Chapter 17
Astra
Three days since the Vex breached the outer ring.
Three days since I killed more of them than I could count and nearly lost the man I loved in the process.
The station was healing, the way stations do, with work crews and welding torches and the relentless hum of repair drones patching hull breaches that still whistled thin streams of cold when you pressed your palm to the walls.
I could feel the temperature differential through my gloves as I walked the C-ring junction, cataloguing damage out of habit.
Structural reinforcement at junction seven.
Blown-out lighting panels replaced with temporary strips that cast everything in a bluish wash, making the faces of passing crew look like they'd been pulled from water.
I was resilient too. That's what I told myself, anyway, while the bruises on my ribs turned from purple to green and the stitched gash on my forearm itched under its biofilm seal with every movement.
"Venn." Corporal Hadley fell into step beside me, datapad in hand. "Dexter Torrence is requesting your presence in the security hub. He says, and I quote, 'at her earliest convenience, which I'd prefer to be now.'"
I bit the inside of my cheek to kill the smile before it reached my mouth. "Tell him I'm on my way."
Hadley glanced at me. Then at the direction I was already walking, which was toward the security hub, because I'd been heading there before he intercepted me. His expression said he was doing math he didn't want to show his work on.
"Copy that," he said, and peeled off.
The security hub was operational again, though "operational" was generous.
Half the displays were running on backup power, their interfaces stuttering every few seconds with a flicker that made my eyes ache.
The main tactical board had been replaced entirely, the old one having taken a direct hit from a Vex plasma charge during the breach.
The new one was military surplus, blocky and graceless, its display a flat green that belonged to a generation of tech most people had forgotten. It worked. That was enough.
Dexter stood at the center console, forearms braced against the edge, his sleeves pushed up past his elbows.
His syndicate marks traced the corded muscle of his forearms in patterns I could now read better than I wanted to admit.
Calm, at the moment. Focused. The faintest luminous thread pulsing at his wrist where his heartbeat lived.
He looked up when I entered, and the marks shifted. Just barely. A warming along the lines at his throat, where the patterns disappeared beneath his collar.
"Earliest convenience," I said. "Here I am."
"Twelve minutes." He straightened. "I expected eight."
"I stopped to inspect the C-ring junction. The hull patch at seven is holding but the sealant's already degrading. Whoever approved that grade of compound for a load-bearing section needs retraining."
"I'll flag it." He was watching me the way he always watched me now, with that precise attention that used to make me want to reach for a weapon and now made me want to reach for him instead. Both impulses still lived in my hands. I was learning to hold them at the same time. "Come look at this."
I crossed to the console. Our shoulders almost touched.
In the hub, with three other officers at their stations and a repair tech on her back under the comm array with her boots sticking out, we kept the distance professional.
Almost. His fingers brushed mine when he handed me the datapad, and the contact lasted one second longer than transfer required.
I felt the heat of his skin, the roughness of the callus on his index finger, and then it was gone and we were both looking at the screen like adults who hadn't spent last night destroying each other in his quarters.
"Reconstruction timeline," he said. "Zane wants a full security audit before we reopen the outer commercial ring. I need your assessment on personnel readiness."
"My team's at seventy percent. I've got four still in medical, two on light duty, and Reeves is going to need a psych eval before I'll clear her for armed patrol.
" I scrolled through the data. The numbers were ugly but workable.
"Give me forty-eight hours and I can staff the outer ring checkpoints.
But I want the sensor grid fully operational before we let civilians back in.
Not this patchwork coverage we're running now. "
"Agreed." He leaned closer, pointing at a section of the display, and his breath moved the hair at my temple.
I kept my eyes on the screen. At her station across the room, Lieutenant Marcos was very carefully not looking at us.
"The sensor array at this junction is the priority. I've already requisitioned the parts."
"From whose budget?"
"Mine."
"Dexter."
"It's done." His tone carried the particular flatness that meant the conversation was over before I'd been invited to have it. I recognized the maneuver because I'd used it myself a hundred times. Coming from him, it still made my teeth clench.
"Fine." I handed the datapad back. Fingers brushed again. This time neither of us pretended it was accidental. "I'll have the assessment on your desk by end of shift."
"I look forward to it."
I turned to leave and made it four steps before his voice caught me. Quiet enough that only I would hear it over the hub's ambient noise.
"Astra."
I stopped. Didn't turn.
"You missed a meal. I can tell because you get that line between your eyebrows when your blood sugar drops."
"I don't have a line between my eyebrows."
"You do. It's there right now."
I left the hub with the line between my eyebrows and the ghost of his attention on my skin like a handprint.
The corridors of Veridian-7 in reconstruction had a rhythm to them, a pulse of activity that ebbed and surged depending on the shift.
I walked through it and let the sounds settle into my body.
The percussion of riveting tools. The hiss of sealant guns.
A crew leader shouting instructions in a mix of Standard and dockside slang that I was starting to understand after months on this station.
The air tasted different in the reconstruction zones, metallic and sharp, new alloys and fresh polymers mixing with the ever-present undertone of recycled atmosphere.
I was cutting through the market level, taking the long route because I needed the walk and the time inside my own head, when I saw them.
Zane Torrence and Talia, crossing the mezzanine ahead of me.
His arm around her shoulders, her body tucked against his side with the easy fit of two people who'd stopped pretending they weren't a single unit.
He was talking to a crew foreman, his free hand gesturing at something structural.
She was listening, but her eyes were doing their own survey of the space, cataloguing details, reading the room.
I recognized the habit. It was one of mine.
She caught my eye over the distance.
I expected a smile, maybe. Or a greeting. What I got was simpler and heavier. A nod. Just that. Her chin dipping a fraction, her gaze holding mine for the span of two heartbeats.
I nodded back.
There was an entire conversation in those four seconds, and none of it needed words.
I knew the shape of her path because I was walking one like it.
The complicated geometry of loving a Torrence.
Of choosing a man whose world would eat you alive if you let it, and deciding to grow teeth instead.
She'd walked it first, or at least walked a version of it, and the nod said she knew.
Not approval, exactly. Recognition. The way soldiers acknowledge each other across a crowded room.
You survived it too. You're still standing.
Zane glanced over. Saw me. His expression gave away nothing, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.
Then they were past, and I was alone in the corridor with the taste of metal and the knowledge that I belonged here now, in this world, in this family's orbit.
Not because I'd been absorbed into it. Because I'd chosen it with my eyes open and my fists ready.
I found Elissa in Training Room Four.
Alone.
The room was one of the smaller ones, designed for individual work rather than group drills.
Mats on the floor, a mirror along one wall, a rack of practice weapons that nobody had restocked since the attack.
The lighting was set to full brightness, no mood, no atmosphere, just flat white illumination that left nowhere to hide.
She was moving through combat forms. Not the loose, exploratory movements I'd seen from her before, the tentative way she used to approach physical training, like she was apologizing for taking up space.
This was different. Her strikes were precise.
Repetitive. She was drilling the same combination over and over, a jab-cross-elbow sequence that would take a human opponent in the throat if she committed to it.
Her form was rough, her stance too narrow, and she was telegraphing the elbow by dropping her shoulder before she threw it.
But the intent behind every movement was new.
I stood in the doorway and watched her for a full two minutes before she noticed me. When she did, she didn't startle. She finished the combination, squared her stance, and turned.
"I want you to train me."
Her voice was different. I'd heard Elissa Torrence speak enough times to know the register of her, the lightness, the warmth, the way she softened her words at the edges like she was afraid of cutting someone.
That softness was gone. What was left wasn't hard, exactly.
It was stripped. Like a wire with the insulation burned away.
I stepped into the room. Let the door close behind me. "You've been training."