"We're launching." I pointed at the illuminated safety indicator. "Not the time."
"Then when? Because you've made sure there's never a time. You take shifts when I'm off duty. You route communicationsthrough Pel'vix instead of contacting me directly. You've turned avoidance into an art form."
He wasn't wrong. I'd been extremely deliberate about limiting our interactions, finding excuses to work separately, and maintaining maximum professional distance. Because the alternative, admitting how his observation had cut through every defense I had, how his insistence that I get help had felt like both betrayal and terrifying care, was unthinkable.
The shuttle lurched as we detached from Mothership's docking array. Through the viewport, the massive bulk of our home ship receded, its lights glittering against the infinite dark of space. We accelerated toward Veridian Station, toward crisis and chaos and work that would keep my mind occupied.
"Did you go?" Zorn asked. "To the session with Dr. Senna?"
My jaw tightened. "That's confidential."
"Your attendance is on record. The content of your sessions is confidential. There's a difference." He shifted slightly, and his shoulder brushed mine as casual contact that sent electricity through my nervous system in ways that had nothing to do with medicine. "I'm not asking what you discussed. I'm asking if you went."
I stared at the viewport, watched stars blur into streaks as we hit cruising velocity. Thought about lying. Thought about deflecting. Thought about all the ways I'd learned to avoid uncomfortable truths.
"Yes," I said finally. "I went."
The relief in his expression was almost painful to witness.Like my compliance with medical orders, with his orders, meant something beyond professional obligation.
"Good. That's good, Bea. How did it—" He caught himself, shook his head. "Never mind. That's between you and Dr. Senna."
Silence stretched between us, but it was different than before. Less hostile, more uncertain. The kind of quiet that forms when two people are trying to navigate territory neither fully understands.
"It was terrible," I heard myself say, and immediately regretted the admission. "The session. It was terrible. Dr. Senna asked questions I didn't want to answer and made observations I didn't want to hear and by the end I felt like I'd been flayed open and put back together wrong."
"That sounds like effective therapy."
"That sounds like torture."
"Sometimes they're the same thing." His voice carried understanding, like he was speaking from personal experience. "Healing hurts. The setting of bones, the cleaning of infected wounds, the confronting of psychological trauma. It all hurts before it helps."
"I'm aware of basic medical principles."
"Are you? Because you seem determined to ignore them when applied to yourself."
The observation should have angered me. Should have triggered the defensive walls I'd maintained for years. But there was no judgment in his tone, just genuine concern that somehow made it worse.
Because concern implied care. Care implied investment. Investment implied vulnerability. And vulnerability was something I couldn't afford.
"The outbreak," I said, redirecting with the finesse of long practice. "What else do we know about the pathogen?"
Zorn studied me for a moment longer, long enough that I thought he might push, might refuse to let me dodge. Then he pulled up his datapad, accepted the subject change with the grace of someone who knew when to retreat.
"Initial reports suggest waterborne transmission. Veridian Station's water reclamation system showed anomalies three days before the first infections appeared. By the time they identified the correlation, contamination was widespread."
"Waterborne with respiratory involvement?" I frowned, mental gears already turning. "That's unusual."
"Extremely. Standard filtration should have caught bacterial or viral contaminants. Whatever this is, it's either very small or very resistant to conventional treatment." He swiped through data streams, pulled up holographic models of symptom progression. "First stage: mild respiratory irritation, easily dismissed as environmental allergies. Second stage: neural inflammation, specifically targeting the limbic system. Third stage: severe respiratory distress as the pathogen triggers cascade failure of pulmonary function."
I studied the projections, noted the rapid progression timeline. "Time between stages?"
"Eighteen to twenty-four hours from first exposure to stage three."
"That's aggressive." My mind catalogued treatment approaches, discarded ineffective options, prioritizedinterventions. "We're going to need to stabilize critical patients immediately while working on pathogen identification. Which means splitting focus between acute care and diagnostics."
"Agreed. I'll handle diagnostics with Dr. Ko'rath. You and Pel'vix manage patient care."
It was a logical division of labor. Zorn's background in xenobiology made him ideal for identifying unknown pathogens. My trauma surgery experience made me better suited for emergency interventions. We'd be working separately for most of the crisis.
