"Your father's message. He said don't trust anyone who tells you to follow him."
I don't move. "Yes."
"Ethan was the one who suggested looking in the sealed section."
The silence that follows is not the same silence we've been lying in. That silence was warm, inhabited, alive with the things we chose not to say. This silence is cold. Structural. The silence of a room that has just changed shape around you while you weren't looking.
I stare at the ceiling. I think about Ethan in the intelligence hub, his careful pauses, his curated revelations. The way he offered the sealed section like a gift, wrapped in plausible deniability and tied with the bow of helpful concern.Your father never told me why. Though I suspect it's related to his personal research.The perfect amount of knowledge. Just enough to send me looking. Just enough to open that door.
"Yes," I say. "He was."
Talia doesn't say anything else. She doesn't need to. The conclusion sits between us in the dark, growing colder by the second, and my arm around her tightens without conscious thought, as if the danger is already in the room with us and the only thing I can do is hold onto what's mine.
The enemy might be closer than either of us knew. And I invited him in.
Chapter 10
Talia
The door chimes,but I don't get visitors. The debtors who used to stop by have stopped, and the Torrences don't knock.
When I open it, Astra Venn fills the frame the way a bulkhead fills a breach. She's in training clothes, a fitted tank over compression leggings, her dark hair pulled back so severely it changes the geometry of her face. Without her usual tactical vest and sidearm, she looks less like the head of Zane's security detail and more like a woman who could kill you with her hands and considers that sufficient.
She looks me up and down. Cataloguing. Not the way men do it, but the way engineers assess load-bearing walls.
"You want to not end up on your knees again?" She doesn't frame it as pity. There's something closer to irritation in her voice, like my weakness at the checkpoint was a personal inconvenience. "I'll teach you. But not because he asked. Because I don't like wasted potential."
"Zane sent you."
"Zane mentioned you could use work. I'm here because I watched the security feed from Checkpoint Nine and itpissed me off." Her jaw tightens, a small flex of muscle beneath dark skin. "There's a difference."
I think about saying no. About the principle of it, the optics, the way every gift in this station comes with wire attached. But my knee throbs under my thumb, and I can still feel the phantom pressure of that guard's hand on the back of my neck, and principle is a luxury I burned through weeks ago.
"When?"
"Now." She turns and walks, not waiting to see if I follow.
I follow.
The training room is deep in the station's operational levels, a space that smells like recycled sweat and the chemical tang of sanitized floor mats. The lighting is harsh, the flat industrial kind that forgives nothing, and the walls are lined with racks of practice weapons that look too real for comfort. Two Empri crew members are sparring in the far corner, their movements liquid and precise, skin flushed the deeper blue that comes with exertion. They glance at Astra when we enter and immediately relocate to the other room.
"Stand here." She points to the center of the mat. "Show me what you have."
"I grew up on transport ships. My father taught me to handle myself."
"I didn't ask for your resume. I said show me."
She comes at me without warning, a controlled strike aimed at my midsection that I manage to deflect with my forearm. The impact jars up to my shoulder, and my body remembers before my brain does, shifting my weight, dropping my center of gravity, turning so her momentum carries her past me instead of through me.
Astra resets. Something in her expression changes. Not impressed, exactly, but recalculated.
"Again."
The next thirty minutes are brutal. She doesn't coddle and she doesn't narrate. She attacks, I respond, and when I respond wrong she puts me on the mat and waits for me to get up. No encouragement, no sympathy. Just the flat assessment of someone building a map of my capabilities and finding it incomplete but not empty.
My body remembers more than I expected. The muscle memory of a childhood spent in corridors where you learned to move fast or get pinned, where the dock kids played rough and the crew played rougher. My father's voice in the back of my skull sayingelbows in, hips under you, never let them get behind you. I'm rusty, and Astra is operating at maybe thirty percent of what she's capable of, and she still puts me down six times out of ten. But the four times I stay standing, I earn them.
She calls a break. Tosses me a water canister from the rack by the wall and takes one for herself, drinking standing up, not even breathing hard.
