Chapter 4
Dexter
I shouldn't be here.
I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't.
I came anyway.
The light was visible from three sections over.
Thin line beneath her door, cutting through the blue-dark of night cycle like an accusation.
Most of the station sleeps during this shift.
She doesn't. I felt her before I saw that light.
The echo of her emotional state bleeding through the walls I put between my senses and the rest of the world.
Not fear. Not rage. Something underneath both. Something that tastes like grief.
I couldn't not come.
The door opens before I can announce myself. She's standing there in grey fatigues, barefoot, her red hair down for once. It catches the corridor light like copper wire. Her green eyes meet mine. No surprise in them.
"I knew you'd come." Her voice is flat. Military-report flat. The tone that means she's already made calculations I'm still catching up to.
"The light under your door—"
"Bullshit." She steps back. Not an invitation. Just making space for the inevitable. "You felt me. That's what you people do."
I step inside. The door closes behind me with the soft hiss of a seal engaging.
Her quarters are exactly what I expected.
Spartan. Military precise. Bunk made tight enough to bounce a credit chip.
Weapons locker, workout mat, a single shelf with gear maintenance supplies arranged by frequency of use.
Nothing soft.
Except the box.
It's open on her small table. The one personal item in the entire space. I see the photograph before she can move to hide it.
My feet carry me there without asking permission. My hand reaches for the frame. She doesn't stop me.
The photograph is old. Actual film, not digital.
Someone thought this moment mattered enough to make it permanent.
The unit stands in front of a transport, twenty faces that look impossibly young.
Holt's on the far left, his arm around Vasquez.
Webb is there too, fourth from the right, before anyone knew what he'd become.
I'm in the center. Younger. Cleaner. My bioluminescence caught mid-pulse, glowing soft against my temples. Smiling.
And beside me: Astra. Her shoulder under my hand. Her face turned slightly toward me, caught mid-laugh at something someone said. The green of her eyes bright even in the photograph's faded colors.
We were good.
"Before." The word comes out rough. I clear my throat. Try again. "We were good. Before."
"Before you left me to die." She's across the room now, arms crossed, body language screaming don't come closer.
"Before that. Yes."
The common room at Sigma-9 smelled like bad coffee and desperation. We'd been running joint operations for three months. Empri tactical assets paired with human combat specialists, the theory being we'd complement each other's strengths.
The theory was right. The execution was brutal.
I remember: late shift, both of us too wired to sleep. She was teaching me some human card game, the rules so convoluted I suspected she was making them up as she went. Her hands moving, shuffling the deck with practiced speed. My hands trying to keep up. Failing.
"You're cheating," I said.
"Prove it." Her grin was sharp. Challenging.
I could have. Could have read her emotions, sensed the spike of mischief, called her on it through psychic certainty instead of evidence. I didn't. That wasn't fun. What was fun: watching her try to keep a straight face while she dealt from the bottom of the deck.
Training together. Her human speed against my Empri senses. She was faster than she should be, adapting tactics mid-movement, turning my advantages against me. I'd pin her. She'd slip free. I'd sense her next move. She'd already be somewhere else.
"How?" I asked after the fifth time she got past my guard.
"You're reading my emotions. I'm reading your body." She tapped my shoulder, the exact point where I'd tensed before every strike. "You move before you feel. Just barely. Just enough."
She was teaching me something my Empri instructors never could. That bodies have their own language. That over-reliance on sensing makes you sloppy.
The night before Sigma-9. I went to her quarters. The mission brief was in six hours. Standard extraction, they said. Simple, they said.
I was going to tell her something. Something that had been building for three months, something I'd been feeling every time I was near her, something that made my marks pulse even when I tried to stay controlled.
The alert sounded before I could start.
"Did you feel it?"
Her voice cuts through the memory. I'm still holding the photograph. Still looking at people who believed they'd all come home.
"What?" I know what she's asking. I need her to ask it anyway.
"When they took me." Her green eyes are level. Steady. The steadiness costs her. I can feel the effort radiating off her like heat. "Could you sense what they were doing?"
The silence stretches between us like a wire pulled taut—fragile, dangerous, ready to snap.
My bioluminescence dims. It's the Empri tell for pain so profound I can't suppress it, can't hide it behind tactical assessment or professional distance.
The patterns along my temples and spine go dark, nearly black against my turquoise skin.
It's vulnerability made visible. A confession written in the language of light and shadow.
She knows what it means. Of course she knows. Astra has spent six years learning every tell, every flicker, every biological confession my Empri heritage makes without my permission. She's cataloged them with the same brutal precision she uses for everything else.
She's still waiting for the answer. Still holding herself rigid. Still giving me space to lie, to deflect, to offer some version of events that makes what I did less monstrous.
I don't take it.
"Yes."
The word drops between us like a blade falling. Clean. Final. Terrible in its simplicity.
She goes completely still. The kind of stillness that comes before violence or breaking. I can feel her emotions through the narrow gap in her walls—shock layering over rage layering over something that tastes like grief.
"And you still—"
She can't finish the sentence. Can't quite voice what she's asking: And you still left me there? And you still completed the mission? And you still chose the numbers over my life while feeling every second of what they were doing to me?
"Yes."
The second confirmation is somehow worse than the first. I felt it all.
The terror. The pain. The desperate, animal fear as they dragged her away.
I tasted copper and lightning and the specific flavor of hope dying.
I felt her calling for me—not out loud, she was too well-trained for that—but emotionally, every cell of her screaming my name.
And I finished the extraction. Secured the asset. Got everyone else out.
I left her in that fear while I completed the objective.
She crosses the space between us in three steps. Her fist catches my jaw before I can react. Before I want to react. The impact snaps my head to the side. Copper floods my mouth. My own blood, blue and bitter.
I let her.
She hits me again. Catches my cheekbone this time. The skin splits. I feel blood running down my face, warm and wrong. My marks flare bright with her rage, with her pain, with the satisfaction she's taking in hurting me.
I stand there. Take it. Don't raise my hands to defend. Don't step back. Don't use my abilities to dampen her fury or redirect it somewhere less destructive.
She's breathing hard now. Fists still clenched. Waiting for me to do something.
I don't.
"Fight back," she snarls. "Push me. Use your fucking alien magic. Make this easier."
She's bracing for it. I can feel her walls slamming up, her training kicking in, every defense she's built against Empri manipulation activating.
Nothing comes.
My marks are glowing with the effort of not doing something. Of feeling everything she's throwing at me and not reaching back. Not smoothing her out. Not making this simpler than it is.
"I could make this easier," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "I won't."
"Why?" The word breaks in the middle.
"Because you'd never forgive me if I did." I meet her eyes. Let her see what's in mine. "And because I need you to hate me honestly. If you're ever going to stop."
Her breathing changes. Shallower. Faster. The rage is still there, but something else is surfacing underneath. Something that tastes like want.
She hates that I can feel it.
She should throw me out.
I can feel her thinking it. The calculation running: order him to leave, seal the door, rebuild the walls. The sensible response. The safe one.
"The night before Sigma-9."
I go very still.
"You came to my quarters. You started to say something." Her voice is steady again. Controlled. The rage locked back down behind discipline. "Then the mission alert sounded."
I remember. The words I'd prepared. The confession I'd been building toward for three months. The moment stolen by tactical necessity.
"What were you going to say, Dexter?"
The answer is in my eyes before I can control it. In the flare of bioluminescence that lights the space between us, painting her face in shades of blue. My marks always betray me first.
"I was going to tell you I loved you." The words come out quiet. Final. "That I'd never loved anyone the way I loved you. That when the mission was over, I wanted—"
She kisses me.
Her mouth on mine, cutting off the words, silencing them both. Her hands fist in my jacket, yanking me down to her level. The kiss tastes like violence and desperation and six years of grief.
I shouldn't. She knows I shouldn't.
Neither of us cares.
My hands find her waist. Her body is exactly as I remember—smaller than mine, perfectly fitted to the spaces between my arms. She makes a sound against my mouth. Half-sob, half-something else. My marks blaze bright enough to light the room.
This is a wound reopening.
This is a cauterization.
This is the thing we've been moving toward since I saw her in that docking bay with my blood on her hands.
She breaks the kiss. Steps back. Breathing hard. Her green eyes are wet but nothing falls.
"Get out." Her voice shakes. "Get out before I do something we'll both regret."
I go.
The door seals behind me. I stand in the corridor, blue blood drying on my face, her taste still in my mouth.
My marks are still glowing.
I can still feel her on the other side of that wall. The echo of what she's feeling: rage and want and something that might be the beginning of forgiveness.
Or might be the beginning of something worse.