Chapter 8: First Stop: The Smuggler's Moon
The silence of the Echo Vale was a pressure they had to manually breathe against. For three days, they drifted through the crystallized scar, making repairs by feel and instrument ping. The scanner came back online in a limited, staticky capacity. It was enough.
“We can’t stay here,” Kael’s voice said, soft in the dim cockpit light. He was at the nav console, his fingers tracing possible exit vectors on the grainy map. “The structural field is degrading. Another week and this pocket will crush us like an egg.”
“Sentimentality later. Plot a course,” Vex grunted from the same mouth, though his influence was in the tense set of the shoulders, the aggressive tap on the screen. “Somewhere with parts. And people who won’t ask questions.”
Tiara, elbow-deep in an open access panel, wiped grease on her trousers. “People are the problem. Zorgon’s people.”
“Exactly.” Kael turned to look at her, his expression earnest. “So we go where his people are, but where his control is thinnest. The grease in his gears. The Smuggler’s Moon. The port’s called Grinder’s Dock. It’s anarchic. If he’s got a presence there, it’s because he’s forcing it. And forced loyalties break easy.”
Vex rolled their eyes, a jarringly human gesture. “Great. A nest of traitors and cutthroats. My favorite. You think we’ll find warm hugs and a resistance cell?”
“I think we’ll find someone who’s lost a shipment, a limb, or a loved one to him,” Kael shot back, the edge in his voice pure frustration. “Someone with a grudge and nothing left to lose. That’s a start.”
Tiara considered the wiring, the burned-out nodes from the jump. They needed isotopes for the core, molecular bond sealant, and about a hundred other things she couldn’t fabricate. “Can we get in without a beacon? Dock off the books?”
A slow, sharp smile spread across their face. It was all Vex. “Now you’re speaking my language. The Grinder’s approach is a mess of derelict hulls and old navigation buoys. We can piggyback a signal from a junker, slip in with the refuse haulers. It’s not pretty flying.”
“Do it,” Tiara said.
The approach was a masterpiece of controlled violence. Vex was at the controls, his hands a blur. The Wandering Light, still tender from its wounds, shuddered as he threaded it through a canyon of shattered freighter hulls, their jagged edges glowing faintly with residual radiation. He killed all non-essential systems, plunging them into a silence broken only by the creak of their own stressed alloy. The only light came from the neon hellscape growing in the viewport.
Grinder’s Dock wasn’t a moon. It was a tumor. A massive, jury-rigged station grown onto a barren asteroid, layered in centuries of added decks, docking spines, and slapped-on habitation pods. Thousands of ships clung to it like metallic ticks. The air on the scanners, once they dared a passive ping, was a soup of conflicting signatures and frantic, encrypted traffic.
“There,” Kael murmured, pointing to a flickering transponder code broadcasting from a half-disintegrated ore carrier. “Its signal is fading in and out. We can mirror its decay, look like just another piece of it breaking off.”
Vex didn’t answer. He nudged the thrusters, sliding them in behind the drifting wreck. The Light’s hull screeched in protest as it adjusted to the carrier’s lazy spin. For ten long minutes, they were just more cosmic debris tumbling toward the chaotic glitter of the dock.
Then they were in the traffic lane, a river of ships flowing toward various maws. Vex guided them away from the main commercial bays, where sleek corvettes and armed guild freighters sat under glaring lights. He took them down, into the lower ducts, where the light was murky and the docking clamps were manual, rust-covered things.
He set them down with a final, jarring clang in a bay lit by a single, flickering orange strip light. The walls wept condensed humidity. The sound was immediate—a bass-throb of machinery from deep within the station, the shriek of metal on metal, and a discordant symphony of shouts, music, and barking from somewhere beyond the bay door.
“Charming,” Tiara said, powering down the engines. The familiar hum faded, leaving them in the vibrating, foul-breathed belly of the place.
They armed themselves discreetly. Tiara kept her blaster in its thigh holster but wore a long, worn coat over it. The twin simply seemed to… condense. Their posture shifted, their gaze turning flat and assessing. It was a unified front of pure threat, no flickering required.
The bay door hissed open not onto a corridor, but onto the market itself.
The noise hit them first—a physical wave of bartering, arguing, and raucous laughter. The smell came next: sizzling street food of unidentifiable origin, pungent alien spices, the ozone of bad wiring, the underlying stink of crowded bodies and stale recycling units.
The space was a cavern, carved from raw asteroid rock and shored up with stolen ship plating. Walkways and ramps zigzagged up into gloom, lit by the garish glow of holographic signs advertising everything from neural implants to fresh water. Stalls welded from cargo containers overflowed with tech, weapons, and biotech. Beings of a dozen species jostled past, their faces marked by hard lives and harder choices.
“Stay close,” the twin said, their voice low. They instinctively moved so Tiara was between them and the wall, their body a barrier against the flow of the crowd.
Tiara’s hunter’s eyes scanned. She saw the obvious security—hulking Brutes in mismatched armor with shock-batons. And she saw the subtle kind: the skinny slicers selling data in shadowed alcoves, the too-watchful ‘bartenders’, the pairs of eyes that tracked new arrivals a little too long.
“We need the Isotope-478,” she said, speaking close to their ear to be heard. “And the bond sealant. Standard places won’t have it. Too controlled.”
“Controlled means military surplus,” Kael’s logic surfaced. “Look for the stalls selling fractured Legion armor, decommissioned rifle parts.”
“Or look for the guy who looks like he bathes in radiation,” Vex added, his gaze locking onto a stall at the far end. It was piled with cracked power cores and glowing canisters marked with hazard symbols. The being behind it was a Gauth, his leathery skin covered in phosphorescent fungal growths.
They moved through the press. A hulking trader tried to block their path, shoving a crate of shimmering scarves at Tiara. “For the lovely lady! Captures the light!”
The twin didn’t break stride. A single, sharp look from them and the trader stumbled back as if shoved, muttering and turning away. Tiara felt the low hum of their power, a warning vibrato pitched just below hearing.
They reached the Gauth’s stall. The being looked up, four milky eyes blinking independently.
“Isotope-478. Molecular bond sealant, G-9 grade,” Tiara said, no preamble.
The Gauth coughed, a wet sound. “Don’t got that. Restricted. Very bad.”
Tiara leaned in, placing a credit chip on the corroded counter. It was a decent amount. The Gauth didn’t blink.
Vex sighed, a sound of pure annoyance. He reached out and, with a casual finger, touched a cracked power core on the stall. The core’s faint glow died instantly, going dark and inert. The Gauth’s fungal patches flared in alarm.
“You’re leaking,” Vex said, his voice conversational. “Also, your third eye is infected. Nasty. We’re not Legion. We’re not cops. We’re the people who make problems go away. We need the stuff to make our problems go away. You have it. Or I make your power supply problem permanent.”
The Gauth stared at the dead core. Then he shuffled backwards, disappearing into a curtain of stained fabric behind his stall. He returned a minute later with two heavy, lead-lined cases. He popped the latches. The isotope canister pulsed with a sickly blue light. The sealant tubes were cold to the touch.
“Triple the chip,” the Gauth rasped.
“Double,” Tiara countered, sliding another chip. “And a location. Someone who’s had trouble with Zorgon’s operations. Recent trouble.”
The Gauth snatched the chips, his fungal growths dimming. He looked at the twin, then at Tiara. Something calculating replaced the fear. “Zorgon. He took my cousin’s haulership. For ‘debts’. Now cousin works the smelter levels. Debt never ends.” He pointed a gnarled finger up, into the tangled superstructure. “Level Blue-Nine. Look for the Mechanic’s Guild hall. Ask for Silas. His daughter piloted that ship. She’s still… angry.”
They took the cases and melted back into the crowd.
The walk to Blue-Nine was a descent into worse air and darker corners. The commercial glare faded, replaced by the functional, grim light of industry. The walls here vibrated constantly with the thunder of smelters and forges. Beings moved with tired resignation, their faces smudged with soot.
The Mechanic’s Guild hall was a large bay door covered in weld scars and faded protest graffiti. Inside, it was a bit warmer, smelling of warm metal and strong solvent. Beings in stained coveralls worked on engine blocks or huddled over schematics.
Tiara approached a woman welding a thruster nozzle. “Looking for Silas.”
The woman killed her torch and lifted her visor. Her eyes were old, tired. She jerked her head toward a back office without a word.
The office was a glass-walled cube overlooking the bay. A man sat inside, his back to them, staring at a screen scrolling with parts manifests. He was bald, with intricate circuitry tattoos snaking over his scalp and down his neck.
Tiara knocked on the glass. He turned.
He saw the twin first. His body went rigid, hand drifting toward a wrench on the desk. Then he saw Tiara. The recognition was immediate, and it wasn’t friendly. It was the cold recognition of a fellow predator.
“Bounty hunter,” he spat. “Grinder’s got no use for your kind. We police our own.”
“I’m not hunting anyone here,” Tiara said, keeping her hands visible. “The Gauth on Level Red said you might understand a problem. A problem named Zorgon.”
The name landed like a physical blow. Silas’s face contorted, a mask of pure, bottled rage. His eyes flicked to the twin again, wary. “What’s your interest?”
“He’s hunting us,” the twin said, their voice neutral. “We’d prefer he stopped. Permanently. We heard he took something of yours. A ship. A daughter.”
Silas leaned back, his chair creaking. The rage cooled into something harder, sharper. “My Alia. Best pilot in the Dock. He framed her for a tariff violation. Confiscated the
her ship. Sold it for parts. She works the smelters now. Her hands…” He trailed off, looking at his own grease-stained fingers. “What’s your proposal?”
“We need a safe berth. Off the books,” Tiara said, leaning against the glass. “Parts, some food. A few days without being scanned.”
“And in return?”
“We’re going to hurt him,” Vex’s voice cut through, low and certain. “We don’t do halfway.”
Kael’s smoother tone softened the edge. “You give us what we need, we give you a chance. We find where he’s weak here. We break it. Maybe we even find where he’s keeping the proceeds from that sale.”
Silas studied the twin’s face, the strange duality flickering in their eyes. He looked at Tiara, assessing her worn coat, the set of her jaw, the steady hazel gaze that held his without flinching. He saw the isotope case at her feet.
“You’re serious.” It wasn’t a question.
“He’s chasing us across the fringe,” Tiara confirmed. “We’re tired of running. So we turn. We fight. He took from you. He’s trying to take from us. That’s common ground.”
A long silence stretched, filled with the distant shriek of a plasma cutter. Silas finally nodded, once. “Bay 42-G. It’s listed as condemned. I’ll reroute the environmental feed. You’ll have air, minimal power. Can’t do food—draws attention. But I know the crews that offload the illicit cargos he brings in. I can get you manifests. Ship schedules.”
“That’s a start,” Tiara said.
“It’s more than you deserve.” Silas stood, his bulk blocking the dim light. “But Alia doesn’t smile anymore. So here’s my promise: you give me proof you’ve struck him—real proof, not just talk—and my guild becomes your eyes here. We’ll hide you. We’ll get you what you need.”
“And our promise?” Kael asked.
Silas looked at them, his eyes burning with a cold, paternal fire. “You find the lockbox where he put the credits from my daughter’s ship. You take it. You wreck whatever operation he’s building here. And if you get a clean shot…”
“We don’t take prisoners,” Vex finished, the words a flat, final statement.
Tiara met Silas’s gaze. The weight of the vow settled in the space between them, heavier than the lead-lined isotope case. It was no grand oath, just a hunter’s contract sealed in mutual rage. “If we get a clean shot, Silas, Zorgon dies. You have my word.”
He held out a calloused hand. Tiara took it. His grip was crushing. “Bay 42-G. Down the service ramp, left at the leaking condenser. I’ll send the first data pack in four hours.”
They gathered the heavy cases. As they turned to leave, Silas spoke again, his voice quieter. “He always travels with a telepath. A Vrellian. Sees tricks coming a mile off.”
The twin paused at the door. A slight, humorless smile touched their lips. “Good thing we’re not a trick,” they said, and the light seemed to bend faintly around them for just a second. “We’re a fact.”
The service ramp was a throat of dripping pipes and flickering emergency strips. Their footsteps echoed too loudly in the metallic hollow. The air grew thicker, tasting of rust and chemical decay.
Bay 42-G wasn’t a bay so much as a wound in the station’s side. A massive hull plate had buckled inward long ago, creating a twisted cave of scaffolds and frozen metal tendrils. Silas had jury-rigged an atmosphere field across the breach, a shimmering, unstable curtain holding back the void.
“Home sweet home,” Vex muttered, eyeing the flickering field with distrust. He dropped the heavy sealant case with a thud that reverberated through the grimy deck.
The Wandering Light sat under the skeletal remains of a gantry, looking small and battered. In the unforgiving industrial glare, Tiara saw every scar from their escape: the blackened scoring along the starboard flank, the warped plates near the engine housing.
Kael was already moving, his hand brushing the ship’s hull with a tenderness that felt private. “The structural integrity held. Mostly. It’s the secondary systems that are fried.”
“We fix the vital shit first,” Tiara said, hauling the isotope case toward the rear cargo hatch. “Engines, life support, shields. Then we plan how to hit Zorgon where it hurts.”
The hatch hissed open, exhaling the familiar, stale-circulated air of the ship. It smelled different now—burnt wiring, ozone, and the sharp, coppery scent of their own fear-sweat from the jump. The main hold was a mess of strewn tools and discarded wrappers from their three-day drift.
Vex stalked to a wall panel, ripped it open, and peered into the snarl of conduits. “Conduit seven is slag. That’s why the nav array keeps glitching. Need to splice in a new primary feed.”
“I’ll handle the isotope injection into the core,” Kael said, hefting the pulsing canister. “It’s a two-person job to stabilize the chamber while it feeds.”
“So we do it together,” Tiara said. It wasn’t a question.
They worked in a rhythm born of desperation and quiet competence. For hours, the only sounds were the clank of tools, the hiss of solder, and their own labored breathing in the tight spaces. Tiara held a beam in place while Kael, his form flickering slightly with the strain of maintaining a solid shape, welded a support brace.
His shoulder brushed hers in the confined access shaft. The contact was electric and ordinary all at once.
“You’re good at this,” he said, his voice close in the dimness.
“Fixing things? Or breaking them?” she asked, holding the light steady for him.
“Knowing which is needed,” he replied softly.
Later, cleaned of grease and sitting on crates in the hold with a single lamp between them, they laid out Silas’s data pad. The manifests glowed in the gloom. List after list of incoming cargo: refined Tallaxian crystals, bio-augmentation serum, pre-colonial artifacts.
“He’s not just running guns,” Tiara said, her finger tracing a column. “This is high-value, cultural. He’s stripping worlds. Building capital.”
“And the schedules show a pattern,” Kael pointed out, zooming in on the map. “Three ships, staggered arrivals every forty-eight hours. They dock at the main commercial bay, Upper Crimson. He’s brazen.”
Vex, who had been silently sharpening a carbon blade, looked up. His eyes reflected the cold light of the pad. “He’s confident. That’s a weakness. He thinks his telepath makes him untouchable.”
“Silas said Vrellian. They’re good. Not infallible.” Tiara leaned back, her spine cracking. “They read surface thoughts, imminent intent. They can’t sort through a mind in chaos.”
Kael stared at her. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we don’t plan an attack. Not directly.” She met his gaze, then Vex’s. “We plan a distraction. Something big, loud, and emotionally fucking chaotic. While the telepath is sorting through the panic of a hundred beings, we hit the real target.”
Vex’s smile was a slow, sharp thing. “The lockbox.”
“The lockbox,” she confirmed. “Silas wants the credits from his daughter’s ship. I want to bleed Zorgon dry. We find where they’re processing the haul from those ships. The secure vault. We don’t steal a crate. We crack the vault and open it to the void.”
Kael whistled low. “That’s not a strike. That’s a declaration of war.”
“He started it,” Vex growled, standing up to pace the shadowed length of the hold. “We’re just finishing the conversation.”
“The distraction?” Kael pressed.
Tiara called up a schematic Silas had included. “Here. The primary reactor for the Upper Crimson sector. It’s old, it’s poorly maintained, and it has a safety override for manual purge. A purge vents superheated plasma into the auxiliary cooling ducts.”
“Which would trigger a sector-wide emergency lockdown,” Kael finished, understanding dawning. “Alarms, panic, containment fields slamming down. Every security goon would run that way.”
“And the telepath would be swamped,” Tiara said. “For ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”
“Long enough,” Vex said, stopping his pacing. He looked at the Light, then at the tools scattered around them. “If we can get the core stabilized and the sealant cured in time.”
“We have twenty hours before the next shipment arrives,” Kael said, calculating. “We work. We finish the repairs. Then we scout.”
Tiara nodded, the plan coiling tight in her gut. It was a gamble. It was madness. It was the only move they had left that wasn’t running. Outside the makeshift bay, the immense, grinding heartbeat of the Smuggler’s Moon thudded on, oblivious. Inside, three people, bound by a single desperate purpose, prepared to make it skip a beat.
Inside, three people, bound by a single desperate purpose, prepared to make it skip a beat.
They didn’t sleep.
The next twelve hours dissolved into the smell of scorched metal, the taste of synthetic protein bars eaten over open wiring diagrams, and the symphony of curses that accompanied every stubborn bolt. Tiara’s world narrowed to the path of a laser calibrator, her fingers moving with a numb precision that bypassed thought. In the core chamber, the atmosphere crackled with raw energy as Kael guided the isotope injection, his form shimmering at the edges like a heat haze. Vex’s influence was in the brute force, the relentless pressure applied to a warped manifold, the growled encouragement that sounded more like a threat.
“Feed it slower,” Kael hissed, his voice strained as the power core gulped the blue isotope.
“It’s bottlenecking,” Vex shot back through the same teeth, muscles corded as he held a regulator valve open by hand. “Needs more flow, not less!”
Tiara, wedged between them with a diagnostic pad, smacked the housing with the heel of her hand. “The manifold’s still warped. It’s creating a back-pressure. Vex, hold it. Kael, pulse the feed on my mark. Three. Two. Now.”
A shudder ran through the deck. The core’s erratic whine smoothed into a deep, steady thrum. Light returned to the consoles, clean and constant.
They slumped back, breathing hard in the suddenly quiet hum. Sweat plastered Tiara’s dusty blonde curls to her temples. The twin leaned against the bulkhead, their shared body looking paler, hollowed out by the expenditure.
“It’ll hold,” Tiara said, voice raspy. She wasn’t asking.
“It’ll have to,” they replied, one voice layered over another, too tired to fully separate.
The ship was a patchwork of fresh welds and optimism. The air recycler still coughed occasionally, and the starboard thruster alignment was a percentage point into the warning zone. But it would fly. It would jump. It was, as the saying went in the grim ports, as fixed as it would ever be.
That left eight hours.
They scrubbed the worst of the grime off with solvent wipes that smelled of acid and regret. They changed into dark, nondescript clothes from the lockers—thick synth-cotton pants, tight black shirts, durable jackets that absorbed light. They armed themselves not for war, but for silence: monofilament blades, compact stun pistols, grab-hooks, and scanner jammers.
“Scouting only,” Kael said, checking the charge on a jammer. His tone was firm, the protector surfacing. “We observe the reactor access, the vault location, the patrol patterns. We do not engage.”
“Unless we have to,” Vex murmured, testing the edge of his blade.
“No,” Tiara said, final. She looked at both of them, at the single face that held her two anchors. “We stick to the plan. Chaos later. Right now, we’re ghosts.”
They became ghosts in the machine of Grinder’s Dock.
The upper levels were a different species of crowded. Less frantic market chaos, more purposeful, grim-faced traffic. Guards in uniforms of no particular allegiance stood at junctions, their eyes scanning for trouble that paid less than they did. Holographic ads here were for bonded security services and high-yield investment opportunities.
The service corridor leading to the Upper Crimson reactor was a wide, cathedral-like space of ancient, humming pipes. Moisture dripped from seams in the ceiling, creating permanent, oily puddles on the grate floor. The air smelled of ozone and hot metal.
“There,” Tiara whispered, pointing up.
The manual purge override was a yellow-and-black striped wheel behind a clear polycarb shield, twenty meters up a maintenance ladder, bolted to a pipe larger than the Wandering Light. It looked untouched for decades.
“Camera at two o’clock, mounted on the eastern conduit,” Kael noted, his eyes tracking the slow, mechanical sweep of a lens. “No blind spot on the ladder.”
“Thermal?” Tiara asked.
The twin’s eyes narrowed, the faintest shimmer passing over their irises. “Standard spectrum. No life-sign monitors. It’s old. They rely on the patrols.”
As if summoned, the clank of armored boots echoed from a connecting tunnel. They melted into the shadow of a massive valve assembly, holding their breath. Two guards passed, their conversation a bored grumble about shift rotations and bad synth-ale.
When the sound faded, Vex let out a slow breath. “Patrol interval, roughly six minutes. Enough time to get up there, crack the shield, and spin the wheel. If you’re fast.”
“I’m fast,” Tiara said. She was already calculating the climb, the likely rust on the wheel’s mechanism.
They moved on, deeper into the station’s arterial heart.
The vault location was the harder find. Silas’s data suggested a secure holding area near the main commercial bay’s administrative hub. What they found was a facade. A brushed-steel doorway labeled “Revenue Processing” with a single, disinterested clerk behind a desk. It was too clean, too obvious.
“It’s a front,” Kael murmured, watching from across a crowded concourse where beings queued for transport permits. “The real vault is somewhere else. Somewhere structural.”
“Follow the power,” Vex suggested, his gaze drifting to the thick, shielded cabling that ran along the ceiling, nearly invisible against the dark alloy. “Not the general grid. Dedicated lines. For heavy shielding and constant cooling.”
They trailed the cables, a silent, three-shadow procession. It led them down, away from the glossy fronts, into a sub-level where the noise of the docks was a muffled thunder above. The walls here were bare rock, sweating and cold. The cable bundle terminated at a featureless blast door, seamless and new, set into the ancient asteroid bedrock. A single palm scanner glowed beside it.
“That’s it,” Tiara said, feeling a cold certainty. The door smelled of money and secrecy.
As they watched, the door slid open with a pressurized hiss. A figure emerged, followed by two hulking guards. Not Zorgon. This was a slim, administrative type in an impeccable grey suit, carrying a data-slate. But behind him, in the briefly revealed interior, Tiara saw rows of gleaming lockboxes and the shimmer of a contained energy field.
The door sealed shut.
“Scanner’s biometrically keyed,” Kael observed, a frown forming. “We can’t fake a palm print without a sample.”
“Then we get a sample,” Vex said, his eyes tracking the grey-suited man as he walked away with his guards.
“He’s heading for the VIP docking spur,” Tiara noted. “Probably overseeing the next shipment arrival. We have four hours until it docks.”
They needed a plan for the palm. And they needed to be far from here when the chaos began.
The last of the eight hours was spent returning through the station’s underbelly, the map in their minds now overlaid with hazards and objectives. The reactor access point, the vault door, the patrol rhythms—it all cohered into a fragile, dangerous ballet.
They were two corridors from Bay 42-G when the air changed.
It was a scent first. Expensive oils and something colder, like static. The ambient noise of the service corridor seemed to dampen, swallowed by a sudden, profound stillness. The twin stopped dead, one hand snapping out to halt Tiara. Their body went rigid, a low, almost sub-audible growl vibrating in their chest.
A figure stepped from a cross-passage ahead, blocking their path to the bay.
He was tall, muscular, the scar across his face a pale, vicious line in the dim light. Zorgon. He wore no armor, just a simple, dark tunic, but the space around him seemed to warp, heavy with implied violence. He wasn’t alone. Beside him stood a Vrellian, its cranial tendrils weaving slowly in the air, its large, black eyes reflecting the emergency strips like pools of oil.
“You’ve been busy,” Zorgon said. His voice was calm, conversational, and it filled the corridor. “Fixing your little ship. Making friends with disappointed mechanics. It’s charming, really.”
Tiara’s blood turned to ice. Her hand didn’t move toward her weapon. She knew it would be a death sentence. The Vrellian’s gaze was a physical weight on her skin, skittering across the surface of her thoughts.
The twin shifted subtly, a fraction in front of Tiara.
“Let’s not posture,” Zorgon sighed, as if bored. “The telepath is a formality. I knew you’d come here. The Smuggler’s Moon is a spiderweb, and I own several of the spiders.” He took a slow step forward. “The entity interests me. A dual consciousness in one form. A rarity. You interest me, hunter. Your resilience.”
“What do you want?” The question came from the twin, but the voice was purely Kael’s, steady and diplomatic, buying milliseconds.
“The same thing I’ve always wanted,” Zorgon said. “Order. The entity will be studied. Its abilities… harnessed.” His eyes, cruel and calculating, settled on Tiara. “And you. You’ve caused significant expense. You will work it off. Your skills have uses, beyond hunting bounties for petty credits.”
Vex’s presence surged, a heat at Tiara’s back. She felt their power coiling, the air prickling.
“Don’t,” she whispered, barely a breath.
The Vrellian’s tendrils twitched. “He is preparing to shift,” it intoned, its voice dry as dust. “An aggressive transformation. He intends to strike.”
Zorgon smiled. “Of course he does.”
But he didn’t order an attack. He simply looked at them, a hunter examining trapped prey. “You have a plan. I know you do. Something involving my reactor, my vault. It’s predictable.” He took another step. They were ten meters apart. “Execute it.”
Tiara stared, disbelief choking her.
“Go on,” Zorgon prompted, spreading his hands. “Try your desperate gambit. I want to see it. I want to see how far you get before I break you.” His smile widened, revealing perfect, cold teeth. “It’s so much more satisfying that way. Run along now. Back to your patched-up ship. Clock’s ticking.”
He stepped aside, clearing the path to their bay. The dismissal was absolute, and more terrifying than any attack.
They moved, slowly at first, then with quickening steps, never turning their backs. The Vrellian’s gaze followed them, a tickle of invasive cold in the back of Tiara’s skull until they rounded the corner.
Inside the shuddering atmosphere field of Bay 42-G, they stopped, breathing hard.
“He’s playing with us,” Kael said, the words ragged.
“He knows everything,” Vex snarled, slamming a fist against the hull. The clang echoed in the cavernous space.
Tiara looked at the ship, at their fragile, hard-won repairs, at the two beings who had become her chaotic, essential center. The plan was compromised. Their timeline was smoke. Zorgon’s cold confidence was a wall.
She saw the grey-suited administrator’