Chapter 3 #2
I should be concerned by this. A smart prisoner is a dangerous prisoner, and a dangerous prisoner requires countermeasures: restricted movement, increased surveillance, perhaps the kind of chemical compliance my father favored for high-value acquisitions who didn't cooperate quickly enough.
I'm not concerned.
I'm delighted.
The word sits in my chest like something warm and wrong, and I don't examine it too closely because I know what I'll find.
I know what it means that I'm watching her outsmart a cage I built and feeling something that isn't anger.
I know what it means that when she pauses at the view port lounge and stands in the blue-white wash of starlight, I zoom the feed to see her face more clearly.
The set of her jaw, the tension in her throat, the way her eyes track the stars with the expression of someone cataloging an escape route and grieving simultaneously.
I know what all of this means. I watch her for twenty-three more minutes anyway.
She orders a station-standard coffee, bitter and flat, nothing like the real beans I keep in my quarters, despite what's available to her.
She wraps both hands around the cup and I watch her fingers, the fine bones of her wrists, the way the warmth loosens something in her shoulders that's been locked since I first saw her in that cargo hold.
She drinks it slowly. Watching the corridor over the rim. Counting footsteps. Timing patrol rotations.
Good girl, I think, and immediately want to break something for thinking it.
I kill the feed.
I pull it back up.
I kill it again.
I keep my hands on the desk and breathe through the particular hell of wanting something I've decided I'm not allowed to take.
Astra arrives at fourteen hundred hours, which means she arrives at thirteen fifty-eight because Astra Venn has never been merely on time for anything in her life. She enters my office, efficient, purposeful, every movement stripped of excess.
"Security report," she says, and doesn't sit.
She never sits in here. I've offered but she prefers to stand, weight balanced, sight lines to both doors.
Old habits from a career that predates her employment with my family, details of which she has never shared and I have never asked about.
We have an understanding, Astra and I: she keeps me alive, I don't dig into whatever she was before she started keeping me alive.
"The new acquisition," she begins, and I note her word choice.
Acquisition, not prisoner, not guest, not her name.
Astra categorizes everything by threat level, and she hasn't determined Talia's yet.
That bothers her. "She's watching everything.
Learning the patterns. Traffic flow on Level Twelve, maintenance schedules, patrol intervals.
She clocked the shift change within four hours of being given corridor access. "
"Impressive."
"Concerning." Astra's jaw tightens by a millimeter. Invisible on anyone else; on Astra, a shout. "She's not broken yet. The ones who aren't broken plan. The ones who plan cause problems. The ones who cause problems on this station…"
"Don't finish that sentence."
Silence. Astra holds my gaze with the flat patience of a woman who has killed more people than either of us has bothered to count.
"Did I ask you to break her?" I keep my voice level and conversational. The register my father used before he hurt people, and I hate that I know how to use it, and I use it anyway because it works.
"No."
"Then why are we having this conversation?"
Astra's expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind her eyes: a recalculation. She's not afraid of me, that's one of the reasons she's valuable. She's assessing, adjusting her approach, the way she'd adjust aim for wind.
"I'm just wondering what you're planning to do when she tries to run."
The question sits between us like an unexploded round.
When. Not if.
Astra doesn't deal in if.
And I don't have an answer. Not the kind Astra wants — the clean, operational kind. She runs, we catch her, consequence follows. That's the protocol. That's what my father would have laid out in precise, inarguable terms, consequence calibrated to ensure there was no second attempt.
"I'll handle it," I say.
Astra looks at me for two seconds longer than comfortable. Reading me the way she reads threat assessments — for gaps, for weaknesses, for the thing that's going to get someone killed.
"Copy," she says finally. And leaves.
The door seals.
I pull up Talia's feed again.
She's back in her quarters. Pacing.
Five steps to the wall, turn, five steps back. Her hands are fists at her sides and her hair, blonde, tangled, unwashed since the cargo hold, swings with each turn like a pendulum marking time she doesn't have.
I watch her pace and I don't have an answer to Astra's question and the not-knowing feels like standing at the edge of something without a railing.
The portrait watches me work.
My father's face, rendered in the hyperrealist style he preferred, every line, every scar, every shade of the bioluminescent markings that ran from his temples to his collarbone captured in pigment that shifts under different light.
The artist was talented. The artist was also executed three days after completion, because my father didn't like how the eyes turned out.
Too soft, he'd said. Makes me look like I give a shit.
I've tried to take it down. Three times. Each time I've stood in front of it with my hands at my sides and felt the weight of his gaze: painted, dead, still somehow pressing down on my chest like a boot. I've left it where it is.
Proof that even dead, Malachar Torrence runs this station from the inside of my skull.
He would have had her by now.
The thought comes unbidden and unwelcome, settling into my bones like station cold. My father wouldn't have waited two days. Wouldn't have assigned permitted zones and watched her through surveillance feeds like some lovesick idiot mapping the habits of a creature he's afraid to touch.
Malachar Torrence had a system for high-value acquisitions: isolation, dependency, chemical nudging if necessary, and then the slow, methodical dismantling of everything that made them them until what remained was compliant, pliable, and empty.
He'd have had Talia in his bed. Pliant. That word: pliant.
Like something bent until it stays bent.
He'd have manipulated her grief for her father into dependence, turned her intelligence against her, found every vulnerability and pressed until she opened, and by the time he was done she'd have been grateful for the attention.
And she'd have been nothing. Everything that makes her dangerous, the calculating eyes, the steady hands, the jaw that sets like she's bracing against a tide, all of it ground down to compliance.
I refuse to be that.
But I want her just as badly.
I stand in front of my father's portrait and feel the truth of it in my marks: the bioluminescence that lives under my skin, inherited from him, the genetic signature of our line that responds to emotion the way a lie detector responds to stress.
They're glowing now. Faintly, in the blue-violet spectrum, concentrated along my forearms where my sleeves are rolled to the elbow. They pulse with my heartbeat.
Want. That's what they're saying, in the only language my body speaks that I can't control.
Want want want want.
The difference between me and my father is the space between wanting and taking. It's the only difference. It's the only one that matters. Some days it feels paper-thin.
I turn my back on the portrait. It watches me anyway.
I go to her at station-dark.
Not because I have a plan. Not because I've calculated the optimal moment for a strategic conversation about cooperation and information exchange.
I go because I've been watching her pace for three hours and I can feel her restlessness through the wall: not literally, not yet, not at this distance, but in the way the air pressure seems to change outside her door, as though her agitation has a gravitational field.
I open the door without announcing myself. Because this is my station and she is my prisoner and if I extend her courtesies she'll mistake them for softness, and softness in this world gets you the kind of death my father designed for people who disappointed him.
She's mid-stride when the door opens. Catches herself, one foot forward, weight shifting, and for a fraction of a second her body reads fight before her brain overrides it.
I see the recalculation happen in real time: the clench of her fists, the assessment sweep of her eyes: my hands (empty), my posture (controlled), the door behind me (closing, sealed, no escape).
She straightens. Settles her weight evenly. Lifts her chin.
"Come to watch in person?" Her voice is rough. Station air dries the throat if you're not used to it, and she's not used to anything here yet. "I was starting to think the cameras were the only way you could get close to a woman."
"The cameras are for security."
"The cameras are for you." She says it with certainty. With the kind of knowing that means she's been thinking about it, about me, watching her. Turning it over in her mind the way she turns over corridor layouts and patrol schedules. Fitting me into her map.
She's not wrong. I don't confirm it.
"Sit down," I say.
"No."
I expected that. I almost wanted the refusal, the defiance, the way her jaw sets and her eyes go hard and her whole body says make me without her having to speak the words.
I sit so it puts me below her sightline. A deliberate choice that costs me the physical advantage and gains me something else: the look on her face when she realizes I've ceded the high ground. Confusion, quick and raw, before she shutters it.
"My father," she says. "Tell me what happened to my father."
"Sit down and I'll consider it."
"Tell me and I'll consider sitting."