There are things I haven't done. Lines I haven't crossed. Versions of myself I haven't met.
But the hardest part is done. The first death. The first proof.
The discovery that the woman I'm becoming doesn't mourn the woman I was.
Zane stands. Offers me his hand. I take it, and he pulls me to my feet, and for a moment we stand there in the corridor with the bodies and the smoke and the amber warning lights painting everything in the color of something that's already burned.
I don't let go of his hand.
He doesn't make me.
Chapter 15
Zane
The evidence doesn't arrivelike a revelation. It arrives in a body count, slow and certain, each piece laid out on the table in the secure room with the quiet precision of a man assembling a weapon.
I stand over the spread of it.
Surveillance logs.
Communication gaps mapped against Vex coordination bursts. Movement tracks from the siege that put Ethan Eames in corridors he had no reason to walk, at times that line up too neatly with breaches in our defense grid. Dexter compiled the packet overnight while the rest of the station was still counting its dead and patching hull fractures. He slid it across my desk at 0400 with a look that said everything his mouth didn't.
Now I'm staring at ten years of trust unraveling on a screen, and the worst part isn't the betrayal. The worst part is how clean it is. How seamless. How the gaps in Ethan's record fit together like teeth in a lock, and I never once thought to check whether the lock had been picked from the inside.
Circumstantial. All of it circumstantial. A good lawyer could explain away any single piece. But taken together, the pattern forms a shape I can't unsee, and the shape is a man who's been watching us from inside our own walls since before I took command.
I pull up the anomaly data. Cross-reference it with Malachar's decoded message, the one Astra cracked three days ago while Vex fighters were chewing through our outer ring. The message names a faction.
Names a purpose.
Names a handler.
And the handler's cover identity matches a station resident who's had access to every level of Torrence operations for a decade.
I close the files. Press my palms flat against the cold surface of the table and breathe through my teeth until the urge to put my fist through something passes. Then I pull up comms and send a single message.
Ethan. Secure Room 7. Now.
He arrives in eleven minutes.Not rushed, not delayed. Precisely the pace of a man with nothing to hide and nowhere more important to be. The door seals behind him with a soft pneumatic hiss, and he takes in the room with the same mild, cataloguing glance he gives everything. Bare walls. Reinforced bulkheads. One table, two chairs, and the kind of soundproofing that means what happens here stays here until someone with my clearance says otherwise.
No cameras. I had Dexter kill the feeds twenty minutes ago.
"Zane." He says my name like we're meeting for coffee. That half-smile sits on his face the way it always does, comfortable and faintly amused, as though the universe is a moderately entertaining show he's watching from a safe distance. He pulls out the far chair and sits without being invited. Crosses one ankle over his knee. Relaxed. Open posture. Every body-language textbook's definition of a man at ease.
I don't sit. I lean against the wall across from him, arms folded, and I let the silence stretch. Three seconds. Five. Ten. The recycled air hums through the vents above us, and somewhere deep in the station's bones, a repair drone whines against damaged hull plating. The sound carries through the walls like a toothache.
"Hell of a day yesterday," I say.
"Hell of a day," he agrees. His voice is warm. It's always warm. That's the thing about Ethan Eames that makes him so effective at whatever he is. The warmth feels real. It sounds real. It sits in the room like a living thing and makes you want to lean into it. "Heard the casualty count is lower than projected. Your defense protocols held."
"Mostly."
"Mostly counts." He tilts his head, studying me with those grey eyes. Grey today. They're always grey in normal light, unremarkable, easy to forget. "You look like you haven't slept."
"I haven't."
"You should. The station needs its commander functional, not running on stimulants and spite."
