To map a system this large, she has to account for every piece that belongs. Every access pattern. Every behavioral profile. Every person moving through the network.
And when you account for everything that should be there, eventually you notice what’s missing. The absence starts to take shape. A gap in the traffic. A profile that stops. A space in the records where someone used to be.
Most people would miss it.
Miro won’t.
So I give her the shape and nothing under it. “People who should have been protected by the safeguards I designed have been exposed. If the substrate is how they’re moving to find my people, I need you to trace their path. Where they’ve been, what they’ve accessed, and where the traffic originates.”
She’s quiet for a beat. Blue light from Percy’s display catches the lenses of her glasses, and behind them her eyes sharpen with concentration. The change reaches me in the air a moment later, the scent of anger giving way to something cooler and more focused.
“If you want me to go that deep, I’ll need the access logs for every cell junction going back to when the designers built the system.”
I run my tongue along my lower lip and draw the air between us across my palate. The heat-sensing pits along my jaw catch the rise in temperature across her forehead and throat. Concentration. Her attention has narrowed completely onto the problem in front of her.
No deception. No hidden agenda. Everything about her points to the same conclusion. She’s exactly what she appears to be: a technician faced with a puzzle she can’t resist solving.
And beneath that intense focus, her scent lingers in my lungs. Warm. Distinctly hers. Untouched by the engineered pheromone blends that saturate the Warrens. The purity of it catches my attention in a way I have no interest in examining.
I straighten so quickly the chair scrapes against the floor.
She flinches. It’s a tiny movement, gone almost as soon as it appears. I don’t like that she flinched at all. The reaction sits wrong somewhere beneath my ribs, a protest I have no business feeling. I kill it. She should be scared of me. There is no other feeling she should have toward me.
“I can do better than access logs.” I keep my tone even, as though the last few seconds didn’t happen. “The network junction points are housed in the lower levels. Physical hardware connects the cells you’ve been mapping. You’ll understand the system faster if you see the infrastructure for yourself.”
I cross to the door and unlock it with my wrist comm. The corridor stretches beyond.
“Come with me.”
The junction points route through the lower levels, and the fastest path cuts through the commercial district.
She falls into step beside me with Percy’s case tucked beneath one arm, her attention already moving over the corridor architecture. Measuring. Assessing.
The panels shift from gold to copper as we descend. Silk drapery ripples in the ventilation currents. Music drifts through the corridors in a register designed to soothe, lowering defenses before the mind has time to object. She’s immune to all of it.
Her attention remains fixed on the structural seams where the original mining colony meets the carved stone overlay. I find myself watching her study my territory, which is a distraction I should have more control over than I do.
The entertainment quarter opens around us, and my mistake becomes obvious within the first thirty paces. I should have taken the longer route.
A pleasure worker emerges from a private suite to our left, escorted by an attendant whose grip on her elbow is professional and firm. Nyssa.
I know her face before the lighting finds it. She’s been in my operation for three years. Steady contract renewals. Above-average client satisfaction scores. The kind of worker who doesn’t generate incident reports.
Her smile is flawless, polished by training programs I designed myself, but it never reaches her eyes.
Bruising shadows her wrists beneath the translucent sleeves of her working silks. I register the marks before she’s passed us. They’re recent, the pattern consistent with a client who ignored the boundaries of his contract. Nyssa doesn’t look at me. She wouldn’t. But I see the way her jaw sets when she registers who’s standing in the corridor.
The attendant escorting her should have intervened before it reached that point. I file his face away for later and add Nyssa’s contract number to the review queue on my wrist comm without breaking stride. Someone in my operation failed this female tonight, and I’ll find out who.
This is the system I built. Better than Kazren’s operation, where workers have no protections and complaints disappear into administrative silence. Better than the Splits, where a body without House affiliation is a body nobody misses.
I gave my workers contracts, boundaries, medical care, and the right to refuse clients who violated the agreement. It’s the best system I’ve been able to build inside an economy that treats people as inventory. But it still produces bruised wrists and smiles that stop at the mouth.
Miro’s thermal signature drops along my jaw. A cold spike. Revulsion held beneath a surface that doesn’t crack. Her pace doesn’tfalter. Her expression doesn’t shift. But the acid bite of her reaction reaches me clearly enough to cut through the ambient pheromone blend.
“Who was she?” She’s still walking, still looking ahead, but the cold in her voice is new.
“Nyssa is an employee of mine.”
