Chapter 10 #3
I can't prove any of it. I have instinct and pattern recognition and the cold feeling in my gut that grew roots when Elissa said his name with stars in her voice.
I have Zane's suspicion, which he hasn't explained and I haven't earned the right to ask about.
I have the fact that a half-Empri man with touch sensitivity and political ambition is spending his free time mentoring the youngest, most vulnerable member of the family who's reach extends from Earth to the outer galaxy.
I think about telling Zane. I compose the conversation in my head, play it forward, and every version ends the same way. With me offering suspicion without evidence to a man who operates on certainty. With me looking like a woman trying to prove her value by manufacturing threats.
Or worse: with Zane taking action based on my instinct and being wrong, and the consequences landing on someone who doesn't deserve them.
So I watch. I note. I build the picture one observation at a time, and I keep my mouth shut, and I add it to the growing list of things I carry alone on this station.
Night comes to the station the way it always does, with the gradual dimming of corridor lights and the shift in the air recyclers that mimics a planetary evening, a simulation of dusk for people who live inside a metal shell surrounded by nothing.
I sit on my bunk with my back against the wall and my knees drawn up and I take inventory.
The debtors are done with me. Kira's words will spread because they're true enough to stick, and by the end of the week I'll be a cautionary tale, the woman who sold herself up instead of standing with her own.
The practical support network I built in those first desperate weeks, the traded rations, the shared information, the small kindnesses that make captivity survivable, all of it is gone now, salted earth where community used to grow.
Astra trains me because she sees raw material, not because she likes me.
There's a difference, and I'm not naive enough to confuse the two.
But she shows up. She teaches with the brutal efficiency of someone who genuinely wants me to survive, even if her reasons are her own.
Tomorrow, same time. The closest thing to a standing appointment I have with anyone who isn't Zane.
Elissa trusts me, and that trust feels like holding a bird in hands that are learning to be fists.
She's soft in ways this station should have beaten out of her, and the softness makes her a target, and I can see the sniper's scope trained on her from across the room and I said nothing.
Good teacher. I called the man aiming at her a good teacher, and the cowardice of it sits in my stomach like a swallowed stone.
Ethan Eames continues to move through this station like water through cracks, finding every gap, every vulnerability, every place where pressure would be most effective. I'm watching. Watching isn't enough. But it's what I have.
And Zane.
I press my thumb into the bruise on my knee again and feel it pulse, a dull heartbeat of damage, familiar now.
I've stopped fighting what I am to him. Not because I've accepted it, but because fighting and accepting have started to feel like the same motion, a resistance that only pushes me closer, the way you struggle against a current and the struggling is what pulls you under.
I'm not a prisoner anymore. The door locks from inside. I train with his head of security. I tend gardens with his sister. I sit at tables where decisions are made, not as a participant but as a presence, and presence is its own kind of power on a station where most debtors are invisible.
But I'm not free, either. Free women don't catalog their position at the end of each day like soldiers counting ammunition.
Free women don't strategize their alliances or measure the distance between who they were and who they're becoming with the clinical detachment of someone monitoring their own infection.
I'm something else entirely. Something this station is making me, or something I'm making myself into, and the distinction matters less each day.
My personal terminal chimes.
I stare at it for a long moment. Messages come through the station's standard communication system, routed through Torrence servers, logged and monitored and stripped of anything the family doesn't want transmitted.
Personal terminals have their own encryption, limited, mostly ceremonial, but distinct from the station's official channels.
I haven't received an outside message since I arrived.
I cross the room and pull up the display.
No sender identification. No header, no metadata trail that I can see, which shouldn't be possible on a system the Torrences control. Just coordinates, a time stamp for thirty-six hours from now, and four words that reach into my chest and close around my heart with fingers made of glass.
Your father is alive.
I read it three times. Four. I read it until the words stop looking like language and become shapes, and then I read it again and they're words once more, and they still say the same impossible thing.
My father. Who I buried in my mind two years ago, when his ship went dark and the salvage crews found wreckage but no bodies and the insurance company ruled it a loss and the creditors came for everything he'd left behind, which was me.
My father, whose debts became my debts. Whose disappearance became my captivity. Whose ghost I carry in every self-defense reflex Astra sharpened today, because he's the one who put them there first.
Alive.
The coordinates are for a location in the station's lower levels, near the cargo bays.
Territory that sits at the boundary between Torrence control and the grey zones where enforcement gets thin and surveillance has gaps.
The kind of place where you meet someone you don't want anyone to know you're meeting, or the kind of place where someone takes you when they want you to disappear.
It's a trap. The logic of it is so clean it's almost elegant.
An anonymous message, untraceable, carrying the one piece of bait guaranteed to make me move without thinking.
Whoever sent this knows my name, knows my history, knows the exact wound that would make me bleed when pressed.
That level of knowledge doesn't come from kindness.
It comes from research, and research means purpose, and purpose aimed at a woman in my position means nothing good.
I know it's a trap. I know it the way I know artificial gravity from real, not in my mind but in my inner ear, in the part of me that orients to danger the way a compass orients to north.
I'm going anyway.