The concern sounds genuine. That's what gets me. Even now, knowing what I know, the concern in his voice sounds like something a friend would say. Something a man who'sspent ten years eating at your table and watching your sister laugh and helping your brother calibrate weapons systems would say, because he means it.
Maybe he does mean it. That's the part that makes this harder.
"Tell me about yesterday," I say. "Walk me through your movements during the siege."
If the question lands wrong, he doesn't show it. He walks me through it. Methodical, calm. Where he was when the first wave hit. What he did during the hull breach on Level 4. How he helped coordinate evacuation of the residential ring. His account is clean, detailed, and almost entirely verifiable.
Almost.
"There's a gap," I say. "Between 1340 and 1407. Twenty-seven minutes where your tracker went dark."
His half-smile doesn't shift. "Tracker malfunction. The EMP burst from the Vex breaching charges knocked out half the personal systems on that level. You can check the maintenance logs."
"I did. Fourteen other trackers went down in that corridor. Yours was the only one that came back online in a different location than where it dropped."
A beat of silence. The hum of the air recyclers fills it, that constant subliminal drone that you stop hearing after your first month on station and never fully stop feeling in your back teeth.
"I moved during the blackout," he says. "Headed toward the secondary armory to grab supplies for the evac team."
"The secondary armory is two levels up and three sections aft of where your tracker reappeared."
"I got turned around. The corridors were dark, there was debris."
"You've lived on this station for ten years, Ethan. You could walk it blind."
That half-smile again. Patient. Warm. A wall built to look like a window. "People make mistakes in combat situations, Zane. Even people who know the ground."
I let it hang. Let him sit with the shape of his own excuse in the air between us, and I watch his hands. They're still. Perfectly, deliberately still, resting on his thighs with the practiced ease of a man who's trained himself never to fidget. Most people miss that. Most people see stillness and read calm. I see stillness and read control, the kind that takes years to build, the kind that means the body underneath has been taught to lie as fluently as the mouth.
"We decoded a message," I say. "From Malachar."
There it is. Not in his face, which stays exactly as it was. Not in his hands, which don't move. In his breathing. The space between one inhale and the next stretches by a fraction of a second, so small that anyone who wasn't watching for it would miss it entirely. But I've spent my life reading the people around me for the micro-tells that separate truth from performance, and that tiny hesitation screams louder than a confession.
"Malachar sent a lot of messages," Ethan says. "Most of them were noise."
"This one wasn't." I push off the wall. Take a step toward him. Then another. Close enough now that I can see the texture of his skin, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that didn't used to be there when he first arrived on station a decade ago. He's aged here. Lived here. Grown into the spaces between us like something organic, rooted andreal. "This one named a faction. Named a handler. Named a purpose."
I stop. Two feet from his chair. Looking down at him the way I look at people when I want them to understand that the conversation has moved past the territory where lies are tolerated and into the territory where they become expensive.
"It named you."
Ethan Eames looks up at me, and for one long, held breath, nothing changes. The half-smile stays. The grey eyes stay. The warmth stays. He is a perfect, seamless surface, and I can feel the shape of his lie pressing against it from the inside like a hand against glass.
Then his eyes shift.
It's fast. A fraction of a second, maybe less. The grey bleeds into something else, a luminous, saturated blue that has no business in a human iris. Full Empri blue, the color of deep-space bioluminescence, the color that the Collective uses to mark their own. It pulses once, bright enough to throw faint light against his cheekbones, and then it's gone. Swallowed back behind grey like a door slamming shut.
But I saw it. And he knows I saw it.
His half-smile changes. It's still a smile. But the warmth drains out of it like heat from a hull breach, and what's left is something thinner, sharper, honest in a way that his warmth never was.
"How long have you known?" he asks.
My hand is on my sidearm. I don't remember reaching for it. The grip is warm from my body heat, the textured polymer biting into my palm with the familiar pressure of something I've held a thousand times. My thumb rests on the release. I don't draw. Not yet. But we both know thedistance between intention and action is measured in fractions of a second, and at two feet, I don't miss.
"Long enough," I say. "Not long enough. Pick whichever answer makes this easier for you."
"Neither does." He uncrosses his legs. Places both feet flat on the floor. Hands open on his thighs, palms up, a gesture of surrender that I don't trust for a second because a man who can shift his eye color at will probably has other tricks I haven't catalogued. "So. What happens now?"
