"They're still my people."
Something moves in his face. Not warmth. Not exactly. Something more complicated, like a man recalculating an equation and finding the answer different from what he expected. "Zane's in the docking ring," he says. "Sector four. He's handling the primary breach point."
I nod. That information sits inside me alongside everything else, alongside the clarity and the blood and the memory of how natural it felt to end a life. I'll find him. But not yet.
"Where do you need me?"
Dexter stares. Then he reaches behind his console and pulls out a sidearm, standard issue, fully charged, and sets it on the edge of the console facing me.
"Corridor nine," he says. "The Vex are trying to hit the environmental systems. If they take atmo control, they can suffocate entire sections."
I pick up the weapon. It fits my hand better than the last one.
I don't find Kira. Kira finds the end she chose.
I hear it over the comm channel while I'm crouched in corridor nine, covering the approach to the environmental control center with two of Dexter's security officers who treat me like a stranger, which is fine, which is accurate.The channel crackles with reports, and one of them is about the east-central junction, about the debtors who pushed forward into the barricade, and about the woman leading them.
She charged the security line. That's the clinical version. The version that will go into whatever report Dexter files afterward.
The version I construct from the fragments I hear over the comm is this: Kira took the front. She always did, even back in the debtor quarters, even when the fight was just about ration allocation or sleeping space. She put herself at the tip of the spear because she believed that was where leaders belonged, and the people behind her believed it too because belief is easier than thinking.
Dexter's forces were trying to separate the debtors from the Vex, trying to push the operatives back without killing the civilians they'd been using as cover. It was working. The Vex were pulling back, the debtors were faltering, confusion replacing rage as the promised liberation started to look like what it always was.
And Kira charged. Because if the momentum died, her rebellion died with it, and she couldn't survive that. Couldn't go back to being a debtor on a station that now knew her name and her treachery. The math of her survival had collapsed, and what was left was a woman who needed to believe in something badly enough to die for it.
She made it six steps past the barricade. The crossfire caught her from both sides, Torrence security and Vex operatives alike, and the irony is so precise it feels engineered. Killed by both of the forces she'd tried to play against each other. Caught in the exact middle of a war that was never hers, that used her the way it used all of us, the way power always uses the people it feeds on.
I hear the report. I process it. I wait for grief.
What comes instead is something with too many edges to hold cleanly. Sorrow, yes, for the woman who braided my hair during a water outage and told me stories about the planet she grew up on. Anger, at Kira for being so easily used, at the Vex for using her, at the system that made her desperate enough to believe them. And underneath all of it, a recognition so cold it makes my fingers numb around my weapon.
That could have been me. If I hadn't been chosen by Zane. If the mark hadn't burned itself into my skin and dragged me upward into his world. I'd have been standing in that crowd, listening to whoever promised freedom, ready to die for a lie because the truth was unbearable.
The only difference between me and Kira is that my monster wanted me specifically.
A Vex operative rounds the corner and I put two rounds in his center mass. He falls. I don't feel anything about it except the recoil in my wrist and the copper-ozone smell of the discharge.
Three.
I've killed three people today.
The number should mean something. It sits in my mind, clean and specific, and I keep touching it the way your tongue touches a broken tooth, expecting pain, finding only the strange smooth edge of something that used to be whole.
The siege breaksthe way storms break on a station, not with a single decisive moment but with a slow, grinding recession. The Vex pull back from the interior corridors first, then from the docking ring, and finally from the hullbreach points, sealing behind them as they go, and the station's own systems close the wounds after them, emergency bulkheads sliding into place like scar tissue.
It takes hours. By the end I'm sitting on the floor of corridor nine with my back against the wall and the sidearm across my thighs and blood on my hands that belongs to at least four different people, only one of them me. A shallow cut on my forearm from shrapnel I don't remember taking. The medic who passes through the corridor offers to treat it and I wave him off. It's already clotting.
The bodies are the worst part and also the most clarifying part. They're everywhere, concentrated at the chokepoints where the fighting was heaviest, and some of them are Vex operatives in their dark tactical gear and some of them are station security and some of them are debtors. The debtors are the ones wearing nothing that would stop a round. The debtors are the ones in their everyday clothes, their work shifts, their sleeping garments. One woman is wearing the same recycled-cotton pullover I used to own. Same color. Same fraying at the cuffs.
She's not Kira. But she could be. She could be anyone I knew.
I look at my hands. The blood has dried in the creases of my palms and between my fingers, dark and cracking like old paint. Literal now. Not a metaphor. Not the abstract guilt of complicity that I've carried since the mark burned into my skin. Actual blood, from actual bodies, some of it belonging to people I killed with my own hands and a weapon that fit them like it was waiting for me.
I wait for the regret.
It doesn't come.
I keep waiting. I sit there on the cold deck plates withthe adrenaline leaching out of my muscles and the alarms finally cycling down from red to amber, and I inventory my own interior with the kind of clinical precision that I imagine Zane uses when he assesses damage after a negotiation gone wrong. I check for guilt. I check for horror. I check for the fracture point, the place where the woman I was is supposed to crack under the weight of what the woman I am has done.
