She turns and walks to the door. Stops with her hand on the release panel.
"Get some sleep, Torrence. You look like death."
"I look like someone who survived it."
The ghost of something crosses her face. Not a smile. Not quite. Something more honest than that, more reluctant. Recognition.
I'm standing in my office with a dead man's blood drying on my hands and a fissure running through the wall I built between us. Hairline thin. Barely visible.
But I know structures. I know what happens when you ignore a fracture in a load-bearing wall. You don't get to choose when it gives. You don't get to choose what comes through.
The fissure is open. And fissures, once opened, never quite close.
I sit back down. Pull up the manufacturing logs. Start looking for ghosts in my own machine.
My hands have stopped shaking.
Chapter 6
Talia
Seven days.
Seven days of his gravitational pull, and I've learned the shape of every room he lets me occupy. The command center with its wall of feeds and the ghost-light of data scrolling across his face. The galley where I eat alone most mornings, picking at food that's better than anything I've had before because even his scraps are luxuries. The corridor between my quarters and his, which I've walked enough times now that my feet know the slight dip in the floor plating near the third junction, the place where the recycled air shifts from cold to colder.
But I have never been inside his quarters at night until now.
The door slides shut behind me and the sound is soft, almost polite, and that's the worst part. Everything in Zane Torrence's world has manners. The violence is well-dressed. The cage has tasteful lighting.
"Sit," he says without looking up.
He's at the long table near the view port, my father's cargo manifests spread across the surface in overlappingholographic layers. Blue light catches the angles of his face and turns him into something carved from the dark between stars. His sleeves are rolled to his forearms, which is a new cruelty I wasn't prepared for. The corded muscle there, the veins, the way his hands move through the data like he's conducting something only he can hear.
I sit.
The chair is real leather. I don't know what animal died for it, or on what planet, but it's soft enough to make me hate myself for noticing. His quarters are nothing like what I expected, and exactly what I should have known. Sparse where it matters, opulent where it cuts. No clutter. No personal effects except a single shelf of physical books with cracked spines, which tells me more about him than any dossier. The walls are a dark composite that absorbs light, and the view port dominates the far wall like a wound in the station's hull, black space bleeding through with scattered stars.
Cold. Beautiful. His.
"Route seven," he says, pulling one manifest forward and expanding it. The blue glow intensifies, painting the table, painting his hands. "Your father used it exclusively for medical supplies until two years ago. Then the cargo weights changed."
I lean forward. The holographic display is detailed enough that I can read individual line items, and he's right. The tonnage shifted. Same route, same declared contents, but the actual mass increased by thirty percent across six consecutive runs.
"He was layering," I say, my voice steadier than I feel. "Legitimate cargo on top, something heavier underneath. The medical supplies were cover."
Zane's eyes lift to mine. Just for a beat. Long enough to feel like a hand pressing against my sternum.
"You recognize the pattern."
"I grew up in his house. I didn't need to see the manifests to know when the shipments were wrong. The security got tighter. He stopped eating dinner with us." I pull another route overlay closer, my fingers moving through the light. "Route twelve is the same. Look at the fuel consumption logs versus the declared weight. He was burning twenty percent more fuel than the cargo justified."
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. Something closer to satisfaction, and I shouldn't feel warmed by it, but my body doesn't care about should.
We work.
For an hour, maybe longer, we work side by side and it's the closest to normal I've felt since I arrived. My mind does what it was trained to do: pattern recognition, data analysis, the quiet forensic work of following money through the gaps in paperwork. I'm no analyst, but knowing the mechanics of things makes me valuable enough that Zane lets me lead. That's the dangerous part. He asks questions that aren't condescending, that are actually sharp enough to push my thinking in directions I hadn't considered. He listens when I explain the routing anomalies with the focus of a man who understands that good intelligence is worth more than good soldiers.
And the whole time, I am aware of him.
