Dexter's eyes don't leave her. "You're the daughter."
Talia meets his stare. I feel the spike of her pulse, fear she's controlling with the kind of discipline that makes me want to put my hands on her, but her voice comes out steady. "I am."
"Cooperating," Dexter repeats. He looks at me, through me. His Empri awareness brushes against mine, not reading me, just making sure I know he could. "You're fucking the debtor." He doesn't frame it as a question. He doesn't need to. He can feel the answer in the way my emotional field bends around her, the gravitational distortion that a person becomes when you want them past the point of strategy. "Smart?"
I don't answer. The silence is its own response, and Dexter understands silence better than most people understand language.
Talia's jaw tightens. I feel the heat of her anger, the humiliation of being reduced to a transaction in two words, and underneath it, something harder. Resolve. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't look at me for rescue.
Good.
Dexter holds his assessment for another beat, then turns back to the tactical display. "At least don't let it make you stupid."
Talia looks at me. Just for a second. Her eyes carry a question she doesn't ask out loud, and I answer it by not answering it, by standing exactly where I am, between her and my brother, a position that says everything I'm not willing to put into words.
"Talia, you can go." I say it like an order because Dexter is watching and because anything softer would be a blade I'd be handing him. "We'll continue the briefing this evening."
She nods. Walks out. Doesn't rush. The door closes behind her with a sound like a held breath released, and Dexter shakes his head once.
"She's going to cost you something."
"Everything costs something."
"That's not the reassurance you think it is."
He's right. I know he's right. I don't care, and the not caring is exactly what worries me.
"How's Elissa?"
Dexter asks it on the observation deck, three hours later, when the strategy session has been dissected and filed and encrypted, and the station has cycled into its evening lighting. The view port stretches from floor to ceiling here, and the stars beyond it are cold and constant in the way that family never manages to be.
I lean against the railing. The observation deck is one of the few places on the station where I let myself breathe, where the vastness outside makes the problems inside feel like they might have edges, limits, something I could hold in my hands and turn until I find the crack.
"She's been trailing around after Ethan like a lost creature," I say.
Dexter snorts. A sound without humor. "Still?"
"She's young."
"She's twenty-two." He says it like an accusation, though I'm not sure who he's accusing. Elissa for not growing out of it. Us for not growing her out of it. "She'll get over it. He's not going to look at her twice."
"No," I agree. Ethan is too careful for that. Too aware of the dynamics, the power imbalances, the fact that Elissa is our sister in every way that matters even if the blood doesn't match. He would never.
We're both sure of this. Elissa is the baby. The one we protect without thinking. The one who doesn't live in our particular darkness.
Dexter rolls his shoulders. A habit from combat, resetting the tension in his body the way you cycle a weapon. He stands beside me at the view port, close enough that our Empri fields overlap, and for a moment I can feel the full shape of what he carries. The years of outer-rim deployments that left scars his turquoise skin can't hide. The soldiers he lost whose names he still recites in the space between sleeping and waking. The fact that Father called him home three months ago and Father wasn't here when he arrived, and the absence of that man is a wound my brother is treating with strategy because grief would require him to stop moving.
"You can't hold this with one hand on the wheel and one on a human," he says.
I look at him. His profile against the starfield is sharp, all angles, a face designed for giving orders in low light. His bioluminescence pulses faintly along his jaw, blue-white, steady as a targeting laser.
"Watch me."
He turns. Meets my eyes. His are the same electric blue as mine, but colder. Not because he feels less, but because he learned to keep the heat deeper, in a place where it fuels him instead of burning him.
"You're not Father," he says. "Stop trying to prove it by being his opposite."
The cut goes in clean. No resistance. Through the muscle and into the bone, the kind of strike that doesn't hurt until you try to move and discover something structural has been severed.
