Page 56 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I kissed her forehead. Light where I touched her.

The mask went back on. She straightened. Sat on the bench.

I sat beside her, my arm around her, her hand on my chest.

“The relay,” she said. “On the Ghost you said you hadn’t walked the dark road in a long time. You’re walking it now. How long?”

“Since Meridian. In controlled bursts. I hide, rest, eat when I can, then use it again when I need to cross something I can’t cross any other way.”

“Define doesn’t come off clean.”

“Nearly two weeks of that is adding up. I lose time in pieces. The edges of me get harder to find. The deepest state is worse.” I made myself say the rest, because she’d be beside me when it mattered and she needed the truth. “If I push it too far, I don’t come all the way back. Not all of me.”

She took that the way she took everything. No flinch. She filed it where she filed the guard rotations and the camera placements. I watched her decide it was one more variable to plan around.

“The comm hub is on the command level,” she said. “Thirty steps from Vain’s conference room. Four guards: two at the door, two inside. Service corridor behind the room has a maintenance access panel.”

“I found it.”

“Of course you did.”

“Vain showed me something in the research wing,” she said.

She told me.

The bond-redirection program. Subject 31. Fourteen successful redirections across four species.

And the part I could not stop hearing: the Khavai fought back. Their shadow biology interfered with the priming. So far, on Khavai, Vain had failed.

Something went cold under my skin.

Not holding people. Rewriting them. Manufacturing loyalty at the neurochemical level.

The Tsekai with his metronome traceries, content because his biology had been told to be. That was what Vain wanted to turn every bond into.

“If this research survives, it doesn’t matter that we expose the trafficking,” Jessa said. “Every government in the Consortium will want the technology. We need the authenticated evidence out, and we need Deyric’s worm inside the research network. Evidence first. Then destroy the source.”

“Can you do both from the comm hub?”

“If Deyric can get his package to me. Tal’s live codes are dead. But Deyric mirrored the Meridian traffic before we left. He’s building a one-use authentication token from that traffic and the Nexus spoof.”

“The Raptor hits in four hours.”

“Then we have hours to finalize, not days, so we build it tight.” She pulled up her mental map. “Narev, three cells down. She memorized the biological-containment override. Rynn’s chain got the four-digit code up to Kovac. His maintenance terminal can reach the lab circuit once the station drops into emergency mode. Attack klaxons are his cue: code first, then ninety seconds of camera blindness on the eastern corridor. Patel, the young guard, already handled the junction door between this level and the spine. His own method. Nothing traces back to him.”

“You trust a guard?”

“I trust that he’s nineteen, maybe twenty, and he’s been writing down compound lists for me on scraps of paper because he can’t watch these people suffer and do nothing.”

“That’s not trust.”

“It’s the best version of it I’ve got.”

She laid out the rest.

The Raptor draws external fire. Deyric’s spoof opens a short authentication window. At the comm hub, I enter his one-use token and open a channel back to the Raptor.

Deyric pushes the rebuilt upload package remotely. I monitor it. You hold the door. Evidence first, worm second.