I’d survive this. I’d survived worse. I’d survived my father’s death on the mining rig when I was sixteen. I’d survived putting myself through engineering certification with no money and no family. I’d survived an eight-month legal nightmare. I would survive a prison on a moon.
I had to.
At a table near the corridor entrance, a small alien sat alone, her smooth tawny skin patterned with darker spots across her shoulders, large amber eyes with vertical pupils. Her pointed ears swiveled toward sounds before the sounds reached me, and a long tail curled around the leg of her bench.
She ate with one hand and watched the room with the calm, counting attention of someone who had memorized every exit. A pilot or a scout, my brain decided. Something about the way she tracked movement said she was used to calculating distances and escape routes. Later, I would learn her name was Tessara.
I sat alone at the end of a table and ate because my body needed fuel, and because sitting idle invited attention. The common area was a study in territorial negotiation. Groups clustered by species, by block seniority, by some invisible hierarchy I hadn’t mapped yet. The human prisoners stuck together at two tables near the dispensary. The alien prisoners spread across the rest.
A tall woman with braided black hair and warm brown skin sat down across from me. Her tray was half-empty, and she moved with the deliberate economy of someone who’d learned not to waste energy.
“New intake?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re handling the bead well. Most humans cry for the first six hours.”
“I’m saving my crying for something that deserves it.”
A flicker of a smile. “I’m Nia. Two years on this rock. Combat medic before they sold me here.” She said it like a weather report. Flat. Factual. “Word of advice? The food gets worse. Eat it anyway.”
I took another bite. “Kira. Engineer. And I figured that out from the texture.”
Nia studied me with eyes that missed nothing. “Block C?”
“Near the Life-Support Hub, apparently. A woman in a white coat made a point of it.”
Behind Nia’s expression, a tightening around the eyes. “Corsine assigned you personally?”
“Seemed interested in my ‘markers.’ Whatever that means.”
Nia’s gaze dropped to her tray. When she looked up again, the easy warmth had cooled by several degrees. “Watch yourself around her, Kira. That woman doesn’t do anything without a reason, and the reasons are never good for us.”
Before I could push for more, a change rippled through the common area. Conversations died. Prisoners who had been sprawled across benches sat up straighter. The guards along the walls adjusted their grips on their weapons.
I turned toward the main corridor entrance.
He filled the doorway.
Over seven feet of dark, dense mass that forced my brain to recalibrate everything it understood about scale. His skin was slate gray, the color of wet stone, and it wasn’t skin. Not entirely. Along his cheekbones and the exposed planes of his forearms, something caught the amber light and threw it back in shifting patterns of deep blue and violet. Scales. Iridescent and alive with color that moved like oil on water.
His head had no hair. Instead, ridged plates of bone followed the crown of his skull, giving him the silhouette of something armored and ancient. His shoulders were broad enough that he’d turned slightly to pass through the doorframe, and every movement he made carried the deliberate control of someone who knew exactly how much damage his body could do and chose, moment by moment, not to do it.
But it was his eyes that stopped me.
Silver. Pale, metallic silver, with vertical pupils that contracted to slits as they swept the room. The eyes of something that hunted by movement, by heat, by instinct. They passed over the prisoners with clinical indifference, tallying and dismissing them.
Then they found me.
The silver pupils dilated. Fractionally. A shift so small I wouldn’t have caught it if I hadn’t been staring, but I was, because something in the hindbrain that still remembered what it meant to be prey had locked my muscles in place and told me not to move.
He held my gaze for two seconds. Three. The scales along his forearms pulsed with a flicker of blue light that was there and gone so fast I almost convinced myself I’d imagined it.
Then he looked away, and the room remembered how to breathe.
“That’s the Warden,” Nia said. Her voice was quiet. Controlled. “Raeth Vorryn. Zethrani. He runs this station with absolute authority, and nobody crosses him. Nobody.”
The Warden moved through the common area without speaking. Prisoners parted for him the way water parts for a hull, instinctive and total. A guard approached with a data-pad, and Raeth took it without breaking stride, his clawed fingers dwarfing the device.
Because of course, he had claws. Retractable, from what I could see, the tips barely visible past his fingertips. Hands that could crush a human skull and were currently scrolling through intake reports with a surgeon’s delicacy.
He paused near the far wall. Read something on the pad. His head turned, and those silver eyes cut across the room to find me again with the accuracy of a targeting system.
