"Soon."
She doesn't push it. But the look she gives me says she's counting days, and the number she's reached is making her uncomfortable.
Astra turns to Talia one more time. That assessing look. "The batch stamp. You could read it by sight?"
"I worked fabrication lines for six years," Talia says. "I can read a compression mold pattern the way you read a threat assessment."
The corner of Astra's mouth moves. Not a smile. An acknowledgment. Then it's gone, and she's back to work.
My office is quiet. The kind of quiet that presses against the eardrums, environmental systems dialed to minimum, the hum of the station barely audible through the walls. I've brought her here because what I'm about to tell her shouldn't exist in a space with cameras and recording equipment. Astra's hub is secure, but secure from outside threats. What I need right now is privacy from my own people.
Talia sits across from my desk. She hasn't asked why we're here. She's waiting, and the patience of it unsettles me, because patience is a weapon I recognize. My father wielded it like a blade. You let the silence stretch until the other person fills it, and what they fill it with tells you everything.
She's doing it to me, and she might not even know it.
"Your father," I say.
Her stillness changes quality. The same posture, the same composed face, but something beneath it goes tight. I can feel it through the mark, a frequency shift, like a string being tuned to a higher pitch.
"What about him?"
"Marcus St. Laurent ran cargo through jump gates. Off-book routes, paths that don't appear on any navigation chart. He knew corridors through contested space that the cartography guilds haven't mapped yet, or mapped and buried."
She doesn't confirm or deny. Her eyes are on mine, reading me the way she read that weapon, with precision and an absence of sentiment.
"His last job was for my father." I let that sit. Watch it land. "A special assignment. Direct from Malachar.Destination classified. He departed from this station and he never reported in."
"I know he never reported in," she says, and her voice is flat in a way that tells me the flatness costs her something. "I've spent three years trying to find out what happened to him. I got debt and a brand for my trouble."
I lean back in my chair. The leather creaks. My forearm throbs under the skin seal, a low, persistent ache that keeps rhythm with my pulse.
"What I'm about to tell you doesn't leave this room."
"You're trusting a debtor with secrets. That's either stupid or strategic."
"It's both."
I pull the file from my desk drawer. Physical copy. Paper, not digital, because digital gets hacked, gets scraped, gets pulled out of encrypted systems by people who are very good at their jobs. Paper burns. Paper can be destroyed completely.
"Your father's last transmission was logged fourteen hours before my father's death." I slide the file across the desk. "The coordinates he transmitted from are in the Ashfall Corridor. A dead zone between Zalt and Torrence territory. No stations. No outposts. Nothing on any chart."
She reaches for the file. Her fingers stop an inch from it.
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because your father might have been the last person to see mine alive."
The words fill the room the way smoke fills a chamber. Slow, everywhere, impossible to breathe around. She picks up the file and opens it, and I watch her face as she reads. The coordinates. The transmission timestamp. The cargo manifest, redacted, black bars over everything except the weightand dimensions. Whatever Marcus St. Laurent was carrying, it was small. Dense. Valuable enough to warrant a classified route and a direct commission from Malachar Torrence.
Her jaw works. Muscles clenching and releasing along the line of bone. I can see her swallowing something, a sound or a word or the kind of grief that comes out sideways if you let it.
"He was alive," she says. "Fourteen hours before."
"He was transmitting from a functional comm array. Beyond that, I can't confirm."
"And then what? He vanished? Your father died? And nobody connected the two?"
"Somebody did." I hold her gaze. "Somebody made sure the connection got buried. The transmission log was deleted from our system. I found it in my father's private archives. An encrypted partition he didn't even tell Dexter about."
