EPILOGUE
She breathes like the station forgot to hurt her.
That's what pulls me from the edge of sleep.
Not the ambient hum of the life support cycling through its night mode, not the slight gravitational fluctuation that makes the sheets feel heavier at this hour.
It's the sound of Talia breathing without fear.
Deep and slow and even, her ribcage expanding against my forearm where I've curled around her, her exhale warm against the pillow, and the mark at her throat pulsing in a rhythm I can feel behind my own sternum.
Slow. Steady. The bioluminescent thread of it casts the faintest blue glow against the sheets, barely visible in the dark. A heartbeat rendered in light.
I can feel her contentment. Not the sharp, electrical surge of her emotions during waking hours, not the complicated knot of want and wariness and intelligence that makes her so fucking difficult and so impossible to release.
This is something quieter. Something I don't have a word for in any language I speak, and I speak four.
It seeps through the bond like warmth through a bulkhead breach, slow and total, filling compartments I didn't know were sealed.
Peace. That's the closest word, and it's wrong. Peace implies an absence. This is a presence. Something alive and deliberate in the space between us, something the marks made possible but she made real.
I haven't felt anything like it since before my father disappeared.
The thought surfaces and I let it sit without pushing it down.
His absence has made me fluent in the language of things that don't come back.
Ships. People. The particular quality of safety that exists when you're a child and you believe, with your whole stupid animal brain, that someone bigger than you has the situation handled.
That vanished with him. The station became mine, and the station doesn't allow peace. It demands vigilance.
Which is why I'm sliding my arm from beneath Talia's body before I've made a conscious decision to move, settling her head onto the pillow with a care I'd deny under interrogation, and crossing the room to the console built into the far wall.
Old habit. Older than the mark on my throat, older than her, older than the man I've become since she arrived.
My father used to do this. I know because I watched him, once, when I was twelve and too curious to stay in my quarters during night cycle.
I'd crept through the residential corridors to the command suite and found him there in the dark, face lit by the pale wash of a dozen feeds, eyes moving from screen to screen with the patient attention of something that feeds by waiting.
A predator's meditation. He'd seen me in the doorway and hadn't sent me away.
Instead he'd pulled me onto his lap and pointed at each feed in turn, teaching me to read the station the way other fathers teach their sons to read star charts.
This corridor connects to the docking ring. Watch the foot traffic patterns. When they change, something's moving that shouldn't be.
This is the merchant quarter. See the vendor on the left? He's been routing inventory through an unlicensed bay for six months. I let him. He owes me the favor now, and I'll collect when I need it.
This is the medical wing. The night shift is when people come for the things they don't want recorded.
The god's-eye view. The station rendered into geometry and light, every corridor a vein, every junction a valve, and the blood flowing through it visible to anyone with the access codes and the patience to watch.
My father loved it. I understand why better now than I did at twelve, because I've spent years sitting where he sat and I've learned the same lesson he tried to teach me that night: power isn't a weapon you hold.
It's a position you occupy. High ground.
Clear sight lines. The ability to see everything and choose what to act on.
The feeds bloom to life under my fingertips.
Forty-seven active cameras across the primary sections, another thirty on the docking ring, a dozen in the corridors most people don't know exist. I cycle through them with the absent focus of a man checking locks before bed.
The merchant quarter is quiet, the shops sealed behind security grates, the walkways empty except for a cleaning drone making its slow circuit.
The docking ring shows three ships locked in, running lights blinking in sequence, no unauthorized movement on any approach vector.
The command deck is staffed by the night skeleton crew, two people I trust as much as I trust anyone who isn't blood, which is to say I trust their fear of me and the reliability of their self-interest.
Everything in order. Everything where it should be.
I almost close the feeds.
My hand is halfway to the console when one of the residential corridor cameras catches movement, and my fingers stop.
Corridor seven. The section between the family quarters and the lower observation deck, a stretch of hallway that serves no particular function at this hour and therefore should be empty.
The camera resolution is grainy at night, the station conserving power by dimming its internal sensors, but I can make out the figure well enough.
Elissa.
My sister is walking with the particular unhurried pace of someone who knows the corridors intimately, someone who grew up in them, someone who doesn't need to look at junction markers to know where she's going.
She's dressed for sleep, soft clothes and bare feet, her hair loose around her shoulders in a way that makes her look younger than twenty-one.
She rounds the corner toward the observation alcove, the one with the view port that faces the nebula, and she doesn't slow down.
She's expected.
Ethan Eames steps out of the alcove like he's been waiting.
Like he's been waiting for a while and doesn't mind, because what he's waiting for is worth the time.
He's leaning against the view port frame when Elissa rounds the corner, and even through the security feed I can see the way his posture shifts when he registers her.
Straightens, but not like a soldier coming to attention.
Like a plant turning toward light. Involuntary. Whole-body.
Elissa's face does something I haven't seen on it since before our father vanished.
Her expression opens. Softens past the careful composure she wears in public, past the diplomatic mask she's perfected, past every layer of Torrence control our father hammered into her.
She smiles at him, and it transforms her whole face, and my hand grips the edge of the console hard enough that the metal bites into my palm.
They talk. I can't hear the audio at this distance without activating the directional mics, and I don't. Some part of me knows that hearing the words would make this something I have to act on, and I am not ready to act on this tonight.
So I watch without sound, reading their bodies instead, and their bodies tell me everything I need to know.
She leans toward him. Not the cautious lean of a first conversation, not the tentative inclination of new acquaintance. She leans like gravity redefined itself and he's the center. Her shoulder brushes his and stays there.
He touches her arm.
Casual. Comfortable. His fingers rest against her forearm in a gesture so practiced, so natural, that it's clearly been happening for weeks.
Sustained contact. Long enough for a man with half-Empri blood and touch-based abilities to do whatever he's doing beneath the surface of that easy, open smile.
His thumb traces a small circle against her skin and Elissa doesn't flinch.
Doesn't pull away. She turns into the touch like it's familiar, like his hand on her arm is a sentence she already knows the ending of.
His eyes catch the corridor's emergency lighting, and the flash is unmistakable.
That half-Empri blue. The telltale signature of abilities running hot beneath a human mask, the glow that my brothers and I learned to control before we could read, because letting it show means letting someone see what you are.
Ethan isn't controlling it. He either can't or doesn't care to.
Around my sister, with her face tipped up toward his and her defenses lowered to nothing, he lets the mask slip.
And Elissa, human Elissa, who has no marks and no Empri blood and no way to feel what he might be threading through that sustained, deliberate contact, doesn't see it.
I could stop this.
The thought arrives with the clarity of an execution order.
I could open comms to the corridor and my voice alone would scatter them.
I could summon Elissa to my quarters and explain what Ethan is, what half-Empri touch can do to a human psyche over time, how the subtle psychic resonance works like a drug, pleasant at first and then necessary and then inextricable from the victim's own emotional landscape until they can't distinguish between what they feel and what's been planted.
I could tell her that the happiness softening her face right now might not be entirely hers.
Or I could kill him. The truce is fresh, the terms barely set, and Ethan Eames made himself useful by offering information about the Protocol and the network he claims to have built.
But useful men can be replaced.
Information can be extracted by other means.
I could have Kael escort him to an airlock and solve this problem the way our father would have solved it, with vacuum and silence and a body that drifts until some patrol ship finds it decades from now.
I could do any of these things, and the man I was five weeks ago would have done one of them before the feed refreshed.