Chapter 15 · The Burn Room

The screen in front of me was full of everything I'd been chasing for three years.

My hands shook. Not much. Just enough that the haptic glove registered it and the cursor jittered across the air display. I steadied my wrist against the edge of the dead relay station's console and made myself breathe.

Behind me, Kira was crashed out on a fold-down bench, still pale from whatever Echo-7 had done to her brain. Mara stood guard by the door, her weapon drawn, listening to the corridor outside. We had maybe twenty minutes before Lane's hunters figured out we'd holed up in this gutted husk of a station. Maybe less.

I should've been moving faster.

But I couldn't stop reading.

Project Starfire. Right there. Not rumor. Not redacted. Full manifests. Cloning authorization signed by Vice Admiral Renner. Gene samples harvested from decorated pilots killed in action—without consent, without family notification. They grew them in batches. Designated them by number, not name. And when the war ended and the program got expensive, they purged the records and burned the lab.

Almost all the records.

I scrolled down. My father's name was in the witness list.