"Tell me about Earth," she says.
"I've never been to Earth."
"The colonies, then. What was it like? Growing up on ships, on stations that aren't this one?" She pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, and the gesture makes her look younger than she probably is. Old enough to be forming her own mind, young enough that the shape of it is still soft. "What's it like to be somewhere where you're not the only one?"
"The only human?"
"The only one who doesn't belong." She says it quietly, without self-pity, the way you state a fact you've long since stopped fighting. "I love my family. Malachar chose me, and Zane and Dex are my brothers in every way that counts. But I can't do what they do. I can't feel what they feel. I pick up emotions the way anyone does, by watching faces and guessing. They pick them up the way you'd pick up a scent on the wind. I'm always a beat behind."
I think about telling her that a beat behind is still close. That human empathy has its own power, its own frequency. But she's not asking to be comforted. She's asking to understand, and those are different needs.
So I tell her about the transport ships. About growing up in corridors that doubled as playgrounds, about learning to read artificial gravity by the vibration in the floor plates, about the colony stations where humans lived in clusters and fought over water rights and told their children storiesabout a planet they'd never see. I tell her about the noise of it, the constant human noise, voices and arguments and laughter echoing off metal walls. And I watch her drink it in like water, this girl raised in luxury and power who is thirsty for something her family cannot give her.
"Ethan's been teaching me things," she says, after a while. The shift is abrupt, the way conversation turns when someone has been holding something back and finally lets it slip. "About the station. About politics, about how the families really work. He's the only one who doesn't treat me like I'll break."
There it is. The crush in her voice, tender and transparent, the way a bruise shows through pale skin. She says his name the way you say the name of someone who has made you feel seen for the first time, and the sound of it puts ice in my stomach.
I think of Ethan Eames. His careful smiles. His hands, always finding reasons to touch. The way Zane watches him with the flat suspicion of a predator recognizing a different species of hunter. I think about what it means to be half-Empri, to have whatever diluted version of their touch sensitivity lives in Ethan's fingertips, and I think about Elissa, who is fully human, who would feel that touch as warmth and attention and special without understanding the mechanism beneath it.
I should say something.
I should tell her to be careful, that Ethan is not what he seems, that the attention of men who make you feel special is often the most dangerous attention of all. But what do I say, exactly?
That I have a feeling?
That her brother's business partner gives me the creeps in ways I can't articulate?
That the man teaching her politics might be reading her emotions through his skin and feeding her back exactly what she wants to feel?
I have no proof. Just the hum of wrongness in my gut and the memory of Zane's voice sayingwatch him.
"He sounds like a good teacher," I say.
It costs me something, that sentence. A small betrayal of the instinct screaming in my chest that Elissa Torrence is being cultivated, carefully and deliberately, by a man who understands exactly how to make a lonely girl feel chosen. I can taste the cowardice of it, metallic and sour on the back of my tongue.
Should I have said something? I'll ask myself this later, in the dark, when the consequences have bloomed into something I can't unfeel. I'll replay this moment and wonder if silence was strategy or selfishness, and I won't be able to tell the difference.
Elissa smiles at me. Warm, trusting, lit up from inside with the uncomplicated happiness of someone who still believes attention is the same as love.
I smile back. And the ice in my stomach doesn't thaw.
The debtorcommon area has its own ecosystem, its own hierarchies and alliances and unspoken rules, and I can feel the shift in them the moment I walk through the door.
Conversations don't stop. That would be too obvious, and the people who survive long enough to still be herehave learned subtlety the hard way. But they thin. Voices lower. Eyes find me and then find each other, and in the quick language of glances, I am discussed, assessed, and categorized.
I am no longer one of them.
Kira is sitting at the far table with two women I recognize from the work rotations, their heads close together over cups of the bitter station coffee that tastes like engine coolant and despair. She sees me coming and doesn't look away, which is worse than if she had. Looking away would mean she's avoiding me. Looking right at me means she's decided.
"Kira." I pull a chair from the next table and sit without waiting for an invitation, because waiting would be admitting I need one.
"Talia." My name in her mouth sounds different than it used to. Colder. Stripped of the warmth that comes from shared circumstance, from the bond of two women treading water in the same drowning pool.
The other two women don't greet me. One of them stands, takes her coffee, and leaves. The other stays but angles her body away, a physical declaration of sides.
"Renna's better," I say. Because that's the truth, and because I want to remind her what I traded for.
"Renna's better," Kira agrees. "And everyone wants to know why. Who called in a favor. Who has access to the kind of medical care debtors don't get." She turns her cup in her hands, the ceramic scraping against the table surface with a sound like a tooth being pulled. "Funny thing about favors on this station. They always come from somewhere. And the people who get them always owe something in return."
