Page 113 of Stripped By the Alien

"Ah,” Lucius chirps. “Here. Detention and processing levels are two decks below us, toward the station's spin axis. There's also a section labeled, as near as I can translate it, 'preparation.' The language appears relatively easy to figure out, but I may be wrong."

I don't think he is. "That's where they'd do it," I say. "Before the auction. Whatever they do."

"From context, that seems likely."

"Then that's where we're going."

We move. Lucius has a gift, it turns out, for finding us the empty spaces. A ventilation shaft here, a maintenance crawlway there, always one level removed from wherever the actual traffic of the station is happening. Twice we freeze in the dark as something heavy and multi-legged clanks past on the other side of a grate, and both times Lucius has already dimmed his own red light before I think to ask him to.

"They're watching the wrong direction," he murmurs to me, once, in the narrow dark. "Every sensor array I've mapped so far is oriented outward, toward the cells, toward the exits. They built this whole station to keep captives from getting out. I don't believe anyone has ever tried to get in before."

"Just as we were hoping," I whisper back.

I'm fully aware of how dangerous this is. But it's a desperate rescue attempt and we do have surprise on our side.

The station reveals itself to us in fragments, glimpsed through grates and cracked panels: a hallway lined with sealed transparent doors, shapes moving behind the fogged material that I try very hard not to look at directly; a wide, echoing space below us that Lucius identifies as a holding bay, hundreds of small enclosures stacked in neat rows like a warehouse.

One corridor is full of Gzet themselves. They're tall, insectile, chitinous things with too many joints in their limbs, moving with the unbothered efficiency of people at an ordinary job. None of them look up. None of them expect anything to be looking back.

By the time we reach the level Lucius calls "preparation," my hands have started shaking.

We come out above it through a grate in the ceiling of what must be an observation gallery. It's dark, unused, and thick with dust that suggests nobody's stood here in a long time. Below us is a room I don't have a word for. Tables, restraints, instruments arranged with the neatness of things used often and cleaned carefully afterward. My stomach turns over.

"There," Lucius says, angling a single sensor down toward a row of small holding cells along the far wall. "Body heat signatures. Six of them. One human-consistent thermal range."

I press myself flat against the grate and look.

She's in the third cell.

Sophia is thinner than I remember, her hair cut short and badly, in a way that suggests someone else did it and didn't care how, and she's sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, very still, in a way that scares me more than anything else has since we left the Beast. But she's alive. She's here, thirty feet below me, close enough that if this were any other kind of wall between us I could call her name and she'd hear it.

"Sophia," I breathe, and my whole chest aches with it.

"Captain," Lucius says. There's something in his tone that makes me look at him instead of her. "I count guards. Two, stationary, at the cell block entrance. And I'm detecting movement closing in on our position from the conduit behind us. I think the maintenance drones I mentioned have finished investigating the hull breach."

"How long?" I ask, pretty sure I know the answer.

"Not long enough."

As expected. I look back down at Sophia, thirty feet and a locked grate and two guards and an entire alien station away from me, and I think: damnit, we came this far.

"Okay," I say, and start working the grate loose with my fingers. "Then we move now."

The grate comes loose with a shriek of old metal. I freeze. Below, neither guard so much as turns.

"Good," Lucius whispers. "Their audio pickups are likely tuned to their own frequency range. We may be beneath their hearing."

I lower myself through the gap and drop the last few feet, landing in a crouch the way Krix'vorr showed me. Weight low, knees soft, silent. The observation gallery opens onto a narrow service stair I hadn't seen from above, and it takes us down into a side passage that runs parallel to the cell block, separated from it by a wall of the same fogged, transparent material.

Up close, I can see her properly. Sophia's eyes are open, staring at nothing, and for one terrible second I think something's already been done to her. Then she blinks, slow, exhausted, and I let myself breathe again.

"Sophia," I whisper, pressing my palm flat against the wall.

Her head turns. It takes a moment before her eyes focus on me, and then her whole face changes, breaks open with something between disbelief and terror and joy all at once.

"Nora?!" Her voice is a rasp, barely audible even this close. "Nora, you're not… how are you here?"

"I'm getting you out," I say. "I have a drone with me. We have a way off this station. Just hold on."