Author’s Note: If you have not already, I suggest you start with Part One of this story. Either way, thank you for joining me on this journey. I plan to publish my stories here first, then eventually move them to Amazon or the like. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome!
Burn Path
The Minnow jolted hard as the burn ignited, its old frame groaning in protest. Talia wrestled the controls, compensating for the uneven thrust. Outside the viewport, the stars spun wildly before snapping into a dizzying blur as they plunged into the Arlen Drift.
A cloud of fractured asteroids and frozen wreckage loomed ahead—remnants of a failed mining colony and the cleanup fleet that never made it out.
Perfect cover.
Or a graveyard.
Kieran gripped the console beside her. “They’re closing.”
“Let them,” she muttered, teeth clenched.
The comms flared again—sharp, angry:
“Unregistered vessel, this is your final warning. Comply or be disabled.”
Talia muted it. “They always say that right before they fire.”
“They won’t risk the cargo,” Kieran said. “I’m worth more breathing.”
Talia shot him a look. “You’re worth more than that.”
Then they hit the field.
The debris came fast—metal plates the size of station walls, shattered solar wings tumbling like knives. Talia wove The Minnow through the chaos, the ship’s alarms shrieking warnings with every near miss. A burnt-out probe spiraled past, close enough to scrape paint.
Kieran tapped into the nav display, rerouting auxiliary power. “I’ve got comm jammers spooled. We can blind them—maybe—if they get too close.”
Talia nodded, sweat slicking her brow. “Hold it. We need to drag them in deeper first.”
The chasing ship didn’t hesitate. Sleek and silver, it followed like a predator, confident in its speed, its firepower, its inevitability.
Until the field thickened.
Until Talia pulled a stunt no sane pilot would dare—cutting the main engines and flipping The Minnow into a reverse roll through a pocket of heavy debris, letting momentum carry them past a collapsing mining frame.
The pursuer faltered.
A metal support beam clipped its starboard wing, sending it tumbling.
Talia hit the throttle, redlining the engines.
They shot forward—through the densest cluster of wreckage, sensors screaming, warning lights blazing like fireworks.
Behind them, the pursuing ship lost its lock.
Then silence.
Only the hum of their own ship. The faint sizzle of heat bleeding off the hull.
Talia leaned forward, gasping, knuckles white.
Kieran didn’t speak. He just reached over and laid a hand on her shoulder.
She laughed—shaky, breathless. “Still with me?”
He squeezed gently. “Always.”
They weren’t safe yet. But they were free—for now.
And in the wreckage of failed missions and falling stars, they were still burning.
Together.
Gravity
The stars outside the viewport were calm again—no chasing ships, no warning sirens, no blinking death markers. Just the silent drift of the Arlen Expanse, glittering with cold starlight.
Inside The Minnow, everything was still.
Talia sat on the floor of the maintenance bay, back against a crate, arms limp at her sides. Her jacket was soaked with sweat, her hair stuck to her face, her hands still shaking from holding the controls so tight.
Kieran knelt in front of her, a med scanner in one hand, the other resting lightly on her knee.
“You’re not okay,” he said quietly.
“I’m breathing,” she replied, eyes closed. “That’s the bar today.”
He scanned her anyway, then set the device aside.
Silence stretched between them, the kind that didn’t demand words but invited them all the same.
“I used to think dying would be loud,” he said, voice soft. “Explosions. Metal. Fire. But the scariest part was how quiet it was.”
Talia opened her eyes.
“I was floating in that wreck,” he continued, “watching the systems fail one by one. I kept telling myself I was fine, that someone would come. And when no one did, I stopped telling myself anything at all.”
She didn’t speak—just listened, her throat tight.
“But then,” he said, eyes locking with hers, “I heard you.”
He reached out slowly, deliberately, and touched her hand.
“I need you to know,” he said, “that I didn’t just survive all those years. I was waiting—for something I didn’t have a name for. And then your voice came through the dark, and I knew what it was.”
She felt her breath hitch. The air between them felt different—charged not with fear or urgency, but something deeper. Slower.
She looked at his hand on hers. Then up into his face.
“I was drifting too, you know,” she said. “Different kind of wreck.”
They sat like that, in the quiet hum of the afterburn, neither needing to name what was forming between them.
It was too early for confessions. Too late for distance.
But here, in this fragile bubble of stolen time, they let gravity pull them a little closer.
Between Stars
They didn’t talk much the next day.
Not because there was nothing to say, but because the silence had changed. It wasn’t hollow anymore. It was full—with everything that lingered between their glances, their shared spaces, the quiet rhythms of two people relearning how to exist beside someone else.
Talia adjusted engine diagnostics with Kieran beside her, their shoulders brushing occasionally. He asked questions about the ship—small ones, curious ones—not because he didn’t understand, but because he wanted to hear her explain it.
She showed him how she rerouted power through the secondary arrays.
He showed her how to recalibrate the old stabilization thrusters using only manual override.
At some point, she caught herself smiling too long when he laughed at his own joke. He caught her watching and didn’t look away.
That night, she didn’t sleep in the lower bunk.
She lay on the floor in the cockpit, wrapped in a spare blanket, staring up through the overhead viewport. The stars above her felt closer here, like they were watching. Not indifferent, just quiet.
Kieran came in without speaking. He sat beside her, then lay back, their shoulders barely touching, their breath syncing without effort.
“How long until Arlen’s Reach?” he asked softly.
“Three days.”
“That’s long enough to pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“That we’re just two people on a ship. No ghosts. No missions. No one chasing us.”
Talia turned her head, eyes meeting his in the dim starlight.
“Then let’s pretend.”
A soft smile tugged at his lips.
“You ever think,” he murmured, “that we weren’t meant to be found by anyone else but each other?”
She didn’t answer right away.
Then, quietly: “Sometimes I think the void listens better than people do. Maybe it heard us both and decided it was time.”
He shifted slightly, just enough that his arm brushed against hers.
No more words after that.
Just stars. Just breath.
And two people, floating together between everything they’d run from and everything they hadn’t reached yet.
Small Things
Talia burned the toast.
Which was impressive, given that it wasn’t real toast—just a rehydrated starch pack molded into a vaguely bread-like shape and browned under a flickering heat coil. But she managed to scorch it anyway.
Kieran laughed from the other side of the galley, where he sat at the tiny fold-out table cleaning a mess of wires and tools.
“You know,” he said, “for someone who can reroute an entire propulsion system mid-flight, your culinary skills are tragic.”
She waved the charred toast at him like a weapon. “It’s a sabotage feature. Keeps guests from getting too comfortable.”
“Too late,” he said, smiling into his coffee bulb.
She tossed the toast, made a second attempt, and joined him at the table.
For a while, they just sat—him fiddling with a broken circuit board, her pretending to care about her latest food disaster. The hum of the ship filled the silence like background music.
She liked the way he filled space without taking it over. The way he moved through The Minnow like he respected its quirks. The way he never made her feel watched, only seen.
Kieran glanced at her, holding up the frayed circuit.
“You’ve been keeping this life-support relay held together with heat tape and hope.”
“Don’t knock hope,” she said. “It’s gotten us this far.”
He smiled, soft and warm. “That it has.”
She watched him work. The way his hands moved. Steady. Careful. Like he knew exactly what he was doing but didn’t rush it.
“Did you miss this?” she asked. “Doing something… normal?”
He looked up, and for a moment, she thought he might make a joke.
But instead, he said, “I didn’t think I’d ever do it again. I didn’t think I’d want to.”
He set the circuit down, looked at her across the narrow table.
“But now I wake up and want coffee. I want to sit across from you while you destroy breakfast. I want to fix things. Not because I have to. Just… because they’re here. And so am I.”
Her throat tightened.
It wasn’t a declaration. It wasn’t a confession.
It was a life—quiet and unfinished and slowly rebuilding itself, right in front of her.
She reached out without thinking and brushed a bit of grease from his cheek.
He caught her wrist lightly. Held it for just a moment.
Neither of them spoke.
But everything was being said.
Arrival
Arlen’s Reach floated in the dark like a promise and a threat.
It wasn’t beautiful—just a ring of modular habitats wrapped around a hollowed asteroid, bristling with antennae and docking arms. But after days in the drift and years in the dark, it was the first solid thing either of them had seen in a long time.
Talia guided The Minnow into approach velocity, comms open but silent. The false manifest still held. No red flags. No pursuit signals.
At least not yet.
Kieran stood beside her, one hand braced on the back of her chair. He hadn’t said much since breakfast. Just watched. Waited. Changed.
She glanced at him. “Last chance to back out.”
He smirked. “You’ve seen me nearly die in a wreck, crawl through debris, and eat your cooking. I’m committed.”
“Okay, rude—but fair.”
A light blinked green on the console.
“Docking approved,” she said. “Bay Twelve.”
She didn’t tell him she’d requested it specifically—an old maintenance wing, mostly unused, far from the main concourse. Quiet. Forgotten.
Just like the two of them.
The ship clunked into place, magnetic seals locking. A hiss of pressure equalizing.
She stood, heart pounding in her throat.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try not to get arrested.”
Kieran reached for his jacket—slightly too big for his thinner frame, but familiar—and pulled it on slowly. He looked around the ship one last time.
“This feels like the part in a story where everything changes.”
Talia met his gaze.
“It already has.”
The airlock cycled open.
Light poured in.
And beyond it, a man in a dark uniform stepped into view.
He was tall, sharp-eyed, wearing an Arlen Reach security insignia—and beside him, a woman stood in a coat with the insignia of Colonial Sciences. Her expression was unreadable.
Talia’s blood ran cold.
The woman stepped forward. Not to Talia.
To Kieran.
And said, “Captain Vale. You’re supposed to be dead.”
Aftershock
The room was too clean.
Talia sat in a reinforced-plas chair that was too white, too square, and bolted to the floor in a way that didn’t feel accidental. The walls hummed with recycled air and passive surveillance. A glass panel looked out on nothing—just black space, framed by a single flickering beacon.
They hadn’t called it a holding room, but it sure felt like one.
Kieran stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, staring into the void like it might still offer an escape.
Neither of them had spoken in ten minutes.
“They knew your name,” Talia said finally. “No hesitation. No doubt.”
Kieran didn’t turn around.
“They knew more than that,” he said. “The woman in the coat—Dr. Arissa Kline. She was part of the mission.”
Talia’s brow furrowed. “She was on the Helios-3?”
“No,” he said. “She helped design it.”
He turned then, face unreadable, eyes darker than she’d seen them.
“She worked on the payload. The biological systems. Me.”
Talia stared. “You’re saying—”
“I wasn’t just the captain,” he said. “I was part of the experiment.”
The words dropped like gravity into the room.
Talia stood, heart racing. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t remember,” he snapped. Then softened. “Not all of it. Bits. Pieces. Dreams that didn’t feel like mine.”
He sat on the edge of the bunk and rubbed his hands together.
“I think they built me to survive what the others couldn’t. I think I was never meant to make it home.”
Talia felt the floor shift beneath her, like the room was tilting.
“They didn’t rescue you,” she said slowly. “They recovered you.”
Kieran looked up at her. “Yeah.”
She crossed the room and sat beside him, close enough that their knees touched.
“I won’t let them take you apart,” she said.
“They might not need to,” he replied. “I think part of me was designed to fall apart on its own.”
He said it with no drama, no fear. Just fact.
Talia reached for his hand. Held it.
“Then I’ll put you back together,” she said.
Kieran gave her a broken, tired smile. “What if I’m not the person I think I am?”
She leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Then we find out together.”
In the Chair
The interrogation room was colder than the rest of the station.
Not freezing—just calculated. Clinical. The kind of cold designed to sharpen the edges of fear and slow the warmth of instinct. Talia sat still, hands folded on the table, jaw set.
The man across from her didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t need to. He wore authority like a uniform, even beneath his neatly pressed civilian clothes. Gray temples. Data slate in one hand, stylus in the other.
“You falsified a ship’s manifest,” he began. “Entered restricted airspace. Recovered a lost military asset without reporting it through any chain of command.”
Talia raised an eyebrow. “Nice to meet you too.”
He didn’t smile.
“This isn’t a disciplinary review, Technician Merrin. This is a strategic debrief.”
“I didn’t know I’d be rescuing a strategic anything,” she said. “Just a voice on an old relay frequency. A person. You remember what those are, right?”
He slid the data slate closer to her. It flicked to life, displaying an image: Kieran in the medbay, unconscious. Monitored.
Asset, the header read.
“Captain Vale’s genetic profile is classified. His original mission has been sealed since the collapse of the Eos program. He is a risk. A deviation.”
“He’s a man,” she snapped. “He was alone for decades. Survived. You buried him, and now you’re treating him like a broken prototype.”
His expression didn’t change.
“Protocol exists for a reason. Emotional entanglement clouds judgment.”
“Funny,” Talia said, standing slowly, leaning over the table. “I’ve never thought clearer in my life.”
There was a pause. Just long enough to make her think maybe she’d gone too far.
Then he asked, quietly, “Did he tell you everything?”
Talia narrowed her eyes. “He told me enough.”
The man tapped the slate. The screen changed—images, blurry but undeniable. A figure standing in the wreck of the Helios-3, lit by emergency lights, blood on his face. Behind him—shapes. Unmoving. Other crew. Not just dead.
Destroyed.
Her stomach turned.
“That was from the final burst log,” the man said. “Before the beacon failed. Before the blackout. Captain Vale wasn’t alone for all of those years. Not at first.”
Talia swallowed hard. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you may not know what you’ve brought back.”
The Distance Between
She didn’t go back to their room right away.
She stood in the corridor outside, staring at the door like it might answer the question she didn’t know how to ask.
What are you?
No—Who are you?
The image from the data slate burned behind her eyes. Blood. Wreckage. A still figure hunched in the dark, surrounded by what used to be a crew.
And Kieran in the middle of it. Silent. Watching.
He didn’t tell you everything.
She hated the way that sentence had taken root. Hated how it made her hesitate, even now.
But she keyed the door open anyway.
He was sitting at the edge of the bunk, arms resting on his knees, staring at the floor. He didn’t look up.
“You were gone a while,” he said.
Talia stepped inside, slow and deliberate. The door whispered shut behind her.
“Interrogation,” she said lightly. “Big words. Bigger chairs.”
He let out a quiet breath that might have been a laugh. Might not have.
“You okay?” he asked, still not meeting her eyes.
She wanted to say yes.
Instead: “They showed me something.”
His body tensed, just slightly. Enough.
“They said you weren’t alone when the crash happened. That there were other survivors. At first.”
He didn’t answer.
“They said you—” She stopped, throat tight. “They think you killed them.”
Silence.
The kind that wraps around your lungs and doesn’t let go.
Then, finally, Kieran looked up.
His eyes were dark. Haunted. Honest.
“I didn’t kill them,” he said softly. “But I didn’t save them either.”
Talia stood frozen.
He stood, slowly, like every movement was a decision. He walked to the far wall. Pressed a hand to the window.
“The AI failed,” he said. “But before it did… it tried to isolate the threat. Quarantine it. I overrode the protocol. I thought it was a malfunction. But it wasn’t. It had detected something in our genetics—flaws. Or maybe design choices. Something programmed.”
His reflection stared back at him from the glass. Pale. Tired.
“I started to change. Not fast. Just… awareness. Reflexes. Healing. I thought I was losing my mind.”
He turned to her then, finally meeting her gaze.
“They tried to sedate me. Contain me. I think they thought I’d snapped.”
Talia’s voice was barely a whisper. “And did you?”
He looked down. “No.”
Then back up.
“But I didn’t stop them when they tried to escape in the escape pods without me. I watched. I didn’t help. Some didn’t make it. One came back.”
A pause.
“She didn’t last long.”
He stepped closer, slowly. No sudden moves. Like he knew she might step back.
She didn’t.
“I’m not who I was when that ship launched,” he said. “And I might never be him again. But the part of me that reached for you across the void—that held on to your voice and followed it home—that’s real. And it’s me.”
Talia stared at him, heart aching.
She didn’t move.
Not away.
Not forward.
Just breathed.
And whispered, “Okay.”
Stillness
Talia didn’t sleep.
Kieran had gone quiet again after that—no more confessions, no more questions. He hadn’t tried to follow when she slipped out of the room. He hadn’t needed to.
She found herself back in the ship’s docking bay, sitting inside The Minnow, surrounded by the faint hum of systems still running on backup power. This place had felt like safety once. Now it felt like a memory trying to hold onto itself.
She stared at the worn console. At the empty co-pilot’s seat.
I didn’t save them.
He hadn’t lied. But he hadn’t told her the truth either. Not until it had already found her.
Talia rubbed her hands over her face, then leaned forward and rested her arms on her knees.
He didn’t kill them. But he let them go.
It shouldn’t be forgivable. Maybe it wasn’t.
But she’d seen men do worse for less. Seen people turn cold because the world demanded it. Kieran had been alone. Scared. Unraveling.
And when he heard her voice… he reached for it.
So had she.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the small tool he’d fixed for her earlier—an old power coupler he’d rewired just to pass the time. She turned it over in her fingers.
He hadn’t needed to do that.
But he had.
She closed her eyes.
What he was—whatever the project had done to him, whatever he had become—she could deal with that later. But who he chose to be, after everything…
That was still unfolding. And part of her wanted to see what came next.
She stood slowly, slid the coupler back into her pocket, and made her way through the quiet halls of the station. A thousand surveillance eyes followed her. Let them.
When she reached the door, she hesitated.
Then she opened it.
Kieran was sitting on the edge of the bed again, head down, elbows on his knees.
He looked up as she entered.
She didn’t say anything.
She walked to him.
Sat beside him.
And took his hand.
No promises. No guarantees. Just presence.
That was enough.
For now.
Orbit
The room was quiet, lit only by the pale glow of the stars bleeding through the viewport. Time moved differently here—measured in heartbeats instead of minutes, in the space between breaths rather than the ticking of clocks.
Talia sat beside Kieran, their fingers loosely laced between them. Neither spoke. They didn’t need to.
She felt it first—the shift in the air. The subtle draw of gravity, not the ship’s, not artificial. Something older. More human.
When she turned her head, he was already watching her.
Not with expectation.
Just with hope.
“Talia,” he said, low and uncertain, like the word itself was fragile.
She reached up and brushed her thumb gently across his cheek. His skin was warmer now. He looked alive.
More than that, he looked present.
“I know,” she whispered.
And then she kissed him.
Not desperate.
Not fast.
Just a slow, steady alignment, like two orbits finding the same center. His hand moved to her waist, hesitant at first, then firmer. Her other hand found the back of his neck, fingers curling into his hair.
It wasn’t fireworks.
It was oxygen.
It was quiet.
It was everything they hadn’t said—but had been saying since the first signal pulsed into the dark and she’d answered.
When they finally pulled apart, he kept his forehead against hers, eyes closed, like he didn’t want to lose the moment.
“You sure?” he whispered.
“No,” she said. “But I want to be.”
He laughed softly, and it cracked through something cold inside her.
“I’ll take that,” he said.
They stayed close. Breathing. Anchored.
In the drift between fear and trust, they’d found each other.
And for now, that was enough.
The Echo File
The knock at the door came hours later—soft, but deliberate.
Talia stirred first, still curled beside Kieran, his arm wrapped loosely around her waist. She blinked sleep from her eyes, sat up, and rubbed at the bruise of rest that came from a night spent holding onto something too good to let go.
Kieran moved slower. He hadn’t slept like that in years, and it showed.
Talia opened the door with her heart already bracing for another interrogation.
But it wasn’t a uniform.
It was Dr. Arissa Kline.
The woman who’d recognized Kieran without hesitation. The one who hadn’t blinked at calling him an asset.
Now, she looked different. Less clinical. More haunted.
She stepped into the room without waiting for permission and handed Talia a slim data drive.
“This was classified until twenty-four hours ago,” she said. “But someone on the board opened a redundancy server that wasn’t supposed to exist.”
Talia frowned. “And you’re giving it to me because…?”
“Because it’s not just about him anymore.”
Kieran had stood now, wary, guarded. “What is it?”
Dr. Kline met his eyes. “Proof that you weren’t the first.”
A beat of silence. Then another.
Kieran stepped forward. “What?”
She turned to Talia. “Play it. You’ll want to see it for yourself.”
Talia inserted the drive into the wall terminal. The screen flickered. Static. Then a file loaded: Project Echo: Subject Logs 002 – 005.
Five faces appeared.
They looked like Kieran.
Not identical. Not clones.
But variations.
Eyes too sharp. Posture too perfect. Skin too unaged for the timestamped footage behind them.
Talia’s breath caught in her throat.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“Five prototypes,” Kline said. “Experimental command units designed to lead long-term isolation missions in frontier space. Hybridized physiology, embedded neural resilience, high emotional mimicry.”
She looked at Kieran.
“You were number six. The only one that didn’t fail.”
Kieran stepped closer to the screen, transfixed.
Talia whispered, “What happened to the others?”
Kline didn’t look away. “They either broke down… or broke everything around them.”
The footage changed—an empty ship corridor, blood smeared across a console, a shattered visor.
And silence.
“Why didn’t I know?” Kieran asked. His voice sounded far away.
“We wiped you between missions,” Kline said. “Your memory wasn’t supposed to hold this long. But it did.”
She turned toward the door.
“I’m not supposed to be here. But you deserve to know. And whatever you choose to do next… you’re not property. Not anymore.”
Then she was gone.
The room felt too small. The air too thin.
Talia turned to him.
Kieran stood still, staring at the screen.
“I’m not just a survivor,” he said. “I’m the experiment that worked.”
Talia stepped beside him. “No,” she said quietly. “You’re the person who reached back.”
He didn’t speak.
But he didn’t step away.
Extraction Order
They didn’t leave the room for hours.
The screen still glowed faintly with the final frame of the file: Subject 006 – Stability: Inconclusive. Status: Pending Reclamation.
Kieran hadn’t said much since Dr. Kline left. He paced in slow, controlled lines like he was trying not to fly apart. Talia stayed close—touch without pressure, presence without push.
When the knock came, it wasn’t gentle.
Three sharp raps. Uniformed. Official.
Talia answered with her jaw tight and heart already racing.
This time, the man on the other side wore the insignia of Colonial Command. Not security. Not medical.
He stepped inside without waiting.
“This facility is under lockdown,” he said. “Your ship is being impounded.”
“Why?” Talia asked. Flat. Controlled.
“Technician Merrin, you are being reassigned. Effective immediately.”
She froze. “Reassigned.”
“You’ve breached multiple protocols and interfered with the containment of a critical asset.”
She stepped in front of Kieran before he could move.
“He’s not an asset.”
The officer didn’t blink. “Captain Vale is to be transferred off-station under biosecurity regulation BZ-18. You will not be accompanying him.”
Kieran’s voice cut in behind her, quiet and razor-edged.
“I won’t go.”
The officer turned to him. “Then we’ll tranquilize you. Preferably with your cooperation.”
Talia’s hand went to her side—instinctively, though there was no weapon there.
“Try it,” she said. “See what happens.”
For a moment, no one moved.
Then the officer smiled. Not with amusement. With strategy.
“You have ten minutes,” he said, stepping back into the hall. “Say your goodbyes. He boards in fifteen. Or we come back with more than one.”
The door slid shut.
Silence.
Kieran looked at her, jaw clenched. “I’m not going with them.”
“Good,” Talia said. “Because we’re not done yet.”
Unstable Alliances
Talia didn’t hesitate.
The moment the door hissed shut behind the officer, she grabbed the terminal, locked down external comm access, and opened the one encrypted channel that hadn’t been scrubbed from the data slate Dr. Kline left behind.
It took two tries.
The third connected.
“Kline,” Talia said, not waiting for pleasantries. “They’re trying to move him. Now.”
The screen flickered. Dr. Arissa Kline appeared, her face washed in low light, somewhere off-station. Her eyes sharpened immediately.
“How long?”
“Ten minutes before they storm the room.”
Kieran stood behind Talia now, silent but watching—his hands fists at his sides, his breath tight.
Kline looked at him.
“You remember more, don’t you?”
Kieran didn’t answer.
“I figured,” she said. “They accelerated his recall the moment you pulled him out of drift. It’s why the file was declassified. Not for your benefit—for theirs. They want to know what else he remembers.”
Talia leaned forward. “Then help us stop them.”
Kline didn’t respond right away. She rubbed the side of her temple, then looked offscreen for a moment, weighing the cost of something unseen.
“There’s a service tunnel,” she said finally. “Medical corridor two. They shut it down after an outbreak five years ago. It connects to the old docking bays—Bay 9, eastern ring.”
“We’ll need a ship,” Talia said.
“You’ll have one,” Kline replied. “A freighter—unregistered. It was assigned to sanitation reclamation and converted to be a drone, but the controls are unlocked. It’s not much, but it’ll fly.”
Talia opened the nav overlay and dropped the coordinates into the station’s internal map. She frowned. “That’s all the way across the platform.”
“I can only delay the internal sensors for three minutes,” Kline said. “After that, the station will know exactly where you are.”
Kieran stepped forward. “Why are you helping us?”
Kline’s expression cracked—just slightly.
“Because I built you,” she said. “And because they want to break you open to see why you didn’t fall apart.”
Then the signal cut.
Talia and Kieran stood in silence for one breath.
Then two.
Then she looked at him.
“We run,” she said.
And he nodded.
Three Minutes
They moved like breath through a sealed room—quiet, invisible, intentional.
The service tunnel was colder than the rest of the station, lit only by flickering maintenance lights and painted with decades of grime. Talia led, her hand gripping a borrowed access tablet Kline had somehow routed to her comms band. Kieran followed close behind, silent and focused.
They didn’t speak.
They couldn’t.
The moment they left their room, Kline’s override kicked in—camera loops, motion sensor scrambles, silent redirections. But it wouldn’t last long. Every second counted.
Talia counted them.
Three corridors.
Two bulkheads.
One breath at a time.
Every junction they crossed was another coin tossed into fate’s palm.
Kieran’s voice was low behind her, steady. “Two guards, fifty meters up.”
“How do you—” she began.
But he’d already gestured—sharply, confidently—toward a recessed hatch just ahead.
They ducked inside just as footsteps echoed down the corridor. Talia pressed her back to the wall, barely daring to breathe.
The guards passed. Talking. Unaware.
When she turned to Kieran, he didn’t look surprised. Just focused.
“You can sense them,” she whispered.
“I think it’s part of what they did to me,” he said. “Crowd detection, threat mapping… It’s not always clear. Just a sense.”
She didn’t question it. Just nodded, trusting it.
Trusting him.
They kept moving.
Every hallway was another heartbeat. Every locked door a test of timing and tech.
Talia hacked a side panel with trembling fingers, bypassing the last security seal to the old medical corridor. It hissed open, stale air flooding their faces.
They stepped inside.
And alarms flared.
Not in the corridor—on the other side.
They’d been found. Too soon.
Talia spun around, cursing under her breath. “They rerouted the grid—Kline must’ve lost control early.”
Kieran grabbed her hand. “We’re close. Don’t stop.”
They ran—quietly, efficiently, every footstep placed like a chess move. Down one corridor. Around another.
And then—
The door.
Bay Nine.
Talia overrode the lock and it hissed open, revealing the drone freighter: boxy, unmarked, ugly as sin.
But alive.
They sprinted across the loading floor. Behind them, the sound of boots—more than two. Heavy. Fast.
Talia hit the loading ramp access.
Nothing.
Kieran didn’t hesitate. He slammed the panel with his palm—once, hard.
The freighter’s systems sparked, flickered—
And the ramp dropped.
They dove inside just as security hit the far end of the bay.
Kieran sealed the hatch. Talia launched.
As the freighter peeled away from the station, she let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
Kieran dropped into the co-pilot’s seat, eyes still on the rear scanner.
“You think they’ll follow?”
Talia looked at him.
“No,” she said. “I think they’ll hunt.”
Author’s Note: Read the final installment of the story in Part Three.
J. Carlo Vegas 
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