Chapter 16
Ethan
The data scrolls faster than I can read it, but my hands keep moving across the interface, pulling files open, cross-referencing timestamps, building a picture I'm not sure any of us are ready to see.
Three days I've been buried in this. Three days since we cracked the Protocol's encryption and the universe split open like a wound, everything we thought we knew about Malachar Torrence bleeding out across my screens in neat little data packets that smell like decades of obsession.
Aura brought me coffee an hour ago. It's gone cold at my elbow, the surface filming over, and I haven't touched it because every time I reach for the cup my eyes catch another file and my hand goes back to the interface instead.
The intelligence analysis center is quiet at this hour.
Just me and the hum of processing cores and the soft blue glow of holographic displays painting the walls in data I wish I could unsee.
The recycled air tastes flat on my tongue, stripped of everything organic, and the only smell is ozone from the overworked terminals and the cold dregs of that coffee going stale.
I pull up another file. Anomaly Research Division. Classification: Blacksite Omega.
They've been studying the tears for decades.
Not the Torrences, not the alliance, not anyone with a name I recognize from the legitimate side of the galaxy.
The Protocol. Operating in the margins, in the silence between official reports, cataloguing every rip in the fabric of space-time with the meticulous patience of people who believe they're saving the universe and don't care how many bodies it costs.
The scope of it makes my chest tight. Hundreds of anomaly events documented.
Spectral analyses, gravitational readings, temporal displacement calculations that make my head ache just scanning them.
They mapped the tears like someone charting a disease, tracking the spread, measuring the progression, trying to predict where the next one would open.
And then, buried in the middle of it all like a bone in the throat of their research, one name: Malachar Torrence.
They've been tracking him. Not just since his disappearance.
Before. Years before. His research into anomaly physics flagged him on their radar when Zane was still a child, and they watched him the way a predator watches something it can't decide whether to eat or recruit.
His publications. His private correspondence, intercepted and filed.
His funding sources traced and mapped. Every conversation he had about the tears catalogued and analyzed and cross-referenced against their own findings.
They knew what he was going to do before he did it.
I sit back in my chair, the vertebrae in my spine popping one by one as I straighten, and stare at the timestamp on the file that changes everything.
He didn't fall through the anomaly. The Protocol's own data confirms it. Malachar Torrence walked in with his eyes open.
Running from the Protocol, yes. Their surveillance closed in, their recruitment attempts turned to threats, and he saw the walls narrowing.
But the data tells a story more complicated than a desperate man throwing himself into the void.
He chose his anomaly. Not the nearest one, not the most accessible.
A specific tear, at specific coordinates, exhibiting specific spectral properties that he'd been studying in private for years, in research the Protocol never managed to intercept because he kept it in his head.
In a mind that brilliant, in a paranoia that justified, the safest vault in the galaxy was his own skull.
The anomaly he chose leads somewhere.
The Protocol spent the next twenty years trying to figure out where.
I open the probe data and my mouth goes dry.
They sent everything through that tear. Sensor arrays.
Mapping drones. Autonomous research vessels packed with instruments worth more than some moons.
Nothing came back intact. Fragments, sometimes.
Twisted metal and corrupted data cores and, once, a probe that returned physically whole but broadcasting readings that didn't correspond to any known physics, as if the instruments had learned a new language on the other side and forgotten the old one.
They sent people, too. I find the files and wish I hadn't.
Volunteers, according to the paperwork. The word sits wrong in my mouth given everything else I know about the Protocol.
Seven individuals over twelve years. Carriers, they called them.
Enhanced humans fitted with communication implants and tracking beacons and enough sensor equipment to map a new universe.
None of them established sustained contact.
But the tracking data, the fragments that made it back through the interference, told the Protocol two things.
First: there was a destination. Not void.
Not chaos. Somewhere with structure, with measurable parameters, with conditions that might, under certain interpretations of the readings, support life.
Second: Malachar Torrence was still there.
Changed, their sensors said. The biosignature readings that filtered back through the anomaly's interference matched his genetic profile but diverged in ways the Protocol's scientists described with words like "unprecedented" and "impossible" and, in one classified memo, "transcendent."
Alive. Changed. And in twenty years, he never once tried to come back through the door he'd walked in.
I close the file and press my palms against my eyes until I see colors.
The pressure feels good. Grounding. Something to focus on besides the vertigo of realizing that the most powerful crime family in known space was built on the ruins of a man who chose to walk into another dimension rather than face what he'd done to his own children.
My comm chimes. Zane's frequency.
"Briefing room. One hour. Bring everything."
His voice is the flat, controlled nothing that means he's holding something heavy and hasn't decided yet where to set it down.
"Understood."
I start compiling.
The briefing room is too small for what's about to happen in it.
Not physically. The space is adequate, a long table with embedded displays, chairs for twelve, the viewport behind Zane's usual position showing a field of stars that don't care about any of this.
But the room is too small for the weight of five people who are about to learn the truth about their father, and the two of us who have to deliver it.
Aura stands beside me at the head of the table, her shoulder close enough to mine that I can feel her warmth through my sleeve.
She's reviewed the data. She knows what we're about to say.
Her face gives nothing away, but her hand brushes mine under the table's edge, once, quick, and I catch it before she can pull back. Squeeze. Let go.
They file in.
Zane first, because Zane is always first. He takes his seat at the head of the table and his eyes find the displays I've prepared and I watch him start reading before anyone else has sat down.
His expression doesn't change. It rarely does.
But his jaw sets in a way that tells me he's already three steps ahead and doesn't like where the path leads.
Talia comes with him, settling into the chair at his right.
Her pregnancy is more visible now, the curve of her belly pressing against the table's edge, and she rests one hand on it in a gesture that might be protective or might be habitual.
Her eyes are sharp, though. Alert. She's been a St. Laurent and a Torrence and she knows how to sit in a room where bad news is coming and not flinch first.
Dexter enters with the economy of motion that defines him.
No wasted steps, no extraneous gestures.
He sits, folds his hands, and waits. Of all of them, Dexter is the one I find hardest to read, and I've made a career of reading people.
There's a stillness to him that could be patience or could be the coiled readiness of someone who's already decided what he'll do and is simply waiting for the confirmation.
Astra is next, and she brings the temperature of the room down two degrees just by existing in it.
She doesn't sit immediately, choosing instead to lean against the wall near the viewport, arms crossed, positioning herself where she can see every face at the table without turning her head.
Tactical even in grief. Especially in grief.
Elissa comes last.
I almost don't recognize her.
The girl I met months ago was soft in the way that sheltered things are soft, not weak but untempered, still carrying the roundness of a life that hadn't yet demanded sharp edges.
That girl would have entered this room looking to her siblings for cues, would have sat where she was told, would have listened with wide eyes and processed the information later, privately, probably crying into a pillow she'd never let anyone see.
This Elissa walks in and takes stock of the room before she takes her seat.
Her gaze moves from face to face with the measured assessment of someone cataloguing threat levels and emotional temperatures.
She sits beside Astra, not looking to her for guidance but positioning herself as a complement, covering the angles Astra's position leaves exposed.
Her posture is straight, her hands still, her expression composed in a way that has nothing to do with calm and everything to do with control.
I did that. Not alone, not entirely, but my betrayal was one of the blades that carved away the softness. Astra's training shaped what grew in its place, but I helped create the wound that made the training necessary.
Something harder than it should be at twenty-two. Something more dangerous than the princess she was.
I look away before the guilt can settle into something I have to deal with right now, and I start the briefing.