Chapter 9
Zane
The name stares back at me from Talia's datapad like a dead man's accusation.
Corso Vell. Former cargo handler, Deck Nine logistics, employed under my father's direct oversight for eleven years. Terminated from station records six months ago. Not fired. Not transferred. Just gone, the way people go when someone decides they never existed.
"Quarantine for what?" I ask, though I'm already pulling up the station schematic on my own terminal.
The intelligence hub hums around me, screens casting their blue-white pallor across every surface, and the recycled air tastes like it always does in here.
Like nothing. Like a place that's been scrubbed of anything human.
Astra leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Medical sealed it. Your father's authorization, personally coded. No override without the Seat's biometric confirmation." She lifts one eyebrow. "Which, as of two weeks ago, is yours."
"Convenient."
"Or deliberate." She straightens. "I've had two teams try to access that section in the months since Malachar disappeared. Both times, the security protocols escalated beyond my clearance. Whatever's in there, he wanted it locked even from me."
That lands somewhere between insult and intrigue. My father trusted Astra Venn with the station's defense grid, its weapons array, and the lives of everyone aboard.
He didn't trust her with whatever was behind that door.
I pull up the quarantine order. Standard formatting, medical language, contamination protocols.
All of it sterile and procedural and utterly devoid of specifics.
The hazard classification reads "Anomalous Environmental Condition, Class Undefined.
" Which means nothing. Which means whoever wrote it either didn't know what they were containing or didn't want anyone else to know.
"Get Dexter," I say. "And get me Ethan Eames."
Ethan arrives before my brother does, which is either a testament to his proximity or his surveillance.
He walks into the intelligence hub like he's entering a party he's already bored by, all loose-limbed grace in that rumpled coat, and he settles into the chair across from me without waiting for invitation.
His eyes, though. His eyes are doing something different from the rest of him.
They're cataloguing. The screens I have open. The schematic. The quarantine file.
"Sealed Section 7-Alpha," he says, before I ask. "You found something."
"I found a name. Corso Vell."
A flicker behind his expression, there and gone like a glitch in a display. "Vell. Yes. Cargo logistics. Quiet man, religious about his routines. Your father liked him because he never asked questions."
"He's listed as residing in the sealed section. Which you told me was quarantined."
"It is quarantined." Ethan crosses one leg over the other and folds his hands in his lap, the picture of a man with nothing to hide, which is how I know he's hiding something. "It was locked down six months ago. Before your father disappeared."
"Before."
"Several weeks before, in fact." He pauses, and the pause has architecture to it, a calculated beat that's meant to feel reluctant. "Your father never told me why. Though I suspect it's related to his personal research."
"Personal research."
Ethan's mouth curves, not quite a smile.
"Malachar had interests beyond station governance, Zane.
You know this. The man spent half his evenings in labs that weren't on any official manifest. He told me once that Duskfall Station was built in this particular location for a reason, and that the reason was older than the station itself.
" He lifts one shoulder. "I assumed it was eccentricity. Now I'm less certain."
I hold his gaze and count the things he's not saying. The information he's doling out in careful portions, enough to seem helpful, not enough to actually illuminate. This is what Ethan does. He stands in the gap between what you know and what you need, and he charges rent.
"You suggested I look in the sealed section," I say.
"I suggested there were places on this station you hadn't explored.
You drew your own conclusions." His smile reaches his eyes this time, and it's the warmest, emptiest thing I've ever seen.
"Shall I pull the access logs? I can tell you who's been requesting entry besides Astra's teams. Might paint an interesting picture. "
"Do it. Send everything to this terminal."
He stands, inclines his head with that practiced courtesy that makes my teeth ache, and leaves.
The door seals behind him and I sit in the silence of the hub, staring at the chair where he sat, thinking about angles.
Ethan Eames deals in information the way other men deal in weapons.
Every piece of intelligence has a trajectory, and you don't always see the target until it's already bleeding.
Dexter arrives with the subtlety of a decompression alarm, shouldering through the door already mid-sentence.
"Astra briefed me. Sealed section, quarantine, former cargo handler, what are we waiting for?
" He plants both hands on the console and leans forward, all coiled energy and impatience.
My brother runs hot the way reactors run hot. Useful, until containment fails.
"We're waiting for information."
"We've got information. We've got a name and a door. I say we open the door and ask the name some pointed questions."
"And if the quarantine is real? If there's an actual biological or environmental hazard behind that seal?"
"Then we go in with gear."
"And if we don't know what gear we need because we don't know what we're walking into?"
Dexter's jaw works. He looks so much like our father in these moments that it's like arguing with a ghost. The same broad shoulders, the same restless intelligence that mistakes speed for strategy. "You're stalling."
"I'm thinking. You should try it."
His eyes narrow, and for a second the room holds something sharp between us, the old friction that's never quite settled into either rivalry or respect.
Then he exhales through his nose and straightens.
"Fine. We go in smart. But we go in today, Zane.
Not tomorrow. Not when it's convenient. That section has been sealed for six months with our father missing or dead.
Whatever's in there isn't getting less dangerous with time. "
He's right. I hate that, but he's right.
"Suit up," I say. "Full environmental. We go in two hours."
The air that escapes the sealed section isn't stale. It should be, after six months of quarantine with no apparent ventilation schedule logged, but it moves against my face with a warmth that has no business being here. A current, faint and steady, as if something deeper in the section is exhaling.
Dexter notices too. I see it in the way his hand moves to the sidearm on his hip, instinctive, the weapon already drawn before his conscious mind has decided to be afraid. "You feel that?"
"Yes."
We move in. The corridor beyond the seal is standard station architecture, durasteel walls and grated flooring, but the lighting has been modified.
The overhead strips are off. In their place, someone has installed low-output lamps at floor level, casting everything in an amber wash that turns our shadows into tall, wavering things that follow us like attendants.
The air smells like soil after rain, except I haven't smelled actual rain since I was seven years old on a planet I barely remember.
"Someone's been living here," Dexter says, low.
He's right again, and I'm going to stop keeping count.
The first room we enter is part lab, part living quarters.
A cot, neatly made, its blanket military-tight.
A hydration station with protein supplements arranged by date.
A pair of boots by the door, worn at the heels, sized for a man of average build.
Corso Vell's boots, presumably. Except Corso Vell isn't here.
What is here: research equipment. A portable spectrometer, analysis screens, data cores stacked in careful towers. And notes. Handwritten notes, actual pen on actual paper, which is an extravagance on a station where every gram of non-essential material is a luxury.
I know the handwriting before I read a single word. The sharp, angular script that leaned hard to the right, as if the hand that made it was always in a hurry to get to the next thought. Malachar Torrence wrote like a man being chased by his own ideas.
I pick up the first page. Dexter comes to stand beside me, close enough that I can hear his breathing change as he sees it too.
Readings consistent for the fourteenth consecutive day.
The tear is stable. Oscillation within predicted parameters.
Corso continues his monitoring rotation without complaint, though I've noted his sleep patterns deteriorating.
Exposure effects remain within acceptable thresholds.
Must determine if proximity duration correlates with cognitive impact before proceeding.
The tear.
I set the page down and pick up another.
The other side is not empty. Spectral analysis confirms structures.
Whether organic or constructed, I cannot determine from this distance.
The tear permits observation but resists physical interaction.
Tools inserted beyond the threshold return altered at the molecular level.
Living tissue has not been tested. I will not test it on Corso.
I will not test it on Corso. Which begs the question my father's careful handwriting doesn't answer: who was he willing to test it on?
Dexter has moved deeper into the lab, pulling open cabinets, scanning data cores with the portable reader he brought. His silence tells me more than his usual noise would. We're both reading the shape of something we didn't expect, and neither of us knows what to do with the geometry of it.