Chapter 3
Aura
I almost miss it. I'm reviewing the dossier Ky compiled on the Torrence family's financial holdings, cross-referencing shell corporations with known Dominion trade routes, when the motion sensor on camera six trips and the secondary monitor flickers to life.
I glance over, expecting a patrol guard or maybe a cleaning drone on its scheduled sweep.
Instead, there's a girl.
Young. Mid-twenties at most, though humans age in ways I still find difficult to read.
Pale skin, almost translucent under the corridor's cold lighting.
Pale eyes, red-rimmed and swollen in a way that speaks to hours of crying before this moment, not minutes.
Hair pulled back in a knot that's coming loose, like she started the evening put-together and has been unraveling ever since.
No bioluminescence. Not a trace. No faint glow along the cheekbones, no shimmer at the temples, no telltale luminous threading in the veins of her wrists. Entirely, unmistakably human.
She stands outside Ethan Torrence's door, and her hand hovers over the chime panel without pressing it. Hovers there, fingers trembling, for eleven seconds. I count.
I set down the dossier.
The girl presses the chime. Then she wraps her arms around herself like she's trying to hold her ribs together, and she waits.
I lean forward in my chair and pull the feed to the primary monitor, enlarging it until her face fills the screen.
The resolution on these cameras is exquisite.
Torrence Station security thinks they're the only ones with eyes in these corridors, but I had my own installed within four hours of our arrival.
Redundancy isn't paranoia. It's professionalism.
Her lips move. I can see them shaping words, but the cameras are visual only.
I hadn't prioritized audio on this particular corridor, a miscalculation I'm already correcting in my head.
She's rehearsing, I realize. Practicing whatever she plans to say, her mouth forming and reforming the same phrases, trying different versions.
The body language is all wrong for a political operative or an intelligence asset.
Too raw. Too uncontrolled. Her shoulders curve inward.
Her weight shifts from foot to foot. She keeps touching her own throat, a self-soothing gesture that reads as deeply habitual.
This is a woman who has been wounded, and who has come back to the blade that cut her.
The door opens.
Ethan stands in the frame, and I watch his face cycle through three expressions in less than a second.
Surprise, which reads as genuine. Then something softer that I can't quite categorize from this angle, something that lives in the space around his eyes and the way his lips part.
Then the mask. Smooth, composed, the diplomatic face I've been studying in briefings for weeks.
He rebuilds himself so quickly that if I'd blinked, I would have missed everything that came before.
But I don't blink. Not when I'm watching.
The girl says something. Her hands come up, palms open, the universal gesture of supplication.
Ethan's jaw tightens. He responds, and whatever he says makes her flinch like he's struck her, though he hasn't moved.
Hasn't shifted his weight, hasn't leaned toward her, hasn't so much as uncrossed his arms from where they've folded over his chest.
Words can be violence. I know that better than most.
She steps closer. He doesn't step back, but something in his posture changes, a stiffening along the spine that I recognize because I've felt it in my own body.
The effort of not reaching for something you want.
Or the effort of holding yourself still when someone else's pain is a gravity you're trying not to fall into.
She's crying now. I can see it in the way the light catches the wetness on her face, in the small convulsive movements of her shoulders.
Her mouth is working around words that are clearly costing her something enormous, and Ethan is standing there receiving them with an expression that has gone perfectly, terribly still.
He says something. Short. Three words, maybe four. His mouth barely moves.
Whatever it is, it breaks her.
She takes a step back. Then another. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth, a gesture so raw it makes my chest tighten in a way I don't appreciate.
She turns and walks away, and her gait is wrong, unsteady, like the gravity has shifted under her and she hasn't recalibrated.
She makes it around the corner before she falls apart completely.
I can see it in the way her pace changes on the secondary corridor camera, the way her walk becomes a stumble becomes a near-run, one hand braced against the wall like the station itself is the only thing keeping her upright.
I switch back to Ethan's door.
He's still standing there. The corridor is empty now, and he's standing in the doorframe staring at the space where she was. His mask is gone. It's the first time I've seen him without it, and the face underneath is something I wasn't prepared for.
Pain. Actual pain, not performed, not calculated.
The kind that lives in the bones. His eyes are closed, and his hand is gripping the doorframe hard enough that I can see the tendons standing out along his wrist. His mouth is a line so tight it's bloodless.
He stands like that for six seconds, and in those six seconds I see something I can work with.
Then he opens his eyes. Exhales once. Steps back into his quarters.
The door closes.
I sit back in my chair and press two fingers against my sternum where that unwelcome tightness still lingers. The monitor glows with the empty corridor, and I stare at it for a long time.
"You should be sleeping."
Ky's voice comes from the doorway of the adjoining room, quiet and carefully neutral in the way that means he's already seen too much.
My brother moves through spaces like he's apologizing for occupying them, all that height folded inward, those broad shoulders curved down.
He'd learned young that being Half-Empri and large was a combination that made people nervous, so he'd spent his whole life trying to take up less room.
It works on most people. It doesn't work on me.
"I don't sleep during active operations," I say without turning. "You know that."
"This isn't an active operation. It's a diplomatic assignment." He comes closer, and I can feel him reading the monitors over my shoulder. The empty corridor. The frozen frame I haven't dismissed, the last clear capture of the girl's face before she turned away. "Aura."
"I'm reviewing security footage."
"You're surveilling your fiancé."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
He's quiet for a moment. I hear him breathe, and I hear the small sound he makes when he's deciding how honest to be with me, a faint click of his tongue against his teeth.
Then the light in my peripheral vision shifts, and I know without looking that his eyes have flashed.
That brief, involuntary pulse of bioluminescence in his irises, hazel bleeding to blue for just a fraction of a second before he catches it and forces it down.
The Half-Empri tell he's spent twenty-eight years learning to suppress.
It always surfaces when he's worried about me.
"Don't," he says.
I pull up the secondary display and start a search query. "Don't what?"
"Whatever you're planning. I know that look." He moves around to the side of my desk, positioning himself where I'd have to actively avoid his gaze to not see him. Tactically sound. Emotionally manipulative. He learned from the best. "That's Elissa Torrence."
The name clicks into place with a satisfaction that feels almost physical. I let it settle, let the implications arrange themselves. "The youngest."
"The youngest. And if you use her, if you turn whatever's happening there into leverage..."
"Why would I use her?"
The question hangs between us, and we both know it for what it is.
Reflex, not denial. The kind of thing I say to buy three seconds of processing time while the calculation runs underneath.
Ky knows this. He's watched me do it since we were children, since I was twelve and already learning to parse conversations for exploitable information the way other girls learned to braid hair.
He doesn't answer. He just watches me with those careful hazel eyes, the bioluminescence tamped down now, nothing showing but his concern and the particular exhaustion of being the person who loves me and can't stop me.
I'm already filing the information away.
Elissa Torrence. Twenty-five. Born in the outer systems, adopted into the Torrence family at age three.
Human. Entirely, completely human, no genetic modification, no psychic capability, no bioluminescent markers.
The only member of the family with no biological connection to the bloodline and no enhanced abilities to compensate.
Protected, then. Sheltered. The kind of sheltered that comes from a powerful family recognizing that one of their own is fundamentally vulnerable in ways the others aren't, and building walls around her so high she might not even know they're there.
I pull her file from three separate databases, cross-referencing Ky's intelligence briefings with publicly available records and the less public information my family's network has been compiling on the Torrences for years.
The picture assembles itself with the satisfying precision of a puzzle I didn't know I was solving.