Page 35 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I couldn’t feel the details. I knew what that shift meant.

I’d watched her do it a thousand times, walking into a supply shortage, a mechanical failure, a crew argument.

Assess. Inventory. Solve.

She was doing it now somewhere ahead of me in deep void. And the fact that her first response to captivity was logistics told me everything I needed to know about whether she’d survive.

“Can you actually feel her?” Tal asked. “Or are you guessing?”

“I can feel her.”

“Feel what? Her location? Her thoughts?”

“Her emotional state. Direction. Intensity.” I paused. “Right now she’s steady.”

“That’s...” He trailed off. “The bonding research I managed communications for. The clinical descriptions. Neurochemical synchronization. Biological dependency. Exploitable attachment.” He looked at his hands. “Is that what this feels like?”

The nav display showed six hours remaining. I looked at it, looked away, and realized I couldn’t remember what I’d just read. I checked again. Six hours.

“No,” I said. “That’s not what it feels like.”

“What does it feel like?”

I thought about the mess hall at 0300. The mug she pushed toward me without asking if I wanted it. The silence that was more comfortable than any conversation I’d ever had with anyone else.

The way the ship felt different when she was aboard versus when she wasn’t, and how I’d never admitted that to myself until she was gone.

“It feels like the ship is quieter when she’s not on it,” I said. “And louder when she is. And both of those things are better than silence.”

Tal stared at me. “That’s the least clinical description of a biological bond I’ve ever heard.”

“Good.”

At the four-hour mark, the Raptor checked in. Maris on comms, professional as always.

Behind her voice, the crew. Deyric’s console chiming. Zevik saying something that made someone throw something at him.

“Ghost, what’s your ETA?”

“Six hours.”

“We’re still burning. Roughly a day before we reach the outer Nexus area. Deyric’s rebuild is moving.”

“Re-key is clean,” Deyric said. “The Nexus spoof is not. That’s the part that can’t be rushed.”

Maris continued. “Once we’re inside their likely sensor range, we go cold. No routine check-ins. No active probing. You should expect one low-power burst when Deyric has the exploit frozen and we have an attack window.”

After that, silence until it mattered.

“I can feel her,” I said.

“Then don’t lose that signal. We’re coming.”

“Maris.”

“Yes?”

“She woke up angry. She’s steady now. Whatever they’re doing, they haven’t broken her.”