"And if we don't know what gear we need because we don't know what we're walking into?"
Dexter's jaw works. He looks so much like our father in these moments that it's like arguing with a ghost. The same broad shoulders, the same restless intelligence that mistakes speed for strategy. "You're stalling."
"I'm thinking. You should try it."
His eyes narrow, and for a second the room holds something sharp between us, the old friction that's never quite settled into either rivalry or respect. Then he exhales through his nose and straightens. "Fine. We go in smart. But we go in today, Zane. Not tomorrow. Not when it's convenient. That section has been sealed for six months with our father missing or dead. Whatever's in there isn't getting less dangerous with time."
He's right. I hate that, but he's right.
"Suit up," I say. "Full environmental. We go in two hours."
The airthat escapes the sealed section isn't stale. It should be, after six months of quarantine with no apparent ventilation schedule logged, but it moves against my face with a warmth that has no business being here. A current, faint and steady, as if something deeper in the section is exhaling.
Dexter notices too. I see it in the way his hand moves to the sidearm on his hip, instinctive, the weapon already drawn before his conscious mind has decided to be afraid. "You feel that?"
"Yes."
We move in. The corridor beyond the seal is standard station architecture, durasteel walls and grated flooring, but the lighting has been modified. The overhead strips areoff. In their place, someone has installed low-output lamps at floor level, casting everything in an amber wash that turns our shadows into tall, wavering things that follow us like attendants. The air smells like soil after rain, except I haven't smelled actual rain since I was seven years old on a planet I barely remember.
"Someone's been living here," Dexter says, low.
He's right again, and I'm going to stop keeping count. The first room we enter is part lab, part living quarters. A cot, neatly made, its blanket military-tight. A hydration station with protein supplements arranged by date. A pair of boots by the door, worn at the heels, sized for a man of average build. Corso Vell's boots, presumably. Except Corso Vell isn't here.
What is here: research equipment. A portable spectrometer, analysis screens, data cores stacked in careful towers. And notes. Handwritten notes, actual pen on actual paper, which is an extravagance on a station where every gram of non-essential material is a luxury.
I know the handwriting before I read a single word. The sharp, angular script that leaned hard to the right, as if the hand that made it was always in a hurry to get to the next thought. Malachar Torrence wrote like a man being chased by his own ideas.
I pick up the first page. Dexter comes to stand beside me, close enough that I can hear his breathing change as he sees it too.
Readings consistent for the fourteenth consecutive day. The tear is stable. Oscillation within predicted parameters. Corso continues his monitoring rotation without complaint, though I've noted his sleep patterns deteriorating. Exposure effects remain within acceptable thresholds. Must determine ifproximity duration correlates with cognitive impact before proceeding.
The tear.
I set the page down and pick up another.
The other side is not empty. Spectral analysis confirms structures. Whether organic or constructed, I cannot determine from this distance. The tear permits observation but resists physical interaction. Tools inserted beyond the threshold return altered at the molecular level. Living tissue has not been tested. I will not test it on Corso.
I will not test it on Corso. Which begs the question my father's careful handwriting doesn't answer: who was he willing to test it on?
Dexter has moved deeper into the lab, pulling open cabinets, scanning data cores with the portable reader he brought. His silence tells me more than his usual noise would. We're both reading the shape of something we didn't expect, and neither of us knows what to do with the geometry of it.
"Zane." His voice is different now. Quiet, almost careful, which sounds so wrong coming from him that I cross the room before I've made the decision to move. He's standing in front of a console built into the far wall, its screen dark, and his hand rests on a small device plugged into its base. A holocaster. The kind used for personal recordings. "It's addressed to us."
The label on the device, in that same urgent handwriting:For Z. and D. Torrence. Play in my absence.
In his absence. Not "in case of emergency." Not "if something happens to me." In his absence, as if he knew, with the same precision he applied to everything else, that he was going to leave.
Dexter looks at me. I look at the device. The lab humsaround us with its impossible warm air and its faint ozone smell and the silence of a room that's been keeping secrets for half a year.
I press play.
My father's face fills the air above the console, rendered in the blue-white grain of holoprojection, and for one vertiginous second I am twelve years old and he is explaining to me why mercy is a resource that must be spent wisely. He looks tired in the recording. The lines around his eyes are deeper than I remember, and his hair, silver at the temples when I last saw him, has gone full white. He's wearing a lab coat over his station clothes, and behind him I can see equipment I don't recognize, structures of light and metal that don't conform to any engineering I know.
"Zane. Dexter." His voice is the same. Precise, measured, the voice of a man who has weighed every word before releasing it. "If you're seeing this, I didn't come back."
Dexter makes a sound beside me. Small, involuntary, the kind of sound a man makes when something hits him in the chest.
"The anomaly is real. What I've been studying, what I've been documenting in these notes, it's not a malfunction. It's not radiation. It's a tear in the structure of space itself, and it's been here longer than this station. Perhaps longer than our species. There is something on the other side." He pauses, and in the pause I see him choose his next words the way he used to choose which son to discipline. Carefully. With an understanding of consequences. "I'm going to find out what."
