THE ASTRONAUT'S FORBIDDEN GIRL
Chapter Three: First Blood
Junker's cockpit was full of smoke and warning chimes and the smell of burning coolant when Wren finally slammed her open palm against the emergency vent release, and for three full seconds she genuinely did not know whether she had just won a match or destroyed the only thing she owned that mattered.
Then the smoke cleared enough for her to see Selene Vantage's Frame on its knees in the middle of the arena floor, systems dark, and the crowd noise hit her like a physical wave.
That was the end of it. The beginning of it had been considerably less certain.
Redlining the throttle had bought her exactly the burst of speed she needed to slip inside Selene's opening strike before the patched coolant line could fail, which meant the failure happened half a second later instead, while she was already too close for Selene's longer-range systems to track her properly. It was not a plan. It was barely a decision. It was the kind of thing Wren's grandmother used to call working the problem you actually have instead of the one you wish you had, and for eleven brutal seconds it worked, Junker moving in tight and ugly and completely unpredictable while Selene's far more expensive Frame tried and failed to line up a shot on a target that refused to hold still long enough to be hit.
Then the coolant line gave out entirely, and every alarm Wren had muted came back screaming at once, and she made the only choice left to her: she stopped trying to win cleanly and started trying to win at all.
She got in close enough that Selene's ranged advantage stopped mattering, grappled the other Frame's weapon arm hard enough to throw off its aim, and used the last burst of overheated power in Junker's failing systems to put her own Frame's shoulder directly into Selene's center mass. It was not a technique from any Institute training manual. It was closer to the kind of move you'd use to shove a stalled cargo hauler off a loading dock, brute and inelegant and entirely effective, and Selene's Frame went down hard enough to trip its own safety shutdown before Wren's did.
By the time officials reached her cockpit, Junker's internal temperature had climbed high enough that the readout had simply stopped displaying a number and started displaying a warning symbol instead, and Wren's hands were shaking too hard to unlatch her own harness on the first three tries.
"That," said the voice in her ear, and it took her a second to place it as Kai's, patched through on a channel she hadn't authorized, "was the single most reckless piece of piloting I have ever watched in a sanctioned match."
"Did I win?"
"You won." A pause, long enough that she could hear him deciding whether to say the next part. "You also very nearly cooked yourself alive doing it. Redlining like that on an unproven system is how the last Wildcard qualifier ended his career in one match."
"Good thing I'm not him, then."
"Kessler." His voice dropped, quieter, less composed than she'd heard it yet. "Get out of the cockpit before you find out the hard way whether that's true."
She got out.
Selene was already being escorted off the field on the other side of the arena, flanked by two Vantage-Hale handlers who looked considerably more worried about brand reputation than about Selene herself, and for one strange second their eyes met across the wreckage. There was no triumph in it on either side. Just two people who had both nearly broken something they couldn't afford to lose.
Milo's next message came through before Wren had even finished walking off the field, no words this time, just four exclamation points and a video clip of himself and their mother watching the broadcast, both of them on their feet, her mother's hand pressed over her mouth. Wren watched it twice before she could make herself put the comm away.
The impound officials were waiting exactly where the intake officer had promised they would be, and Wren watched them wheel Junker away toward the Institute's inspection bay with the specific, hollow feeling of handing over something she'd built with her own hands to people who had never once had to build anything themselves. Doyle walked beside her afterward, silent, which was somehow worse than if he'd said something.
"You could tell me I did something stupid," Wren said eventually.
"You did something stupid. You also did something nobody in six years has managed, which is win a Wildcard match. Both things are true. I'm allowed to sit with both of them for a minute before I decide which one to yell about first."
It took Compliance most of the afternoon to finish their inspection, and Wren spent it in a cramped waiting room with bad lighting and worse coffee, running the match back in her head over and over, trying to figure out how Selene had known exactly where to strike. Someone inside that supervised prep window had handed away information nobody outside Wren's own bay should have had.
Kai found her there twenty minutes in, which she had not expected, standing in the doorway like he wasn't quite sure whether he was allowed to be there either.
"I'm not here to say I told you so," he said.
"You're doing a bad job of not saying it."
"I came to tell you that whoever tipped Selene off about the coolant weakness did it from inside a supervised Institute window, which means it wasn't a lucky guess and it wasn't something she figured out from watching your qualifying race." He crossed his arms, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked less like the reigning champion and more like someone actually worried. "That's not a competitor doing competitor things. That's someone with access trying to get you hurt. I don't know who yet. I intend to find out."
"Why do you care?"
"Because I don't like cheating," he said, too fast, and then, more slowly, like the words cost him something, "and because if it's someone connected to Osei Dynetics, I would rather know that from you than find it out later from a headline."
He left before she could figure out how to answer that, which was probably for the best, because she didn't have an answer yet.
When the door finally opened, it wasn't a Compliance officer standing there. It was one of the junior inspection techs, a young woman named Priya who Wren vaguely recognized from the prep bay that morning, holding a data slate against her chest like it might try to escape.
"You should probably see this before the senior inspectors do their write-up," Priya said, glancing back over her shoulder like she wasn't entirely sure she was allowed to be here. "That component your registration flagged yesterday, the one Compliance couldn't match to any manufacturer. We finally got a clean scan of it during the post-match inspection."
"And?"
"It's not just unlisted. It's not built with any fabrication method currently in commercial use. The internal lattice structure is decades ahead of anything Osei or Vantage-Hale or anyone else in this arena is publicly working on." Priya lowered her voice further. "I've been doing this job four years. I've never seen a signature like it. Whoever made this part either doesn't exist on any registry we have access to, or doesn't want to."
Wren felt something cold settle low in her stomach, underneath the exhaustion and the adrenaline crash. "I built that part myself. I know I did. I remember every piece I put into that housing."
"Maybe you built the housing," Priya said. "I don't think you built what's inside it."
Doyle's expression, when Wren glanced at him, had gone carefully, deliberately blank in a way that told her he was not nearly as surprised by this as he should have been, and she filed that away next to everything else she didn't have time to be afraid of yet.
"Can I see it?" Wren asked.
Priya hesitated, then turned the data slate around, and Wren found herself looking at a scan of the very component she had assembled in her scrapyard workshop over a year ago, the one she remembered soldering by hand under a tarp by lamplight, and it was subtly, unmistakably wrong. The internal structure did not match anything she remembered building. It looked less like a machine part and more like something that had grown.
"That's impossible," Wren said. "I would know if I hadn't built this."
As if in answer, the component on the scan flickered, a small pulse of light moving through its lattice structure in a pattern too deliberate to be a scanning artifact, and every readout on Priya's data slate spiked at once.
"That's not possible," Priya said, staring at the slate. "It's not powered. It's sitting in a containment locker four floors below us with the power cells physically removed."
The slate flickered again, the same pulse, stronger this time, and somewhere down the corridor an alarm began, quiet at first and then rapidly less quiet, the specific rising tone Wren had already learned to recognize as very bad news indeed.
Whatever was inside Junker's frame had just woken up on its own.