Page 46 of Claimed By the Wraiths

“Are you injured?”

“Nothing important.” There was bruising along one side of his jaw. “They want to know what I gave Jessa. What she copied. Whether I contacted anyone after Meridian.”

“Did you?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“I know. They don’t.”

He studied the grille. “Can you get me out?”

I could have opened the room. The lock was standard. Two minutes, maybe less.

An empty diplomatic holding room would also trigger a station-wide lockdown before I had Jessa’s routes, before the Raptor had a way in, before four thousand prisoners had any chance of surviving the response.

“Not yet.”

Tal closed his eyes once. Opened them. “I thought you were going to say that.”

“They need you alive.”

“That is becoming less comforting every time you say it.”

“I’ll come back.”

“Bring a better line.”

I replaced the grille and left him there.

Days five through eight were slower.

The broad map was easy. The useful map took repetition.

Which guard always looked left before turning right. Which service lift stalled for four seconds between the command and holding rings. Which cameras shared a junction box. Which patrols overlapped only on paper because one team always stopped for caf at the same supply station.

I learned the station the way Jessa learned a supply problem: not as rooms, but as dependencies.

The pull toward her never stopped.

I stopped naming it every time I felt it.

Some hours it sat warm and steady behind my sternum. Some hours fear came through sharp enough to put me on my feet before I remembered there was still metal between us and no safe way to cross it. More often there was concentration. Anger. A stubborn forward pressure that told me she was still herself.

By the seventh day, my hands sometimes stayed dark a few seconds after I dropped the meld.

By the eighth, I woke in the service void with no memory of lying down.

I started using the timer on the flush comm for sleep because my sense of elapsed time had become unreliable.

Forty-three minutes. One hour twelve. Twenty-eight.

Enough to keep moving. Not enough to repair what the deeper crossings were costing.

On the ninth day I went back to Tal.

The bruise on his jaw had gone yellow at the edges. There was a second one at his temple.

“They revoked the access,” he said before I asked. “All of it. I heard two of them arguing about the audit trail. My codes are dead.”