The hologram flickers, as if even the light carrying his image is uncertain.
"Don't follow me. Whatever you find in these notes,whatever Corso tells you if he's still here, do not attempt to cross the threshold. I don't know what's on the other side for certain, and I won't have my sons pay for my curiosity."
He leans forward slightly, and for a fraction of a second the composed mask drops and I see something I've never seen on my father's face. Not fear.
Something past fear, on the other side of it, where a man arrives after he's been afraid for so long that the emotion has burned itself out and left only the residue: resolve.
"Don't trust anyone who tells you to follow me. Not the council. Not your advisors. No one." His eyes, even in holographic rendering, find the exact place where I'm standing. "And sons. Whatever I was to you, don't let it determine what you become."
The recording ends. His face collapses into light and then into nothing, and the lab settles back into its amber-lit quiet, and my brother and I stand side by side in the space our father used to occupy, breathing air that smells like something that shouldn't exist.
Dexter's hands are fists at his sides. "He left. He just... left."
"He did what he always did." My voice comes out flat, controlled, and I don't trust it. I don't trust the steadiness of it, because underneath that surface I can feel something structural threatening to give way. "He made a decision. He executed it. He didn't consult anyone who might have talked him out of it."
"He didn't say goodbye."
"He said don't follow. That's close enough."
Dexter turns to me, and the look on his face is one I haven't seen since we were children. Since the night ourmother was traded and he climbed into my bed because the dark in his room was too large to hold alone.
Raw. Young. Furious in the way that only loss can make a person furious, when the thing you've lost didn't have the decency to be taken from you but chose to go.
"I need to hit something," he says.
"Later." I reach past him and eject the holocaster from the console, pocketing it. "Right now we secure these notes. Every page, every data core. Astra gets copies. No one else."
"Not Ethan?"
The question sits between us with more weight than it should.
"Not Ethan," I say. "Not yet."
Dexter searches my face, finds something there he doesn't like but understands, and nods once. We work in silence after that, cataloguing and packing with the methodical efficiency of men who need their hands busy because if they stop, they'll have to think, and thinking right now is a door that opens onto a room neither of us wants to enter.
I go to Talia.
Not for strategy. Not for her intelligence on the debtors or her sharp mind or any of the things I should want from her, the useful things, the things that make sense within the framework of what she is to me. I go because the corridors are too quiet after Dexter splits off to handle the evidence, and my quarters feel like a mausoleum, and somewhere between the sealed section and my own door I stopped walking toward solitude and started walking toward her.
Her quarters. I override the lock because I can, because the station responds to me the way it responded to him, and I am trying very hard not to think about what that means.
She's awake. Sitting cross-legged on her bed with a datapad balanced on her knee, wearing a thin shirt that doesn't belong to me and loose pants that ride low on her hips, and her hair is down around her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a different person. Softer. Younger. Someone who might have existed before debts and missing fathers and me.
She looks up when I enter, and whatever she sees on my face makes her set the datapad aside without a word. She doesn't ask what's wrong. She doesn't offer platitudes or comfort or any of the things that would make me turn around and leave. She just watches me, those dark eyes reading me the way she reads everyone, except with me she doesn't bother hiding that she's doing it.
"You look like someone who just found out something they can't unfind," she says.
I close the door behind me. The lock engages. The room is small, smaller than mine, and it smells like her. Like the soap the station provides, generic and clean, but underneath that something warmer, something that lives in her skin and her hair and has started to live in my lungs when I'm not careful.
"My father left a message." The words come out before I choose to release them. "He's gone. He left. Voluntarily."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't do the thing people do when you tell them something terrible, the theatrical widening of the eyes, the performance of sympathy. She absorbs it. Her jaw tightens, just slightly, and she nods once.
"Are you here because you want to talk about it?"
"No."
"Are you here because you want to not talk about it?"
