Page 16 of Claimed By the Wraiths

“That’s the plan.”

“Bring yourself back too. I don’t have a protocol for what you’d do to this ship without her, and I’d rather not invent one.”

Thoryn stood by the hangar door. As I passed, he put his hand on my shoulder.

The weight of it, the stillness. Thoryn didn’t waste words on what his hands could say.

Alix caught my arm. “The shadow thing. At the relay. Those soldiers couldn’t see you.”

“No.”

“Can Consortium security systems see you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tested it against their hardware.”

“Test it before you need it.” She pressed a bypass tool into my hand and let go. “That’s free advice from a professional.”

Maris kissed Jessa on the cheek and handed her a chip. “Updated transponder codes. If you need to run, the Ghost becomes invisible.” She looked at me over Jessa’s shoulder. “Take care of my ship. We’ll reposition toward Meridian while you’re on station, but stay well outside conference traffic.”

“I know.”

“I’m talking to both of you.”

The Ghost was small. The cockpit opened onto a narrow cabin with one bunk and a fold-down seat, a refresher barely large enough to turn around in, and a cargo hold the size of a closet. Maris had rebuilt it for speed and stealth, not comfort.

Jessa took the pilot’s seat. I took the copilot’s. The hatch sealed behind us, closing out the hangar, the crew, the Raptor.

Everything familiar reduced to a closed door and two people in a space too small for distance.

“Ready?” she asked.

“No.”

She smiled. It was the first real smile I’d seen from her in days. “Good. Me neither.”

She brought the engines online and the Ghost slid out of the Raptor’s hangar into open space.

JESSA

The Ghost wasn’t designed for two people to share for fourteen hours.

There was one bunk. One narrow bunk, bolted to the cabin wall, with a thin mattress and a blanket that smelled faintly of Maris’s engine grease. The fold-down seat across from it was technically a second sleeping option, but Serak’s legs didn’t fit when it was deployed.

We figured this out thirty minutes into the transit.

“I’ll take the seat,” he said.

“You won’t fit in the seat.”

“I’ll fit.”

“You didn’t fit in the maintenance conduit either and you went through it anyway. That doesn’t mean it was comfortable.”

“I don’t need comfortable. I need functional.”

“You need sleep. If we’re doing this, you need to be sharp when we get there, not cramped and exhausted.”

He looked at the bunk. Looked at me. Looked at the bunk again.