Silence. Astra holds my gaze with the flat patience of a woman who has killed more people than either of us has bothered to count.
"Did I ask you to break her?" I keep my voice level and conversational. The register my father used before he hurt people, and I hate that I know how to use it, and I use it anyway because it works.
"No."
"Then why are we having this conversation?"
Astra's expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind her eyes: a recalculation. She's not afraid of me, that's one of the reasons she's valuable. She's assessing, adjusting her approach, the way she'd adjust aim for wind.
"I'm just wondering what you're planning to do when she tries to run."
The question sits between us like an unexploded round.
When. Not if.
Astra doesn't deal inif.
And I don't have an answer. Not the kind Astra wants — the clean, operational kind.She runs, we catch her, consequence follows.That's the protocol. That's what my father would have laid out in precise, inarguable terms, consequence calibrated to ensure there was no second attempt.
"I'll handle it," I say.
Astra looks at me for two seconds longer than comfortable. Reading me the way she reads threat assessments — for gaps, for weaknesses, for the thing that's going to get someone killed.
"Copy," she says finally. And leaves.
The door seals.
I pull up Talia's feed again.
She's back in her quarters. Pacing.
Five steps to the wall, turn, five steps back. Her hands are fists at her sides and her hair, blonde, tangled, unwashed since the cargo hold, swings with each turn like a pendulum marking time she doesn't have.
I watch her pace and I don't have an answer to Astra's question and the not-knowing feels like standing at the edge of something without a railing.
The portrait watches me work.
My father's face, rendered in the hyperrealist style he preferred, every line, every scar, every shade of the bioluminescent markings that ran from his temples to his collarbone captured in pigment that shifts under different light. The artist was talented. The artist was also executed three days after completion, because my father didn't like how the eyes turned out.
Too soft,he'd said.Makes me look like I give a shit.
I've tried to take it down. Three times. Each time I've stood in front of it with my hands at my sides and felt theweight of his gaze: painted, dead, still somehow pressing down on my chest like a boot. I've left it where it is.
Proof that even dead, Malachar Torrence runs this station from the inside of my skull.
He would have had her by now.
The thought comes unbidden and unwelcome, settling into my bones like station cold. My father wouldn't have waited two days. Wouldn't have assigned permitted zones and watched her through surveillance feeds like some lovesick idiot mapping the habits of a creature he's afraid to touch.
Malachar Torrence had a system for high-value acquisitions: isolation, dependency, chemical nudging if necessary, and then the slow, methodical dismantling of everything that made themthemuntil what remained was compliant, pliable, and empty.
He'd have had Talia in his bed. Pliant. That word:pliant. Like something bent until it stays bent. He'd have manipulated her grief for her father into dependence, turned her intelligence against her, found every vulnerability and pressed until she opened, and by the time he was done she'd have been grateful for the attention.
And she'd have been nothing. Everything that makes her dangerous, the calculating eyes, the steady hands, the jaw that sets like she's bracing against a tide, all of it ground down to compliance.
I refuse to be that.
But I want her just as badly.
