The last speaker doesn’t finish because someone cuffed him, and I like the idea that fear is eating them from the inside about now. I crawl and I crawl and I crawl, counting turns with one hand and marking the seams with a claw I let slip for a split second, a scar only I’ll recognize on the way back. In tight spaces you smell things in order: metal first, then dust, then men, then the long, old stink of a ship run by appetites. I learn her by nose and by ear and by the way my knees complain at corners I don’t like.
I build a map in my head. Hangar here—a ribcage of rails and net; machine shop two levels down and aft, humming and swearing; mess toward the spoke, clatter and clank and a hiss that says the grease is working hard; crew bunks in a honeycomb along the portside, music leaking out that should be killed on principle; cargo holds big as sins, stacked in blocks and strapped like history hates being moved. I find a maintenance ladder between lifelines and file it under my spine for later.
Time stops being measured by minutes and starts being measured by patrol patterns. The footfalls change every nine minutes. The laughter thickens after a meal and thins after a fight. Once a deckhand sings a lullaby in a language I don’t know and I almost pity him until he laughs at his own joke. TheBloodseeker swallows time and I let her, because patience is a weapon men like Khong mistake for a wound.
I drop into a vent more generous than the last and peek through the ribs into cargo three. One Reaper, alone. He’s smaller than the ones who wear captain’s pride, but he’s still a head taller than most men and bristling with bone. He has the look of a bored dog—that particular meanness built of muscle with nothing to do. He toys with a blade and checks a lock code on a crate whose stenciling I read upside down: MEDICAL. The cargo lights paint him in stubborn amber; the way he stands says he thinks his back’s to a wall. He is wrong.
“Talk to me,” I whisper on a breath too small to see, and it’s not to him, it’s to the map I’ve made and the body that’s carried worse.
My suit creaks when I shift. He doesn’t hear it; the Bloodseeker has a thousand creaks louder than a man trying to be shadow. I tap the grill with a fingertip. Twice. Not enough for a man to saywhatto, enough for an animal sense to twitch. His head turns. He shows me his profile, his throat, the place where the bone ridge gives way to soft because every predator has a place he forgets to guard.
“Who’s there,” he barks, the word skidding up a half-step like he’s heard his own stories and half believes them.
I push the grill and let it fall. It hits lightly. Not enough to clatter. Enough to make him take three steps and put his weight where I want it: under me.
I drop.
No war cry. No flourish. I land on his shoulders and ride him down, my forearm across his windpipe, my other hand finding his jaw. He bucks, bone spurs raking my thigh, and heat jumps into my blood that says this is what I was built for and I tell itlater.He’s strong. They always are. He goes for his knife. I use his wrist against him, heel of my hand to his elbow, pop the jointwrong with a wet, sharp noise. His first howl is loud. My palm finds his mouth. The second howl is a breath eating itself.
“Sleep,” I hiss into his ear, not because I believe in mercy but because the word feels right. I tighten, not around his neck—too much noise—but across the carotids, the old way that drops a big thing fast if you have the nerve to wait two long seconds. He thrashes like a dying fish on a line. He claws a line of heat across my forearm and finds scale, not meat. His heels drum the deck. I count one, two, three. He fades. I hold two more heartbeats because he would not have given me one.
When he’s gone, I let him lay heavy and whisper to the part of my head that wants to bellow victory. “No.” I don’t want a ship hearing me whoop like a boy.
I roll him, check the eyes, pry the blade from his loosened hand. The knife is a mean little thing, bone-handled, serrations like bad teeth. I take it. I slide his body behind a stack of empty pallets and wedge a drop cloth over the dark shape of him. Blood beads in a slow, reluctant line under his ear where a spur caught him on the fall. I rub it with my thumb and wipe my thumb on the inside of my suit at the seam where no one will sniff. The cargo cam sits in the corner like a bored god. I look where it’s not looking.
His comm bead is stuck to the cartilage of his ear with adhesive and arrogance. I peel it, roll it between finger and scale until I feel the tiny catch release and the little click that says I own one more of their voices. I stick it under my own jaw where the scale thins and the heat of me will hide it from lazy scans.
“Cargo three,” a voice grumbles in the bead, static-gnawed. “Report.”
I make his breath with my breath and add a growl I learned from a man I killed on a different ship. “All clear.”
“Say my name,” the voice demands, because fear is a uniform here.
I look down at the dead thing at my feet and riffling the pockets gets me a strip of tags. “Kren.”
A beat. Then, satisfied: “Right. Keep your eyes. Captain’s bringing something special up from the hard hold.”
My teeth find themselves together hard enough to creak. My hands stop wanting to shake and start wanting to be careful. I picture a hard hold: lower than cargo, below comfort, deep in the ship’s belly where the sound of engines is a god that never sleeps. I picture red hair in the wrong light. I picture yellow skin bruising in ugly colors. I pick the knife up and teach my hand how it feels.
I breathe the Bloodseeker in. Ozone, oil, bone. I listen to her railings tick like cooling weapons. I count the steps of a patrol two bays over and the lazy swing in a drunk man’s voice down the corridor. I put the Bishop in my pocket against the ache in my thigh so it presses when I move and reminds me where I’m going and why.
“Keep your eyes,” the voice said.
“I am,” I answer, but not to him and not out loud. I ghost back into the ribs and start toward the sound of the engine the ship thinks is a heartbeat and I know is a trail.
The Bloodseeker is a bad church; everything in her hums a creed I don’t accept. I move with it anyway—between ribs of pipe and cable, past grates sunburned by engine heat, under catwalks that smell like old oil and cheap victory. My comm bead—Kren’s bead—ticks softly against my jaw, feeding me nonsense and orders not meant for me. I give the ship a different sermon.
“Vent B-nine, open,” I whisper to a maintenance port, fingers already in the wires. “Spill steam on corridor four.”
A valve exhales. Far below, a guard curses. “Hot! Who ran the purge?”
“Engineering, you clowns,” another voice snaps. “Stop standing under it.”
“Copy,” I murmur, letting the panel fall back. “Walk south, not north.”
I hook a talon under a junction cap and pull. Sparks kiss my knuckles. The deck lights along an intersecting passage flicker, then die. Boots slow. Arguments start. I smile without my mouth.
“Cargo three,” someone barks over the bead. “Report.”
