Chapter 13
Zane
Three days of watching a man breathe, and I've learned nothing except that Ethan Eames sleeps exactly six hours, takes his coffee without sugar, and has the emotional depth of a vacuum seal.
The security hub sits in the guts of Meridian Station, four levels below the command deck, a room that smells like cooling fans and stale protein bar wrappers.
Twelve screens tessellate the far wall, each one feeding a different angle on a different corridor, a different room, a different slice of my territory that might be rotting from the inside.
Astra Venn occupies the center console like she was born in it, her fingers moving across three separate data streams without looking at any of them.
She hasn't slept either. I can feel the brittle edge of her focus, a wire pulled taut enough to hum.
"Anything," I say. Not a question. I already know the answer from the flat line of frustration running beneath her professional calm.
"He had breakfast in the officers' mess.
Spoke with two of Dexter's supply chiefs about inventory rotations.
Spent forty minutes in the training bay running weapons drills with your sister.
" She pulls up the relevant feed without being asked.
"Then he went back to his quarters for an hour.
No communications in or out during that window. "
"That you can see."
"That I can see." She doesn't take the implication personally.
Astra deals in facts and the spaces between them, which is why I trust her more than almost anyone on this station.
She tips her chin toward the secondary monitor.
"I've flagged the communication gaps. He's using the station's relay system like everyone else, but there are dead zones.
Sixty to ninety seconds at irregular intervals where his node goes quiet.
Could be nothing. Could be burst transmissions compressed tight enough to hide in the system noise. "
I lean forward. The chair creaks beneath me. "Can you crack the bursts?"
"If they exist, and if they're using standard encryption, give me a week. If they're using something proprietary." She shrugs one shoulder without taking her eyes off the data. "Then I need hardware I don't have and time we probably don't."
I stare at the grid of feeds. Screen seven shows Ethan crossing a junction on level three, his stride unhurried, his posture relaxed.
He stops to let a maintenance crew pass, nods to the foreman, continues on his way.
A man with nothing to hide. A man so perfectly at ease in his skin that the ease itself becomes suspicious, because nobody who lives in this world is that comfortable. Not honestly.
I reach for him the way I've been reaching for him for three days.
Carefully, the barest extension of my awareness, a thread so thin he shouldn't feel it brush against whatever wall he keeps between himself and the rest of us.
I've read hundreds of people in my life.
Thousands. The guilty ones stink of it, their fear a sour chemical tang that no amount of bravado can mask.
The innocent ones radiate confusion, irritation, sometimes righteousness.
The dangerous ones feel cold, controlled, their emotions packed tight and pressurized like charges waiting for a detonator.
Ethan feels like none of those things.
Ethan feels like nothing.
Not emptiness. Not suppression. Not the void where emotions have been forcibly removed.
Something worse than all of that. Smoothness.
A surface so polished that my awareness slides off it like water off hull plating.
When I push harder, just slightly, I get the faintest impressions: mild contentment, steady focus, a low warmth that could be loyalty.
Textbook emotions for a trusted lieutenant going about his day.
Exactly the right feelings at exactly the right intensity.
And that terrifies me more than guilt would.
Because I know what controlled emotions feel like.
I control my own every waking hour. The difference is that mine have edges, seams, places where the control thins and the real thing bleeds through.
Rage when my mother was sold. Want when I look at Talia too long.
The chronic low-grade tension of running an empire my father left like a bomb with a missing timer.
My control is a hand gripping a live wire.
Ethan's is something else entirely. His is a painted wall.
Smooth and featureless and exactly the right color, and when I knock on it, the sound that comes back tells me nothing about the room behind it.
Half-Empri. That's the problem. My abilities work by reading emotional resonance, the bioelectric signatures that sentient nervous systems generate whether they want to or not.
Full humans can't hide them. Full Empri broadcast them like beacons.
But a half-breed who grew up knowing what he was, who spent years learning to modulate his own output the way a musician learns to tune an instrument.
.. that person could show me exactly what they wanted me to see.
Or show me nothing at all.
"He knows," I tell Astra.
Her fingers pause. "Knows what?"
"That we're looking. Maybe not the specifics. But he can feel the attention. He's compensating."
She absorbs this without visible reaction. "Does that confirm guilt?"
"It confirms he has something worth hiding.
Whether that's betrayal or just the standard self-preservation instincts of someone who grew up half-caste in a world that treats hybrids like defective merchandise.
" I push back from the console, the chair rolling on grav-dampened casters. "It doesn't confirm anything useful."
Screen four catches my attention. The training bay, the same one Astra mentioned.
The feed is time-delayed, pulled from the archive she flagged earlier.
Elissa is there, my adopted sister, all her human vulnerability wrapped in the borrowed confidence of a girl who thinks she belongs in a world that would eat her alive.
She's running a close-quarters sequence with training blades, and Ethan is correcting her grip, his hands adjusting hers with patient precision.
He says something I can't hear. She laughs.
Not her polite laugh, the one she deploys at family dinners.
Her real one, bright and unguarded, the laugh of a girl who has found someone who makes her feel seen.
My stomach turns.
I should pull her from his orbit. Reassign her training to Dexter's people, find some reason to put distance between them that doesn't tip Ethan off.
I should do it today. Right now. I should walk down to level three and interrupt whatever lesson is currently in progress and take my sister by the arm and explain to her, quietly and without room for argument, that Ethan Eames is not what he appears to be and that her human nervous system makes her uniquely susceptible to the kind of emotional manipulation a half-Empri can deploy through touch alone.
I should do all of that.
Instead, I watch the archived feed play out.
Ethan adjusts Elissa's stance, one hand on her shoulder, the other guiding her elbow.
The contact lasts three seconds, maybe four.
Normal for instruction. Meaningless, probably.
But the way she leans into it, just barely, the way her posture opens toward him like a flower toward whatever passes for sunlight in this metal coffin of a station, it tells me everything about what she's feeling and nothing about what he's doing.
If he's feeding her emotions through that contact, warmth, safety, the specific cocktail of neurochemical comfort that half-Empri can transmit through skin, she'd never know.
She'd just feel good around him. She'd seek him out.
She'd trust him. Her human brain would assign meaning to the chemistry and call it connection, call it friendship, call it the beginning of whatever impossible romance a young woman builds in her head about the handsome older man who sees her when nobody else does.
And I let the feed run because I have bigger concerns.
Because Ethan's potential betrayal threatens the station, and Elissa's crush threatens only Elissa, and the cold mathematics of triage mean I can't afford to tip the investigation for the sake of a girl's feelings.
I tell myself this. I build the rationalization with the same precision I use to build everything else, load-bearing walls and structural supports and a foundation of logic that holds up under scrutiny.
It holds up fine. It'll hold up right until the moment it doesn't, and then I'll remember this feed, this morning, this choice, and I'll understand that the foundation was rotten the whole time.
But that's later. Not now.
Dexter finds me in the corridor outside the hub, which means either Astra told him where I was or he's been tracking my movements the same way I've been tracking Ethan's. Both options are equally likely and equally annoying.
My brother looks like he hasn't slept in days, which is par for the course.
The military trained him to function on four hours, and the years since have trained him to function on less.
His uniform is creased in the wrong places, evidence that he slept in it, probably at his desk, probably with a tactical display still glowing behind his eyelids.
He falls into step beside me without greeting, which is how Dexter communicates affection.
"Astra briefed me," he says.
"When?"
"Twenty minutes ago. I've been running my own audit since." He pulls a data chip from his breast pocket and holds it between two fingers like a cigarette. "Ethan Eames. Personnel file, full background, every reference and recommendation that got him through our door ten years ago."
I take the chip. It's warm from his body heat. "And?"