Page 8 of Claimed By the Wraiths

The second encryption layer was harder. Someone had modified the standard authentication, buried a private channel underneath the government system. My father’s department had never used anything this layered.

Whoever built this wanted it hidden from the diplomatic corps itself.

When I went to use the refresher, there was a protein bar on my bunk. The expensive kind, from the stash Maris kept in their quarters.

No note. Thoryn didn’t do notes.

Palm down on the table in the briefing. Protein bar on the bunk.

I went back to the encryption. Third layer.

It was late when I felt him in the doorway. Not heard. Felt.

The particular weight of Serak’s attention, the way the air in a room shifted when he was watching.

I kept working. He didn’t speak. The silence stretched past comfortable into something that had edges. I let it sit because I didn’t have the energy to be the one who broke it.

Not today.

“You haven’t said anything,” I said to my screen.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. That you’re angry. That you understand. Something.”

He came into the briefing room and sat at the table behind me. The chair scraped. He settled.

I didn’t turn around.

He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the encryption blurred on my display and I stopped pretending to read it. Long enough that I started running the options for what his silence might mean, discarding the ones that didn’t fit, circling the ones that did.

“I’m not angry,” he said.

“But.”

“No but.” A pause that said otherwise. “Torrin checked out clean when you joined. I had no reason to dig further. And you did the work. You kept this crew running.”

“I should have been ready sooner.”

“Maybe.”

I turned around. He was sitting with his hands on the table. Dark at the knuckles.

I made myself look at his eyes. Black, pupil-less.

Nothing to hold onto. Never had been.

“Are we alright?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. The silence held, and this time it was a different kind from the comfortable ones we’d built between us at the late watch, different from the operational quiet during briefings. This one had a decision inside it, and I couldn’t tell which way it would break.

I waited. He looked at me and I held it.

The encryption hummed on the display behind me. Down the corridor the Raptor’s ventilation cycled, the ship doing the thing it always did, carrying us.

And I sat there with my whole future hanging on the next sentence out of his mouth.

“You and I are fine,” he said. Each word landed separately, spaced apart, as if he’d had to find them one at a time and wasn’t certain of any of them until he heard them out loud. “Get some sleep. You can finish the decryption in the morning.”