He's right. I knew that then. I know it sharper now.
"Since his disappearance, we've had four targeted incursions into our supply lines, a coordinated data breach in the financial networks, and eight days ago, a Zalt operative put a molecularly tipped round in the view port of my office."
Ethan pulls up the ballistics report. The hologram shows the trajectory, the entry point, the round's composition. Military grade. Outer-rim manufacture.
Dexter studies it for six seconds. "Zalt doesn't have the resources for this alone."
"No."
"So who's backing them?"
"That's what we're trying to determine." Ethan tapsthrough to the financial traces. "The money moves through seventeen shell entities before it goes dark. Someone with significant infrastructure is funding this. I've followed the threads as far as the Meridian Exchange, but they dead-end at a holding company registered to a station that was decommissioned nine years ago."
Dexter doesn't look at the financial data. He looks at me. "Father's dead, Zane. Accept it and consolidate."
The words land in the room like a body hitting the floor. Ethan goes still. I feel my own jaw tighten, the muscles bunching along the hinge, and I breathe through it because if I don't, my bioluminescence will flare and everyone in this room will see me bleed.
"I'm not sure he is."
Dexter leans back. His chair creaks under his weight. He's broader than me, thicker through the shoulders and arms, built by six years of combat in environments where gravity fluctuates and the only constant is the need to hit harder than whatever is hitting you.
"Based on what? Hope?" The word sounds clinical in his mouth. A diagnosis, not a feeling. "Three months with no contact. No encrypted signal. No dead drop. No body, sure, but Malachar Torrence doesn't go silent unless he can't speak. And the list of things that could shut him up is very, very short."
"The anomaly he was researching." I pull up the files, what's left of them. Most were purged from the system within hours of his disappearance. "Whatever he found out there, it was significant enough that someone erased his research."
"Or he erased it himself."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because he found something worth hiding." Dexter's blue eyes hold mine. "Even from us."
The silence that follows has weight. I can feel Ethan's discomfort in my peripheral awareness, the low hum of a man sitting between two forces that might collide. He's calculating his position, the way he always does. Useful. Ethan is always, relentlessly useful.
"Regardless," I say, and the word is a door I'm closing on a conversation I'm not ready to have, "we need to address the immediate threats. The Zalt are escalating. The assassination attempt was a message, and if we don't respond with something louder, every minor syndicate in this sector will read it as weakness."
"Agreed." Dexter leans forward again. Tactical mode. This is where he lives, where his mind moves like a weapon finding its groove. "Response options."
We spend forty minutes building a strategy. Dexter is brilliant at this, and I hate how much I need him to be. He sees angles I miss, the military applications of our commercial networks, the way station infrastructure can be weaponized without anyone seeing the teeth until they close. Ethan provides the financial architecture, the way money moves to fund retaliation without leaving traces that lead back to us. I hold the center. I make the decisions. I feel the room.
That's the dynamic. Dexter fights. Ethan funds. I feel.
Talia standsin the doorway of the conference room like she's been asked to step into an airlock and isn't sure if the pressure will hold.
I brought her here because Dexter needs to see her. Notbecause he asked, but because hiding her is a weakness I can't afford. If my brother finds out about her through channels instead of from me, that changes the calculus in ways I can't control. So I put her in front of him. Let him assess her.
Let him say whatever he's going to say, and deal with it on my terms.
She's wearing the clothes I had sent to her quarters. Dark fabric, simple cut, nothing that marks her as cargo or captive. She looks like she belongs on a station of this caliber, and something in my chest responds to that, a satisfaction I don't examine too closely.
Dexter is standing by the tactical display, arms crossed, when she enters. His gaze goes to her the way it went to the docking bay: sweep, assess, categorize.
I feel him reading her. Not with Empri abilities, he wouldn't use those on her without my permission, but with the blunt instrument of military observation. Posture. Eye movement. The way her hands hang at her sides, deliberately unclenched, the effort of appearing calm visible to anyone who knows how to look. He sees her the way he sees everything: as a factor in an equation.
Threat. Asset. Liability. Distraction.
I watch him cycle through all four in under three seconds.
"Talia St. Laurent," I say. "She's under my protection. Her father's debts transferred to her upon his death. She's cooperating with our investigation into his cargo routes."
