Chapter 13 #3
I close the feed. I don't go to her.
There will be time for that later, or there won't, and either way the Vex are coming, and Ethan's wall is still standing, and my sister is sleeping in a room three corridors from a man who might be sharpening her into a key to our destruction.
I cycle back to Ethan's feed. Watch the heat signature breathe.
The alarms don't start slowly. There's no buildup, no gradual escalation from yellow to red, no courtesy warning that the world is about to crack open.
One moment the hub is quiet, just the soft click of Pell's keystrokes and the subsonic hum of the station's bones.
The next, every screen goes white, then red, then splits into a grid of emergency feeds that tile themselves across the wall like a mosaic of oncoming ruin.
Astra's voice comes through the comms, stripped of every ounce of calm I've ever heard her maintain. "We've got a breach. Multiple entry points. The Vex Collective." A burst of static eats three seconds. Her voice comes back harder. "They're not testing anymore. This is an invasion."
The floor shudders beneath my feet. Not a vibration, not the gentle reminder that we live inside a metal shell hanging in the void.
A shudder. The station groaning in its joints, the sound of something massive making contact with the outer hull, the kind of impact that travels through the superstructure and arrives in your skeleton before your ears register the noise.
My coffee cup slides off the console and shatters on the floor.
Pell is already on her feet, pulling up defense grids, routing emergency protocols, her hands moving with the mechanical precision of someone who trained for exactly this moment and is now living inside it.
I'm standing too, though I don't remember the decision to stand, my hands flat on the console, my eyes scanning the cascade of red across every feed.
Multiple entry points. Not one breach, not a focused assault on a single weakness. Multiple. They mapped us. Dexter was right, and the timeline wasn't days, it was hours, and we spent those hours watching a man sleep while the enemy positioned themselves to cut us open from every direction at once.
I pull up Dexter's comm. "Dexter."
"Already moving." His voice is flat, clipped, the voice of a man who has been waiting for a war and is almost relieved it's finally here.
"I've got defensive teams deploying to sections seven, twelve, and fifteen.
The outer ring is compromised at three points.
I need you to authorize the emergency seal on the civilian levels. "
"Authorized. Lock it down."
The station shudders again. Closer this time, the impact translating through the walls as a deep percussive thud that I feel in my back teeth. Somewhere below us, something metallic screams, the sound of a bulkhead giving way or a hull plate buckling under force it was never meant to absorb.
I'm already pulling up feeds, cycling through cameras, looking for Elissa, looking for Talia, looking for the locations of every person whose survival is non-negotiable.
Talia is still in the briefing room on level five, on her feet now, her hand on the data terminal like she's trying to decide whether to run or keep reading.
Elissa's quarters show a thermal signature sitting up in bed. Awake. Scared. Alone.
And then I find Ethan.
Screen seven. The same feed I've been watching for three days, the same corridor on level three, the same angle that's shown me nothing but a man going about his unremarkable life.
He's standing in the junction where the corridor splits toward the eastern docking ring, the section that Astra just flagged as one of the breach points.
He's alone. He's not running. He's not moving toward a defensive position or a weapon locker or any of the emergency stations that every officer on this station knows by heart.
He's standing still.
And he's smiling.
Not the polite, controlled expression I've watched him wear for three days.
Not the patient warmth he shows Elissa or the professional neutrality he deploys in meetings.
This is something else. Something I've never seen on his face, because he's never let me see it.
It lives behind the wall, behind the smooth painted surface I've been knocking on, and now, in the chaos, in the moment where every eye on this station is looking at the incoming fire instead of looking at him, he's let it through.
It's a small smile. Satisfied. The expression of a man watching a plan unfold exactly the way it was designed to.
The station screams around me. The alarms climb in pitch. Pell is shouting coordinates into a comm channel I'm no longer listening to.
I stare at Ethan Eames smiling on screen seven, and the wall I've been trying to see through becomes a mirror.
It shows me what I should have seen weeks ago, what I would have seen if I'd been less patient, less careful, less committed to being smarter than my father.
The enemy isn't at the gates. The enemy has been eating at my table, training my sister, walking my corridors with a smile I was never meant to catch.
And the siege has begun.