Page 20 of Reaper's Brat

"Then we compress it and we aim it everywhere." I'm already cutting the archive down to its spine — the historian's last words, the manipulation records, the sabotage data, the proof, stripped to the bone and flagged for every faction channel, every newsfeed, every listening post in range. Not to one buyer. To all of them at once, so it can't be bought back. "She spent her whole life keeping this in the dark by controlling who got to see it. Sowe don't sell it. We give it away. You can't put a fire out by buying it."

The transmitter has other ideas. We've chained more power through it than it was ever built to hold, and halfway through staging the compressed archive the coupling arcs over — a white crack of light that throws Caelis backward and fills the compartment with the stink of burned insulation. For one cold heartbeat the staging board goes dark, the whole archive hanging unsent, three hundred years one short circuit from staying buried forever.

"No," I hear myself say, very calmly, the way I only get when a wreck is actively trying to kill me. "No, you don't." I go in barehanded past where I should, past the safeties, and I bridge the dead coupling with a length of salvaged line and the heel of my glove, and the burn climbs my arm bright as a brand, and I hold it there anyway, because Tomas taught me you can fix almost anything if you're willing to be the part that holds it together. The board comes back. Caelis scrambles up, sees what I'm doing, and jams a proper shunt into place so I can let go before my hand cooks through the glove.

"You're insane," he breathes.

"I'm a scavenger," I tell him, shaking, cradling the arm. "Same thing, better stories."

The ship lurches. Saren's voice comes over the comm, tight: "Flank's clearing. Now, Thea. Whatever you have, now."

I hit transmit.

For four seconds theHollow Wakepours three hundred years into the dark — a dead historian's cracked voice, a murdered world's last testimony, the names of mechanisms if not the names of the men, all of it screaming outward at the speed of light toward every world close enough to hear. Four seconds. Then the jamming slams back down and the window's gone.

But four seconds is enough, because light doesn't stop once you let it go.

The proof of it comes fast. Daxira's fleet, which has been pressing in for the kill, hesitates — and on the open channels, suddenly, there's traffic. A Coalition listening post acknowledging receipt. A Trident relay flagging the broadcast for command. Independent stations, pirate nets, a dozen voices all at once asking the same question across the static:is this real?The truth is loose, and it's loose everywhere, and there is no longer any version of today where killing us puts it back.

Daxira's voice cuts onto our channel one last time, and the elegance has gone out of it at last. "You stupid, sentimental animals," she says, and there's real fear in it now, naked. "Do you have any idea what you've just done? Who you've just exposed? They'll burn this whole region to bury that signal. You haven't saved anyone. You've signed every death warrant in the quadrant, starting with your own."

"Maybe," I tell her. "But they'll have to do it in the light now. With everyone watching. That's all I ever needed — to make them do it where it can be seen." I lean into the pickup. "You made me a fuse once, Daxira. Turns out you should've checked which way I was pointed."

She doesn't answer with words. She answers with everything she has left — her flagship swinging its full armament onto theHollow Wake, no longer trying to capture, only to erase, to kill the messenger even though the message is already gone, because some people would rather be right about the dark than admit the light got out.

CHAPTER 36

SAREN

Daxira's flagship turns its whole armament onto us, and I understand, with the cold clarity that has kept me alive thirty-eight years, that the Hollow Wake does not survive the next sixty seconds. We have nothing left to answer a broadside with. The signal is sent; the truth is loose; and none of it will matter if her guns finish us before we can limp out of range.

There is exactly one move left on the board, and I have spent my whole life refusing to be the kind of captain who makes it.

"Vasha. You have the ship." I am already out of the chair.

Her ruined horn snaps toward me, and she reads my face the way fifteen years lets her read it. "No. Whatever you're about to do — no."

"A flagship can't fire what it's bleeding from the inside. Their guns stop the moment their own decks are the emergency." I look at the board, at the six ships, at the one that matters. "I put myself aboard and make myself a problem too expensive to ignore. It's the only thing that buys you the time to run."

"Alone," she says flatly. "You mean alone."

"I mean alone. I will not spend one more of us than the math requires, and tonight the math requires one." For once it is true,and for once the one is me, and I find I can make that trade without flinching when the name on the line is my own.

Althea has heard all of it from the transmitter station, and she crosses to me fast and takes a fistful of my harness — not to stop me. To be sure of me. "You come back," she says, low and fierce, the bonding-marks still fresh on both our skins. "I didn't survive a fuse you lit and a whole city falling on our heads just to bury you in the last hour. Whatever you go in there to do, you do it fast, and you come home and finish what we started."

"I intend to." I press my brow to hers, one breath, the bond running bright and steadying between us. "I have a future now. I have no intention of dying in the past."

Then I let her go, because Vasha already has the helm hauling us alongside, and I cross to Daxira's ship through vacuum and gunfire, alone, because some debts a captain does not delegate, and because the one way to stop a flagship from killing my crew is to be inside it making a more interesting problem.

Caelis cuts me a hole in their hull with our last cutting charge and I go through it the way I went through the boarders, except this time there is no part of me holding back, because there is no longer anyone aboard theHollow Wakewho needs me to be careful in front of them, and because the woman who taught me I was more than a weapon also taught me, without meaning to, exactly when to be one.

Daxira's people are mercenaries, not believers, and mercenaries do the sensible thing when a Reaper opens their corridor like a tin: they get out of the way. I let them. I am not here for them.

The ones who don't stand aside teach the rest why they should. I go through Daxira's forward guard the way weather goes through a fence — not with rage, rage is loud and slow, but with the cold economy three hundred years of survival cutinto my hands. I take no joy in it. I take no time over it either. Somewhere behind me theHollow Wakeis keeping my clan alive by the second, and every breath I waste in this corridor is a breath Vasha has to buy back with our dying guns.

And then I reach the labor decks, and I slow, because I was not prepared for this.

They are chained. Daxira's rowers, her loaders, her menial crew — collared to their stations with the cheap restraint-tech the cartels use on debt-bound labor, left there as the fight turned, expendable the way I was always told my own people were expendable. Most of them flinch from the gray nightmare that has just torn their guards apart. A few don't. A few look at me with the flat, exhausted recognition of people who have already met every kind of monster and are only waiting to learn which one I am.