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I suddenly felt very exposed.

No badge.

No wrist unit.

No official identity on my body except the registration implant beneath my skin.

I touched the place near my inner arm without thinking.

That one wasn't coming out unless I found a knife and became much braver than I currently felt.

I abandoned the supply platform.

If the system had flagged me, the station routes were probably already a bad idea.

I took the maintenance corridor instead. Working in the lab had one advantage. I knew the service routes. Deliveries broke, power systems failed, and technicians used these passages to avoid pushing carts through public areas. Half of them I’d memorized simply because they saved time. The corridor narrowed as I descended, the lighting dropped, and the hum of the main station faded behind thick metal walls.

I slowed, a fresh wave of doubt washing over me. Maybe this was stupid. No, it was definitely stupid. The real question was whether it was less stupid than walking straight into Central Review and handing myself over. I kept going, the passage eventually opening into another loading bay several levels below the public platforms. It was a different world down here. Smaller ships, private freight operations, no uniformed attendants watching every move. It looked promising, if also dangerous. Promising enough.

Staying near the wall, I watched a freighter crew load containers through an open hatch while another vessel sat with its engines running, two males arguing heatedly beside the ramp. Then, at the far end of the bay, a narrow passenger transport flashed its departure warning. Private charter, outer settlement route. Perfect.

I approached the woman managing boarding.

She was Zunatorian, lighter-skinned than most of the males around her, pale orange light moving beneath her throat in slow pulses.

“Where is this going?” I asked.

She looked me over once, then again, taking her time. “Bren outpost.”

I had heard of it. Barely. Far enough.

“Can I board?”

“Passage is twelve yǔpil.”

I nearly laughed from relief. Money. A problem I could actually solve. I dug into my bag and pulled out the credits I’d packed, counting them twice before holding them out.

She took the coins without a word and without asking why a human woman was traveling alone. I loved her immediately.

“Departure in four minutes,” she said.

“Perfect.”

I boarded. The transport was small and ugly—and also beautiful, because it had doors. Doors that closed. Seats that moved away from Zuna’s central settlement. I walked down the aisle and took the farthest one from the entrance, pressing myself against the wall.

My hands would not stop shaking, so I tucked them beneath my thighs to hide the tremor. People boarded around me—a trader with a worn satchel, two laborers smelling of engine grease, an older male carrying a bundle of herbs that filled the air with sharp, unfamiliar sweetness. No warriors in polished armor, no administrators with their cold eyes and colder questions. No one looked at me twice.

When the hatch began to close, my lungs loosened for the first time since morning. I had done it—not escaped, not really, but I had moved. And chosen something that mattered.

The thought should have felt better than it did. Choice was supposed to feel like freedom, but instead I sat there with everything I owned crammed into one bag, no idea whether Sera’n was alive, and the sick realization that if I went back now, I might never be allowed to leave again. Apparently freedom could feel a lot like terror when you had nowhere to go.

The transport lifted.

I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them. Trusting anything today felt stupid. The ride took less than an hour. Bren outpost was smaller than I’d expected—a freight hub and refueling station with a few low buildings under the red-brown sky. No administrative towers, no palace routes, no laboratory. Good.

I’d imagined outer settlements like this one while waiting in registration offices, tuning out strangers debating my reassignment. In those daydreams, such places were freer: less structure, fewer questions about ownership or bonds or where a human woman belonged. Now, standing in Bren with a bag on my shoulder and no ID on my wrist, I understood what I’d missed asking. Freer for whom? I was still human, unbonded, alone. Distance didn’t grant invisibility.

I left the transport with the others and let the crowd carry me into the station. I was hungry, unsteady, and had nowhere to sleep—those problems came first, in that order. Then a plan. Work here, maybe, in another medical facility where they’d hand me a lab coat and stop asking questions. No—too traceable. Anyone with database access could find a human woman in a medical facility within a day. Better to keep moving, farther out: a trading post, a refugee settlement, some place where nobody counted people and nobody cared what my name used to be.