After she retired to the adjacent chamber, I knelt beneath my desk and opened the false panel, a compartment I had discovered during my first month on the station and told no one about.
Not the guards. Not Corsine. Not anyone.
Empty, for now. I replaced the mounting screws and stood. When the evidence we were building needed a place to survive without us, it would survive here. The guards who searched these quarters searched for weapons. They did not search for data.
CHAPTER 5: THE BREAKING POINT
POV: Kira | Day 12
I woke up reaching for him through the wall.
My hand was pressed flat against the metal partition between our rooms, fingers spread, as though my body had tried to close the ten feet between us while I slept. The metal was warm. One hundred and ten degrees of Zethrani biology radiating through the wall like a heating element, and my unconscious self had navigated to it with the accuracy of a targeting system.
I pulled my hand back. Pressed it against my thigh instead. Breathed.
I’d skipped the morning meal cycle. The protein paste sat in the dispensary like wet concrete, and the thought of eating it with the pull already gnawing through my nervous system had turned my stomach. I’d forced down water instead. Enough to keep my kidneys functioning. Enough to qualify as survival.
Twelve days. I had been on Vexar-6 for twelve days, and in that time I had been drugged with a synthetic catalyst I hadn’t consented to, bonded to an alien warden through a biological mechanism I couldn’t control, moved into his quarters by medical necessity, and recruited into a conspiracy to take down a trafficking ring spanning the galaxy. My father would have calledthis a hell of a work rotation. I called it Tuesday on a prison moon.
The humor didn’t land. Because the thing I wasn’t letting myself name, the thing that had been building for the past six days like pressure in a sealed system, had reached a threshold overnight I could no longer engineer around.
The bond wanted more.
The low-grade ache that had become my baseline since moving into the adjacent chamber had sharpened during the night into something with teeth. Not the skull-splitting migraine of the corridor collapse. A pull that lived in the wiring of my nervous system, a current running through the wiring of my body that pointed in one direction and one direction only.
Toward the wall. Toward the heat. Toward him.
I showered. The water came lukewarm and recycled and did nothing for the pull. I dressed for the Hub rotation. Standard issue, thin fabric, functional. It sat wrong against my skin. Too rough. Too cold. My nerve endings had retuned for a different texture, and knowing it made me want to tear the suit off and press bare skin against something warmer.
Against scales.
I sat on the sleeping platform and gripped my knees until the urge passed. It didn’t pass. It settled into a holding pattern, circling like a ship in a docking queue, waiting for clearance.
I went to the Hub. Worked for three hours. Replaced a corroded sensor array in the secondary air processor and rerouted a drainage line leaking into the eastern maintenance tunnel. My hands did the work while my brain ran a parallel process, analyzing the escalating physiological symptoms with the same rigor I’d apply to a failing system.
Elevated skin sensitivity. Thermal dysregulation. Persistent awareness of his location within the station, accurate to within approximately ten meters. An ache that wasn’t pain, exactly, but occupied the same neural pathways pain used, and demanded the same kind of relief.
Phase Two. The Tether. I had been managing it by sleeping ten feet from his wall and working inside the hundred-meter threshold, keeping the acute symptoms suppressed.
But the threshold was narrowing. A hundred meters had become seventy, then fifty. And the ache no longer wanted proximity. It wanted contact. Skin to skin. Heat against heat.
It wanted what it had tasted in the Processing Room and been denied ever since.
I put down my tools at the three-hour mark because my hands were trembling, and I couldn’t torque a bolt to spec. Garrick didn’t question it. I’d earned enough credit over twelve days of work, so he let me come and go without commentary.
I walked back to the Warden’s wing. The ache eased with every step, and the relief bordered on pleasure, and the pleasure made it worse because my body registered the pattern and wanted more.
Closer equals better. Contact equals resolution. Biology’s logic, and nothing I had agreed to.
I keyed the code on the chamber door. Stepped into the main office. Raeth was at his desk, reviewing something on his data terminal, and when I entered, his head turned with an accuracy that told me he had tracked my approach through the corridors by sound or scent or whatever alien sensory apparatus his species used to monitor the location of things that mattered to them.
The scales along his cheekbones were pulsing. Blue shading toward violet. A slow, rhythmic shift I had learned to read over the past week. Blue was baseline. Violet was suppression. Purple was something he hadn’t let me see yet.
“You returned early.” His voice was lower than usual. Rougher at the edges.
“I couldn’t hold a wrench steady.”
He was quiet. His silver eyes tracked my face, my hands, the way I was standing with my arms crossed over my chest as though I could physically contain the current running through me. The pupils contracted, then widened. He breathed through his mouth, and the muscles of his face pulled tight with the effort of it.
