Chapter 16 #2
I pull the single chair from the desk and position it across from her, close enough to talk, far enough that she doesn't feel cornered.
She's staring at her own hands, her fingers working against each other in a rhythm that might be anxiety or might be something she learned from Ethan.
I don't know. I should know. I should have been paying closer attention.
"He didn't hurt me." Her voice is small. Not broken, just small, pulled inward like the rest of her.
"I know."
"He said he wanted to show me something." Her fingers still, then start again. "The other side. What Father found."
My blood goes cold in a specific, targeted way, concentrated in my hands and the back of my neck.
What Father found. Malachar's obsession in his final years, the research that consumed him, the questions he kept asking about the dark between stations and what lived in it.
We destroyed those files. We thought we destroyed all of them.
"What did he tell you?"
"That Father was right. That there's something out there. Something that changes things." She looks up, finally, and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. She's been crying, but not now. Not for me. "He said I could understand it because of what I am. Because of where I came from."
The stone in my sternum grows heavier. Elissa's origins are sealed records.
We know she was found on a derelict ship, the only survivor, with no identification and no memory of anything before she was discovered.
Malachar adopted her within weeks. At the time, we thought it was uncharacteristic generosity.
Now I'm wondering what our father saw in a six-year-old girl from a dead ship that made him reach for her.
"Would you have gone?" I ask. "With Ethan. If he'd asked you to leave with him. Would you have gone?"
Silence. The kind that has texture and weight, that fills the room the way water fills a sinking compartment, one centimeter at a time.
"Yes." She says it quietly, but she says it looking at me. "I would have."
I sit with that. Let it land. Don't flinch from it, even though it cuts somewhere deep, somewhere that still believes family means something unbreakable.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?" A flicker of something in her expression. Surprise, maybe. Or disappointment that I'm not angry.
"You're telling me the truth. That matters more than the answer."
She looks at me for a long moment, searching for the lie, the anger underneath, the judgment I must be hiding.
She doesn't find it. Not because it isn't there, but because I've been hiding things from people who are better at reading me than Elissa, and right now my sister needs honesty more than she needs my rage.
"We'll figure this out," I tell her. "Whatever he did, whatever he showed you, we'll untangle it."
She nods. Goes back to looking at her hands.
I leave. The door seals behind me, and I stand in the corridor and let myself feel it for three seconds. The fear. The understanding that my father's legacy is a bomb with a timer we can't read, and Elissa might be holding a piece of the detonator.
Three seconds. Then I seal it away and move.
She's in my quarters when I get there.
Our quarters. We haven't named it that out loud, but the evidence is everywhere.
Her jacket over the back of the desk chair.
A second coffee mug, the ceramic one she took from the mess because she said the standard-issue cups tasted like recycled polymer.
Her boots by the door, placed neatly beside mine, and the sight of them together, her small worn ones next to my larger pair, does something to my ribs that I don't have a word for.
Astra is standing by the viewport, looking out at the scarred hull of the station and the stars beyond it.
She's stripped down to a tank top and the soft pants she sleeps in, and from behind she looks almost relaxed.
Almost peaceful. Until she turns, and I see her face, and I realize she's been standing here working herself up to something.
"Close the door," she says.
I do. The lock engages, and the room becomes a sealed space, just us and the recycled air and whatever she's about to give me.
She reaches for the hem of her tank top. Her fingers hesitate for half a heartbeat, a pause so brief I might have imagined it, but I know this woman's hands. I know what hesitation looks like on her. Then she pulls the fabric up and over her head and drops it on the floor.
I've seen her body before. I've touched it, tasted it, mapped its responses in the dark. But she's never stood in front of me like this, in full light, without the urgency of heat or the excuse of crisis to blur the details.
The scars.
They cover her like a language I should have learned years ago.
A long, raised line from her left hip to her ribs, white against her brown skin, the kind of scar that comes from a blade held by someone who knew anatomy.
A starburst of smaller marks across her right shoulder, shrapnel or fragmentation, healed rough because whoever treated it didn't have proper equipment.
A burn on her left forearm, circular and deliberate.
Not an accident. A message. There are more.
Crossing her stomach, her back when she turns slowly for me, her thighs when she pushes the soft pants down and stands in nothing but the station's cold air and six years of damage.
"Count them," she says. Her voice is steady. This is not a performance of vulnerability. This is an act of war. She is showing me exactly what my absence cost, and she wants me to see every line of the invoice.
I step closer. She holds her ground, chin up, jaw set, daring me to flinch.
I don't.
I raise my hand and touch the first scar, the long one on her hip. My fingertips trace its length, feeling the raised tissue, the way her skin changes texture where the blade went deep.
"Brekka Station," she says. "Eight months after you left. A debt collector named Hannis who thought I had something he wanted."
I lean down and press my lips to the scar's starting point. Her stomach contracts beneath my mouth, a tiny flinch she can't suppress.
I move to the starburst on her shoulder. Trace each point of it with my thumb.
"The Outer Ring job that went wrong." Her breath shifts. "Incendiary round detonated six feet from my position. The field medic was dead, so I pulled the fragments out myself with a multitool and a bottle of station whiskey."
My mouth follows my fingers. I kiss each mark, each raised point where metal entered her body and she survived it alone.
The burn on her forearm. Circular. Deliberate.
"Don't," she says, and her voice cracks for the first time.
"Tell me."
She exhales. "A man named Creel. Ran a crew in the Helion sector. I was trying to get information. He wanted to make sure I remembered who was asking the questions." She pauses. "I killed him three days later."
"Good." I press my lips to the center of the burn and hold them there, letting my breath warm the scarred skin.
My marks are doing something I can't control, pulsing with a light that feels warm against my own skin, guilt and want and something else, something larger, bleeding through the bioluminescence in a rhythm I can't steady.
She turns, showing me her back, and the scars there are worse. Longer. Deeper. The evidence of someone who spent six years surviving in the spaces between stations where no one cares if you live or die, and who did it without backup, without support, without the man who should have been there.
I trace every one. She names them. A litany of violence, delivered in that steady voice that only shakes twice more.
Once when she tells me about the knife wound on her lower back, the one that nicked her kidney and nearly killed her on a station with no medical facilities.
Once when she tells me about the marks on her inner thighs, and I sink to my knees on the cold floor and press my forehead against her hip because I need a moment before I can keep going.
She doesn't tell me it's okay. It isn't.
Her hand comes to rest on the back of my head. Not comforting. Just present.
I kiss the scars on her thighs. Each one, moving slowly, my lips and my breath the only apology she'll let me make with my body since she won't accept the words.
She won't hear "I'm sorry" because she doesn't want me sorry.
She wants me to know. To carry the knowledge of what I did when I left, to hold every scar in my memory the way she holds them in her skin.
She's shaking by the time I've reached the last one.
A fine tremor running through her legs that she can't stop.
I look up at her from my knees and her eyes are bright, not with tears, but with something hotter.
Something that's been building since she pulled her shirt off, since she stood in the light and dared me to see her.
I rise, pulling her against me, and her bare skin meets the fabric of my shirt and she makes a sound in her throat, low and involuntary. I strip the shirt off. Press skin to skin, my chest against hers, and let her feel my marks pulsing where they touch her. The warmth of them, the light.
"I see you," I tell her. The only words that matter. "All of it. I see you."
Her hands fist in my hair and she pulls my mouth down to hers.
The kiss is not gentle. It tastes like salt and anger and the particular desperation of two people who have been circling this moment for weeks, for years, for the entire duration of the damage mapped across her skin.
Her teeth catch my lower lip and the sting of it goes straight to the base of my spine, and I pull her tighter against me, one hand spread across the small of her back where the knife scar is, the other cradling the back of her skull.