Page 16 of Big Bad Red Protector

I grab the nearest prayer lamp from its niche and throw it. Not at the attacker—at the floor in front of him, where the oil casing shatters and the flame spreads across the tile in a line that takes him a half-second to navigate around. Calyra's hand closes on my arm and we go through the hidden door and she pulls it shut behind us.

The hidden corridor is narrow and dark, and she moves through it as if she has walked this path in her mind many times before tonight.

Station alarms begin outside—the particular cascade of tones that means a security event has triggered multiple reporting systems simultaneously. Emergency shutters will be dropping in the public corridors. Personnel will be moving away from the sanctuary sector.

"How much farther?" I ask.

"The outer junction. Sixty meters."

Behind us, the hidden door holds. For now.

We clear the junction into the secondary service corridor, and the station alarm has reached full volume, and then there is someone in the corridor ahead of us moving toward us fast?—

I have one second to identify that the figure is too large to be another attacker before Kheltor's hand closes on my arm and pulls me against the wall with the controlled force of someone redirecting a projectile.

He is breathing hard. There is a dark stain across his left shoulder that I recognize, and a cut above his jaw that has bled and dried and bled again, and his attention moves across me in the sharp systematic way of someone conducting a damage assessment rather than an emotional reunion.

"Calyra," he says.

"Behind me," I manage.

He checks the corridor in both directions, then looks at me one more time with an expression I cannot categorize because it sits between fury and something that has no military name.

Calyra reaches us. She is not injured. She is not afraid—not visibly. But she puts her hand briefly on my arm before she speaks.

"What I told you," she says, quiet and precise beneath the alarms. "There are records older than anything the currentarchives acknowledge. They are not in the station's central system." She meets my eyes with focused calm, trusting me with something irreplaceable. "They are beneath the station. In the structure itself."

In the Bridge.

"Go," Kheltor says, and we go.

CHAPTER 12

KHELTOR

The safehouse is exactly as I left it three months ago: undisturbed, unlisted in any station schematic, and cold enough that the emergency light throws shadows with edges.

I run the perimeter in four minutes while Nina stands near the center of the room and says nothing. This is notable because she has not voluntarily said nothing since the first day I met her. She is watching me check the door seals and sensor panel and reinforced shutters with spent-adrenaline stillness, sitting inside what remains.

The sanctuary attack was twelve minutes. She handled it.

I check the panel a second time because the first check was thorough and the second gives me something to do that is not standing in the middle of a room acknowledging what is happening to me.

"You can stop," she says.

"The south seal?—"

"Kheltor." My name in her mouth, deliberate and tired and something else beneath both of those. "The room is secure."

I turn.

She has not moved from the center of the room. Her uniform is creased from the corridor run and there is a burn mark on her sleeve from the sanctuary floor fire. Close. It was so close. My left shoulder carries the memory of three guards between me and the Coalition quarter, and the cut on my jaw has started bleeding again, and I am aware of both with the same controlled distance I apply to most damage.

The distance is not holding the way it usually does.

"You're going to tell me it was a security decision," she says. "Coming for me. That you needed the investigation intact."

"Nina—"