Chapter 9 #2
"Zane." His voice is different now. Quiet, almost careful, which sounds so wrong coming from him that I cross the room before I've made the decision to move.
He's standing in front of a console built into the far wall, its screen dark, and his hand rests on a small device plugged into its base.
A holocaster. The kind used for personal recordings. "It's addressed to us."
The label on the device, in that same urgent handwriting: For Z. and D. Torrence. Play in my absence.
In his absence. Not "in case of emergency." Not "if something happens to me." In his absence, as if he knew, with the same precision he applied to everything else, that he was going to leave.
Dexter looks at me. I look at the device. The lab hums around us with its impossible warm air and its faint ozone smell and the silence of a room that's been keeping secrets for half a year.
I press play.
My father's face fills the air above the console, rendered in the blue-white grain of holoprojection, and for one vertiginous second I am twelve years old and he is explaining to me why mercy is a resource that must be spent wisely.
He looks tired in the recording. The lines around his eyes are deeper than I remember, and his hair, silver at the temples when I last saw him, has gone full white.
He's wearing a lab coat over his station clothes, and behind him I can see equipment I don't recognize, structures of light and metal that don't conform to any engineering I know.
"Zane. Dexter." His voice is the same. Precise, measured, the voice of a man who has weighed every word before releasing it. "If you're seeing this, I didn't come back."
Dexter makes a sound beside me. Small, involuntary, the kind of sound a man makes when something hits him in the chest.
"The anomaly is real. What I've been studying, what I've been documenting in these notes, it's not a malfunction.
It's not radiation. It's a tear in the structure of space itself, and it's been here longer than this station.
Perhaps longer than our species. There is something on the other side.
" He pauses, and in the pause I see him choose his next words the way he used to choose which son to discipline.
Carefully. With an understanding of consequences. "I'm going to find out what."
The hologram flickers, as if even the light carrying his image is uncertain.
"Don't follow me. Whatever you find in these notes, whatever Corso tells you if he's still here, do not attempt to cross the threshold. I don't know what's on the other side for certain, and I won't have my sons pay for my curiosity."
He leans forward slightly, and for a fraction of a second the composed mask drops and I see something I've never seen on my father's face. Not fear.
Something past fear, on the other side of it, where a man arrives after he's been afraid for so long that the emotion has burned itself out and left only the residue: resolve.
"Don't trust anyone who tells you to follow me. Not the council. Not your advisors. No one." His eyes, even in holographic rendering, find the exact place where I'm standing. "And sons. Whatever I was to you, don't let it determine what you become."
The recording ends. His face collapses into light and then into nothing, and the lab settles back into its amber-lit quiet, and my brother and I stand side by side in the space our father used to occupy, breathing air that smells like something that shouldn't exist.
Dexter's hands are fists at his sides. "He left. He just... left."
"He did what he always did." My voice comes out flat, controlled, and I don't trust it.
I don't trust the steadiness of it, because underneath that surface I can feel something structural threatening to give way.
"He made a decision. He executed it. He didn't consult anyone who might have talked him out of it. "
"He didn't say goodbye."
"He said don't follow. That's close enough."
Dexter turns to me, and the look on his face is one I haven't seen since we were children. Since the night our mother was traded and he climbed into my bed because the dark in his room was too large to hold alone.
Raw. Young. Furious in the way that only loss can make a person furious, when the thing you've lost didn't have the decency to be taken from you but chose to go.
"I need to hit something," he says.
"Later." I reach past him and eject the holocaster from the console, pocketing it. "Right now we secure these notes. Every page, every data core. Astra gets copies. No one else."
"Not Ethan?"
The question sits between us with more weight than it should.
"Not Ethan," I say. "Not yet."
Dexter searches my face, finds something there he doesn't like but understands, and nods once.
We work in silence after that, cataloguing and packing with the methodical efficiency of men who need their hands busy because if they stop, they'll have to think, and thinking right now is a door that opens onto a room neither of us wants to enter.
I go to Talia.
Not for strategy. Not for her intelligence on the debtors or her sharp mind or any of the things I should want from her, the useful things, the things that make sense within the framework of what she is to me.
I go because the corridors are too quiet after Dexter splits off to handle the evidence, and my quarters feel like a mausoleum, and somewhere between the sealed section and my own door I stopped walking toward solitude and started walking toward her.
Her quarters. I override the lock because I can, because the station responds to me the way it responded to him, and I am trying very hard not to think about what that means.
She's awake. Sitting cross-legged on her bed with a datapad balanced on her knee, wearing a thin shirt that doesn't belong to me and loose pants that ride low on her hips, and her hair is down around her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a different person.
Softer. Younger. Someone who might have existed before debts and missing fathers and me.
She looks up when I enter, and whatever she sees on my face makes her set the datapad aside without a word.
She doesn't ask what's wrong. She doesn't offer platitudes or comfort or any of the things that would make me turn around and leave.
She just watches me, those dark eyes reading me the way she reads everyone, except with me she doesn't bother hiding that she's doing it.
"You look like someone who just found out something they can't unfind," she says.
I close the door behind me. The lock engages.
The room is small, smaller than mine, and it smells like her.
Like the soap the station provides, generic and clean, but underneath that something warmer, something that lives in her skin and her hair and has started to live in my lungs when I'm not careful.
"My father left a message." The words come out before I choose to release them. "He's gone. He left. Voluntarily."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't do the thing people do when you tell them something terrible, the theatrical widening of the eyes, the performance of sympathy. She absorbs it. Her jaw tightens, just slightly, and she nods once.
"Are you here because you want to talk about it?"
"No."
"Are you here because you want to not talk about it?"
I cross the room in three strides. She's on her feet by the time I reach her, not retreating, not bracing, just rising to meet whatever I'm bringing through her door.
My hands find her waist and I pull her against me with a force that should frighten her, and maybe it does, maybe that slight catch in her breath is fear, but her hands come up to my chest and she doesn't push me away.
She grabs the front of my shirt and holds on.
"Then don't talk," she says.
I kiss her like I'm trying to leave a mark on the inside of her mouth.
She makes a sound against my lips, surprised, hungry, and her fingers tighten in my shirt and pull me closer.
The anger in my chest has nowhere to go except into her, and she takes it, opens for it, meets it with something of her own that tastes like defiance and need and the same caged fury I've been carrying since I heard my father's voice tell me to let him go.
Her back hits the wall. The sound her body makes against the metal is dull, solid, real in a way that cuts through the noise in my head.
She gasps, and I swallow it, pressing her harder into the surface until there's nowhere for her to go, nothing between her and the cold steel except the thin fabric of that shirt and the heat pouring off both of us.
"Tell me to stop." I don't know why I say it. I don't want to stop. I won't stop, not unless she makes me, and even then the stopping might break something in me that I can't afford to lose right now.
Her eyes find mine. Close, so close I can see the flecks of blue in the grey and the way her pupils have gone wide and dark. "No."
I pull her shirt over her head. She lets me, lifting her arms, and the wall is cold against her bare skin and she hisses at the contact but doesn't move away.
I press my mouth to her throat and bite down, not gently, and the sound she makes goes straight through me like voltage.
My hands are rough on her, rougher than they should be, fingers digging into the curve of her waist, her hip, pulling at the waistband of those loose pants until they're around her ankles and she kicks them away.
She reaches for my belt. I let her open it, let her shove my pants down far enough, because I need to be inside her more than I need to be in control and that terrifies me in a way my father's disappearance didn't. She wraps one leg around my hip and the angle is imperfect, desperate, both of us grabbing at each other like we're trying to get purchase on something that keeps sliding away.