She sees it. Her breath catches. Her eyes widen. And I watch her realize, truly, fully realize: she has power here. Not the power of the captor, not the power of violence or authority or empire.
The power of being wanted by something dangerous, and knowing exactly what lever to pull.
"Careful," I breathe. My voice sounds like a stranger's, low, strained, scraped raw by the effort of not moving. "You're teaching me what buttons to push."
"Maybe I want you to push them." She snarls it. Actually snarls, her lip pulling back from her teeth, and the combination of aggression and proximity and the cocktail of her emotions still crashing through my nervous system makes my vision narrow to her mouth. "At least then I could hate you honestly."
She's challenging me to do the thing I've refused to do. To close the distance. To put my hands on her. To prove that I'm exactly what she called me: a monster, her classification, accurate, irrefutable. She wants me to lash out so that she can stop being confused about the wanting and settle into the clean simplicity of being a victim.
She wants me to be my father because my father was simple. My father was a problem with a clear shape, a villain with a legible script, and you could hate him without complication.
I am not simple. And she knows it. And that's the thing she can't forgive.
I stand slowly. She doesn't step back and the space between us compresses to inches and my marks are so bright they cast light on her face; blue-violet shadows pooling in the hollows of her cheeks, under her jaw, in the dip of her throat where her pulse is hammering fast enough that I can count it.
I don't touch her.
I lean close enough that my mouth is near her ear and I hear her breathing stop, and I feel the full-body clench of her wanting me to and hating herself for it, and it takes everything I have, every molecule of the discipline that separates me from the dead man in the portrait, to justspeak.
"When you're ready to stop testing me and start surviving, you know where to find me."
I step back.
I leave.
The door seals between us and I stand in the corridor with my marks blazing under my clothes and my hands shaking at my sides and the taste of her emotions still on my tongue like something sweet that I'm going to thinkabout when I shouldn't, in the dark, in the quiet hours when the station hums and I'm alone with the portrait and the empire and the wanting.
Dexter returns in three days.
My brother is coming home, and I have a woman in my quarters who's learning to weaponize her own heartbeat against me, and Ethan knows something about her father that he's holding like a knife behind his back, and the Collective is circling, everything my father built is trembling on the axis of what I do next.
I press my palm flat against the sealed door. On the other side, I feel her: standing exactly where I left her.
Not pacing or moving. Breathing.
I pull my hand back before the warmth of her registers through the metal.
Chapter 4
Talia
The womanin processing bay seven is missing three fingers on her left hand.
I notice it because she's trying to calibrate a plasma coupler with her right, and the tool keeps slipping. Every time it does, the guard nearest her taps something on his wrist display. A tally. Demerits, maybe. Or deductions from whatever pittance she's earning toward a debt that will outlive her.
I shouldn't be here.
The access corridor between the debtor labor pools and the residential ring has a security checkpoint that should have stopped me, but Zane's mark does strange things to locked doors on this station. The scanner read my throat and the barrier retracted without a sound. I don't know if that means he programmed me into the system or if the mark itself carries some kind of passive clearance. Either way, I walked through, and no one stopped me. No one even looked twice.
Now I'm standing behind a observation rail on themezzanine level, looking down into the mechanical guts of Veridian-7, and I'm understanding for the first time what I was worth before he pulled me off the auction floor.
The labor pool stretches the length of a cargo hangar. Rows of workstations, each one a different station in what I recognize as a component reclamation line. Ship parts, mostly. Drive cores stripped for rare minerals. Hull plating broken down and resmelted. The air is thick with the smell of scorched metal, and beneath it, something organic. Sweat and exhaustion and the particular staleness of bodies that haven't been given enough time to wash between shifts.
There are maybe two hundred people down there. Humans, mostly, though I spot a few Empri with their bioluminescence dimmed to almost nothing. Stress response, I think. Or maybe they just don't have the caloric intake to keep the light burning. The humans look worse. Gaunt faces, mechanical movements, the economy of energy that comes from knowing every calorie counts. They work in twelve-hour rotations. I know this because the shift board is visible from up here, and I can read the schedule. Twelve on, six off, repeat. Two meals. One water ration above minimum.
I recognize faces from the transport.
The man who'd been two rows ahead of me, the one who kept whispering prayers to a god whose name I didn't know. He's on the smelting line, and his prayers have stopped. The teenager, the one who couldn't have been older than sixteen, is sorting components into bins with hands that move too fast, the kind of speed that comes from fear of falling behind. And at the far end, near the waste processing chute, a woman catches my eye.
