Chapter 10
Dexter
I noticed it the second we cleared the docking clamps, the way the station's spine caught light from the local star and threw it back in familiar patterns that should have felt like relief.
Should have felt like coming home. Instead, the corridors were too narrow, the ceilings too low, and every bulkhead I passed reminded me that this place was held together by engineering and optimism in roughly equal measure.
I'd spent my whole life on this station.
I'd never once thought about how easy it would be to crack it open.
Haven's End had done that. Peeled back something I couldn't put back.
Astra was already three steps ahead of me on the gangway, her kit bag slung over one shoulder, her stride the measured clip of someone who'd decided the mission was over before the ship had even docked.
She hadn't spoken to me since we'd entered Torrence space.
Not hostile, not cold, just finished. Like she'd filed everything that happened on Haven's End into a drawer and locked it.
I watched the back of her neck as she walked. The place where her hair met skin, where I'd pressed my mouth in the dark while she came apart against me.
She turned left at the junction without looking back.
I turned right.
The intelligence briefing room sat three levels below the command deck, shielded and swept for surveillance on a rotating schedule.
Zane was already there when I arrived, standing at the head of the table with his hands clasped behind his back, studying the wall display like it owed him something.
Talia occupied the chair to his right, legs crossed, fingers steepled, watching the door as I came through it.
Ethan Eames stood along the far wall, arms folded, his posture relaxed in a way that read as careful to anyone who knew how to look.
I knew how to look.
"You're late," Zane said without turning.
"Docking took longer than it should have. Port authority wanted a full cargo manifest." I dropped the data core on the table. It skidded across the polished surface and stopped against Zane's knuckles. "They can wait. This can't."
Zane picked up the core, turned it over once, and slotted it into the briefing console.
The wall display shifted, populated with the data we'd pulled from the laboratory on Haven's End.
Schematics, frequency maps, location coordinates, decades of research condensed into files that the Obsidian Protocol had never intended anyone outside their circle to see.
"Talk me through it," Zane said.
So I did. The laboratory buried in Haven's End.
The equipment designed to measure spatial anomalies.
The records going back thirty years, forty, longer.
Multiple tears in the fabric of space, not random, not isolated, but forming a network.
Connected. Deliberate, or at least patterned in ways that suggested something beyond coincidence.
I pulled up the frequency map and let it speak for itself. Dots of light scattered across the display, each one marking a confirmed anomaly. There were more than we'd known. More than anyone outside the Protocol had known.
"The nearest one." I touched the display, expanded the sector. "Here. Close enough to Veridian-7 that you could reach it in a single jump."
Silence settled over the room like pressure.
Zane stared at the coordinate marker. His face did what it always did when something landed hard: nothing.
Absolute nothing. That perfect mask of cold efficiency that I'd watched him build since we were boys, since the day he decided that feeling things where people could see was a luxury the heir to the Torrence syndicate couldn't afford.
But I was his brother. I could read the tension in his jaw, the stillness in his hands that meant he was holding something down with both fists.
"Father knew about the network." His voice was level. Controlled. Dead. "The nearest anomaly. That's where he went."
Not a question. A confirmation of something he'd already suspected, maybe already known, fitted now into a larger picture that made it worse instead of better.
I nodded. There was nothing to say to that.
Our father had walked into one of these tears and hadn't come back, and now we knew he'd done it with full knowledge of what he was stepping into.
That changed things. The grief, the mystery, the thin hope that it had been an accident.
All of it rewritten in a single coordinate.
Zane's hand closed over the edge of the console. His knuckles went white for half a second before he let go.
"What else?"
I gave him the rest. The Obsidian Protocol's research into stabilization.
Their attempts to control the tears, predict them, use them.
Their failures. The data suggested they'd been working toward something specific, a way to open anomalies on demand, and that they'd gotten close enough to be dangerous without ever getting close enough to be safe.
Talia asked the right questions. Strategic ones, resource ones, the kind that mapped threat to response with clean precision. I answered them while watching Ethan.
His control was excellent. I'd give him that.
He stood against the wall with the same easy posture he'd held since I walked in, his expression attentive and measured, the perfect picture of a trusted advisor absorbing complex intelligence.
But I'd spent the last two weeks in the field with my abilities dialed to their sharpest edge, reading hostiles in real time, feeling for deception through walls, and Ethan Eames was not as smooth as he thought he was.
When I mentioned the network, something flickered across his emotional register. Recognition. Not surprise, not the sharp intake of new information, but the duller resonance of hearing something confirmed that you already knew.
When I brought up the Obsidian Protocol by name, his shoulders tightened by a fraction. His breathing stayed steady, but the emotional frequency underneath shifted into something guarded. Walled off. The way someone feels when they're actively suppressing a reaction they can't afford to show.
He knew. He already knew about the network. He already knew about the Protocol.
The question was how. And the question after that was what he'd done with the knowledge.
I finished the briefing without letting any of what I'd noticed reach my face.
Talia asked two more questions about the anomaly's proximity to shipping lanes.
Zane gave orders for increased sensor sweeps of the sector.
Ethan said nothing, offered nothing, and when the briefing ended, he straightened off the wall and left with a nod that was perfectly calibrated to convey respect and nothing else.
I waited until Talia followed him out, then closed the door.
Zane was still studying the display. The network map glowed against the dark wall, all those points of light connected by lines that the Protocol's researchers had drawn between them. It looked like a constellation. It looked like a web.
"Your advisor is compromised."
Zane didn't move. Didn't turn. "I know."
"You know." I let that sit for a beat. "And you're handling it."
"I am."
"Are you? Because I just watched him react to information he shouldn't have. The network, Zane. He recognized it. He knew about the Protocol before I put it on that screen."
Now Zane turned. His eyes were flat, the way they got when he was calculating rather than feeling, running scenarios and outcomes behind that mask. "His reactions were subtle."
"To anyone who wasn't reading him, sure. To me?" I shook my head. "He lit up like a target."
Zane's jaw tightened. A muscle jumped beneath the skin, visible for a second before he locked it down. "It's complicated. Elissa..."
"Is our adopted sister the reason you're letting a potential traitor walk free?"
The silence that followed was its own answer.
It filled the room the way vacuum fills a hull breach, absolute and suffocating, and I watched my brother stand in it without flinching because that was what Zane did.
He stood in impossible situations and refused to buckle, even when buckling would have been the honest thing.
"She cares about him," Zane said finally. The words cost him something. I could feel it, the bitter edge of a man forced to weigh family against security and finding that the scales wouldn't balance.
"She cares about someone who may be feeding intelligence to people who want us dead. That doesn't earn him clemency. It earns her a conversation she's not going to like."
"And you're going to be the one to have it?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Because the truth was I didn't know how to have that conversation any more than he did, and we both knew it.
"Watch him," I said instead. "Closer than you have been. I don't care what it costs you with Elissa. If he moves wrong, I need to know."
Zane held my gaze. Whatever he was feeling, he'd buried it so deep that even I couldn't reach it without pushing harder than I was willing to push. "You'll know."
I left it there. Not because I was satisfied, but because pressing harder would fracture something between us that we couldn't afford to break. Not now. Not with everything else bearing down.
Talia caught me in the corridor outside my quarters. She had a way of appearing that suggested she'd been waiting rather than passing by, a studied casualness that fooled precisely no one.
"Astra," she said. No preamble, no warmth-up. Just the name, dropped between us like a blade on a table.
I kept walking. She fell into step beside me.
"What happened out there?"
My hand found the door panel. I pressed my thumb to the scanner and waited for the lock to cycle, using the three seconds it took as an excuse not to answer.
Talia waited too. She was good at that.