"You chose them over us." She says it again, quieter thistime, and the quietness is worse than the shouting. "Now watch what happens."
An explosion rocks the deck beneath us. Not close, but close enough that the lights flicker and several people stumble. The alarms shift pitch, a higher frequency now, urgent, and through the nearest view port I can see the flash of weapons fire against the station's exterior hull, bright and silent in the vacuum.
The crowd surges. Kira turns away from me and toward them, raising her voice, and they move with her like water finding its channel. Toward the upper corridors. Toward the security checkpoints.
Toward a fight they cannot win.
I stand there for three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough to feel the station shudder again, long enough to watch people I know disappear around the corner with murder in their eyes and hope in their throats, long enough to understand that this is the moment.
Not the moment I choose Zane over them, or them over Zane.
The moment I stop pretending those are the only options.
I follow.
The corridorsabove the debtor quarters are already a war zone.
Dexter's security forces have established a barricade at the junction of the east and central corridors, and the Vex breach teams are pressing from two directions, squeezing toward the security hub like fingers closing into a fist. The fighting is loud and ugly and nothing like thechoreographed violence I've seen on feeds. It's smoke and sparks and the wet sound of rounds hitting bodies and the screaming, god, the screaming doesn't stop, it just layers, voice on top of voice until it becomes its own kind of white noise.
And then I see what the Vex are actually doing with the debtors.
Kira's people have flooded into the corridor from below, driven by the promises she fed them, and the Vex operatives are letting them through. Not fighting alongside them. Letting them through. Using them as a moving wall of bodies between themselves and Dexter's barricade. The debtors push forward, some with their makeshift weapons, some with nothing but their hands and their rage, and the Vex advance behind them, firing over their shoulders, through the gaps between them.
Meat shields. They're using Kira's people as meat shields.
A woman I recognize stumbles and falls and the crowd surges over her. I lose sight of her in two seconds. A man I shared a water ration with last week takes a round in the shoulder and spins, and the Vex operative behind him doesn't even break stride, just steps over him and keeps firing.
My mark pulses so hard I think the skin might split. Zane is somewhere on this station feeling what I'm feeling, and what I'm feeling is something cold and clean and sharp, something that cuts through the panic and the noise and the smoke like a blade through silk.
I'm moving before I decide to move.
The corridors branch here, and I know the layout better than the Vex do. There's a service corridor that runs parallel to the main throughway, maintenance access, cramped andunlit, and it comes out thirty meters ahead of the barricade, behind the Vex advance line.
I run.
The service corridor smells like coolant and the particular metallic tang of station infrastructure that never sees a cleaning cycle. I keep my hand on the wall and count junctions by feel. The fighting sounds are muffled here, transmitted through the walls as vibrations more than noise, and for a few seconds it's almost quiet, almost peaceful, and I can hear my own breathing and it's steady.
That should scare me. I
t doesn't.
I come out of the service corridor into the junction near the main airlock, and that's where I find Astra.
She's pinned behind a structural support column, firing from cover at a Vex operative who has her flanked from an alcove fifteen meters ahead. There's blood on her left side, a dark spread soaking through her tactical vest, and her shooting arm is steady but her face is grey. She's hurt worse than the wound looks, I can tell. I've watched her train. I've watched her body move with that liquid precision that makes violence look like mathematics. Right now her movements are jagged, economical in the wrong way, the way you move when you're rationing what's left.
The Vex operative advances on her position. He's big, armored, professional in a way the others aren't. Not a foot soldier. Someone who came here to kill specific people, and Astra is apparently on his list.
He fires. She rolls. The round takes a chunk out of the column where her head was, and the debris catches her face, and she goes down on one knee, and he's moving, closing the distance, and she brings her weapon up but she's a half-second slow and they both know it.
There's a body on the floor between us. Station security, killed in the initial breach, his sidearm still in its holster. I see the weapon the way Astra taught me to see weapons: grip angle, charge indicator, safety position. Green light. Charged. Safety off because he died reaching for it.
I pick it up.
It's warm in my hand. Residual heat from the body beneath it, from the man who carried it and will never carry anything again. The grip is slightly too large for my fingers and I adjust without thinking, the way Astra showed me, settling the web of my thumb high against the backstrap.
The operative doesn't see me. He's focused on Astra, closing the last ten meters, and his weapon is leveled at her chest and Astra's trying to get up but her leg gives and she catches herself on one hand and she's looking at him the way a woman looks at the thing that's about to end her, not with fear but with a furious, grinding refusal to stop fighting even now.
I raise the weapon.
