I stand in front of my father's portrait and feel the truth of it in my marks: the bioluminescence that lives under my skin, inherited from him, the genetic signature of our line that responds to emotion the way a lie detector responds to stress. They're glowing now. Faintly, in the blue-violetspectrum, concentrated along my forearms where my sleeves are rolled to the elbow. They pulse with my heartbeat.
Want. That's what they're saying, in the only language my body speaks that I can't control.
Want want want want.
The difference between me and my father is the space between wanting and taking. It's the only difference. It's the only one that matters. Some days it feels paper-thin.
I turn my back on the portrait. It watches me anyway.
I go to her at station-dark.
Not because I have a plan. Not because I've calculated the optimal moment for a strategic conversation about cooperation and information exchange. I go because I've been watching her pace for three hours and I can feel her restlessness through the wall: not literally, not yet, not at this distance, but in the way the air pressure seems to change outside her door, as though her agitation has a gravitational field.
I open the door without announcing myself. Because this is my station and she is my prisoner and if I extend her courtesies she'll mistake them for softness, and softness in this world gets you the kind of death my father designed for people who disappointed him.
She's mid-stride when the door opens. Catches herself, one foot forward, weight shifting, and for a fraction of a second her body readsfightbefore her brain overrides it. I see the recalculation happen in real time: the clench of her fists, the assessment sweep of her eyes: my hands (empty), my posture (controlled), the door behind me (closing, sealed, no escape).
She straightens. Settles her weight evenly. Lifts her chin.
"Come to watch in person?" Her voice is rough. Station air dries the throat if you're not used to it, and she's not used to anything here yet. "I was starting to think the cameras were the only way you could get close to a woman."
"The cameras are for security."
"The cameras are foryou." She says it with certainty. With the kind of knowing that means she's been thinking about it, about me, watching her. Turning it over in her mind the way she turns over corridor layouts and patrol schedules. Fitting me into her map.
She's not wrong. I don't confirm it.
"Sit down," I say.
"No."
I expected that. I almost wanted the refusal, the defiance, the way her jaw sets and her eyes go hard and her whole body saysmake mewithout her having to speak the words.
I sit so it puts me below her sightline. A deliberate choice that costs me the physical advantage and gains me something else: the look on her face when she realizes I've ceded the high ground. Confusion, quick and raw, before she shutters it.
"My father," she says. "Tell me what happened to my father."
"Sit down and I'll consider it."
"Tell me and I'll consider sitting."
The corner of my mouth does something I don't authorize. She sees it. Her eyes narrow.
"This isn't a negotiation," she says.
"Everything is a negotiation. Your father knew that." I watch the words land, the flinch she tries to hide, the way her nostrils flare with the effort of keeping her expressionlevel. I'm using her father as leverage and I feel the ugliness of it settle into my sternum like a swallowed coal.
But this is what I am.
"You want to know what happened to him. I want your cooperation."
"Cooperation." She tastes the word like poison. "Meaning what? You want me docile? Grateful? Should I get on my knees and thank you for the recycled air and the surveillance?"
"I want you to stop mapping escape routes that don't exist and start understanding that your best chance of surviving what's coming is me."
"The man who kidnapped me is my best chance of survival." Flat. Disbelieving. "That's what you're selling."
"I'm not selling anything. I'm telling you the market conditions."
