“Percy comes with me.” I’m shaking and for sure he feels that through my layers of clothing.
His attention shifts away from me and toward the room, and I can feel it before I see it. Those amber eyes sweep across the narrow bed, theworkstation, and the battered mug balanced on the desk. He’s looking for a person.
“Who is Percy?”
The question is so genuinely puzzled it nearly cracks me open.
I tilt my chin toward the window. “He’s my datapad.”
Another pause follows. I can’t see his face, but something about the silence behind me changes before he finally asks, “You named your datapad?”
“He’s more trustworthy than any living being I know.”
“I know the feeling.” He releases me, finally, and the absence of his heat leaves a cold imprint along my spine that my body resents.
I’m at the window before the sentence ends, hauling Percy’s case back through the gap, the reinforced corners scraping the frame as I drag him inside. The case is intact. The seals are intact. I run my thumb across the latch and the lock clicks open and Percy’s display blinks amber, alive, undamaged.
“You never would have gotten away.” He says it from behind me, conversational, as if we’re discussing the weather and not how he broke into my apartment and pinned me against his chest. “Not from me.”
I close Percy’s case and turn around. “Don’t be so sure about that.”
The half-smile returns. He doesn’t argue, which is worse than arguing, because it means he’s confident enough to let my defiance sit unanswered.
I face him and seeing him from the front is worse. From the front, I get the full picture. A six-foot-eight Sethrai male with copper-and-bronze scales, amber eyes bright with genuine amusement, and a body built for the kind of violence that doesn’t need to advertise itself.
The backup drives press against my ribs inside my jacket. The secondary devices are still tucked into their pockets, exactly where I put them. Everything I packed in the minutes before he arrived is still on my body.
“If I’m coming with you, I want to bring my mug.” I nod toward the workstation.
He crosses the room and picks up the ceramic mug from the edge of the desk. When he turns back, he’s holding it with an odd degree of care.
His gaze moves across the rest of the room. The narrow bed. The dead overhead light. The cables crossing the floor. He arrives at the same conclusion I did months ago.
There’s nothing else worth taking. The next person who lands in the Splits with three hundred credits and a prayer can have what’s left.
“How do you live here?” The question is quiet. Not pity. Something worse.
Genuine confusion, as though the idea of this room as a life doesn’t fit anywhere in his understanding of the world.
“It’s better than the alternative.”
He holds my gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Something shifts behind the amber of his eyes, a thought he chooses not to share.
“Then I hope you prefer mine.”
Chapter Four
ZAVIN
The Warrens open beneath us in a slow descent, and the human female beside me walks into my territory carrying everything she owns clutched against her chest.
Percy’s case is locked between her arms. Reinforced corners press into the front of her jacket where backup drives cast faint rectangular shadows beneath the fabric. Her ceramic mug occupies one hand, her grip tight enough to whiten her knuckles around the handle. That contrast between the object and the way she holds it tells me more about her than the intrusion ever did.
And that intrusion — I’m still turning it over in my head, still tasting the disbelief that hasn’t quite faded since I traced the hack to an eight-by-ten room in the Splits and found a single human female at the other end of it.
Our encryption cost more credits than her entire district produces in a year. Three cryptographers spent four months designing the recursive layering, and every intelligence agency I’ve employed to test the architecture has failed to get beyond the second tier.
She carved through eight.
