She turned and walked out.
The guard sealed the door behind her, and I stood alone in Processing Room 7 with the ghost of her temperature still mapped across my fingertips and the thrum in my chest resonating at a frequency that would not be silenced.
I pressed my palms flat against the table. The metal was warm where her arm had rested.
The bonding gene in my bloodline was supposed to be extinct. Bred out. Deleted from the genetic code by Velori scientists who had needed warriors, not lovers.
For six generations, no male of the Vorryn line had bonded. My father had not. His father had not. It was a settled fact. A closed file.
I looked at the warmth on the table. Felt the echo of cool skin against my overheated fingers. Listened to the thrum that had settled into the base of my skull and showed no sign of fading.
Corsine had flagged this woman before she arrived. Had noted her “markers.” Had placed her in a cell near the systems hub and assigned her a work detail that would keep her withinthe station’s core infrastructure, close to the ancient technology predating the prison’s conversion.
Close to the compatibility scanner that Corsine had spent three years studying.
The realization landed like a blow to the sternum.
She had done this. Corsine had triggered it. Whatever compound, signal, or catalyst the doctor had weaponized from the ancient systems, she had used it. On this human. And on me.
I straightened. Pressed my claws into my palms until the pain clarified my thinking. Breathed through the thrum until it subsided enough for me to function.
Then I pulled up Corsine’s research access logs in my terminal and began reading.
CHAPTER 3: THE COMPULSION
POV: Kira | Days 3–5
The Life-Support Hub was a disaster.
The kind that killed you slowly, over months, one failing component at a time, while the people in charge pretended the system was holding. I recognized it the way you recognize a dying engine: by the sound. The main air processor should have hummed at a consistent sixty hertz. This one stuttered between fifty-four and sixty-seven, and every time it dipped below fifty-six, the carbon dioxide levels in the east wing would spike for three to five minutes before the backup scrubber caught up.
I’d eaten the half-portion from the dispensary before the shift started. Protein paste, gray and flavorless, washed down with recycled water that tasted like the inside of a pipe. My body needed fuel. I gave it fuel. Sentiment had no role in the transaction.
I’d been in the Hub for four hours on my first day of work detail, and I’d already identified eleven critical maintenance failures, six secondary failures, and one junction box that was actively sparking behind a panel nobody had opened in what looked like two years based on the dust accumulation.
“Don’t touch that.” The Hub supervisor, a heavyset human named Garrick with a permanent squint and fingers stainedblack with lubricant, pointed at the junction box without looking up from his own terminal. “That panel’s been sparking since before I got here. Touch it, you cook. Leave it.”
“It’s going to arc to the main conduit within the next three months,” I said. “When it does, you’ll lose primary air processing for the entire C block.”
“Then I’ll fix it in three months.”
I bit down on the response I wanted to give because I was two days into a prison sentence, and antagonizing the man who controlled my work detail seemed like a poor investment. Instead, I turned back to the water recycler he’d assigned me to repair.
A pump seal had failed, and the replacement parts were the wrong ones. The gasket was rated for a lower pressure than the system produced, which meant it would hold for six weeks and blow again, and whoever replaced it next would find the same wrong gasket in the parts bin because nobody had bothered to update the requisition codes.
I pulled the pump housing apart and laid the components on the metal workbench in the order I’d need them for reassembly. My hands were steady. My focus was clear. The work was familiar, and familiar was the closest thing to safety I’d found since arriving on this station.
What was not familiar was the low-grade headache building behind my right eye.
It had started when I’d left Block C that morning. A faint pressure, like a thumb pressed against the inside of my skull. I’d blamed the Comm-Bead. The skin behind my ear was still swollen, still hot to the touch, and a tension headache after neural surgery performed by an assembly-line technician with glassy eyes seemed like a reasonable consequence.
But the headache wasn’t staying faint. By the time I’d been in the Hub for two hours, it had sharpened into a focused point of pain that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. By hour three, it had spread to the base of my skull and down the back of my neck. By hour four, I was having trouble keeping my hands steady on the pump housing because the pain was eating away at the edges of my concentration.
I set down the wrench and pressed my fingers against my temples. Breathed. The air in the Hub tasted of oil and hot metal and the faint ozone signature of overtaxed electrical systems. Under my feet, the floor grating vibrated with the labored rhythm of the air processor.
“You good?” Garrick’s voice, distant. Not concerned. Administrative.
“Fine. Bead’s still settling.”
