Chapter 10 #2
"The colonies, then. What was it like? Growing up on ships, on stations that aren't this one?
" She pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, and the gesture makes her look younger than she probably is.
Old enough to be forming her own mind, young enough that the shape of it is still soft.
"What's it like to be somewhere where you're not the only one? "
"The only human?"
"The only one who doesn't belong." She says it quietly, without self-pity, the way you state a fact you've long since stopped fighting.
"I love my family. Malachar chose me, and Zane and Dex are my brothers in every way that counts.
But I can't do what they do. I can't feel what they feel.
I pick up emotions the way anyone does, by watching faces and guessing.
They pick them up the way you'd pick up a scent on the wind. I'm always a beat behind."
I think about telling her that a beat behind is still close. That human empathy has its own power, its own frequency. But she's not asking to be comforted. She's asking to understand, and those are different needs.
So I tell her about the transport ships.
About growing up in corridors that doubled as playgrounds, about learning to read artificial gravity by the vibration in the floor plates, about the colony stations where humans lived in clusters and fought over water rights and told their children stories about a planet they'd never see.
I tell her about the noise of it, the constant human noise, voices and arguments and laughter echoing off metal walls.
And I watch her drink it in like water, this girl raised in luxury and power who is thirsty for something her family cannot give her.
"Ethan's been teaching me things," she says, after a while.
The shift is abrupt, the way conversation turns when someone has been holding something back and finally lets it slip.
"About the station. About politics, about how the families really work.
He's the only one who doesn't treat me like I'll break. "
There it is. The crush in her voice, tender and transparent, the way a bruise shows through pale skin. She says his name the way you say the name of someone who has made you feel seen for the first time, and the sound of it puts ice in my stomach.
I think of Ethan Eames. His careful smiles.
His hands, always finding reasons to touch.
The way Zane watches him with the flat suspicion of a predator recognizing a different species of hunter.
I think about what it means to be half-Empri, to have whatever diluted version of their touch sensitivity lives in Ethan's fingertips, and I think about Elissa, who is fully human, who would feel that touch as warmth and attention and special without understanding the mechanism beneath it.
I should say something.
I should tell her to be careful, that Ethan is not what he seems, that the attention of men who make you feel special is often the most dangerous attention of all. But what do I say, exactly?
That I have a feeling?
That her brother's business partner gives me the creeps in ways I can't articulate?
That the man teaching her politics might be reading her emotions through his skin and feeding her back exactly what she wants to feel?
I have no proof. Just the hum of wrongness in my gut and the memory of Zane's voice saying watch him.
"He sounds like a good teacher," I say.
It costs me something, that sentence. A small betrayal of the instinct screaming in my chest that Elissa Torrence is being cultivated, carefully and deliberately, by a man who understands exactly how to make a lonely girl feel chosen.
I can taste the cowardice of it, metallic and sour on the back of my tongue.
Should I have said something? I'll ask myself this later, in the dark, when the consequences have bloomed into something I can't unfeel. I'll replay this moment and wonder if silence was strategy or selfishness, and I won't be able to tell the difference.
Elissa smiles at me. Warm, trusting, lit up from inside with the uncomplicated happiness of someone who still believes attention is the same as love.
I smile back. And the ice in my stomach doesn't thaw.
The debtor common area has its own ecosystem, its own hierarchies and alliances and unspoken rules, and I can feel the shift in them the moment I walk through the door.
Conversations don't stop. That would be too obvious, and the people who survive long enough to still be here have learned subtlety the hard way. But they thin. Voices lower. Eyes find me and then find each other, and in the quick language of glances, I am discussed, assessed, and categorized.
I am no longer one of them.
Kira is sitting at the far table with two women I recognize from the work rotations, their heads close together over cups of the bitter station coffee that tastes like engine coolant and despair.
She sees me coming and doesn't look away, which is worse than if she had.
Looking away would mean she's avoiding me.
Looking right at me means she's decided.
"Kira." I pull a chair from the next table and sit without waiting for an invitation, because waiting would be admitting I need one.
"Talia." My name in her mouth sounds different than it used to. Colder. Stripped of the warmth that comes from shared circumstance, from the bond of two women treading water in the same drowning pool.
The other two women don't greet me. One of them stands, takes her coffee, and leaves. The other stays but angles her body away, a physical declaration of sides.
"Renna's better," I say. Because that's the truth, and because I want to remind her what I traded for.
"Renna's better," Kira agrees. "And everyone wants to know why.
Who called in a favor. Who has access to the kind of medical care debtors don't get.
" She turns her cup in her hands, the ceramic scraping against the table surface with a sound like a tooth being pulled.
"Funny thing about favors on this station.
They always come from somewhere. And the people who get them always owe something in return. "
"I owe for Renna's treatment."
"You owe him. There's a difference." She leans back. Studies me with an expression I've seen before, on dock workers who've watched a colleague cross a picket line, the look of someone who understands the choice even as they condemn it. "You're not one of us anymore, Talia. You're one of them."
The words land with the clean precision of a knife between ribs.
Not because they're cruel but because they're accurate.
I think of Astra's training room, of Elissa's garden, of my quarters where the door locks from the inside and the water runs hot.
I think of Zane's hands on me and the way I stopped flinching and the way I stopped wanting to stop flinching.
"I'm trying to survive."
"We're all trying to survive. Some of us are doing it without crawling into a Torrence's bed."
The words hit the table between us like something dropped from height. The woman beside Kira shifts, uncomfortable, and won't meet my eyes.
"You don't know what you're talking about.
" My voice comes out flat. Not defensive.
I'm past the point where Kira's opinion can wound me in the way she intends, but it can cut in other ways, in the practical ways of a woman without allies, a woman who has traded the solidarity of the desperate for the patronage of the powerful and now sits in the gap between both.
"Maybe not." Kira stands. Picks up her cup. Looks down at me with something that might be pity and might be disgust and is probably both. "But I know what it looks like from out here. And so does everyone else."
She leaves. The other woman follows. I sit at the table alone, in a room full of people who used to be my peers, and I feel the space around me like a quarantine zone.
This is the first cost of my bargain, and I know it won't be the last.
Over the next two days, I watch Ethan Eames.
Not obviously. I've learned enough from Astra about controlling what I project, and from Zane about the value of observation, that I know how to track someone without turning my attention into a searchlight.
I watch the way you watch a weather pattern that might become a storm, from the periphery, noting the shapes it makes.
He moves through the station like someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere.
Command meetings with Zane, where he sits at the table and speaks in measured sentences and his suggestions are always reasonable, always sensible, always aligned with the Torrence interests in ways that are almost too clean.
Social gatherings in the officers' lounge, where he touches shoulders and clasps hands and laughs at the right moments, and every point of physical contact lasts a beat longer than it needs to.
He touches people constantly. Always making contact.
A hand on an arm during conversation. Fingers brushing a colleague's wrist when passing data pads.
The casual grip of a handshake that lingers.
If you're not looking for it, it reads as warmth, as the easy physicality of someone comfortable in his own skin.
If you are looking for it, it reads as data collection.
I think about what Astra said. You get used to being read. You learn to control what you project.
Ethan isn't projecting. He's receiving. Every touch is an antenna, pulling in the emotional frequencies of the people around him, and he's doing it so naturally, so smoothly, that no one notices the intake.
They just notice that Ethan understands them.
That Ethan listens. That Ethan pays attention in ways that make them feel important.