Chapter 27 · The Kids They Burned

I couldn't stop looking at the file.

Echo had dumped it onto the screen in the hold after it killed the beacon. Just a list at first. Names, dates, gene markers. Twenty-three kids grown in tanks on a station nobody was supposed to know about. Project Starfire. All of them cloned from dead pilots, the ones who went down fighting in the Third Expansion and never made it home.

All of them terminated ten years ago when the program got shut down.

Except the last entry didn't say terminated. It said *transferred*.

Kira Voss. That was me. Transferred. Not killed. Moved somewhere else, memory-wiped, turned into a cargo pilot flying contraband on the edge of mapped space.

I sat on the floor with my back against the crate Senna had cuffed me to earlier. She'd unlocked me after Echo played that last memory—my mentor, the one I thought I remembered, shoving clones toward the fire. I could still see his face. Calm. Cold. Like he was putting down sick animals.

Senna was across from me now, leaning against the opposite wall. She hadn't said much since the memory ended. Just asked if I wanted water.