"You're not starting from nothing," she says. "That helps."
"Is this the part where you tell me I have potential?"
"This is the part where I tell you your guard drops on the left and your instinct is to retreat when you should be closing distance." She caps her water. "Potential is just failure that hasn't happened yet."
I take a long drink. The water tastes like station: flat, recycled, faintly mineral, the ghost of whatever was in the pipes before. My arms are shaking and my lungs feelscraped raw, and something in my chest is lighter than it's been in weeks. The simple animal satisfaction of using my body for something other than surviving.
"The checkpoint," I say, when the silence has settled into something that feels less like surveillance and more like rest. "The guard. He knew I was a debtor and he knew I was with Zane and he decided to test which one mattered more."
Astra doesn't look at me. "It's not about whether they touch you. They'll always try. It's about the cost of trying."
"And if I'm not in a position to set costs?"
"Then you get in one." She sets her canister down. "You're Empri-touched. You read the room better than you think you do, but you're leaking everywhere. Every emotion on your face, in your posture, in the way you hold your hands. You get used to being read, or you learn to control what you project. Those are the only options."
I think of Zane's hand on my chin, turning my face toward his. The way he reads me like a frequency he's already tuned to. I wonder if he knows how much I broadcast, or if for him it's not broadcasting at all but just the way I sound, constant and loud and impossible to ignore.
"What about Dexter Torrence?" The question leaves my mouth before I've decided to ask it, pulled out by something in Astra's voice when she saidyou learn to control what you project. Like she was speaking from a specific kind of experience.
Astra goes still.
Not the combat stillness of someone ready to strike. The other kind. The kind that lives in the body of a woman who has just heard a name she wasn't prepared for, and every muscle locks down because the alternative is something she can't afford.
"What about him?"
Her voice is flat. Not angry. Controlled in the way Astra controls everything, with the precision of someone who has learned that the alternative is worse. But I can see it, the tension in her jaw, the way her fingers have gone rigid around the water canister.
"Nothing." I hold my hands up, palms out. A gesture of retreat that is also an acknowledgment. "I just noticed…"
"You notice too much." She picks up her canister and throws it in the recycler with more force than necessary. "Back on the mat."
We don't discuss it further. But something has been said in the space between the words, and neither of us pretends otherwise. Astra trains with Dexter's family, sleeps on a station run by his brother, breathes his recycled air. And whatever Dexter Torrence is to her, it's the one crack in her control.
Is it leverage or recognition? It's one woman seeing another woman's wound and choosing not to press.
We train for another hour. By the end I'm soaked through and my arms won't stop trembling and there's a new bruise forming on my hip where she swept my legs and I went down hard. But I also landed a clean strike to her ribs that made her grunt, and when she looks at me as I'm leaving, there's something in her face that isn't approval but might be its precursor.
"Same time tomorrow," she says. Not a question.
"Same time tomorrow."
The station gardensexist because the Torrences understand something fundamental about power, which is that it must occasionally look beautiful to remain tolerable.
Hydroponics serves the practical purpose, rows of engineered crops growing under artificial sunlight in sealed bays on the agricultural level. But the gardens are something else. A sprawling atrium near the station's central axis where real soil has been imported, where engineered trees grow toward a view port ceiling that lets in actual starlight, where the air smells like chlorophyll and wet earth instead of recycled nothing. It's the closest thing to a planet this station has, and it exists because Malachar Torrence decided his adopted home should have one beautiful lie.
I find Elissa among the ferns.
She's kneeling in a patch of ground cover, her pale fingers working through the leaves of something that looks like it shouldn't grow in artificial gravity but does anyway, thriving in defiance of its circumstances. She's the youngest Torrence, the only human, and she looks it. Pale skin, pale eyes, dark brown, almost black hair that falls around her face in a way the Empri women's never does. Among the blue-skinned crew members who tend the garden around her, she stands out like a single white stone on a dark shore.
She looks up when she hears my footsteps and smiles, and the smile is genuine in a way that catches me off guard. I've been on this station long enough now that genuine warmth feels foreign, like a language I used to speak but have forgotten the grammar of.
"Talia." She brushes soil from her hands and sits back on her heels. "I was hoping you'd come through here. I see you sometimes, on the upper walkway."
"You've been watching me?"
"Maybe. You're interesting to watch, my brother likes you." She says it without guile, and I believe her. Elissa Torrence has the rare quality of meaning exactly what shesays, which in this family must feel like a disability. "Sit with me? I have questions."
I sit. The ground cover is soft under my legs, and the smell of living things fills my lungs and makes something in my chest ache with a homesickness I didn't know I still carried. Not for any specific home. For the concept.
