Sloan’s neural comms pinged her again as they neared the entrance of the archive office. Her father had resumed the call no more than five minutes later. “Do you have companions with you?” That was the first thing he asked.

  Sloan only realized then. She’d been so focused on the task at hand that she had completely forgotten to add that detail in her earlier request.

  “Yes,” she answered, her tone even, but with the slightest hint of frustration at her own lapse. “One.”

  “Race-adjacent?”

  “Human.”

  “Gender?”

  “Male.”

  There was a pause, the sound of faint breathing on the other end before he spoke again. “Rojas Kha’amuuri.”

  Kha’amuuri. That would be a Kestrisi surname for someone from the Southern hemisphere, and Priest wouldn’t pass for a typical Kestrisi more often than not.

  But a Mendax representative shouldn’t have this knowledge.

  “And your name is Lanberta von Wallenstein,” Sloan’s dad continued. Then he sent over the holo-tag. That was the only viable option. They couldn’t have access to hyperweave IDs, and quantum ink markers were impossible to forge.

  “Lanberta von Wallenstein…” She mused. “Thank you.”

  He cut off comms immediately.

  Sloan turned to Priest with a calm voice. “We got our identities. Remember the name, Rojas Kha’amuuri.”

  “Rojas Kha’amuuri,” Priest repeated the name, but his pronunciation wasn’t close.

  “Rojas Kha’amuuri. Try again,” she said.

  He repeated. It still wasn’t close. The local Kestrisi dialect required more nuance than him simply brute-forcing his tongue through syllables.

  She shrugged. “If they question, say you’re an immigrant.”

  The Grand Archive of Bor’tho loomed into view, a monolithic structure of dark metal and impact-resistant ceramic plating, its sharp angles accentuated by the exasperated buzzing of the gravity pillars chained to its corners. The pillars weren’t there to lift it—no one expected the Archive to take flight—but to counteract the violent wind currents that often tore through the district.

  “Overkill,” Priest glanced up and muttered.

  Sloan scoffed. “Just two years ago, a rogue storm break half the city.”

  He didn’t argue. Instead, he repeated the name under his breath. “Rojas Kha’amuuri.” It was still wrong.

  The place looked exquisitely well-brushed, unlike the rusting ruins on most backwater worlds. There were even security drones surrounding the place instead of the ancient stationary cameras. They moved in a non-wavering trajectory, some of which never once looked at the entrance where the two were walking toward. Sloan stepped a fraction out of the designated walkway and into the artificial turf. The drone continued on as if she weren’t there.

  So this is a backwater world after all, she mused. Just care enough about protecting its own image.

  A woman sat near the gate. She stood, tall and poised, as she saw people approaching. She was Zvevan, or at least a descendant, who were blessed with a slight pearlescent sheen on their skins, eyes larger than a human’s, and irises a deep, luminous shade of violet, Her hair, though dark, carried an almost metallic undertone that shimmered with movement like those in an inconceivably unbelievable hair shower gel commercials. There was something eerily symmetrical about her face, but that was probably because Sloan hadn’t seen too many Zvevans.

  She regarded them with an expression that teetered between polite disinterest and mild scrutiny. “Do you have a pre-arrangement?” Her voice carried a measured cadence.

  “Of course,” Sloan replied.

  She glanced at her holo-screen on her wristband. “And your names?”

  “Lanberta von Wallenstein,” she said.

  Priest spoke, “Rojas Khaa’muuri.” Still wrong. If the woman had noticed the mismatch in pronunciation, she hadn’t shown any signs of suspicion yet.

  “IDs?” She asked. Sloan showed her their IDs. She gave both of them a quick scan. Sloan resisted the urge to peer in and saw how different the forged data was to actual personal information.

  Sloan could feed her heart rate rising as the lady scanned their IDs with her wrist device. Her violet eyes leafed through the projected data with all the attentiveness of someone reviewing a grocery list, and it didn’t seem like she was sparing a glance at the readout. Sloan felt the tension in her shoulders spike—until the woman gave a slow, absent nod and waved them through.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  That was easy. I’ve made a big deal out of nothing.

  The woman was already busy with something else, her fingers tapping idly against her device. Priest stepped forward first, and Sloan followed, not glancing back.

  They didn’t talk about the walk-in. Sloan asked, “Do you feel ghost pains, Priest?”

  “Ghost pain?”

  “The type of pain you feel when your limbs still hurt even though they aren’t there.”

  The silence stretched, settling between them like a weight.

  She let out a quiet exhale. “I thought when you wanted to tag along, it meant you had something to say. I guess I thought wrong.”

  He didn’t answer, or more correctly, his answer to her was another topic entirely. “We need records on the time and date of official and unofficial Republic landings,” Instead, Priest said, his voice low but sure. “Flight logs, docking permits, cargo manifests.”

  Sloan turned on the messaging function from her wristband and texted him. McPherson is not on good terms with the Republic. She kept her gaze ahead as she gave an extension to his answer, “Passenger registries?”

  “If they exist,” Priest replied. “Though if someone was careful, they would not be listed. We will also need personnel clearance logs, maintenance requests, and if possible—” he glanced at her, “—private hangar access records.” Then a message came. Are they trying to blackmail Republic with this info?

  Sloan clicked her tongue. “That’s a stretch,” she said as she finished sending a reply. Shiya Mura once asked me to send some classified information that I believe belongs to the Republic to Austjsocs. I was shocked. The two are the biggest rivals.

  The interior of the Grand Archive was deliberately designed to confuse outsiders. Her eyes turned to the ceiling the stretched endlessly above them, then to the stack of holoscreens lining the data towers.

  Vorsen-Signa 880s.

  The model was distinctive. Its violet interface had a slightly colder hue compared to standard displays, and the modular stands had an odd habit of flickering at the edges when subjected to long-term use.

  She pointed toward the leftmost corridor. “That way.”

  Priest arched a brow. “Not Flight Data Access?”

  Then came Priest’s reply. The last warlord I met works for McPherson. He raised an army of 4,000. The legal limit is 1,000.

  “That’s a trap,” she said, already walking. “That’s where they send people who don’t know better. We need Traffic Control Logs instead—every registered landing has to go through them first.” Sloan replied. How do you know?

  The place smelled of nothing, and sounded like the inside of a giant indexing machine. As they walked past an intersection, the ponderous drag of her sleeve against the surface seemed amplified. When she altered her stance, even the slight creak of her boot felt too loud for a split second, only to be drowned out by the steady drone of the machines.

  Priest answered her message. He’s Umi. The reptilian race. They reassign numbers to match actual personnel count.

  There was no longer any chatting.

  I didn’t know that. Sloan replied.

  Then came a reply.

  Prove your worth, Sloan Albrecht. it said. The sender wasn’t Priest. It was a private, decrypted messenger. Her decryption program had hesitate just long enough for her to realize whoever had sent this knew exactly how to bypass her security measures.

  Only after that did Priest’s next message came, Are you certain your Father is trustworthy?

  Sloan turned to him, wide-eyed. He had already switched out his human-like fingers for more extended, pointed ones. Stratosclaws. She had only seen those claws in Republic blueprint prototypes and never thought such redundant technology would ever be mass-produced in a world of plasma projectiles. She had no idea when or where Priest had gotten his hands on them.

  She realized it now. The place sounded like an indexing machine. But that was all there was to it. There was no voice. No footsteps. No clerks. No researchers.

  No humans.

  When had she last heard a voice?

  Then a pair of footsteps arose from the intersection behind their backs.

  Priest turned, and in that instant, the footsteps accelerated to an inhuman level. A blur of motion, scales catching the dim artificial glow, and then—an Umi reptilian soldier was upon them.

  Their HyperWeave armor, a fancier term for navy blue reinforced cloth, concealed the iridescent mix of deep green and bronze of their skin, but couldn’t hide the shape of the scaly, layered ridges down their arms and across their shoulders.

  Priest fired. A gravitational shot—silent, precise, meant to hold the soldier mid-air in an inescapable choke. The target spectrum was much smaller than the shot he had sent to lift Sloan mid-air, but she had no doubt the concentrated power was greater. Umi’s mechanical arm shot forward—similar to Priest’s, but new. Custom-made. McPherson’s work. The plating split apart like a flower in bloom, absorbing the gravitational shot like it was never there. No slowed momentum.

  Sloan stepped back on instinct, movements honed from battles long past. What in the void? Even I haven’t seen absorption tech that immaculate.

  Her hand reached for the plasma gun at her hip—the one she’d swiped from Koto’s henchman back on Earth. But before she could even raise it, the reptilian had already closed the distance.

  A punch. Priest caught the first strike, but the impact sent a metallic whine through his arm, servos straining against the force. His stance staggered and his body flailed for a second.

  The second punch landed clean on Priest’s cheek.

  Priest folded on impact. Before he could collapse against a server stack and set off a chain reaction of destruction, the Umi soldier caught him, lowering him to the ground with surprising care.

  Sloan, gun still raised, hesitated. Her eyes focused on the number plate on his chest. Number 3994.

  They weren’t here for the kill.

  However, fighting back was futile.

  There was another reptilian behind him. His reptilian features twitched as he ambled over, sharp teeth parting slightly in what could almost be called an amused snarl.

  “I want him killed,” he looked at Priest’s limp body on the soldier’s arm. “But Boss has plans. Different plans.” Then he turned to Sloan. “Sloan Albrecht of the Kestris-9 subdivision. A planetary criminal you are.”

  Sloan kept her gun raised but didn’t fire. “A statement of fact,” she said, voice level. “Not a question.”

  “I am not asking,” the reptilian gave her his closest version of a human smile. “Let us exchange pleasantries. My name is Garnash.”