"And tip him that we're watching." I hear the excuse even as I say it, hear how neatly it lets me avoid the harder conversation, which is that pulling Elissa back means explaining to her why, and explaining means watching her face when she realizes the one person on this station who made her feel like she belonged might have been engineering that feeling through her skin. I'm not ready to do that to her. I tell myself it's strategy. It's not. It's cowardice wearing a better suit.
Dexter reads it in my face. He doesn't call me on it, which is worse.
I go back to the hub in the dead hours between second and third shift, when the corridors are dim and the station's population thins to the night crews and the insomniacs and the people whose business prefers the dark. Astra has been replaced at the main console by one of her subordinates, a quiet woman named Pell who tracks data the way a predator tracks movement, with total stillness and occasional bursts of lethal precision.
"Anything new?" I drop into the chair Astra vacated. It's still warm.
"Eames is in his quarters. No outgoing comms for thepast four hours." Pell's voice carries the flat cadence of someone reporting weather. "I flagged a sixty-three-second dead zone in his node activity at 0217. Could be a system hiccup. Could be a compressed burst. I've captured the window for analysis."
"Good." I stare at the feeds. Ethan's door is closed, his quarters dark on the thermal overlay. Just a body in a bed, generating the standard heat signature of sleep. Peaceful. Unremarkable. A man resting after a long day of being exactly what everyone expects him to be.
I cycle through the other feeds. Level six, where the debtor housing gives way to the market stalls and the cramped offices of people who owe me enough to work for free. Level four, the training bays, empty now except for a maintenance bot buffing scuff marks off the sparring mat. Level two, officers' quarters, where Dexter's light is still on because Dexter's light is always still on.
I find her on level five.
Talia isn't in her quarters. She's in the small briefing room adjacent to Astra's secondary office, seated at a table with a portable data terminal and three separate information feeds scrolling across its surface. Her hair is pulled back, and she's wearing one of the station-issue shirts that's too big for her, the collar slipping off one shoulder in a way that sends a specific kind of heat through my blood that I don't have time for. She's reading. Making notes. Cross-referencing something on the terminal with a handwritten list I can't make out from the camera angle.
I pull up the metadata on her feeds. Debtor network communications. Population movement data for the lower levels. Resource allocation reports. She's building a map of the station's social architecture, the informal power structures that live beneath the organizational charts, thealliances and grudges and dependencies that actually determine how this place functions.
Nobody told her to do this.
I sit there, watching her work, and something in my chest recalibrates. It's not the wanting, though the wanting is always there, a gravitational constant that I've stopped trying to resist and started learning to use. This is something different. This is the recognition that the woman on that screen is not the woman I brought here.
The cargo has become something else entirely.
She's learning my world not because I forced her to, but because she's decided to survive in it on her own terms, and her version of survival involves understanding every system well enough to turn it into a weapon or a tool.
She is becoming a partner. The word settles into me with a weight that's half comfort and half terror, because partners are leverage, and leverage in my world is just another word for a vulnerability someone can use to put you on your knees.
I watch her for too long. I know I'm watching too long because Pell's silence behind me has shifted from professional to pointed, and because the clock on the secondary monitor tells me I've been sitting here for nine minutes without blinking at anything else.
I close the feed. I don't go to her.
There will be time for that later, or there won't, and either way the Vex are coming, and Ethan's wall is still standing, and my sister is sleeping in a room three corridors from a man who might be sharpening her into a key to our destruction.
I cycle back to Ethan's feed. Watch the heat signature breathe.
The alarms don't start slowly.There's no buildup, no gradual escalation from yellow to red, no courtesy warning that the world is about to crack open. One moment the hub is quiet, just the soft click of Pell's keystrokes and the subsonic hum of the station's bones. The next, every screen goes white, then red, then splits into a grid of emergency feeds that tile themselves across the wall like a mosaic of oncoming ruin.
Astra's voice comes through the comms, stripped of every ounce of calm I've ever heard her maintain. "We've got a breach. Multiple entry points. The Vex Collective." A burst of static eats three seconds. Her voice comes back harder. "They're not testing anymore. This is an invasion."
The floor shudders beneath my feet. Not a vibration, not the gentle reminder that we live inside a metal shell hanging in the void. A shudder. The station groaning in its joints, the sound of something massive making contact with the outer hull, the kind of impact that travels through the superstructure and arrives in your skeleton before your ears register the noise. My coffee cup slides off the console and shatters on the floor.
Pell is already on her feet, pulling up defense grids, routing emergency protocols, her hands moving with the mechanical precision of someone who trained for exactly this moment and is now living inside it. I'm standing too, though I don't remember the decision to stand, my hands flat on the console, my eyes scanning the cascade of red across every feed.
Multiple entry points. Not one breach, not a focused assault on a single weakness. Multiple. They mapped us. Dexter was right, and the timeline wasn't days, it washours, and we spent those hours watching a man sleep while the enemy positioned themselves to cut us open from every direction at once.
I pull up Dexter's comm. "Dexter."
"Already moving." His voice is flat, clipped, the voice of a man who has been waiting for a war and is almost relieved it's finally here. "I've got defensive teams deploying to sections seven, twelve, and fifteen. The outer ring is compromised at three points. I need you to authorize the emergency seal on the civilian levels."
"Authorized. Lock it down."
The station shudders again. Closer this time, the impact translating through the walls as a deep percussive thud that I feel in my back teeth. Somewhere below us, something metallic screams, the sound of a bulkhead giving way or a hull plate buckling under force it was never meant to absorb.
I'm already pulling up feeds, cycling through cameras, looking for Elissa, looking for Talia, looking for the locations of every person whose survival is non-negotiable. Talia is still in the briefing room on level five, on her feet now, her hand on the data terminal like she's trying to decide whether to run or keep reading. Elissa's quarters show a thermal signature sitting up in bed. Awake. Scared. Alone.
And then I find Ethan.
