"That depends entirely on what you tell me in the next five minutes."
He looks at my hand on the weapon. Looks at my face. Something moves behind his eyes, a calculation so fast I can almost hear it, the quiet click of options being weighed and discarded. Then he exhales, and his shoulders drop by a degree, and for the first time in ten years, I think I'm seeing Ethan Eames without the performance.
He looks tired.
"I was placed here by a faction within the Empri Collective," he says. "A branch that operates outside the main hierarchy. They knew about the anomaly before your family did, before anyone on this station had any idea what was sitting in your backyard. My mission was simple. Watch. Report. Wait for the right moment." He pauses. Swallows. The sound is audible in the sealed room. "That was ten years ago."
"And the right moment?"
"Never came. Or it came and I didn't act on it. Depending on who you ask."
I pull the sidearm. Don't aim it. Let it hang at my side, the weight of it a punctuation mark in the conversation, a reminder that this room has no cameras and the soundproofing works both ways. "Keep talking."
"When Malachar found out about the anomaly, he ran." Ethan's voice is steady, but there's a grain in it now, a texture that wasn't there before. Like someone scraping the smooth paint off a wall to show what's underneath. "Went through it. I still don't know exactly what he found on the other side, but whatever it was scared him badly enough that he chose the anomaly over facing the people he'd been working with. He thought the other side was safer than staying."
"You didn't report his disappearance."
"No."
"Why?"
His jaw tightens. The muscle jumps once, twice, and settles. "Because something had changed. I don't have a clean answer for you, Zane. I don't have a strategic justification or a calculated betrayal narrative that makes this make sense. Something had changed, and I didn't report it, and I couldn't explain to myself why." He looks at me, and his eyes are grey again, steady and human and lined with something that could be exhaustion or grief. "I've been here ten years. I've eaten at your table. I've watched Dexter build weapons systems that shouldn't work and then make them work through sheer stubbornness. I've taught Elissa how to read star charts. I've watched your father hold this station together with his bare hands and then watched you take over and do the same thing."
The name hits me in the chest. Elissa. He says it with a softness that makes my trigger finger itch.
"This is my home now," he says. "The people I was supposed to spy on, the family I was supposed to help destroy." He stops. Breathes. "I don't want to destroy them anymore."
The room is so quiet I can hear the blood movingthrough my own ears. The recycled air tastes flat and metallic on my tongue, the way it always does in the sealed rooms where the filtration runs on backup systems. Gun oil from the sidearm mixes with it, sharp and familiar, grounding me in the physical reality of what I'm holding and what it can do.
I want to believe him.
That's the problem. That's always the problem with Ethan, with the warmth that might be real, with the decade of shared history that might be genuine, with the tired eyes of a man who might actually mean what he's saying. I want to believe him because the alternative is that he's the best liar I've ever encountered, and I've met liars who could sell a corpse its own funeral.
But wanting to believe and being able to verify are two very different currencies, and in my world, the first one is worthless without the second.
"How do I know any of this is true?" I say. "Your control is too good. You shifted your eyes back in under a second. You sat in this chair and lied to my face about a tracker malfunction without a single physiological tell until I cornered you. Give me one reason to believe that the truth isn't just another layer of the act."
"You can't know." He says it simply. No defensiveness, no plea. "My training makes that impossible, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie. But I can give you information. Names, dead drops, communication protocols, the structure of the faction that placed me here. Everything I have. Everything I know."
"That could be curated. Fed to me to direct my attention where they want it."
"It could be. But it's all I've got." His hands are still open on his thighs. I notice, distantly, that his fingertips aretrembling. Micro-tremors, barely visible. "Kill me if that's what you've decided. I won't fight you. But understand what you'll lose. I know their methods. I know their personnel. I know what they want from the anomaly and how far they're willing to go to get it. You kill me, and you're fighting blind."
He's right. The calculation is ugly and it's cold and it sits in my gut like swallowed glass, but he's right. He knows too much about the station, the anomaly, the faction, everything.
Removing him doesn't just eliminate a threat.
It eliminates a resource I can't replace, in a war I didn't know I was fighting until three days ago. I can't afford to throw away the only intelligence asset I have, even if that asset has been lying to me since the day we met.
I raise the sidearm. Level it at his chest. His breathing doesn't change. His eyes don't close. He watches the barrel with the calm attention of a man who has considered this outcome and made peace with it, and I hate him for that composure because it makes it harder to pull the trigger and easier to respect him, and I don't want to do either.
The door opens.
The sound cuts through the room like a blade, the pneumatic hiss of the seal breaking, and I know who it is before I see her because only three people have the override code for this room, and Elissa sounds nothing like Dexter.
Elissa stops in the doorway.
She's still wearing yesterday's clothes, wrinkled from sleeping in them if she slept at all. Her hair is pulled back in a knot that's coming loose, dark strands framing a face that looks younger than twenty-five, but older than it did a month ago.
