Chapter 15
Aura
The holotable throws blue light across the war room like something sacred, and I hate it.
I hate the clean geometry of it, the way it reduces what's about to happen to vectors and timestamps and pulsing target markers, as though we aren't about to send people to kill and die inside a building I've only seen through my husband's memories.
"All teams confirm ready," Zane says from the far side of the table.
His voice carries the particular flatness of a man who has ordered enough death to strip the ceremony from it.
He doesn't look at me. He's watching the feeds, six of them tiled across the secondary display, each one a body camera strapped to a squad leader.
Six windows into the next hour. "Aura. Confirmation on access code validity. "
Zane nods once. "Dexter."
The comm crackles. Dexter Torrence's voice comes through from the ground, tight with the restrained energy of a man who has been waiting for this particular fight for longer than I've been part of it. "In position. Breach team standing by. Say the word."
"The word," Zane says.
No countdown. No rousing speech. Just a man telling his brother to begin.
On the feeds, the world fractures into motion.
I have watched combat footage before. Studied it, analyzed it, written reports on tactical efficiency and force deployment with the dispassion of someone whose body was never in the frame.
This is different. This is live, and the data that's guiding every team through those corridors came from the man I sleep beside at night.
"Strike Team Alpha breaching main corridor." Astra Venn's voice is steady beside me. She's running tactical, her fingers moving across her console with the precision of someone conducting music only she can hear. "Resistance light. Eames' data accurate on guard rotation."
I watch the primary feed. Alpha team flows through the corridor like water finding a channel, their movements rehearsed and lethal, and the two guards at the junction point don't even get their weapons up before they're down.
One of them clutches his throat. The camera moves past him and I see his legs kicking, a reflex that looks almost peaceful from this angle, like a man dreaming of running.
Ethan's data made that possible. The schedule, the shift gap, the precise seventeen seconds when that junction would only have two guards instead of four.
"Protocol is scrambling research files," Astra reports. Her eyes flick to a data stream I can't parse as quickly as she can. "They know they're compromised. I'm reading mass deletion protocols activating on their internal servers."
"Hold the data core secure," I say, and my voice doesn't waver. "That's priority one. Everything else is secondary to the core."
Zane glances at me. Something in his expression that might be approval, or might just be the recognition that I've earned the right to give that order. He doesn't countermand it.
On the secondary feeds, Dexter's ground force hits the east wing.
The resistance there is heavier than projected, which means someone rotated extra personnel after Ethan's last intelligence window.
Three days. That's all it took for the data to begin decaying.
Bodies pile up on both sides and I track the casualty counter in the corner of Astra's display, a number that climbs in small, terrible increments, each one a person whose death I helped architect from the clean geometry of this room.
"Bravo team taking fire in the lab wing," Astra says. "Two down. Requesting—"
"Reroute Charlie squad through the maintenance corridor." I pull up the facility schematic, the one Ethan drew from memory over three sessions, his hand steady even when his voice wasn't. "Access code 7-7-Tango-4. It bypasses the main lab and puts them behind the defensive position."
The code works. Of course it works. Everything he gave us works, because he lived there, breathed that recycled air, walked those corridors for years before the Protocol sent him to infiltrate the Torrences, before he met me, before everything.
The intimate knowledge of a place that shaped him into a weapon now used to tear that place apart.
Charlie squad flanks the defenders. The gunfire on the feed becomes one-sided, then stops.
"Lab wing secured," Astra confirms.
I don't feel triumph. I feel the hollow arithmetic of it, the subtraction, the way each success on our side is built on a foundation of Ethan's stolen years.
Every code he remembered. Every schedule he recited.
Every vulnerability he identified because he'd been one of the people those defenses were meant to protect.
"I'm going in." His voice on the comm cuts through the tactical chatter with an edge that makes me close my eyes for exactly one second.
"Ethan." Zane's tone carries a warning.
"I need to see it." A pause that has weight, that fills the war room with the specific silence of a man who has already decided. "I need to own what this looks like from the inside."
I open my eyes. Find his feed among the tiled displays.
He's at the breach point, geared up in borrowed tactical armor that doesn't quite fit his frame, and even through the low-resolution body cam footage I can see the set of his shoulders.
The way he holds himself when he's armoring the parts of him that kevlar can't cover.
"Let him go," I say.
Zane looks at me. Really looks, for the first time tonight.
"He needs this," I say. "And we might need him in there. He knows the layout better than anyone on the ground."
A beat. Zane nods.
I watch my husband walk into the building he helped us destroy.
His feed shows me corridors I've seen in schematics but never like this, never with the overhead lights flickering from weapons damage and the emergency strips casting everything in that sickly amber that makes blood look black.
He moves well. Better than I expected, with the trained economy of someone who remembers how to be a weapon even when he's been pretending to be something softer.
I wonder how much of what he showed me, the gentleness, the hesitation, the way he'd pause before touching me as though asking permission from himself, was real and how much was this, the operative underneath, waiting.
He rounds a corner and stops.
On the feed, I see it the same moment he does. A man in a lab coat, pressed against the wall, unarmed. The man's face is turned toward Ethan's camera and even through the grain of the footage I can see recognition break across his features like sunrise over something terrible.
"Eames?" The man's voice is thin, bewildered. "Ethan, is that—what are you—"
Ethan doesn't answer. Not with words. He stands there for three seconds that I count in my own pulse, and I can see his hand tighten on the weapon at his side, and I can see the man in the lab coat beginning to understand, the recognition curdling into something else, and then Ethan raises the gun and fires twice and the man folds against the wall and slides down it with a sound the microphone picks up too well.
A colleague. Someone he knew. Someone who probably ate lunch in the same cafeteria and complained about the same recycled air and knew Ethan's name and the sound of his footsteps in the corridor.
Ethan steps over the body and keeps moving.
I realize my fingernails are cutting crescents into my palms. I unclench them.
Watch the blood return to white half-moons in my skin and think about how this is what love looks like when it's grafted onto war.
Not soft. Not kind. Just two people destroying things together and trying to survive the debris.
"Data core team approaching primary server room," Astra says.
"Good." My voice is someone else's. Someone useful. "Keep the corridor clear for extraction."
Twenty minutes into the assault, the complication arrives.
It doesn't come through tactical channels or threat assessments. It comes through Dexter's feed, his camera jerking as he kicks open a door on the facility's sublevel that wasn't on any schematic Ethan provided, because Ethan didn't know it existed.
"What the fuck," Dexter says, and the profanity from a Torrence on an open channel is enough to make Zane's jaw tighten.
"Report," Zane says.
"There's..." A pause. The camera pans across a room that takes me several seconds to process, because my brain keeps trying to reclassify what I'm seeing into something that makes sense, something that fits inside the parameters of a research facility.
"There are people down here. In cells. Dozens of them.
Some kind of, I don't know, containment pods, medical rigs.
They're hooked up to machines I've never seen before. "
The war room goes quiet.
I pull the feed larger on my display. The resolution sharpens and I wish it hadn't.
The room is vast, carved from the station's substructure, lined with transparent containment units that glow with a faint bioluminescence I recognize from Empri tech.
Inside each one, a person. Some human. Some clearly Empri, their features carrying the distinctive markers.
Some somewhere between, with the half-formed quality of people caught in a transformation they didn't choose. Half-Empri. Like Ethan.
They are thin. They are damaged. Several of them have surgical scars visible even through the glass, their bodies mapped with the evidence of procedures I don't want to understand.
One woman is curled in the corner of her pod with her hands over her ears, rocking.
A man in the adjacent unit has his eyes open but nothing behind them, his face slack with the absence of a mind that checked out and never returned.
"Ethan." My voice is barely above a whisper. "Did you know about this?"
His feed shows him stopped in a corridor, one hand braced against the wall. He heard Dexter's report. He's hearing it all.