"Power isn't given," he says. "It's taken. Or earned."
"I'm earning it right now. I'm standing in front of you asking for something and refusing to leave until I get it."
"You're standing in front of me making demands you can't enforce. That's not power. That's noise." He stands, and the room reorganizes itself around him the way it always does, gravity bending toward the center of mass. He comes around the desk and stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze. "You want power on this station? Real power, not the borrowed kind that evaporates the moment you walk into a corridor where my name isn't enough? You earn it."
"How?"
"You have something I need."
The words settle into my stomach like cold water. Not because I don't understand what he's saying. Because I do.
"The debtor networks," I say.
"You're smart. That's one of the reasons I kept you." His hand comes up and his thumb traces the line of my jaw, a gesture that is somehow both tender and clinical, like he's checking the quality of something he owns. "I control the economic structure. The labor assignments. The enforcement. But the informal networks, the conversations that happen after lights-out, the hierarchies that form when people are desperate and need someone to follow, those are invisible to me. My cameras catch movement. They don't catch trust."
"You want me to be an informant."
"I want you to be useful." His thumb pauses at the corner of my mouth. "Who's organizing. Who's complaining. Who might be useful, and who might be dangerous. You can move through those spaces. They trust you. Or they will, if you give them reason to."
"You mean if I help Renna."
"Renna gets treated. Transferred to better quarters. Proper medication, proper care. In exchange, you give me what I need to manage the population effectively."
I stare at him. His eyes are steady, calm, the grey-green of deep water with something moving beneath the surface, the scar through his eyebrow more intimidating than I remember.
He's not hiding what he's asking. He's not dressing it up or softening the edges. He's laying it out the way he lays everything out: with the precision of a man who has never needed to deceive because his power makes deception unnecessary.
I think about Kira's hand on the curtain frame, white-knuckled. I think about Renna's breathing, that wet terrible rattle that sounded like a clock running down. I think about the word informant and what it means, the particular ugliness of trading other people's trust for the currency of someone else's survival.
"If I do this," I say. "I need real clearance. Not companion tier. Administrative access. I need to be able to move through this station without your guards putting me on my knees."
"That can be arranged."
"And I need it in the system. Permanent. Not something you can revoke the next time I make you angry."
His thumb presses into the soft skin below my ear, and I feel my pulse jump against it, feel him feel it. "You don't make me angry, Talia. You make me interested. That's far more dangerous for both of us."
"Do we have a deal?"
He lets the silence stretch. Lets me sit in it, lets me feel the shape of what I'm agreeing to. Then he nods once.
"We have a deal."
I turn to leave and I make it three steps before his voice stops me.
"Talia." I look back over my shoulder. He's standing exactly where I left him, his hands at his sides, the projection screen casting its cold blue light behind him like a halo that chose the wrong man. "The kneeling won't happen again. That's not a concession. It's a correction. No one touches what's mine without consequence."
The way he says it makes the floor feel unsteady under my feet. Not a kindness. A territorial claim. The guards won't pay because I was humiliated.
They'll pay because someone handled his property without authorization.
I walk out before my face can show him how much that distinction costs me.
The information comes easierthan I expected, and that's the part that makes me sick.
I visit the labor ward in a few hours. Renna's transfer is already in process. Two medics arrive with a transport gurney and proper equipment, and they handle her with the efficient gentleness of people who have been told this particular patient matters to someone who matters. Kira watches with an expression I can't name, something between relief and a wariness she can't quite suppress.
"You did it," she says, when the medics have taken Renna through the doors that were locked to me yesterday and that now open at the touch of my newly upgraded clearance chip.
