Page 62 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Vain stood behind them in civilian clothes. No weapon.

He looked at me across the corridor and I recognized the expression.

Not anger.

Interest.

Even now, he was looking at a result.

“You bonded with her,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“You’re proving my point, Commander. Look at yourself. Burning alive for one woman.”

The first guard fired.

I dropped the blaster and the rigid tools back across the hub threshold. None of it could follow where I was going.

I went dark.

Not the controlled bursts I’d used on the first two waves.

Deeper.

The corridor lost its edges. Light bent and broke. The places between one shadow and the next stopped being separate places.

They were good.

One fired ahead of my movement instead of at it. Another swept low while the third covered the retreat angle. They forced me farther into the dark with every pass.

I spent what I had left.

Nearly two weeks of short crossings and bad sleep sat inside my muscles like accumulated damage. My hands had already started forgetting their boundaries before the assault began.

I pushed anyway.

The first guard went down.

Then the second.

Plasma cut through the dark where my ribs had been half a second earlier. I changed rhythm. Came out behind the third. Went under the fourth shot instead of around it.

The fifth saw me.

Actually saw me.

For one frozen second his eyes locked on mine inside the shadow.

Then I was past him.

The sixth fell near the wall.

My vision blanked and came back with Vain already moving.

“The evidence is out,” he said. “The research isn’t.”

He reached for the recessed command panel beside the corridor junction.