Saya did not stay anywhere long, not because she feared being found, but because staying invited patterns, and patterns were what the Empire read best. She moved constantly, threading her way through stations that no longer cared who passed through them, places that had survived by being forgettable rather than strong. These ports had been built to be overlooked, designed with outdated layouts, poor traffic control, and administrative systems that never fully modernized because no one had thought it worth the cost. They survived because they asked no questions, kept no records worth stealing, and existed just far enough from anything important to be ignored.
The Empire had not shut them down yet.
That, more than anything else, unsettled her.
If the Empire were acting on fear, these stations would have been the first to go. They would have been swept clean, locked down, brought to heel under the justification of "preventive security." Instead, they were being left alone, watched but untouched, allowed to continue their quiet, unremarkable existence.
That suggested restraint.
Restraint meant planning.
She sat across from a woman dressed in civilian gray at a narrow table bolted directly to the floor. The room around them was small and utilitarian, a repurposed storage space with sound-dampening panels that didn't quite mask the hum of station systems running behind the walls. The air was stale, recycled too many times to carry any trace of freshness, and a single light strip overhead buzzed faintly, its brightness uneven where age had begun to wear through the casing.
The woman's hands were folded neatly in front of her, fingers interlaced with deliberate care. Her eyes were sharp in a way that had nothing to do with alertness and everything to do with discipline. This was someone who chose her words carefully because she understood what words could cost.
"They reopened an authority block," the woman said.
Saya did not react. She had learned a long time ago that reacting too quickly gave other people information they had not earned. "Which one."
The woman shook her head. "Designation stripped. Only function remains."
Saya frowned despite herself. "That shouldn't be possible."
"It wasn't," the woman replied calmly. "Until someone decided it needed to be."
Saya leaned back slightly in her chair, the metal frame cool against her spine. "What does it authorize."
"Coordination without review," the woman said. "Sector wide. Fleet wide. Intelligence wide."
The words settled heavily between them. Saya felt a tightness form in her chest, the kind that came not from panic but from recognition. "That removes checks."
"Yes," the woman said. "And consequences."
"Who benefits," Saya asked.
"No one officially," the woman replied. "Which is why it passed quietly."
Saya stood, pushing her chair back with a soft scrape against the floor. "Then this isn't panic."
"No," the woman agreed. "It's preparation."
"For what," Saya asked.
The woman looked away, her gaze fixing briefly on the wall as if the answer were written there and she simply didn't want to read it aloud. "For uncertainty."
Saya left without another word. There was nothing more to be gained from the conversation, and lingering would only increase the chance that someone noticed she had been there at all.
Back aboard her transport, she sealed the hatch and let the familiar hum of the ship settle around her. The vessel was small, unremarkable, and intentionally underpowered, built for quiet efficiency rather than speed or defense. As soon as she was strapped into the pilot's seat, she pulled up regional traffic maps and began cross-referencing them with older data sets. Patrol density was increasing, but not where it would have made sense under any conventional doctrine. The Empire was not reinforcing borders, not tightening control over trade hubs, not guarding valuable systems or contested routes.
Instead, the increase was focused on empty places.
Ignored places.
She overlaid the maps with recent Empire engagements, filtering out noise until only confirmed actions remained. Slowly, a pattern emerged, faint at first and then impossible to unsee. It wasn't a pursuit. There was no central vector, no obvious target being chased across systems.
It was a net.
Her comm chimed softly.
A short message from Jerad appeared on the screen.
They are watching where no one should care.
Saya closed her eyes briefly, letting the words settle. "Yes," she said quietly to no one. "They are."
She opened a secure channel and routed the request through three dead relays, infrastructure so outdated and underfunded that no modern system bothered to monitor it anymore. "Pull me archival movement data," she said. "Pre-consolidation. Anything matching this spread."
The system acknowledged the request.
The response took longer than she liked.
While she waited, her transport drifted along the outer edge of the station's traffic zone, her presence indistinguishable from dozens of other small craft passing through. She watched Empire vessels on her sensors, noting how they moved with deliberate slowness, never rushing, never clustering tightly enough to draw attention. They were positioned to see, not to intercept.
When the data finally came through, her jaw tightened.
The pattern existed before.
Once.
And it had ended badly.
She pulled up the historical record, skimming past the surface-level summaries and into the raw movement logs, the kind most analysts never bothered to read. The similarities were unmistakable. The same emphasis on peripheral systems. The same avoidance of overt enforcement. The same quiet tightening of observational coverage until entire regions became transparent to Imperial intelligence.
Her transport shuddered lightly as it exited drift near another station, this one larger and cleaner, its architecture newer, its signage carefully maintained. It was still pretending to be neutral, still wearing the mask of independence that made commerce flow smoothly through its docks.
She did not dock.
Instead, she slowed her approach and watched Empire ships pass by in wide, deliberate arcs. They didn't stop anyone. They didn't hail, scan, or challenge passing vessels. They simply observed, recording trajectories, timing, deviations so small most pilots wouldn't even notice they were making them.
They weren't enforcing law.
They were collecting context.
Her console chimed again.
New data flagged.
A name appeared on the screen.
Not a ship.
Not a person.
A classification.
Her breathing slowed as she read it, the implications settling in with a familiar, unwelcome weight. This wasn't an escalation meant to resolve quickly. This was a framework being put into place, one designed to operate indefinitely until something revealed itself.
She opened another channel. "Jerad," she said.
Static answered for a moment before his voice came through. "I'm here."
"They've escalated," she said. "Quietly."
"How," he asked.
"They aren't tracking ships anymore," she replied. "They're tracking events."
Jerad was silent, and she could picture him considering that, fitting it into the larger picture he'd already been building.
"They don't know what they're looking for," Saya continued. "But they know where it happens."
"And where is that," Jerad asked.
Saya glanced back at the data, at the overlapping lines and zones that marked the Empire's attention. "At the edges," she said. "Where things break."
The channel cut abruptly.
Not by her.
She checked her console. No warning indicators. No security alerts. Her transport's alarms stayed silent.
But something had changed.
She pulled up her sensors again, this time widening the range and stripping out civilian traffic. Empire signatures were adjusting course. Not toward the station. Not toward any obvious objective.
Toward her.
Not fast.
Not openly.
Just enough to matter.
Saya set her hands on the controls, feeling the subtle vibration of the ship respond to her touch, and began calculating her options. There were still ways out, still angles she could take, but none of them felt clean anymore.
And for the first time in years, she realized she might not be ahead of the line.