Page 45 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I needed somewhere to leave them before I needed that distinction under fire.

Two levels below cargo processing I found a dead service void behind an obsolete coolant manifold. No camera. No active maintenance tag. Dust on the floor except for the line my boot made crossing it.

Good enough.

I cached the pack there: rations, water, the medkit Solren had forced on me, the heavier bypass tools, Alix’s smallest bypass strip, and the blaster. Anything rigid stayed here whenever I needed the deeper state.

The flush comm stayed on me.

Then I went to work.

Within the hour, the Ghost sweep told security Tal hadn’t traveled alone. An infiltrator alert spread through cargo and maintenance. They couldn’t close the service spine without choking their own research and holding traffic, so they hardened the chokepoints instead: hard scanners, staffed junctions, random sweeps. The surface meld beat eyes and ordinary cameras. It did not beat a scanner I was stupid enough to walk through. I wasn’t.

Tal’s schematics were mostly accurate. The lower level matched. The spine corridors matched.

The holding area in the middle ring was bigger than the layout showed. New sections, recently built, the metal still bright at the welds, the conduit runs freshly bolted. They’d added an entire wing on the eastern side.

More cells. More capacity. More people.

Through a maintenance grating I looked down into rows of narrow doors. A Tsekai woman sat against one wall, traceries gray and lifeless. A Tamzari male had folded his massive body into a corner too small for him. An Akaruun woman held her palm against the metal beside her bunk as if somebody might answer from the other side.

Thousands of people.

In boxes. In the dark. In deep void where nobody would hear them.

The pull in my chest went down and east.

Jessa was somewhere below me.

Every part of my body wanted to follow that direction immediately. I didn’t.

I mapped the station first.

The first three days became corridors, guard rotations, junctions, and the service spaces between them. Holding level: two guards per post, three posts on the eastern corridor, twenty-two-minute patrol cycles. Command level: polished floors on one side of the wall and maintenance steel on the other. Comm hub: one main door, four guards when fully staffed, a maintenance panel behind the room that sat between the hardened chokepoints.

Three routes between the holding level and the hub.

Spine corridor. Ventilation. Lateral maintenance shaft.

Three ways in. Three ways out.

I used the meld only when movement required it. Dark across an exposed junction, pale and motionless in a dead cavity. Dark past a camera, pale behind a coolant stack while a patrol crossed. I returned to the cache when I could, drank by measured mouthfuls, ate field rations without tasting them, and slept in pieces too short to feel like sleep.

The station had food in service lockers. Water in maintenance taps. Air that never stopped smelling faintly of disinfectant and hot circuitry.

It had everything required to stay alive.

That was not the same as living well.

On the fourth day I found Tal.

They’d put him in an administrative holding room off the security level rather than the prisoner wing. Better chair. Same locked door.

I waited until the corridor cleared, opened the maintenance grille above the room, and said his name once.

Tal looked up so fast he hit the back of the chair.

“Please stop appearing out of walls.”