Screen seven. The same feed I've been watching for three days, the same corridor on level three, the same angle that's shown me nothing but a man going about his unremarkable life. He's standing in the junction where the corridor splits toward the eastern docking ring, the section that Astra just flagged as one of the breach points. He's alone. He's not running. He's not moving toward a defensiveposition or a weapon locker or any of the emergency stations that every officer on this station knows by heart.
He's standing still.
And he's smiling.
Not the polite, controlled expression I've watched him wear for three days. Not the patient warmth he shows Elissa or the professional neutrality he deploys in meetings. This is something else. Something I've never seen on his face, because he's never let me see it. It lives behind the wall, behind the smooth painted surface I've been knocking on, and now, in the chaos, in the moment where every eye on this station is looking at the incoming fire instead of looking at him, he's let it through.
It's a small smile. Satisfied. The expression of a man watching a plan unfold exactly the way it was designed to.
The station screams around me. The alarms climb in pitch. Pell is shouting coordinates into a comm channel I'm no longer listening to.
I stare at Ethan Eames smiling on screen seven, and the wall I've been trying to see through becomes a mirror. It shows me what I should have seen weeks ago, what I would have seen if I'd been less patient, less careful, less committed to being smarter than my father. The enemy isn't at the gates. The enemy has been eating at my table, training my sister, walking my corridors with a smile I was never meant to catch.
And the siege has begun.
Chapter 14
Talia
My hand goesto the comm unit clipped at my hip, but the channel is already flooded. Voices overlapping, Dexter's security teams calling positions, someone screaming about hull integrity in sector nine. Zane's voice cuts through once, a single command I can't fully parse before it's swallowed by static.
The mark on my wrist flares hot. His adrenaline or mine, I can't tell anymore. They bleed into each other the way ink bleeds into water, and what's left is just a color I don't have a name for.
I should find him. That's the smart play, the safe play, the play that the woman I was twenty-five days ago would make without thinking. Find the powerful man. Stand behind him. Survive.
But my feet are already moving in the other direction.
Toward the debtor quarters.
The corridors are chaos. Station personnel running with purpose or running blind, some armed, some just fleeing. I flatten myself into a service alcove as a squad of Dexter's security forces pounds past, their boots hittingthe deck plates in unison, weapons charged and humming that high-pitched whine that sets my jaw on edge. None of them look at me. I'm furniture. I'm wallpaper. I'm the boss's woman, which means I'm either untouchable or irrelevant depending on who's doing the math.
The debtor quarters sit in the lower ring of Veridian-7, where the artificial gravity runs a fraction heavier and the air recyclers work a fraction harder and everything costs a fraction more from your body just to exist. The walls here are thinner, and I can hear things through them that I couldn't hear in Zane's quarters: the grinding of the water reclamation system, the distant percussion of the station's core keeping its ugly heart beating.
I round the corner into the main throughway and stop.
There are people here. Dozens of them, maybe more, clustered in the open space where the corridor widens into what passes for a communal area. Debtors. My people. But they don't look like the debtors I left behind when Zane pulled me into his orbit. They look organized. They look armed, some of them, with makeshift weapons cobbled together from maintenance tools and stripped-down panel fixtures. And they look angry with a specific, directed fury that tells me someone has been stoking this fire long before today.
Kira stands at the center of them.
She's changed. Not physically, not really, though her hair is pulled back tight and there's something sharp and unfamiliar in the set of her shoulders. The change is in her face. The fear is gone. The careful, calculating survival that kept her alive in these quarters for months has been replaced by something incandescent, something that burns behind her eyes like a reactor running too hot.
She sees me. And the look she gives me could strip paint from a bulkhead.
"Look who crawled back." Her voice carries. She wants everyone to hear. "The Torrence pet, come to check on the livestock."
The words land in the center of my chest. I keep my feet planted. "Kira. What is this?"
"This is what happens when people stop waiting to be saved by the people selling them." She steps forward, and the crowd shifts with her, a single organism responding to its nerve center. "The Vex are here, Talia. And when they take this station, the debts go away. All of them. Every contract, every bond, every leash. Gone."
The murmur that runs through the crowd is hungry. I hear it in voices I recognize, people I shared ration packs with, people whose names I know, whose children I've watched sleep in the corridors when the quarters were too crowded.
"That's not how this works," I say. "The Vex aren't liberators. They're a syndicate. They'll just put new collars on you with different branding."
Kira's smile is a wound. "You chose them over us. You let Torrence mark you, let him dress you up and fuck you in his penthouse while we rot down here. You don't get to come back now and pretend you know what we need."
I absorb that. Let it settle into me alongside the truth of it, which is the part that makes it hard to breathe. Because she's not entirely wrong. I did choose. I chose Zane over this, over them, and the reasons I told myself were complicated, but the result was simple. I left.
"Kira, listen to me. The Vex operatives on this station don't care about your debts. They're using you."
