Page 75 of Claimed By the Wraiths

For the first time since Meridian, there was nothing left to count.

JESSA

Three days later, nobody was waiting for the next alarm.

The evidence was spreading through every network in the Consortium. Investigations were opening and arrest warrants were being issued.

The feeder stations were being ordered offline; some had already gone dark. Legitimate Consortium forces had taken control of Nexus Station and prisoner transfers had begun.

Narev was eating real food and talking in full sentences. She’d asked Solren about boat-building materials available at the nearest station.

Solren had looked confused. Narev had looked like a woman with plans. I suspected she’d have a workshop within the month.

Rynn and Kovac were in the same room for the first time in fourteen months. Solren said the reunion had been quiet.

They’d stood in the doorway of the medical bay and looked at each other. Rynn had put her hand on the wall between them out of habit, before she’d realized there was no wall. Then she’d walked through the space where the wall used to be and that was it.

No drama. Just a woman closing the distance that should never have existed.

Patel had been picked up by the legitimate Consortium forces. I’d given his name to the processing team with a note: cooperated.

Facilitated prisoner access. His compound lists had gone to Solren the first day, scraps of paper that mapped exactly what the suppressed prisoners had been fed.

What happened to him was still under review. He was barely twenty. He’d opened a door.

Tal had been freed from Vain’s detention during the assault. When the first legitimate Consortium ships docked within a day of the battle, he surrendered voluntarily, walking to them before anyone came for him.

He’d handed over every communication record he had and asked to testify. The last I’d heard, he and his family were under protective guard with the investigators; he was cooperating and had slept through his first full night since Meridian.

The fourteen redirected subjects were the hardest cases. Solren had spent two days with the Consortium medical teams studying the neurochemical profiles.

He wouldn’t call it reversible yet. He called it “not proven irreversible,” which was Solren for “I’m going to figure this out and nobody is going to stop me.”

Three days of aftermath. Three days of debriefings and handoffs and the slow work of undoing what Vain had built. Three nights since the battle. The first belonged to medbay. The second to the Ghost. This was the third, and it was different.

We were in his quarters. The door was closed. The Raptor’s vibration carried through the deck and the walls and the narrow bed.

Wider than the Ghost’s bunk. Still not wide enough for two people unless they wanted to be close.

We wanted to be close.

Serak sat on the edge of the bed, shirtless. I’d been learning his body for two days and I still found new things.

Yesterday it had been a pale hooked scar at the base of his right thumb, the kind I would have missed if I hadn’t been tracing his hand.

“What happened there?”

He looked at the mark. “Mairuke.”

I sat up.

His expression changed immediately.

“No.”

“You cannot say that name and then tell me no.”

“The question was what caused the scar.”