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The voice came through again. Static first, then words.
"Kira. I know you can hear me."
I couldn't move. My hand was still on the thruster control, knuckles white. The jump had left me nauseous and now this—some guy who knew my name, coming through on a channel that shouldn't exist.
Senna was already on it. She jabbed at the comms panel, trying to trace the signal. "Who the hell is this? Identify yourself."
"Not for you, Officer Cole." The voice was calm. Male. Maybe forty, maybe older. Hard to tell through the distortion. "This is between me and Kira."
I found my voice. It came out rough. "I don't know you."
"Not yet." A pause. I could hear something in the background on his end—rhythmic beeping, like a med scanner or a ship's diagnostic. "But you will. Your mentor made sure of that."
My chest went tight. "My mentor's dead."
"Captain Lena Voss died ten years ago," the voice agreed. "But she left something behind. For you. I'm Echo-7. I've been waiting a long time for you to wake up."
Senna cut the audio. Her face was hard. "Don't listen to this. It's a fleet trap. They're trying to keep us talking while they triangulate."
"Then why haven't they jumped us already?" I shot back. My head was pounding. Too much, too fast. Clone. Fake memories. And now some ghost claiming he knew a woman whose DNA I apparently shared. "We're sitting ducks out here. If they wanted us, they'd have us."
"Unless they want to see where we go first." Senna pulled up the nav screen. Empty space in every direction. We'd jumped blind, no destination locked. Standard evasion protocol—made us harder to follow, but it also meant we had no idea where we'd landed. "We need to move. Now."
I looked at the comms panel. The signal was still active, waiting. "What if he's telling the truth?"
"Truth?" Senna laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Kira, you were sentenced to death six hours ago. I pulled you out because I need you alive, not because I trust every random voice on the line. Starfire was a black op. If this guy knows about it, he's either fleet intel or something worse."
"Worse than being executed for treason I didn't commit?"
She didn't answer that.
I reopened the channel. "Echo-7. Prove you knew her."
Static crackled. Then: "She used to drink her coffee cold. Said hot coffee was for people with time to waste. She flew a Valkyrie-class interceptor with a custom neural link she built herself, against regs. And she called you 'little spark' before they wiped you."
My stomach dropped.
I didn't remember any of that. But something in my chest did. It ached.
Senna's hand was on my shoulder, tight. "Kira. Don't."
I shook her off. "Where are you?"
"Sending coordinates now," Echo-7 said. "But you won't make it if you don't deal with your tail first."
"What tail?" Senna snapped, already pulling up the scanner.
I saw it the same time she did. Two blips, coming in fast from the edge of our sensor range. Fleet hunters. Sleek, mean, built for one thing: retrieval or elimination.
"Shit," Senna breathed.
The comms crackled again. "They locked onto your jump signature. You've got maybe four minutes before they're in firing range. The shuttle you're in isn't made for this."
"No kidding," I muttered. My hands were already moving, pulling up the pilot's interface. The controls felt wrong—too simplified, too slow. This thing was built to haul cargo on short hops, not outrun military-grade predators.
Senna was strapping in. "We can't outrun them. We need to jump again."
"Jump drive needs twelve minutes to cool down," I said. The numbers were right there on the screen, glowing red. "We don't have twelve minutes."
"Then we're dead."
Echo-7 cut back in. "Not if she flies it."
I stared at the comms. "I am flying it."
"No. You're thinking like a cargo pilot. You need to think like what you are."
"I don't even know what that means—"
"Figure it out fast. I'm uploading a sim to your neural port. Run it. It'll come back."
My neural port. The one I'd had installed five years ago for long-haul route autopilot sync. Standard gear for freight runners. Except now I was wondering if anything about me was standard.
Senna was yelling something, but I couldn't hear her. The hunters were two minutes out. I pulled the neural jack from the console, hands shaking, and plugged it into the port behind my ear.
The world went sideways.
I wasn't in the shuttle anymore. I was—somewhere else. Cockpit, but different. Faster. The controls were layered, responsive, alive under my hands. A fighter, not a freighter. And I knew how to fly it.
No. I'd always known.
The sim ran through me like water finding a crack. Evasive patterns I'd never been taught. Combat rolls. A maneuver called a gravity slingshot that required timing so precise it was banned in civilian space. My hands moved before my brain caught up, muscle memory I didn't have lighting up like old wiring.
When I came back, I was gasping.
Senna was shaking me. "Kira! What the hell just happened? Your eyes—"
"I know what to do," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Strap in. And don't touch anything."
She stared at me. Then she sat down and locked her harness.
I took the stick.
The hunters opened fire. Plasma rounds, burning past us. One clipped the shuttle's rear shield, and alarms started screaming. I didn't care. I could see the pattern now—where they'd shoot, where they'd move. I'd done this before. Or the woman whose DNA I carried had.
I cut the main engines.
Senna shouted, "What are you doing?"
I didn't answer. The shuttle started to drift, momentum carrying us forward but decelerating fast. The hunters adjusted, slowing to match. They thought I was giving up.
I waited. Three seconds. Two.
Then I fired the maneuvering thrusters at full burn, all of them, in a pattern that shouldn't work. The shuttle spun—hard. The G-force slammed me into the seat, and I heard Senna's harness creak. We whipped around, nose pointing back the way we'd come, and for one beautiful second we were flying backward at speed while the hunters were still trying to brake.
I fired the main engines.
We shot forward, threading the gap between them. One of the hunters tried to correct, clipped the other, and they both went into a spin. Not destroyed. But far enough behind.
"Now jump," I said. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold the stick.
Senna didn't argue. She slammed the jump drive override, and the shuttle screamed in protest—too soon, not cooled down, warning lights everywhere—but it worked.
We jumped.
When we dropped out, I was slumped in my seat, tasting blood. I'd bitten my tongue at some point. Senna was breathing hard beside me, staring at me like I'd just grown a second head.
"Where did you learn that?" she whispered.
"I don't know," I said. And I didn't. The memory of the sim was already fading, slipping away like water through my fingers. But my hands still remembered.
The comms chimed. Echo-7 again.
"Impressive. Lena would be proud."
I closed my eyes. "What do you want from me?"
"The same thing you want. The truth. Lena left a black box before she died. Proof of what they did—what they're still doing. It's hidden. Only you can unlock it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the key. Your DNA, your neural signature—she built the lock around you. I've been trying to find it for ten years. And now you're finally here."
Senna leaned forward. "And where exactly is 'here'?"
Echo-7's voice shifted. Colder. "Sending the coordinates now. But you should know—fleet intel already has a hunter team en route. Officer Victor Lane is personally leading the retrieval op. If he gets to the black box first, everything Lena died for disappears."
A file popped up on the nav screen. A location. Deep in the Fringe territories, near the border of uncharted space. The kind of place you only went if you were running or hunting.
I looked at Senna. Her jaw was tight.
"Your call," she said quietly. But I could see it in her eyes. She wanted that black box as much as I did. Maybe more.
I pulled up the file. Inside were nav coordinates, encrypted access codes, and one image: a woman in a fleet uniform. Dark hair, sharp eyes, a half-smile that looked like trouble.
Captain Lena Voss.
She looked like me. Or I looked like her. Same nose. Same stubborn set to the mouth.
I swallowed hard. "Plot the course."
Senna didn't move for a second. Then she nodded and started entering the coordinates.
Echo-7 spoke one more time before the channel went dead. "One more thing, Kira. Don't trust anyone. Not even Officer Cole. Everyone involved in Starfire had their reasons. And not all of them were clean."
The line cut.
I looked at Senna. She was staring straight ahead at the nav screen, her expression unreadable.
"He's lying," she said. Flat. Too flat.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe he's the only one telling the truth."
She didn't answer. The shuttle's engines hummed as we started moving, heading toward coordinates I didn't trust, chasing a ghost I'd never met, with a woman who'd saved my life but wouldn't tell me why.
Behind us, somewhere in the dark, Victor Lane and his hunters were coming.
And I still didn't know who the hell I really was.