Page 51 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Maybe the orderly dropped it. Maybe Rynn never saw it. Maybe she saw it and decided it was a trap.

We tried again.

The second message came back two medical rotations later.

A list of security-feed junction points on the holding level. A note that Kovac had an unsealed maintenance terminal behind his vent grate, left open after a repair call.

Rynn hadn’t been sedated twice because she was desperate.

She’d been testing the system.

By the end of the first week, I had people.

I did not have a plan.

That took the second week.

Narev’s containment code could pull staff toward the research wing, but only if someone could enter it when the station went into emergency mode.

Kovac’s maintenance terminal sat on the same eastern service subnet. In emergency mode it could reach the lab containment circuit as well as the eastern camera feeds. He could do both, but only once before the faults drew attention.

Patel could make the junction fail open with three bad codes, but he needed a patrol slot where the error looked like incompetence rather than sabotage.

Rynn could carry timing through the medical chain, but every message took hours and every extra message increased the chance somebody noticed there was a chain at all.

So we tested pieces without firing them.

A folded form went up a level and came back marked in the corner.

A medical rotation shifted by six minutes because Patel asked for a scanner recalibration.

Kovac touched the maintenance terminal long enough to confirm that the lab containment circuit and the eastern camera feeds both ran through the eastern junction, then put everything back exactly as he found it.

Slow. Complicated.

Logistics.

By the tenth day, the network could move information from my cell to the lab wing and up through the holding tiers.

By the twelfth, everybody knew only the piece they needed.

Narev: containment code.

Kovac: trigger the containment alarm, then ninety seconds of camera blindness when the station attack began.

Patel: the junction door open on a failure that looked accidental.

Rynn: timing and message route between levels.

Nobody had the whole map except me.

That mattered if one of us broke.

Vain interviewed me again on the twelfth day.

He still wanted Serak’s shadow mechanics.

He still wanted the details of what had been forming between us.