Page 22 of Claimed By the Wraiths

The service corridors were narrow, poorly lit, and empty. The air was cooler than the commercial level, carrying the smell of conduit lubricant and recycled coolant. The lighting was industrial, flat white panels at wide intervals, shadows pooling in the gaps between them.

Perfect terrain.

I spent most of the first three hours mapping. Main service spine running vertically through the station’s core.

Lateral corridors branching to each level, connecting the commercial ring to the residential ring to the conference levels. Junction boxes at every intersection, each one with a maintenance terminal that showed local security camera feeds. Standard Consortium hardware, the same systems I’d been reading.

The conference levels were two rings above me. The hum of foot traffic filtered down through the floor overhead. Hundreds of diplomats and support staff walking on polished floors, talking about trade policy and territorial disputes, and ten meters below them a Khavai captain was crawling through their ventilation system.

Alix had told me to test the shadow-meld against Consortium security hardware before I needed it. I took her advice.

Second lateral corridor. Security camera mounted at the junction, standard wide-angle, motion-triggered recording.

I walked past it in civilian clothes, skin normal. The camera tracked me. Green indicator light, feed recording.

I walked back, let the shadow-meld rise. Not full. A surface layer.

My skin darkened, the corridor shadows bending toward me. I walked past the same camera.

The indicator light stayed dark. No tracking. No recording.

The camera’s motion sensor couldn’t resolve me from the background.

Good to know.

First check-in. Jessa’s voice through the comm, low and professional. “Registered. Badge active. Conference floor is busy. Tal’s session is tomorrow morning. I’m attending a reception tonight to establish my presence.”

“Security?”

“Standard conference protocol. ID checks at the level entrances. Nothing unusual.”

“How’s the reception?”

“The canapés are terrible and someone is trying to explain trade tariffs to me.”

“My sympathies.”

“Check in three. Out.”

I went back to mapping.

Second lateral corridor, connecting the commercial level to the residential ring. Maintenance terminals every fifty meters. Security camera feeds accessible from each one.

That’s when I found the first problem.

The conference security was standard. Badge checks, perimeter patrols, cameras at entry points. Normal for a diplomatic venue.

But underneath it, in the service levels, there was a second layer. Personnel moving through the maintenance corridors who weren’t maintenance staff. Civilian clothes, but they moved in pairs, communicated on a frequency I couldn’t identify, and carried themselves wrong for civilians.

Straight backs. Eyes that didn’t settle. Hands that stayed near their waistlines.

I counted six in my first two hours of observation.

They weren’t conference security. They weren’t station staff. They were something else.

I marked their patrol patterns on my schematic. Two-hour rotations.

Three teams of two. Concentrated around the service access points closest to the conference levels.