My bioluminescence flickers. I feel it along my arms, my throat, the involuntary brightening that's the Empri equivalent of a flinch. I can't stop it.
Dexter sees it. And his own markings pulse inresponse, a brief sympathetic flare along the backs of his hands. He feels the wound he dealt. That's the cruelty of what we are. He cut me and felt the blade go in from both sides.
Neither of us apologizes. Torrence men don't. We just stand in the wreckage we make of each other and call it family.
"I'm not trying to be his opposite," I say, when I trust my voice again. "I'm trying to be better."
"Better." Dexter tastes the word like he doesn't like the flavor. "Better gets you killed in the spaces between what people deserve and what they get. Father understood that. He wasn't good. He was effective."
"And he's gone."
"Yes." Dexter's voice is quiet now. The rage banked. The grief closer to the surface than he'd ever allow anyone else to see. "He is."
We stand in that for a while. Two brothers in the dark, looking at stars that have no opinion about whether we survive this. The station hums around us, recycled air and gravitational generators and the ten thousand small systems that keep people alive in the void, and all of it runs on the infrastructure our father built and the empire our family holds and the choices I'm making that my brother thinks will ruin us.
Maybe he's right. Maybe the hand I'm keeping on Talia is the hand I should be using to hold the knife. Maybe wanting her is a liability that will metastasize into something fatal, and Dexter can see the tumor because he's standing outside my body where the X-ray works.
Or maybe he's wrong. Maybe the man who can hold both, the empire and the woman, the violence and the want, is the man who wins this.
I don't know yet. And the not knowing is the sharpest thing in this room full of sharp things.
Dexter pushes off the railing. Checks the chrono on his wrist. Military habit. Always tracking time like it's ammunition he's spending.
"One more thing." He's at the door, his kit bag over his shoulder, his face back to stone. "The Vex Collective is moving resources to the outer stations. Supply caches. Personnel. Infrastructure that doesn't have a civilian explanation."
I go still.
"Something's coming," he says. "Bigger than the Zalt assassination attempt. Bigger than whoever funded it. Someone's playing a long game, and we're not seeing the board."
The Vex Collective. The name lands in my chest like a slug that doesn't exit. They're old power, pre-syndicate, the kind of organization that makes families like ours look like a recent innovation. If they're mobilizing, the scale of what's coming isn't something I can address with territorial strategy and financial maneuvering.
I think of Malachar.
Of the anomaly in the Drift that swallowed him.
Of research so dangerous he either destroyed it or someone destroyed it for him.
I think of Talia's father.
Marcus St. Laurent, running cargo to nowhere for reasons nobody could explain. Shipping coordinates that pointed at empty space. Manifests that didn't match any known supply chain.
I think of the way those threads might connect, the shape of a pattern I can almost see, like a constellationwhere the stars are there but the lines between them haven't been drawn yet.
Dexter holds my gaze for one long second. Then he walks out, and the door closes, and I'm alone with the stars and the terrible suspicion that every threat I'm fighting is a limb of something I haven't seen the body of yet.
The pieces are all there. Malachar's disappearance. The Zalt escalation. The Vex mobilization. Talia's father and his ghost routes. The anomaly in the Drift.
I can feel them in my awareness like objects in a dark room, each one solid and distinct, and I know if I could find the light switch the shape they make together would change everything.
But the room stays dark. And something in the dark is breathing.
Chapter 8
Talia
The medical wardsmells like antiseptic stretched too thin, diluted past the point of doing its job, layered over something sour and human that no amount of recycled air can scrub clean. I tell myself I'm here to learn the layout and map the corridors, the guard rotations, the places where Zane's authority thins enough to show the bones of this station underneath. Intelligence gathering.
The lie tastes flat before I've even finished thinking it.
