The door to the pre-op room slid open again. The sound was a soft, clean hiss, identical to the one that had admitted them, but it carried a finality that felt like a hammer blow. It was not the medical droid returning. It was not a maintenance worker. Kaelen’s entire body went rigid, a reflex honed in the alleys of the Ceres Down-Spiral, a tightening of muscle that preceded flight or fight.
Julian Valerius stepped into the room. He was flanked by two corporate guards, their forms rendered anonymous by the flat black of their tactical gear, pulse carbines held at a low, disciplined ready. Julian himself was, as always, immaculate. His dark gray Yama-Mitsui Solutions suit seemed to repel the sterile light of the clinic, its perfect creases a statement of absolute order in a system built on chaos. He did not look at Kaelen. His gaze fell first on the sedated form of Corbin Vance, then drifted to the silent, black-composite shape of Walter Bell.
— An impressive infiltration, — Julian’s voice was smooth as polished chrome, carrying no hint of anger or surprise. It was the voice of a man reviewing a quarterly report. — Bypassing a Mars-grade sensor net is no small feat. The diversion was… creative. A waste of a perfectly good ship, I imagine, but creative.
The guards took up positions on either side of the door, their movements economical and perfectly synchronized. They were not preparing for a firefight. They were closing a cage. Julian took a slow step toward the medical bed, his polished shoes making no sound on the polymer floor. He was a predator who had cornered his prey and now intended to savor the moment.
— But you assumed my objective was the same as yours, — Julian continued, a faint, condescending smile touching his lips. — You thought this was about the data. About the ghost of Aris Volkov. It never was. It was about the anchors. The messy, physical proof. And now, it is about this.
He gestured with one elegant hand toward the unconscious courier. The Sanitas-7 medical droid, its instructional loop uninterrupted, continued its silent preparations, the blue light on its chassis pulsing with cold, steady purpose.
— Here is the choice, Kaelen, — Julian said, finally turning his full attention to him. The pressure of his gaze was a physical weight. — A simple cost-benefit analysis for the man who used to be an Empath.
He began to circle the medical bed, his movements slow and deliberate. He was framing the scene, making Kaelen the audience to his own damnation.
— Option A: You take the fragment. You do what you came here to do. But ripping a psychic echo of that magnitude from an unprepared, sedated mind… it will leave him a shell. A drooling, empty vessel for the rest of his short, institutionalized life. You’ll have your ghost, and you’ll have another victim on your conscience. In essence, you become me.
The words landed like shards of ice. Kaelen’s gaze flickered to Corbin Vance, to the slack, unremarkable face of a man whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The hum of the medical monitors was a flat, steady line, a sound of life unaware of its own imminent destruction. The price was Corbin’s sanity.
— Option B, — Julian said, pausing on the far side of the bed, placing himself between Kaelen and the courier. — You walk away. You let the droid do its work. A clean, routine psychic hygiene procedure. The fragment of Volkov, a stray piece of data, will be wiped. You let the courier live his insignificant life, and you let Aris Volkov die for good. A second, final erasure. Your redemption, your entire purpose, turns to ash.
Kaelen felt a profound, hollow cold spread through his chest. It was the silence he had felt in the holding cell, the emptiness left by the ghost’s fading presence, but now it was a choice presented to him as a solution. He could have that silence back, forever. All it would cost was everything he had fought for. He looked at Julian, at the man who was a perfect mirror of the monster he had almost become, and saw the clean, absolute certainty in his eyes. Julian believed in order. This choice was his final lesson in what that order cost.
Kaelen’s hand went to the back of his neck, his fingers finding the cold, useless metal of the Ghost-Eater Shunt. It was a dead thing, a token of his failure. He was trapped. He could not sacrifice this innocent man. He could not abandon Volkov. The two paths were two different kinds of erasure, and he was standing at the point where they converged.
Then, a sound. A series of quiet, mechanical clicks.
Walter Bell moved. The raven Uplift, who had been as still as a statue, took two silent steps forward. From a concealed compartment in his chassis, he produced a compact harness of woven silver filaments and dull gray diagnostic nodes. A stabilization rig. It was Keeper technology, intricate and purposeful, a thing designed not for erasure, but for preservation.
Julian’s smile faltered for a fraction of a second. He had not accounted for this.
— There is a third option, — Walter’s synthesized voice cut through the sterile air, flat and devoid of any of Julian’s manufactured drama. It was a statement of pure, irrefutable fact.
He held up the rig.
— A direct mind-to-mind transfer. The psychic strain of a forced extraction from an unshielded host is… considerable. It would be like catching a plasma bolt in your bare hands. It requires a shield. A buffer to absorb the psychic backlash and stabilize the donor mind.
Walter turned his head, and the single, unblinking amber glow of his custom optic fixed on Kaelen. The trust in that gaze was absolute, a thing forged in the fire of a dozen impossible situations. It was the culmination of their entire journey, from the dusty data-tomb on Ceres to the collapsing bio-dome on Europa. It was the answer born from their hostile, necessary partnership.
— You would have to absorb the damage yourself.
The true choice. It was not about Corbin Vance. It was not about Aris Volkov. It was about him. The price was not sanity or redemption. The price was his own mind. He would have to stand in the path of the fire, to take the damage that would have shattered the courier, and hope that enough of him was left to stand up after.
He met the raven’s unblinking gaze and gave the only answer that mattered.
