"Brother." His voice has dropped half an octave since I last heard it. Six years of barking orders into comms over weapons fire will do that.
"Dexter."
He closes the distance in four strides and grips my forearm in the old way, the Torrence greeting, wrist to wrist, where you can feel the other person's pulse. His is slow andeven. His emotions are anything but. Up close, the grief is sharper. Loss like a blade he's been carrying point-inward, letting it cut him in private where no one can see the blood.
He loved Father. He just doesn't believe love obligates him to pretend the man is alive.
His gaze shifts past my shoulder. Finds Astra.
Something moves through his emotional field so fast I almost miss it. Recognition, yes, but more than that. A pull, magnetic and vicious, immediately strangled. He kills it so fast it's like watching someone snap a bone back into place before anyone notices the break.
"Venn." His mouth barely moves around her name. "Still standing."
Astra's expression doesn't change. Not a flicker. But those twelve extra heartbeats become fifteen.
"No thanks to you," she says.
Five words. Delivered flat, surgical, with the kind of precision that only comes from having rehearsed something a thousand times and still meaning every syllable. She turns on her heel and walks toward the security checkpoint, her boots striking the deck plates in a rhythm that sounds like punctuation at the end of a sentence she'll never finish.
Dexter watches her go. Three seconds. Then he pulls his attention back to me with the mechanical efficiency of a man rotating a gun turret.
"She's still running security." It's not a question.
"She's the best I have."
"She's the best anyone has." He says it like a fact, like reporting the tensile strength of hull plating. Nothing personal in his voice at all, which tells me everything personal about what just happened.
I file that away too. Deeper this time.
"Your quarters are prepped," I tell him. "But we need to talk first."
"Obviously." He shoulders his kit bag, one strap, military style, the weight of it nothing to him. "Who else is in the room?"
"Ethan."
Something flickers across Dexter's face. Not quite contempt. Evaluation. He's measuring Ethan's usefulness the way he'd assess a weapons system, by capability, reliability, and the odds it turns on you when you need it most.
"Fine," he says. "Lead on."
The conference roomsits at the core of the station's command level, windowless by design. Father had it built that way. No view ports means no vulnerabilities, no exterior access points, no distractions. The walls are layered with signal dampening that turns the space into a dead zone for surveillance. Inside this room, the only things that exist are the people at the table and whatever truths they're willing to put on it.
Ethan is already seated when we arrive. He's pulled up holographic displays across the table surface, financial projections and territory maps and the forensic analysis of the Zalt assassination attempt that nearly took my head off three days ago. He looks up when the door opens, nods to me, then sees Dexter.
"Welcome back." Ethan's voice carries the careful neutrality of a man who's spent years being useful to people who could destroy him. He respects Dexter. He also knows exactly what Dexter thinks of him, and he doesn't waste energy pretending otherwise.
Dexter drops his kit bag by the wall and takes the chair across from Ethan. His eyes move across the holographic displays with the speed of someone trained to absorb tactical data under fire.
"Walk me through it," he says.
I take the head of the table because someone has to, and because if I don't, Dexter will, not out of ambition but out of instinct. He leads the way other people breathe.
"Three months ago, Father disappeared." I keep my voice level. The facts first. "His last known location was the research station at Kael-7. He was investigating an anomaly in the Drift. Gravitational signatures that didn't match any known phenomena."
"Investigating." Dexter rolls the word over like checking a round for defects. "Personally."
"Personally."
"That should have been your first sign something was wrong. Malachar Torrence doesn't do anything personally unless the stakes are existential."
