Page 64 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Who.

Where.

Jessa.

Her name stayed.

“Diplomatic at ninety-six,” Deyric said.

I heard Jessa behind me. Not the words first. Her voice.

I held onto that.

“Serak.”

Closer.

“Ninety-eight.”

The dark wanted everything without edges. My name. My hands. The difference between the floor and my knees on it.

Jessa stayed specific.

“Twenty minutes,” Deyric said.

“One hundred percent,” she said. “Upload complete.”

A breath. Then: “Triggering the worm.”

A pause. The console behind me hummed. A different sound, deeper, the worm propagating through the facility’s network, finding the research databases, the backup systems, the archived files.

Everything Vain had built. Everything his researchers had developed. The redirected bonding protocols, the neurochemical priming techniques, the success cases.

All of it burning from the inside out.

“Worm is active,” Jessa said. “Propagating through the facility network. Research databases corrupting. It’s in the connected backups. It’s still spreading.”

“The feeder stations?” I asked.

“Deyric built the worm to follow the network connections outward. If the feeder stations are still linked, it’ll reach them. If someone copied data offline...” She paused. “Then we deal with fragments later. The primary datasets are burning now.”

Another pause. Longer.

“Deyric,” she said. “Confirm.”

Deyric’s voice, from the Raptor. Quiet.

“It’s everywhere it can reach. Every connected channel. Every connected network.”

Silence.

“It’s done.”

Maris came over comms. “Main hangar secure.” Zevik followed: “External array is dark.” Ressh said the remaining security posts were surrendering or breaking.

The fighting stopped. Not all at once. In pieces.

Weapons going silent across the station. Voices going quiet. The klaxons cutting out, one by one, until the only sound was the hum of the transmission equipment and Jessa’s breathing behind me and the slow dissolution of everything I was.