Page 34 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I memorized the layout.

Service spine. Access points. Three routes between cargo and command: main spine corridor, ventilation, lateral maintenance shaft.

“How current?”

“Eight months.” Tal looked at the timestamp. “That was the last certification. Anything they changed after that won’t be here.”

“What kind of modifications?”

“Expansion. The holding area was at capacity six months ago. They were adding cells. The manifests your crew recovered showed three thousand subjects. Current estimates based on the communication traffic I was managing suggested significantly more.”

More than three thousand. People in metal boxes in deep void, their bonds broken and rewritten by a man who thought he was solving evolution’s design flaws.

Tal breathed out through his nose. “I liked you better when you were just threatening me.”

He didn’t argue further. He sat in the copilot’s seat, gripped the armrests, and breathed. I flew the Ghost toward deep void and tried not to think about the last time I’d been in this cabin.

The blanket was still on the bunk. I didn’t look at it. I didn’t need to look at it to know it was there, the same way I didn’t need to look at my hands to know they were dark.

Some things stayed.

Four hours in, the proto-bond shifted.

I’d been feeling Jessa since the docking bay at Meridian. A constant pull, directional, warm, the connection finally given permission to operate at full capacity.

For the first four hours, what came through was muffled. Sleep-silence. The sedative holding her under, her consciousness pressed flat, her emotional state unreadable except as a baseline hum of alive.

Then she woke up.

The shift was sudden. The muffled hum became a spike. Confusion first, sharp and disorienting, the feeling of a mind coming online in a place it didn’t recognize.

No images. No thoughts. Just disorientation, discomfort, and a sharp sense of wrongness.

Then recognition. She knew where she was. Not the specific facility, not the specific cell, but the situation.

Captured. Held. Alone.

Then fury.

I gripped the flight controls. The fury wasn’t mine but I felt it in my chest, in my jaw, in the heat that climbed my forearms.

Not a diffuse anger. Focused. Sharp.

The fury of a woman who’d been knocked down and was already calculating how to get back up.

“She’s awake,” I said.

Tal looked at me. “How do you know?”

“She’s angry.”

“Is that good?”

“For Jessa, yes.”

The fury settled into something colder. Controlled.

The quality of her attention shifted from raw emotion to work. She was taking stock.