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Warrior status: deceased.

Collection date: six years ago.

Compatibility record attached: human female, registration batch forty-two.

Nothing about that was unusual. Zunatorian labs kept biological material from deceased warriors for hereditary studies, compatibility analysis, treatment research, and enough other purposes that my old Earth lab would have looked primitive beside this one.

The problem was the accession number.

I tapped the display and brought up the linked specimen manifest.

771-9C.

I frowned harder.

Then I backed out and reopened the original record.

771-4A.

Same warrior.

Two different accession numbers.

“Seriously?”

Sera’n sighed without looking at me. “You speak to the machine often.”

“The machine listens better than most people.”

“I am standing here.”

“I noticed.”

His mouth twitched.

That was as close as Sera’n usually came to laughing.

I smiled despite myself and opened the original collection record.

The laboratory hummed around us, clean, bright, and cold enough that I sometimes wondered whether Zunatorian scientists had decided body heat was an unnecessary luxury.

They had mastered interplanetary travel, regenerative medicine, bio-electric healing, weapons that could carve through metal, and machines I still couldn’t identify after nearly a year.

But apparently no one had invented a thermostat.

I rubbed my hands together and kept reading.

The lab was one of the few places on Zuna where I could almost forget how I had arrived here.

Almost.

There were no auction platforms here. No registration halls. No rows of enormous warriors examining human women while officials discussed compatibility, fertility, lineage, and futures none of us had been invited to choose.

Here, I had a work station.

A badge.

A schedule.