The floor drops out from under me.
Not the literal floor. The other one.
The foundation I've been standing on since I was old enough to understand that my father was flawed but human, compromised but mine, a man who made bad choices but never the worst ones. That floor.
It opens and I fall.
My father didn't just owe money. He wasn't just a debtor. He ran cargo for the Torrence syndicate. Willingly. Regularly. The last job for Zane's father three months ago, when my father kissed my forehead in the docking bay and told me he'd be back in six weeks and I should stay out of trouble.
Six weeks turned to eight. Eight turned to twelve. Then the debt collectors came. Then the extraction teams. Then the processing bay and the line and the man with the blue-lit skin who pulled me out of it.
Zane turns. His eyes meet mine and in them I see something I don't expect. Not cruelty. Not satisfaction. Something closer to recognition. The look of someone who also lost a father to whatever happened three months ago.
"You're going to help me find out why," he says.
The door closes behind him.
I stand in the starlight with his heartbeat in my throat and the ruins of everything I thought I knew settling around me like ash.
I don't eat. I don't shower.
I sit on the edge of the bed and I press my fingers to themark on my neck and I feel it pulse. His rhythm. Steady. Patient. Certain.
And I think: I didn't know. I didn't know any of it.
But the mark on my throat pulses like a second heart, and I am not sure anymore which one is lying to me. His or mine.
Chapter 3
Zane
The Eighth Consortiumtwo light-years away owes me forty-seven thousand credits for a shipment of refined helikon that crossed into my corridor three cycles ago.
Forty-seven thousand credits is not a number. It is the cost of disrespect. It is the price of believing my shipping lanes are suggestions instead of law. The helikon moved under my protection, through airspace that answers to my name, and they decided to test what that protection is worth.
If I do not have confirmation of transfer by station-dark, I will send Astra. She will board the captain’s vessel with a ledger in one hand and a blade in the other. She will collect what is owed in whatever order she finds most educational, and she is very creative when she is teaching a lesson.
That's the thought I'm holding when the morning briefing starts. Not Talia St. Laurent. Not the way she sleeps curled on her left side with one hand tucked under her jaw like she's holding her own face together. Not the fact that I know that because I watched her for eleven minutes last night before I made myself kill the feed.
The shipment. The debt. The business of empire.
"Manifest discrepancy on the Eighth run." Ethan slides the datapad across my desk without looking up, his fingers already scrolling through the next problem on his own screen. "Someone's skimming fuel cells. Small amounts, smart enough to stay under automated audit thresholds, stupid enough to think we don't run secondary checks."
"Who."
"Dock crew seven. Specifically, their shift lead: a Haldon Riggs. Nineteen months on station. Clean record until approximately six weeks ago, which coincidentally aligns with the Vex Collective opening a recruitment channel on the lower levels."
I take the pad. The numbers are clean, precise, annotated in Ethan's careful hand. He's already done the work. He always has. My father's advisor for over a decade, and now mine: seamless in the transition, as though the man he served for years didn't disappear in the blink of an eye.
I've never asked him what that was like. He's never offered.
"Handle it," I say. "Publicly enough to discourage. Not so publicly that we lose the rest of the crew."
"An audience of peers, then. Not a spectacle." Ethan nods, and the half-smile that lives permanently at the corner of his mouth deepens by a fraction. "Your father would have made it a spectacle."
"My father's not here."
"No," Ethan agrees. "He's not."
