Chapter 15 #2
He looks at my hand on the weapon. Looks at my face.
Something moves behind his eyes, a calculation so fast I can almost hear it, the quiet click of options being weighed and discarded.
Then he exhales, and his shoulders drop by a degree, and for the first time in ten years, I think I'm seeing Ethan Eames without the performance.
He looks tired.
"I was placed here by a faction within the Empri Collective," he says.
"A branch that operates outside the main hierarchy.
They knew about the anomaly before your family did, before anyone on this station had any idea what was sitting in your backyard.
My mission was simple. Watch. Report. Wait for the right moment.
" He pauses. Swallows. The sound is audible in the sealed room. "That was ten years ago."
"And the right moment?"
"Never came. Or it came and I didn't act on it. Depending on who you ask."
I pull the sidearm. Don't aim it. Let it hang at my side, the weight of it a punctuation mark in the conversation, a reminder that this room has no cameras and the soundproofing works both ways. "Keep talking."
"When Malachar found out about the anomaly, he ran.
" Ethan's voice is steady, but there's a grain in it now, a texture that wasn't there before.
Like someone scraping the smooth paint off a wall to show what's underneath.
"Went through it. I still don't know exactly what he found on the other side, but whatever it was scared him badly enough that he chose the anomaly over facing the people he'd been working with.
He thought the other side was safer than staying. "
"You didn't report his disappearance."
"No."
"Why?"
His jaw tightens. The muscle jumps once, twice, and settles.
"Because something had changed. I don't have a clean answer for you, Zane.
I don't have a strategic justification or a calculated betrayal narrative that makes this make sense.
Something had changed, and I didn't report it, and I couldn't explain to myself why.
" He looks at me, and his eyes are grey again, steady and human and lined with something that could be exhaustion or grief.
"I've been here ten years. I've eaten at your table.
I've watched Dexter build weapons systems that shouldn't work and then make them work through sheer stubbornness.
I've taught Elissa how to read star charts.
I've watched your father hold this station together with his bare hands and then watched you take over and do the same thing. "
The name hits me in the chest. Elissa. He says it with a softness that makes my trigger finger itch.
"This is my home now," he says. "The people I was supposed to spy on, the family I was supposed to help destroy." He stops. Breathes. "I don't want to destroy them anymore."
The room is so quiet I can hear the blood moving through my own ears.
The recycled air tastes flat and metallic on my tongue, the way it always does in the sealed rooms where the filtration runs on backup systems. Gun oil from the sidearm mixes with it, sharp and familiar, grounding me in the physical reality of what I'm holding and what it can do.
I want to believe him.
That's the problem. That's always the problem with Ethan, with the warmth that might be real, with the decade of shared history that might be genuine, with the tired eyes of a man who might actually mean what he's saying.
I want to believe him because the alternative is that he's the best liar I've ever encountered, and I've met liars who could sell a corpse its own funeral.
But wanting to believe and being able to verify are two very different currencies, and in my world, the first one is worthless without the second.
"How do I know any of this is true?" I say.
"Your control is too good. You shifted your eyes back in under a second.
You sat in this chair and lied to my face about a tracker malfunction without a single physiological tell until I cornered you.
Give me one reason to believe that the truth isn't just another layer of the act. "
"You can't know." He says it simply. No defensiveness, no plea.
"My training makes that impossible, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie.
But I can give you information. Names, dead drops, communication protocols, the structure of the faction that placed me here. Everything I have. Everything I know."
"That could be curated. Fed to me to direct my attention where they want it."
"It could be. But it's all I've got." His hands are still open on his thighs.
I notice, distantly, that his fingertips are trembling.
Micro-tremors, barely visible. "Kill me if that's what you've decided.
I won't fight you. But understand what you'll lose.
I know their methods. I know their personnel.
I know what they want from the anomaly and how far they're willing to go to get it.
You kill me, and you're fighting blind."
He's right. The calculation is ugly and it's cold and it sits in my gut like swallowed glass, but he's right. He knows too much about the station, the anomaly, the faction, everything.
Removing him doesn't just eliminate a threat.
It eliminates a resource I can't replace, in a war I didn't know I was fighting until three days ago. I can't afford to throw away the only intelligence asset I have, even if that asset has been lying to me since the day we met.
I raise the sidearm. Level it at his chest. His breathing doesn't change.
His eyes don't close. He watches the barrel with the calm attention of a man who has considered this outcome and made peace with it, and I hate him for that composure because it makes it harder to pull the trigger and easier to respect him, and I don't want to do either.
The door opens.
The sound cuts through the room like a blade, the pneumatic hiss of the seal breaking, and I know who it is before I see her because only three people have the override code for this room, and Elissa sounds nothing like Dexter.
Elissa stops in the doorway.
She's still wearing yesterday's clothes, wrinkled from sleeping in them if she slept at all. Her hair is pulled back in a knot that's coming loose, dark strands framing a face that looks younger than twenty-five, but older than it did a month ago.
She takes in the scene the way a person takes in a car wreck. Her eyes go to me first. Then to the gun. Then to Ethan, sitting in the chair with his hands open and my weapon aimed at his heart.
"What's happening?" Her voice cracks on the second word. She steps inside, and the door seals behind her, and the room that was already too small shrinks to the size of a coffin. "Zane, what are you doing?"
I can't answer her.
The truth is a bomb with too many blast radiuses.
To explain what Ethan is, I have to explain what he might have been doing with her.
Every conversation, every lesson in star charts, every casual touch that might not have been casual at all.
Touch-based manipulation is what the Empri are known for, the ability to read and influence through physical contact, and Elissa has been closer to this man than anyone on the station.
If I tell her that, if I crack open that particular box, I don't just reveal Ethan's betrayal. I reveal that her own feelings might not be her own. That the infatuation she thinks is hers might have been planted, cultivated, grown in soil he prepared.
I can't do that to her. Not here. Not like this. Not with a gun in my hand and her looking at me like I've become someone she doesn't recognize.
"Routine debrief," I say. The lie tastes like ash. "Post-siege protocol."
"With a gun pointed at him?" She's not stupid. She's never been stupid, and the hurt in her voice is already crystallizing into something sharper, something that looks like the beginning of choosing a side. "Zane."
"Elissa." Ethan's voice, warm again, and I want to shoot him for that warmth, for the way she turns toward it like a plant toward light. "It's fine. Your brother has questions. He's entitled to them."
"He has a weapon aimed at you."
"He has good reasons." Ethan looks at me over her head, and there is something in his grey eyes that might be gratitude or might be the most sophisticated manipulation I've ever witnessed.
He's giving me an out. He knows I can't explain, and he's making it easy for me to step back from the edge, and I can't tell if that's mercy or another play.
I holster the sidearm. The click of the retention strap is loud in the silence.
"We're done here," I say to Ethan. My voice sounds like someone else's, flat and controlled in a way that costs me more than anyone in this room will ever know. "For now."
He stands. Smooth, unhurried, every movement telegraphed and nonthreatening in a way that only someone trained to be dangerous would bother performing.
He passes Elissa on his way to the door, and I watch his hand, watch it like a hawk on a thermal, and he doesn't touch her.
Not even a brush of the shoulder. He leaves the narrowest possible margin of space between them, and whether that's restraint or strategy, it's the only reason he walks out of this room alive.
The door seals behind him.
Elissa stares at me. "What was that?"
"Leave it, Elissa."
"Don't do that. Don't give me that command-voice like I'm one of your officers. I walked in and you had a gun on him. On Ethan. You owe me an explanation."
"I owe you nothing that compromises station security.
" The words come out harder than I intend, and I watch them land on her face like a slap.
Her chin comes up. Her eyes go bright, and not with tears.
With the particular fury that runs in our family like a genetic defect, the kind that makes us hold on tighter when anyone tries to pry our fingers loose.