Chapter 16
Dexter
The Vex are broken. Scattered into the dark between stations with their leadership gutted and their supply lines severed.
My people are already running salvage on their abandoned ships, stripping them for parts and intel, and by tomorrow there won't be enough of their fleet left to threaten a cargo shuttle.
We won.
The word sits wrong in my mouth. Tastes flat. I keep looking at the damage reports as if one of them will tell me something I don't already know, something that makes the number seventeen feel like a cost and not a failure. Seventeen people who trusted the Torrence name to keep them breathing.
I close the display.
Astra is in the corridor outside, leaning against the bulkhead with her arms crossed and her face carrying the particular stillness she wears when she's holding something sharp. I know that look. I've been on the other end of it enough times to recognize the blade before it falls.
"Webb talked," she says. No preamble. No softening.
"I know."
"He talked about Sigma-9."
My feet stop moving. The corridor hums around us, that low-frequency vibration of a station holding itself together through sheer engineering stubbornness, and for a moment it's the only sound.
Sigma-9. The ambush that almost killed my brother.
The one that took his unit, his people, and left him with scars the Empri marks couldn't cover.
"Tell me."
She does. All of it. Webb's confession, recorded and verified, laying out in meticulous detail how Malachar Torrence arranged for the ambush.
How he fed coordinates to a third party.
How the attack was designed to push Zane toward a specific psychological break, one that would make him more controllable, more dependent on the family structure Malachar had built.
And the woman. A civilian, taken during the chaos, held as leverage for a deal that Malachar never intended to honor.
Astra's voice doesn't waver as she delivers it. Clinical. Precise. The way she used to brief mission parameters back when she was still pretending she was just an asset.
"Zane needs to hear this from us," I say.
"From you." She uncrosses her arms. "He needs to hear it from his brother."
She's right. I hate that she's right.
Zane is in the private meeting room off the secondary command hub, the one our father used for conversations he didn't want recorded.
The irony of the location isn't lost on me.
Talia is with him, sitting close but not touching, her presence the kind of quiet anchor that Zane gravitates toward even when he won't admit he needs it.
He looks up when I enter. His marks are steady, a slow pulse of deep blue that means he's calm, centered, present. I'm about to ruin that.
Astra comes in behind me and closes the door. The lock engages with a soft click that sounds, in the silence of this room, like a round being chambered.
"What is it?" Zane reads me the way he always has. Faster than anyone, more accurately than I'd like. His gaze moves from my face to Astra's and back, and I watch the blue in his marks shift half a shade darker. "Dex."
"Webb gave us a full confession." I pull the chair out across from him and sit because I want to be at his level when I say this. Not standing over him. Not delivering it like a briefing. "About Sigma-9."
The room changes temperature. I don't mean that metaphorically. Zane's marks flicker, and Talia's hand moves to his forearm, and the air between us takes on the quality of a held breath.
I tell him everything. The arranged ambush.
The coordinates fed to hostiles through a chain of intermediaries that all trace back to our father's private accounts.
The woman taken as collateral for a deal Malachar was running with a faction that doesn't exist anymore, a faction he burned after they served their purpose.
I tell him that his people, his unit, the soldiers whose names he still recites in the dark hours when he thinks no one's listening, died because Malachar Torrence needed his son broken in a specific way.
I tell him our father was the architect of the worst day of his life.
Zane's marks go dark.
Not dim. Not faded. Dark. Every bioluminescent line on his skin extinguishes like someone pulled a breaker, and in the artificial light of the meeting room his face looks wrong without them.
Exposed. The Empri marks are part of him the way my bones are part of me, and seeing them absent is like watching a man lose something fundamental. Something structural.
Talia's fingers tighten on his arm. She doesn't speak. She knows what this is. Emotional shutdown, the Empri body protecting itself from a grief so large that feeling it all at once would be destruction.
Zane sits perfectly still for eleven seconds. I count them.
"Leave me."
Two words. Flat as station hull plating. No anger in them, no grief, nothing at all, just a man closing a door from the inside and turning off the lights.
"Zane."
"Leave me." He doesn't look at me. Doesn't look at any of us. His eyes are fixed on a point somewhere past the far wall, past the station, past everything. "Please."
The "please" is what moves me. My brother doesn't say please. Not to me, not to anyone. That single word is the only crack in the shutdown, the only evidence that behind the dark marks and the dead voice, something is screaming.
I stand. Astra is already at the door. Talia hasn't moved.
"Tal," Zane says. Still flat. Still nothing.
She leans in and presses her lips to his temple, a gesture so tender it makes my chest ache, and then she rises and walks out with us. The door closes behind her, and through it I hear nothing. Absolute silence. Whatever Zane Torrence does with his grief, he does it alone and without sound.
Talia leans against the corridor wall and closes her eyes. "How bad?"
"Bad," Astra says.
"His marks have never gone fully dark before." Talia's voice is steady, but her hands are pressed flat against the wall behind her, fingers splayed, holding on. "Not even after Sigma-9 itself."
"He didn't know the truth after Sigma-9," I say. "He thought it was enemy action. Random. The kind of loss you can metabolize because it belongs to the war." I look at the sealed door. "This is different. This is his father."
"Your father too." Talia opens her eyes.
"I already knew what he was." The words come out harder than I intend. "I've had years to sit with it. Zane still had... pieces. Things he held onto. Memories of the man before the monster, or the version of the man he needed to believe existed."
"And now?" Astra, beside me.
"Now he knows there was no before. There was just the monster, all the way down."
We wait. The corridor hums. The station breathes its recycled breath around us, and we wait.
Two hours later, Zane emerges.
His marks are back, but they're wrong. Muted. Running at maybe half their usual luminance, like a system operating on backup power. His eyes, though, are clear. Too clear. The kind of clarity that comes from burning away everything soft and leaving only the framework.
He finds me in the secondary corridor near the med bay. I'm waiting because I knew he'd come here. Zane processes things in a specific order: alone first, then with me, then with the world.
"Our father was a monster." He says it like he's reading a status report. Factual. Settled. "We knew that."
"We did."
"This is just specificity." He stops in front of me, and up close I can see the evidence of those two hours in the room. Nothing visible. Nothing dramatic. Just a man who walked in carrying something and walked out having set it down. Or buried it. "Details on a picture we already had."
"Zane."
"It doesn't change anything." His voice stays level. Controlled. The voice of a man who has decided what he feels about this and will not be moved from that decision, regardless of what his body or his marks or his memories try to tell him. "He's gone. What he did is done. We move forward."
I want to reach for him. I want to grip his shoulder or pull him in or do something physical that says I know you're lying, I know this is killing you, I know the child inside you who loved him is choking on this.
But Zane has chosen his architecture for this grief, and it's made of control and forward motion, and if I crack it now, here, in a corridor where anyone could walk past, he'll never forgive me.
So I nod.
"Forward," I agree.
He nods back. Something moves behind his eyes, quick and raw, and then it's gone. Buried under the clarity. Under the decision.
He walks past me toward wherever Talia is waiting, and I stand in the corridor and feel my brother's grief like a phantom limb.
The child who loved a father despite everything, learning that "despite" was never going to be enough.
That the man he loved had done the math on his son's suffering and found it acceptable.
Useful. A variable in an equation that only Malachar could see.
I let him go. There's nothing I can say that would make this smaller. There's nothing anyone can say.
Some truths just have to be carried.
Elissa is in the holding suite on deck nine.
Not a cell. I was specific about that. A suite, with a bed and a functioning wash unit and food that isn't ration packs.
She's not being held as a traitor. She's being held because we don't yet understand the full scope of what Ethan did to her, what he offered, what he planted in her head during those weeks of careful manipulation, and until we do, she's safer here. We're safer with her here.
The guilt of that calculation sits in my sternum like a stone.
She's sitting on the edge of the bed when I enter, her feet bare against the cold floor, her hair down in a way she never wears it.
Elissa Torrence, adopted into our family at six years old, given our name and our protection and, apparently, our father's particular talent for being drawn to darkness.
She won't meet my eyes.