Chapter 19 · The Buyer at the End

I jack in before Briar can stop me.

The port's still warm from the original. Blood on the rim. Mine or hers, doesn't matter. The cable clicks home and the Long Invoice hits me like a freight door slamming open.

Cold. Vault cold. Four hundred years of it pouring into my skull.

"Sable, wait—" Briar's voice cuts off. The med bay goes away. I'm in the lattice now. The ship's bones. Every bulkhead, every seal, every dying system singing its status into my brain.

And something else. Something huge and patient, waiting in the dark.

The system recognizes me. Of course it does. I'm wearing the right face. The right implants. It doesn't care that I'm a copy. It just knows I have admin.

But it's not alone in here.

There's a partition. Massive. Older than the retrofit, older than the Beacon Lattice failure. It sits in the core like a tumor, and the moment I brush against it, it wakes up.

Access request: OWNER-PRIORITY OVERRIDE.

Oh hell.

I try to pull back. Can't. The partition's already wrapping around my connection, tracing my implants, mapping the pathways.