Kael Vass

Kael read the pipework like a second language, tracing the dump line by eye while ND-E got lost in the noise. He put two daggers into Cinderwalker on the first exchange and kept finding the gaps after, sneak attack after sneak attack chipping the thing down while everyone else argued about wrenches. When the server room cracked open, his instinct was pure heist logic: subvert the security system, make the smuggling job trivial, worry about St. Crow later. He lost that argument gracefully enough, mostly because information turned out to matter more than he expected — especially once Now's real name hit the table.

Kael went in first, the way he always does — quiet, to the edge of the wall, a look around the corner before anyone else moved. He found the blast door and the droids sealing it shut, and the old scorch marks that meant somebody had already died trying to get through. When the fight came he did what he does best: in, out, a knife in something's throat before it noticed him there. He didn't plan the charge that got Velveteen dropped and he said so afterward, plainly, the way he says most things that matter to him.

Trust, Kael decided, had to be earned with blood paid in kind — so he told them about the vault, the black relic, the crew that vanished, and the thing fused now into his spine. Saying it out loud didn't make it lighter. When Mistarion's book showed him the exact vessel he'd been sent to steal, something cold settled under the words he didn't say next. He asked for two thousand on the Reclamation job without blinking — the fine plus a margin — then lifted a guard's security key mid-distraction, tripping over the sleeping engineer on the way. Captain by default, captain by habit — he's starting to wonder if the title was a mistake.

Kael let the group argue the angles — cartel, corpo, third way — without pushing hard in any one direction, more interested in watching how everyone else tipped. He bought six shots of the local rotgut off Scraps and drank it like it was the best thing he'd ever tasted, mostly to see if anyone would call him on the lie. Nobody did; the crystal didn't flicker either. What stuck with him was the paperwork glimpsed on the way out — Korlok's face on a wanted sheet made sense. Mistarion's didn't, and Kael filed that away without saying so out loud.

Kael read the room before anyone swung a fist — five drunk workers backing up one loudmouth, no weapons, all bark. He tried a flashy dagger trick to make them think twice and, when talk failed, put a knife to the ringleader's throat. When it went loud he made it count: two men down, the first with the pommel of a dagger to the back of the head while Onerous buzzed in the man's face. Kael doesn't love that it came to this, but he trusts a fight he can read more than a room he can't. When the others talked about slipping out, he told them he'd catch up — and walked up to Narok Tarr's table instead of running.

Kael let the boy talk and mostly listened, and what he heard didn't sit right — a kid pulled out of a bakery by men with clubs because his blood did something a wizard wanted to study. He did the talking with Zabetta too, laid the story out plain enough to be useful without handing over anything that wasn't his to give. Ten thousand credits changed hands and he watched her count every gem out loud so nobody could say later he'd been cheated. Three days of rented safety bought with a green chit felt like the first real breathing room since The Rock came apart. He's already cataloguing who on this station can be trusted exactly as far as their own interest goes — which, so far, is everyone.

He had the angle and he had the grip. He went into the roll already composing the line he would say afterwards, because that is how it works: you land it, you smile, you move on and nobody asks how. Her hand was not there. He has run it back perhaps forty times since and it comes out the same every time — fingers closing on nothing, the heat coming up, a sound he has decided not to think about. Then the elf says it out loud on the shuttle, mildly, like a man handing back a dropped glove. Kael has not answered him yet.

He says almost nothing and does almost everything. Checks the dead guard for a key before anyone else thinks to. Pockets a set of homemade thieves' tools. Throws the lever. Hands the baton to the person who can actually use it. When the tortle asks who sent him, Kael asks who sent the tortle. Whatever's been running quietly in the background for him — and something always is — the ceiling coming down didn't switch it off. If anything, the chaos is useful.