Chapter 16 #2
"The Protocol's files span thirty-one years of anomaly research," I begin, pulling the first display into focus. "What I'm about to show you changes the fundamental understanding of what happened to Malachar Torrence."
The room is very quiet. The kind of quiet that has teeth.
I walk them through it. The surveillance.
The tracking. The research the Protocol conducted in parallel to Malachar's own work, a shadow version built on stolen data and expendable lives.
I show them the probe results, the carrier missions, the incremental accumulation of evidence that the anomaly Malachar chose leads somewhere real.
And then I show them the biosignature data.
"He's alive." I let the display speak for itself, the readings pulsing on the screen in patterns that match Malachar Torrence's genetic markers with a confidence interval that leaves no room for wishful thinking.
"Changed, according to these readings. The Protocol's analysts couldn't fully characterize the modifications. But alive."
The silence that follows is a living thing. I can feel it pressing against my skin, heavy and sharp-edged, filling the room the way water fills a drowning man's lungs.
"He's been alive this whole time." Dexter's voice is flat. Not angry, not broken, not anything. Just flat, the way a blade is flat before it turns. "And he never tried to contact us."
"The anomaly may not work both ways," I offer, because it's true and because someone has to say something that isn't an accusation.
"The Protocol couldn't establish two-way communication.
Every signal they sent degraded within seconds of crossing the threshold.
It's possible that from the other side, the door is opaque. He might not have a way back."
Aura adds, quiet and precise, "The physics support that interpretation. Anomaly permeability appears to be asymmetric in most documented cases."
"Or he chose not to."
Zane's voice cuts through the careful science like a knife through silk.
He's not looking at the displays anymore.
He's looking at his hands, spread flat on the table, and his face is the controlled nothing I've learned to fear, the expression he wears when the truth is so heavy that showing its weight would break something he can't afford to break.
"He was running from us too," Zane says. "From what he'd done."
No one argues. The words sit in the room like a body no one wants to claim.
Talia shifts in her seat, and when she speaks, her voice has a quality I haven't heard from her before. Something fragile held together by something fierce.
"The carrier missions." She's looking at the display, at the list of seven names, seven people the Protocol sent through the anomaly as expendable data points. "You said none established sustained contact."
"Correct."
"But did any of them survive? On the other side?"
I pull up the file I've been dreading. "One carrier's biosignature persisted for approximately fourteen months after transit.
The data is fragmented, but the Protocol's analysts classified the carrier as having reached the destination.
" I pause. Read the name. "Marcus St. Laurent. Carrier Four. Status: unknown."
Talia's hand goes still on her belly. For three seconds, maybe four, she doesn't breathe. Zane's hand finds hers under the table, his fingers wrapping around her wrist, holding on, and she lets him, which tells me more about what she's feeling than any expression could.
"My father might be there too," she says. Her voice is steady in the way that things are steady right before they shatter. "On the other side."
Zane's thumb moves across her pulse point. He doesn't have answers. None of us do. But he holds on, and she lets him, and for a moment the room is just that: two people sitting with an impossible grief while the rest of us try not to look too closely.
It's Elissa who breaks the silence.
"Can we reach him?"
Every head turns. She's sitting straight in her chair, hands folded, eyes moving between the anomaly data and the biosignature readings with an analytical focus that belongs in a war room, not on the face of the youngest person in the room.
"Can we retrieve him?" she continues. "The Protocol's data gives us coordinates, spectral profiles, transit parameters.
We have resources they didn't. Better ships, better tech, and people who actually want to come back instead of being sent as disposable sensors.
" She pauses, and her eyes settle on Zane. "Can we get to him?"
Not whether they should. Not what Malachar deserves after twenty years of silence, after the empire of pain he built and abandoned, after the children he broke and left to reassemble themselves from the pieces. Just the operational question, stripped clean of sentiment.
I watch her and feel the weight of every choice that brought her here.
The soft girl would have asked why. Would have asked if Malachar wanted to be found, if he'd earned the rescue, if the father who left them deserved the risk.
This Elissa asks how, because she's learned that the universe doesn't care about deserving and the only question that matters is capability.
Something harder than it should be. Something I helped make.
Astra, beside her, shows nothing on her face. But I catch the slight shift of her weight, the fractional adjustment that brings her shoulder closer to Elissa's, and I recognize it for what it is. Not comfort. Acknowledgment. The trainer noting that the student has arrived somewhere new.
"With the Protocol data, combined with our own research and the alliance's resources, a transit mission becomes theoretically possible.
" Dexter has his hands steepled now, his eyes distant with calculation.
"The coordinates are precise. The spectral profile would allow us to tune our approach.
We know more about the anomaly's behavior than the Protocol did when they attempted their carrier missions. "
"Theoretically possible is not the same as advisable," Aura says.
"Nothing about this family is advisable." Astra's voice from the wall, dry as recycled air. "When has that stopped us?"
A sound escapes Zane that might be a laugh in another life. "The mission would be dangerous. Probably one-way. Possibly pointless."
"And if he's there?" Talia asks. "If he's alive, changed, on the other side of something we barely understand? If my father is there too?"
The question hangs.
Zane looks at his siblings one by one. Dexter, already running logistics behind his eyes.
Astra, coiled and ready, waiting for a direction to point herself.
Elissa, still and sharp, a blade someone forgot to sheathe.
And Talia, carrying his child, carrying her own grief, carrying the impossible weight of a father she never got to bury because he might not be dead.
"We plan it," Zane says. "We don't commit yet.
We plan it, we assess the risk, and we make the decision together.
" His eyes find mine. "Eames. You and Aura continue the data analysis.
I want to know everything the Protocol learned about the other side.
Every reading, every fragment, every failed transmission.
If we're going to open that door, I want to know what's behind it before we step through. "
"Understood."
The briefing breaks apart slowly. Dexter leaves first, already speaking into his comm, pulling logistics teams together with the quiet efficiency of a man who builds plans the way other people breathe.
Astra and Elissa leave together, and I notice that they walk in step now, matched in rhythm, the human and the alien moving with the same predatory economy that makes the back of my neck prickle.
Talia stays seated for a moment after the others have gone. Zane beside her, his hand still wrapped around her wrist, both of them looking at the display where Marcus St. Laurent's name still glows in the pale blue light of incomplete data.
Aura touches my arm. We leave them to it.
Some things don't need an audience.
Our quarters are quiet. The door seals behind us and the sound of the station falls away, replaced by the soft thrum of environmental systems and the particular silence that belongs to spaces where two people have learned to exist together.
Aura sits on the edge of the bed and pulls her boots off, one and then the other, and I watch her the way I've learned to watch her: not cataloguing threats, not assessing angles, just looking at the person I chose and feeling the specific ache of knowing I'd follow her through an anomaly in space-time without hesitating.
"This changes things," I say.
She looks up at me, one boot in her hand, her hair falling across her face in a way that makes her look younger than she is. "Everything changes things."
I sit beside her. The mattress shifts under my weight, tipping her toward me by centimeters, and she lets herself lean until her shoulder presses against mine. The warmth of her seeps through my shirt and settles somewhere behind my sternum, a coal that never quite goes out.
"The Torrences might go after Malachar," I say. "If they do..."
"Then we help them."
She says it like it's simple. Like following a crime family through a tear in space-time to find a man who might be a monster or might be something worse than a monster is just the next item on the list.
"That's what alliance means," she adds, and turns to look at me, and her eyes are steady in a way that makes my throat tight. Not because she's certain. Because she's not, and she's choosing this anyway, choosing it with open eyes and full knowledge of the cost.
"Do you want to go?" I ask. "Through the anomaly?"
She's quiet. The environmental system hums. Somewhere in the station, I can hear the distant percussion of cargo being moved, the ordinary rhythms of a world that doesn't know it might be about to crack open.
"I want to stay with you," she says. "Whatever that looks like."
"Even if it's the other side of space-time?"
She takes my hand. Her fingers are cool from the recycled air, and when they wrap around mine I feel the calluses on her palm, the evidence of the life she's built, the work she's done, the weapons she's held.
She lifts my hand to her mouth and presses her lips to the knuckle of my index finger, and the gesture is so simple, so small, that it hits me harder than anything has in days.
"Especially then," she says against my skin.
I pull her in. My arm around her shoulders, her face turning into my neck, and for a minute we just sit there, breathing the same flat station air, holding on to each other in a galaxy that keeps finding new ways to test the grip.
Her breath is warm on my throat. Her heartbeat is steady against my ribs. And I think about anomalies and doorways and the specific courage it takes to say yes to someone when you don't know what yes will cost.
I press my mouth to her hair. She smells like the station's soap, generic and chemical, and underneath it something that is just her, warm and alive and here. I hold on tighter than I need to.
"Whatever comes through that door," I say, "we face it together."
She nods against my neck. Doesn't speak. Doesn't need to.
The silence between us is the good kind. The kind that holds.
The alarm shatters it.
Station-wide. The klaxon cuts through every wall, every sealed door, every quiet moment in every quarter, a sound designed to reach the brainstem before the conscious mind can catch up.
My body is moving before I've finished processing the noise, rolling off the bed, reaching for the console, pulling up the alert data with hands that remember crisis even when the rest of me is still catching up.
Aura is beside me in three seconds, boots back on, her eyes scanning the readout over my shoulder.
"The anomaly," she says.
The nearest one. Malachar's anomaly. The tear in space-time that's been sitting in the Protocol's coordinates like a held breath for twenty years.
It's expanding.
The readings cascade across my screen in real-time, each one worse than the last. Spectral output increasing by orders of magnitude.
Gravitational distortion radiating outward in waves that the station's sensors are picking up as tremors, subtle but measurable, the kind of vibration you feel in your teeth before you feel it in your feet.
The tear is widening, its edges pulling apart with a kind of deliberate slowness that feels less like physics and more like intention.
Something is coming through.
Not debris. Not radiation. Not the scrambled fragments of another failed probe returning in pieces.
The biosignature readings are lighting up my display in patterns I've never seen, complex and structured and wrong in ways that make my skin crawl, because they're close to human but not close enough, altered in ways that echo the Protocol's descriptions of what happened to Malachar's readings over two decades on the other side.
My comm screams with Zane's frequency, and when I answer, his voice has lost even the pretense of calm.
"The anomaly. Are you seeing this?"
"Seeing it."
"It's not random expansion. The pattern is deliberate. Something is pushing through from the other side."
Aura's hand finds my shoulder. Her grip is hard enough to bruise, and I'm grateful for it, the pain a sharp point of focus in a moment that feels like the floor is dissolving.
On the screen, the anomaly's readings spike again. The tear widens. The biosignature resolves.
Not something.
Someone.
The door is opening, and someone is coming back, and every readout I can see tells me the same thing in a language older than the stars.
Whatever walked through that anomaly twenty years ago is not what's walking back.