Fang sat on the edge of the motel bed, her boots kicked off, one leg tucked beneath her, the other bouncing idly as she scanned the holoscreen hovering above her wrist. The motel room was half-decent—by galactic standards, even better than most. The walls weren’t stained with anything suspicious, the sheets smelled like actual detergent, and the air filter was working well enough that the room didn’t have that stale, recycled tang common in budget stays. Someone had even bothered to slap a half-artistic, half-generic mural on one wall—some abstract swirl of blues and golds, meant to evoke a sense of serenity.

  Gravel had done well.

  Not that she doubted him. Even without the extra cash from their last mission, he always made sure the team stayed somewhere livable. He wasn’t the kind of leader to let his crew hole up in a place that smelled like a mooing rostlock. If they were going to risk their lives on the regular, the least they deserved was a clean bed at the end of the day, was what he said.

  Fang had received Vanje’s coordinates five minutes earlier. As soon as she did, her fingers slid across the interface, narrowing down the safest approach.

  “Tch. Real considerate of him to pick the worst goddamn place to be stranded.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek.

  She pulled up a rotating 3D map of Kestris-9’s underbelly. The city itself was a labyrinth, but beneath it? An even worse mess. Centuries of old infrastructure layered over newer tunnels, maintenance shafts, and forgotten smugglers’ routes. She pinched and dragged the display, shifting through layers, toggling on security overlays and heat maps.

  Fang narrowed her eyes as she refined the map’s parameters. With a flick of her fingers, she activated a LIDAR scan overlay, feeding in real-time topographical data gathered from the city’s historical records and any recent seismic activity. The system reconstructed the underground with near-millimeter precision, highlighting potential collapses or areas where tunnels had shifted over time. Next, she engaged a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) simulation, cross-referencing it with known material compositions, before switching to electromagnetic field detection. She let the system sweep for active power lines, communication relays, and even abandoned but still-reactive components from old city infrastructure.

  A knock at the door snapped her attention up. Instinct had her hand flying toward her sidearm, a Standard Type-2 Laser Gun, several degrees less potent than Hunter’s. She didn’t draw it—just let it rest there, fingers curled around the grip.

  “Who?” she called.

  "Priest.”

  She relaxed. “And what’s old pop doing at my door?”

  “Passing through.”

  She padded over, unlocking the door just enough to peer through the gap. Priest stood outside, as always looking like he belonged in a surgery room, not a backwater motel hallway.

  “You wanna come in?” She asked with a grin on her face.

  “No. But I should.” He stepped inside uninvited, which was fine—she left the door open anyway. “How are the simulations?”

  Fang swung the door shut behind him and strolled back toward her holoscreen, scaling up the map toward the center of the room so Priest could see. She paced around excitedly like a kid showing off a perfect test score to their parents.

  “Alright, so the LIDAR overlay gave me a solid topographical read. Ground-penetrating radar confirms structural integrity for most of the usable routes, though there’s some settling in the lower east quadrant. No full collapses yet, but I wouldn’t risk any pressure-heavy movement there.”

  She swiped the air and moved to another layer. “Electromagnetic field detection mapped out active power sources—mostly old infrastructure, but this cluster here,” she tapped on a glowing red section, “means there’s still some live comms running through. Either old surveillance lines or a system someone forgot to turn off.”

  Priest gave a slow nod, studying the readout. “You know a lot about this.”

  Fang grinned. “Had to. My degree was in Interstellar Navigation, so these were part of my coursework. INS-202: Deep Space Cartography, INS-307: Planetary Terrain Mapping, INS- . . . uh . . . INS-something: Subsurface Scanning and Structural Analysis. Had a whole semester on GPR modeling alone.” She rolled her shoulders. “Mapping voids in asteroid tunnels isn’t so different from navigating ancient sewer systems, turns out. Just less risk of getting shot at by sewer rats the size of a hover-bike.”

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  Priest gave another slow nod. He didn’t say impressive, but she caught the faintest hint of approval in his expression.

  She smirked. “So? What’s old pop thinking? There are a couple good routes here that we can go without being caught by surveillance.”

  She’d been calling him that since forever. Priest had never objected, never so much as raised an eyebrow at the nickname. And for a guy who had no problem calling out things he didn’t like—usually with all the warmth of a surgical laser—that had to mean he loved it. At least, that was what Fang chose to believe.

  Priest gave the map one last glance, then gave a simple nod of approval. “It is workable.”

  Fang expected him to follow up with a question about logistics or risk factors—something practical. Instead, he said, “You went to university.”

  She stared at him. “Uh. Yeah?”

  “I was in uni once.”

  Fang stared. “You? University? Where?”

  He didn’t elaborate. Just nodded, like that was all there was to say on the matter.

  She squinted at him, waiting for the inevitable pivot back to work. It never came.

  “Awww, c’mon! I spilled my gut and soul to you, and you couldn’t even give me the name of the uni you went to!”

  Priest was silent for a moment, then finally—finally—said, “Sathos Military Academy.”

  Fang blinked. Once. Twice.

  Then her lips twisted into a grin.

  “Wait. Sathos? As in the Space Border Corps’ Sathos?” She folded her arms, tilting her head. “Old Pop, you do know that’s not really a university, right?”

  A military academy. Huh. She knew Priest had experience, but she’d never pinned him as the type to start out in a place like that. Not Republic, not a merc—just some underfunded border corps grunt, babysitting smuggler lanes and cleaning up after bigger factions. No wonder he didn’t talk about it.

  Priest adjusted his cuffs. “It was an institution of higher learning.”

  She let out a sharp laugh. “Yeah, military learning. That place is basically a boot camp with a few extra textbooks.”

  The Space Border Corps—technically a neutral peacekeeping force, independent from the Republic. But sadly, with all peacekeeping forces, they were barely-funded, barely-armed outfit reduced to catching small-time criminals on the edge of the galaxy. No one wanted to bankroll an army that could pose a threat someday.

  Fang was going to ask more, but furrowed her brow as a thought surfaced.

  Now that was weird. Priest never dropped a conversation about work midway. Hell, he barely entertained conversation outside of work at all. Small talk? From him? What next, was he gonna start gossiping about celebrity scandals?

  Well, they did gossip sometimes. Fang had once regaled him with a story about a smuggler who faked his own death by launching a decoy body into a sun, only to get caught because he couldn’t resist attending his own funeral in disguise. Priest had merely sighed and muttered, “Predictable.”

  Sometimes, he even gave her advice—more often than not, judgmental ones, especially when she leaned toward the mischievous. Like the time she’d spent an entire mission convincing some poor sap that she was an heiress to a galactic spice empire just to see how far she could push the lie. When she bragged about it later, expecting at least some admiration for her dedication to the bit, Priest just folded his arms and said, “Deception is a tool. Don’t waste it on entertainment.”

  Fang, naturally, took that as permission to refine her craft rather than a warning.

  Having spent enough time with the old man, she knew the look he had on his face right now. Priest was getting sentimental. Or at least, as sentimental as a man like him could get—which wasn’t much, but just enough to set off her instincts.

  A slow grin spread across her face. “Wait a sec. This isn’t just some random trip down memory lane, is it?” She folded her arms, leaning in. “Did meeting your old flame stir something in that metal heart of yours?”

  Priest exhaled, the closest he ever got to a scoff. “She was a direct competitor, more than anything.”

  Fang let out an exaggerated gasp. “Ohhh, so there was something!”

  Priest adjusted his cuffs again, which was what he did when he wanted to physically walk away from a conversation but couldn’t.

  That only encouraged her. She threw her hands in the air and stomped on the ground once. “C’mon, you’re really not gonna elaborate? Give me something—love, rivalry, stolen glances across a battlefield—”

  “Goodnight, Fang.”

  And just like that, he was done. As he turned for the door, her grin got so wide it practically stretched into another dimension, the kind where Priest actually spilled personal details without being interrogated for hours first.

  She’d just uncovered something. She just had to figure out how to pry the rest out of him later.