My Infinite System.

The tension in the common room, which had been a low simmer, quickly boiled over.

”Pulled it off?” Reia repeated, not looking up from her datapad. Her voice was dangerously calm. ”She’s a fugitive hiding on our ship. If that’s your definition of ’pulling it off’, it explains a lot about your previous career choices.”

Marc’s smirk vanished. ”She exposed a multi-system corporation with nothing but her wits. What were you doing at her age? Polishing your collection of tactical graphs?”

”Building the foundation that allows me to not get caught,” she shot back, her eyes flashing up to meet his. ”There’s a difference between a clever stunt and sustainable strategy. One gets you a moment of glory. The other keeps you alive.”

”Glory? She’s trying to get justice for her dead parents!”

”And emotional motivation is a liability in a tactical scenario. It clouds judgment.”

”Maybe clear judgment is overrated when people are getting killed!”

Silas looked back and forth between them like he was watching a ball game. ”Okay, okay, everyone’s smart in their own way! Reia’s smart-smart, the kid is... street-smart! Right? It’s all... good smart.” He gave a hopeful, lopsided grin.

Vyn, who had been observing from her shadowed corner with an expression of profound weariness, let out a soft sigh. ”Silas,” she said, her voice flat. ”Just... don’t. You are adding noise, not signal.”

Before Silas could form a retort, the inn’s main door slid open with a frantic hiss. Evelyn stood there, her face pale, one hand firmly holding Lira’s. The young Cerebrian girl was trembling, her silver eyes wide with a terror that seemed to radiate from her very core.

”Something’s wrong,” Evelyn said, her voice tight.

Lira pulled away from Evelyn and stumbled further into the room, her gaze darting wildly until it landed on Marc. ”They have him! They took him! We have to help!” Her words tumbled out in a desperate, gasping rush.

Marc was on his feet in an instant, crossing the room to kneel in front of her, his earlier anger completely forgotten. ”Who, Lira? Who took who? Slow down. Breathe.”

Lira clutched at his arm, her small fingers gripping his sleeve. ”My uncle. Midas. They have him. Omni-Stellar. I saw it!”

Reia was now watching intently, her analytical mind fully engaged. ”Saw it? How? Did you receive a transmission?”

”No! I... I was just sitting on the ship, and then... it was like a dream, but I was awake.” Lira’s voice shook. ”I saw men in grey uniforms at his door on Fresia. His farming moon. They were polite, but their eyes were... cold. They said they were bringing him to me for a family reunion. But it was a lie! I could feel the lie! He was scared. He didn’t want to go with them. They’re using him to get to me!”

She looked around at all of them, her pupil-less eyes pleading. ”We have to go! We have to help him before they hurt him!”

Marc looked up at Evelyn, then at Lucian, who had emerged silently from his room at the commotion. ”It’s a trap. They’re using her family as bait.”

”Of course it is,” Reia stated, her tone clinical. ”It’s the obvious next move. They failed with force, so they’re attempting emotional manipulation.” She turned her focus to Lira. ”The vision. Describe it. What were the specific markings on the uniforms? The model of their transport? The layout of your uncle’s dwelling?”

Lira flinched, overwhelmed by the barrage of questions. ”I... I don’t know! It was just a feeling, pictures in my head!”

”But how?” Silas asked, bewildered. ”How can you see pictures from another planet?”

There was a moment of silence as the strange reality of the situation settled over them. Lira just shook her head, tears of frustration welling in her eyes. ”I don’t know! It just happens sometimes. I just... know things I shouldn’t. I feel things.”

Reia’s eyes narrowed, her head tilting as she processed this new data point with intense focus. She studied Lira not with skepticism, but with the piercing gaze of a scientist who has just discovered a fascinating anomaly.

”You’re a clairvoyant,” Reia said, the words dropping into the room with the weight of absolute certainty.

Lira stared at her, confused. ”A... what?”

”A precognitive sensitive. You receive information through extra-sensory perception, likely tied to strong emotional stimuli. In this case, your fear for your remaining family member acted as a catalyst, allowing you to perceive events across interstellar distances.” Reia spoke as if she were reading from a textbook. ”It’s a rare, often untrainable ability among most species. But for a Cerebrian like you said she is, Marc, with her accelerated neural development... it’s a logical, if unprecedented, evolution.”

The room was dead quiet. Marc looked from Reia’s analytical face to Lira’s terrified one. The corporate trap was one thing. This—this was something else entirely.

Lucian’s gaze was fixed on Lira, his own concerns momentarily overshadowed by this revelation. The little girl wasn’t just a victim; she was an oracle. And Omni-Stellar, in their ruthless efficiency, had just unknowingly threatened the one person who could truly see their moves coming.

The silence that followed Reia’s diagnosis was thick enough to choke on. Lira looked more terrified than ever, her new identity as a ’precognitive sensitive’ doing nothing to ease the raw fear for her uncle.

Silas was the first to break, his mouth hanging open. ”She can see the future?”

”Not the future, the present,” Reia corrected, her voice like chipping ice. ”It’s a data stream she doesn’t know how to process. We need to calibrate her perceptions, run tests to determine the range and accuracy—”

”Enough.”

Marc’s voice cut through the budding analysis. He was still kneeling in front of Lira, but his eyes were on Reia, hard and final. ”You talk and think too damn much.”

He turned back to the girl, his large hands gently gripping her shoulders. ”Lira. Look at me. You saw where they took him? You feel where he is?”

She nodded, a frantic little motion. ”It’s a moon. Fresia. It’s all red dust and big, purple caves. I saw the landing pad near his dome. I know it.”

”Good enough for me.” Marc stood up, pulling Lira with him. He ignored the protests starting to form on the others’ lips. ”I’m gonna need you to trust me again. And I need to see what you saw. In your head. Can you let me do that?”

Lira, her world reduced to this one chance, just nodded again, her trust in him absolute.

Marc placed a hand on her forehead, his own eyes closing. A faint, golden light flickered at the edge of his vision for a split second. He was in and out of her mind in a breath, taking only the imprint of the place, the location seared into her memory by fear.

”Got it,” he grunted.

”Marc, this is reckless!” Lucian snapped, finally stepping forward. ”We have no intel, no exit strategy!”

”The strategy is they don’t get to use her family,” Marc shot back, his voice low and deadly. ”The exit is I bring him back.”

Reia took a sharp step forward. ”You are acting on unverified sensory data from an untrained psychic! The statistical probability of a successful, unsupported extraction is—”

”—better than the probability of him staying alive once Omni-Stellar has what they want,” Marc finished for her. He gave her a look that was part challenge, part something else she couldn’t quite place. ”Sometimes, you don’t get a plan. You just get a chance.”

Before anyone could utter another word, the air around Marc and Lira shimmered, warping like heat haze on a desert road. There was no sound, no flash of light. One moment they were there, solid and real. The next, they were gone, leaving behind only the faint scent of ozone and stunned silence.

---

The world reassembled itself in a disorienting lurch. The soft, organic light of the Drifting Leaf was replaced by a harsh, reddish glow. Lira stumbled, Marc’s steadying hand the only thing keeping her upright.

They stood on a rocky outcrop overlooking a small, dusty landing pad carved into the side of a massive, purple-hued canyon. The air was thin and dry, scratching at the throat. Below, a grey Omni-Stellar transport with the markings XT-788 sat on the pad, its ramp lowered. Just as Lira had seen.

And there, being escorted down the ramp by two security personnel, was a man with Lira’s same silver hair, his shoulders slumped in defeat. Her Uncle Kael.

Marc pulled Lira down behind the cover of the rocks, his eyes already scanning the area. Two guards by the ship. One pilot visible in the cockpit. Probably one more inside.

”Okay, kid,” he whispered, a grim smile touching his lips. ”Ambush it is.”

A/N

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