Page 7 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Because the crew wasn’t just reacting to me. They were waiting for him.

I looked at Serak. The dark was there, along his jaw, even in the briefing room light. Those black eyes, unreadable.

He might throw me off the ship in the next thirty seconds. Or he might not. I couldn’t tell.

“Can you decode it?” he asked.

The room exhaled.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then get started.”

JESSA

Nobody said anything as the briefing broke up. That was worse than shouting.

Deyric set up the workstation without looking at me. Three displays, a secure partition, the encrypted files queued and ready. He pointed at the chair, tapped the screen, and left.

Professional. Not one word that wasn’t about the work.

I sat down and started on the first encryption layer. The patterns came back faster than I expected. My fingers remembered before my brain caught up, the muscle memory of a sixteen-year-old watching over her father’s shoulder as he demonstrated the key rotation sequences. Deyric already had the cipher material; what he lacked was the institutional map that told him which apparently meaningless fields were key references.

I hadn’t touched diplomatic encryption in over a decade. My hands didn’t care. They knew.

That was the thing about the past. You could walk away from it, change your name, build a new life on a ship full of people who didn’t ask where you came from.

But your hands remembered.

The rest of me was shaking. I kept my fingers moving on the console and didn’t let the tremor reach them.

Zevik found me twenty minutes in. He leaned in the doorway, feather crest flat, arms crossed. He stood there long enough that I knew he was working up to something, which for Zevik meant about four seconds.

“Consortium,” he said.

“Diplomatic corps. Not military.”

“There’s a difference?”

“To the people inside it, yes.” I kept my eyes on the display. “To the people it hurts, probably not.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You know, I crashed a transport on Velik Prime. Killed three of my squadron because I was showing off.” He shifted in the doorway, the iridescent feathers on his crest catching the light as he moved. “Everyone’s got something they carry. You’re not special.”

He pushed off the doorframe and walked away. His boots were loud in the corridor. Zevik didn’t do quiet exits.

I stared at the encryption and breathed.

The others came through over the next few hours. Not all at once, not coordinated, but steady enough that I knew the crew had talked among themselves before finding me separately.

Ressh sat on the edge of the table and told me names didn’t matter and to eat something. Alix pulled up a chair, watched me work for a full minute, asked two questions about whether the Corren identity had any active trace to the Raptor, and left when I said no. Solren appeared at my elbow between the second and third layers, checked the scrape on my forearm without a word, and walked out.

Deyric came back when I was between the first and second layers. He leaned over my shoulder, looked at the progress, and adjusted a data pathway I’d been routing around.

“The last system I built this clean was for a Consortium signals division,” he said. “They used it to find people who didn’t want to be found.”

He didn’t look at me. “Better that you’re the one taking this apart.”

He left. That was the most personal thing Deyric had ever said to me.