I peel my back off the wall and cross the ward on steadier feet than I have any right to have. The fear is still buzzing under my ribs, the mark is still rising and falling, and the door is still sealed. None of that has changed. What changes is that I stop freezing, no longer stuck in the open space of the room, and I have a plan, and a plan is all a girl like me has ever really needed.
Find the seam.
I start over. I walk the walls again, palms flat, pressing the obsidian in sections I have already pressed, because the first sweep was scattershot and panicked, and I missed things. This sweep is methodical. I map the room in grids inside my head, marking every twenty centimeters, looking for the faintest shift in temperature and the softest difference in resonance. Even a sealed ship has to cycle air. Even a sealed ward has to handle waste. A feed has to be somewhere. There is always a feed.
Working the south and east walls yields nothing. As I trace the west wall from the reclamation archway to the bathroom, the obsidian stays perfectly smooth and cool and as polished under my hands as the first time I touched it. I crouch and press low along the baseboard. I stretch up on the tips of the alien shoes and feel as high as my arms will reach. I work the corners, because corners are where lazy engineers hide their access panels, and this ship is at least a thousand years old and was built by engineers who were not lazy.
Nothing changes. Every centimeter of obsidian reads the same: polished, patient, and unbothered by my hands.
"Comeon," I hiss at it. "There has to be something. There has to be?—"
Dropping to my hands and knees, I push my palms against every seam joining the floor plating. The mat yields firmly under my weight as I trace the room's edges, sweeping my fingers along the wall joints, the base of the bed, the basin's pedestal, and finally, the sloped archway of the reclamation alcove.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The Reaper and his ship have thought of every single one of these. Of course they have. He is centuries old, and his ship is older than I can imagine, and I am twenty-seven, and I grew up scrapping Coalition cryo-holds for parts, and of course the salvager tricks I know how to run are the same tricks a thousand other salvagers have tried to run on this hull and failed.
I sit back on my heels atop the bio-mat.
The frustration crawls up the inside of my throat, hot and metallic, and my eyes sting. I blink hard and force the tears back. His ward will never see me break. The mark already throbs in time with my frustration, and I can picture him somewhere on this ship, feeling the flow of it and understanding exactly what it means.
Pushing to my feet, I cross the three steps back to the bed and drop down onto it, back flat, arms flung out, staring up at the ceiling arching high above me.
"Great," I announce to no one. To the ceiling. To the Ship. "This isgreat."
Suddenly, the mark on my chest flares—a spike of static replacing the steady, rhythmic warmth and stealing my breath. I gasp, my hand flying to my sternum. The sensation originates externally, striking as a frantic, grinding drop in pressure, a violent glitch that rattles my teeth before smoothing out again just as fast. It feels like someone else's control slipping.
The bio-mat under me gives the tiniest bit of warmth, breathing in faint response to its new name. The ward settles into a patient, cyclic silence. Somewhere outside this sealed panel, a Reaper older than my entire line is going about his business on a ship that answers his every whim, and I am a girl in borrowed shoes and someone else’s tunic with a glyph burning under her collarbone, facing seamless architecture without a single weakness to exploit.
I close my eyes.
Think, Nyx. You have to find a way out.
CHAPTER 6
DRAEVIK
Frustration evolves into a new and unwelcome sensation. Resting my gauntlets on the cool surface of the primary nav-spire, I watch the tactical feeds scroll past. The mournful drone of stasis drops away, and a sharp, oscillating pounding takes its place, syncing with the marker etched into the girl’s skin. The bond crackles like a live wire in my skull, twitching with every surge of her adrenaline.
I reach the central command dais and tap a series of runes on the console. Suddenly, a micro-tremor violently seizes my left hand. My forearm veins flicker erratically, my muscles locking in a painful spasm. My vision fractures for a split second, the HUD flashing a blaring string of crimson warnings—CRITICAL SEPARATION / BIOLOGICAL TETHER UNSTABLE. I clench my fist until the joints pop, forcing the tremor down and banishing the alert.
Isolation from her seems to be accelerating a stasis-decay in my neural pathways. I search my memory for the restricted files on the imprinting process, but I encounter the same cold, blank wall of corrupted data. A missing crystal of knowledge that infuriates my tactical mind.
"Virex," I command. The syllables emerge as a series of harsh, splintering rasps that cut through the silence. "Visual feed. Tactical ward."
The center holo clarifies, revealing the small, contained corridor of the holding wing. I watch as Nyra paces the length of the room. She embodies a flurry of frantic energy, though the bio-mat betrays no sound from the passing feet. She remains defiant. Her composure locks into place, and her sun-kissed-brown eyes scan every seam of the wall with a focus that borders on lethal. She stops at the door, slamming her palm against the thickened panel with a dull thud.
"I know you're listening!" she shrieks at the ceiling. "I can feel you, you giant metal freak! Open the door!"
Leaning back against the command chair to analyze the anomaly, I note that most beings secured by a Reaper Commander enter rapid physiological decline—catatonic shock or fatal adrenaline spikes. She does neither. The tactical readout confirms her cortisol levels are stabilizing into an aggressive, problem-solving iteration. She perceives the containment ward purely as a structural obstacle demanding a bypass.
Commander, the ship whispers through our neural link.The marker is attempting to bypass the tertiary environmental seal. She is prying at the seam of the panel with her fingernails. Two are scratched down to the quick. She has not stopped.
My combat matrix flags the self-inflicted damage as a sub-optimal biological state. "Let her exhaust the impulse. She has received the parameters of her containment. Her failure to comply indicates a need for secondary reinforcement."
Monitoring her activity grid for another cycle, I watch her move to the sleeping dais, then back to the door, then to the reclamation alcove. She stares at the rising steam of the sterilization cycle with pure suspicion. The ship provides her with sanitary garments—soft, charcoal-grey fibers woven withReaper silk—and a basin of treated water. As the door sealed, she drowns the first set in the reclamation cycle, resulting in a wasteful rejection of resources.Virex Primemerely replicates the items, anticipating her eventual compliance. The second set she has ignored.
She stands defiant in the thin, sweat-damp underlayer she wore beneath her scavenger suit, a rough synthetic weave stained at the collar with the dust of a fringe world that has been living on her skin since before I woke. Every fiber of it is an offense. It is the clothing of a species that bathes without intention, that wraps itself in whatever can be shed fastest, that treats its own flesh as an afterthought to be hidden rather than honored. The smudge of carbon scoring, still dark along the curve of her cheek, is almost less of an insult than the tunic itself.