Chapter 10 #2
The door slid open. I stepped inside. She leaned against the frame, not entering, not leaving. Her dark eyes tracked my face with that particular Talia sharpness, the one that cut through deflection like it was tissue paper.
"Nothing that needs a debrief," I said.
"I didn't ask for a debrief. I asked what happened."
I dropped my kit on the bunk and stood with my back to her, staring at the viewport. Stars. The same ones I'd been looking at my entire life. They hadn't changed. Everything else had.
"She's fine."
"I didn't ask if she's fine." Talia's voice softened by a degree. Just one. "I asked what happened. There's a difference, and you know it."
I turned around. Talia's face held no judgment, no amusement, nothing I could use as an excuse to shut the conversation down. Just steady attention and something underneath it that looked dangerously like concern.
"Something," I said. The word felt inadequate. Enormous and useless at the same time. "Something happened."
"I know." She pushed off the doorframe. "Be careful with her. She's harder than she looks, but she's not unbreakable."
The laugh that came out of me was short. Not bitter, exactly, but honest in a way that surprised me. "Neither am I."
Talia's smile was sharp. The kind of smile that held a warning inside it like a pin inside a grenade. "I know. That's what worries me."
She left. The door closed behind her, and I stood in my quarters listening to the hum of the station's environmental systems and wondering when the people around me had started seeing things I thought I'd hidden.
I found Elissa in the common area on deck seven.
Found is generous. I went looking for her because the conversation with Zane had left something jagged in my chest, and I needed to see her with my own eyes.
Needed to assess. That was the word I used inside my own head.
Assess. As if I could reduce my sister to a tactical consideration and make the whole thing cleaner.
She was sitting at one of the long tables near the viewport wall, a data tablet propped against a coffee cup, laughing at something Ethan was saying.
Her pale skin caught the overhead lights and threw back a warmth that didn't belong to this station, that had always seemed borrowed from somewhere softer.
Her grey-blue eyes crinkled at the corners when she laughed, and the sound of it carried across the space with an ease that made something in my chest tighten.
She looked happy.
Ethan sat across from her with his body angled in, attentive without crowding.
He was telling a story, his hands moving in small, precise gestures, and every few seconds his fingers would brush the table near hers.
Not touching. Almost touching. The kind of proximity that reads as coincidence if you're not watching for it, and reads as strategy if you are.
I stood at the entrance to the common area and watched.
Empri touch manipulation is subtle. It works through skin contact, through the bioelectric interface that full-blooded Empri use for emotional bonding and communication.
Ethan was only half, which should have limited his capacity, but half was still enough.
Half was enough to nudge. To influence. To create a sense of warmth, trust, connection that felt organic even when it wasn't.
And Elissa was human. Fully human. Adopted into an Empri family, raised among us, loved fiercely and completely, but her neural architecture had no defenses against the kind of influence Ethan could exert.
She'd feel it as chemistry. As attraction.
As the dizzy certainty that this person understood her, saw her, wanted her in ways that felt too perfect to question.
She wouldn't know. That was the part that made my hands curl into fists at my sides. She wouldn't know that what she felt might not be entirely hers.
I should have walked over. Should have sat down beside her and said something. Should have pulled her aside and told her what I'd felt in that briefing room, what I suspected, what I feared. I should have warned her.
I thought about what I'd say. The words assembled themselves in my mind with clinical precision. I think your crush is a traitor and I can't prove it. I think he's using his half-Empri abilities on you and you don't even know it's happening. I think you're in danger from someone you trust.
And then I thought about her face. The way the laughter would drain out of it.
The way she'd look at me, her brother, standing there dismantling the one thing in her life that was making her smile.
She'd argue. She'd defend him. She'd say I was paranoid, overprotective, that I didn't understand, and maybe she'd be right about all of it.
Or she'd believe me, and the light in her eyes would go out, and I'd be the one who killed it.
I stood there for a long time. Long enough to watch Ethan make her laugh twice more, long enough to see his hand finally make contact with hers in a gesture that looked accidental, long enough to see the slight flush that climbed her throat at the touch.
Then I turned and walked away.
Another failure. Filed alongside all the others, in a drawer that was getting full.
Three days passed.
Astra was already back at work. Head of Security, moving through the station with the kind of focused efficiency that left no room for anything personal.
I watched her in briefings, in corridor crossings, in the mess hall where she ate alone at the corner table with her back to the wall and her eyes on every entrance.
Professional. Contained. The walls rebuilt so thoroughly that you'd never know they'd come down.
We passed each other in the main concourse on the second day. Her eyes met mine for approximately one second. Something moved behind them, a heat, a recognition, something alive that she buried before it could reach her expression. She nodded. I nodded. We kept walking.
On the third day, I saw her in the training bay, running hand-to-hand drills with two of her security team.
She moved like water, like violence with a rhythm, and I stood in the observation gallery above and watched until she pinned the larger of the two against the mat for the third time and I had to leave because my body was remembering things my discipline couldn't override.
I respected the distance. I understood it. She needed to be who she was on this station, needed her authority intact, needed the space to process what had happened between us without me crowding the edges of her life.
Understanding it didn't stop it from gutting me.
Late on the third night, I lay in my bunk with the lights off and the viewport showing nothing but stars and the station's slow rotation. Sleep wouldn't come. It hadn't come properly since Haven's End, since I'd learned what she sounded like when she stopped fighting what she wanted.
I reached out with my abilities.
Not far. Not invasive. Just enough to extend my awareness beyond my quarters, through the corridors and bulkheads and the hum of environmental systems, past sleeping crew and night-watch guards, until I found her.
Her emotional frequency was distinctive.
I'd learned it on Haven's End, in moments of fear and desire and the complicated space between.
Now I could locate it in my range the way you'd find a familiar voice in a crowd.
Not by searching for it, but by knowing its shape so well that it surfaced on its own.
She was in her quarters. Awake. I could feel the texture of her awareness, alert but not anxious, the low steady burn of someone lying in the dark with their thoughts for company.
Underneath the composure, something ached.
Something that reached in my direction without reaching, like a hand held out in a room where she thought she was alone.
I didn't push. Didn't probe. Didn't try to read the specifics of what she was feeling.
I just held the thread of her presence in my awareness and let it anchor me.
She was okay. She was here. She was alive and whole and on the other side of walls she'd chosen to build, and I would stand on my side of them for as long as she needed me to.
She probably knew I was there. An Empri of her training would sense the faint resonance of another's abilities at the edge of her awareness, the psychic equivalent of hearing someone breathe in the next room. She'd know it was me. She'd know what it meant.
She hadn't told me to stop.
I held the thread until my breathing slowed and the tension in my body released by degrees. Not sleep, not quite, but something close to it. Something that let me close my eyes and feel, for a few minutes, like the universe wasn't about to come apart.
The alert woke me at 0347.
My console was screaming. Priority level maximum, the kind of alert that bypassed standard notification protocols and hit every command-level officer on the station simultaneously.
I was on my feet before I was fully conscious, hand on the console, eyes processing the data before my brain caught up.
Sensor array data from the perimeter buoys at the edge of Torrence space. Fleet signatures. Dozens of them. Warships in attack formation, troop carriers holding position behind the line, support vessels arrayed in a pattern that any tactician would recognize as staging for a full-scale invasion.
The Vex Collective.
I scrolled through the ship classifications with cold spreading through my chest. Destroyers. Cruisers. Assault carriers with launch bays already pressurized. This wasn't a raid. This wasn't a probing action or a show of force designed to test response times. This was an army.
And buried in the fleet's communication signatures, flagged by our intelligence algorithms, a transponder code I recognized.
Webb.
He'd joined them. Taken everything he knew about our defenses, our patrol routes, our station vulnerabilities, our family's operations, and handed it to the people most willing to use it against us.
Every access code he'd memorized, every security protocol he'd helped design, every weakness he'd catalogued during his years inside our organization, all of it gift-wrapped for the Collective's war planners.
I stared at the display until the numbers stopped blurring and resolved into the shape of what was coming. The fleet was holding position, not advancing yet, but the staging pattern suggested they were waiting for something. A signal. A final piece of intelligence. An opportunity.
My hand found the comm panel.
"Zane. Wake up. We have a problem."
A pause. Then my brother's voice, sharp and clear, no trace of sleep. He'd been awake already. "I see it."
"Webb's with them."
Another pause. Longer. When Zane spoke again, the coldness in his voice had crystallized into something that could cut through hull plating. "I see that too."
The display updated. The fleet hadn't moved, but new signatures were appearing at the edges of the formation. More ships. Still assembling.
Still growing.
I stood in my quarters in the dark, the alert's red light washing everything in the color of emergency, and thought about Astra three corridors away.
About Elissa on deck seven with a traitor's hand on hers.
About Zane carrying the weight of a syndicate that might not survive the month.
About my father, who'd walked into an anomaly knowing what it was, and left us to face whatever came after.
The siege was coming. And the station that had felt too small when I'd docked three days ago now felt like exactly what it was.
A target.