell him my crew has decoded the comms he’s been routing. We have authenticated evidence of what passed through his channels. We’re going to use it. His choice is whether his name is on the list of architects when the story breaks, or on the list of sources.”

“And if he refuses?” Maris asked.

“Then we have the evidence anyway. He just doesn’t get to control how he goes down.”

“What’s the actual ask?” Ressh asked.

“Access codes for the diplomatic routing network. Every communication is logged on both ends. With those codes, the conspiracy’s own records become the evidence, authenticated through the Consortium’s own systems. Nobody can dismiss it as fabricated by hostile actors.”

The crew listened the way they always did. Attentive, quiet, professional.

Except for the part where every few seconds someone’s eyes slid toward Serak.

Maris spoke first on logistics. “The Ghost is civilian-registered. Untraceable to the Raptor. I can have it prepped in six hours.”

“Extraction?” Alix asked.

“Three options.” Maris pulled up the station layout. “Conference crowd on the main concourse. Delegation shuttle bay on the upper ring. Ghost at the civilian port running my transponder codes. If the first two are compromised, the Ghost disappears.”