"His word, not mine." She stands. "Strip to your undergarments. Med team will be in shortly."
She leaves, but the guards stay and I realize I am meant to strip down in front of them.
Without a choice, I peel off the processing jumpsuit they gave me in the labor bay. Thin grey fabric that smells like everyone who wore it before me. Underneath, I'm wearing the underwear I was captured in, two days ago or three, I've lost the count. Plain black. Functional. Chosen for a life where I might need to run, not for a moment like this where I stand in blinding white light while two armed strangers study the wall above my head with practiced disinterest.
My body in this light is a map of the last seventy-two hours. Bruises on my forearms from the extraction team's compliance holds. A scrape across my left hip where I hit the floor of the transport shuttle. My ribs are visible in away they shouldn't be. Three days without real food will do that when backing up years of skipping meals for work.
The med team arrives. Two of them who appear genderless in their sterile suits, faces behind transparent shields. They don't introduce themselves. They don't speak to me at all. One runs a scanner from my skull to my feet, the device humming a frequency I feel in my back teeth. The other draws blood. Four vials. I watch my own blood fill them, dark and red and unremarkable, and I think: that blood is still mine. Whatever else they take, the blood in those vials remembers being free.
They check my eyes, my reflexes, the inside of my mouth. One of them parts my hair and examines my scalp with gloved fingers. Looking for implants. Trackers. Modifications. I have none. I'm exactly as basic as I appear: a human woman with no enhancements, no augmentations, no value beyond what someone with power has decided to assign me.
The scanner beeps. The med tech studies the readout, and I catch the smallest flicker of a reaction behind their face shield. A blink held too long. They tap something into the holo-tab and leave without a word.
I'm alone with the guards for eleven minutes. I count the seconds because it's something to do with my mind that isn't screaming.
I hear him before I see him.
Not his footsteps, but the absence of other sound. The corridor outside the medical bay goes quiet the way a forest goes quiet when something with teeth moves through it. The ambient hum of conversation, the click of boots, the small human noises of a station at work. All of it drops to nothing.
Then he's in the doorway.
Zane Torrence.
He's changed since the processing bay. Different clothes, dark and fitted, the kind of fabric that moves like liquid. The bioluminescent lines along his throat and jaw pulse with that same slow, steady rhythm. Blue-white, almost gold. The tones shimmering like something alive under his skin, keeping its own time.
The guards straighten. Not to attention, exactly. Something more involuntary than that. Their shoulders drop, their breathing slows, their faces smooth into an expression I can only describe as calm. Forcibly calm. The kind of calm that doesn't come from inside.
I watch it happen to them and my stomach turns to ice.
Empri calm.
Everyone knows what the Empri are. A species that perceives and manipulates the emotional states of those around them.
Rare. Dangerous.
The kind of dangerous that doesn't need weapons because it makes weapons of the people nearest to it. The Interstellar Accords classified empathic manipulation as a category-one violation twenty years ago, which did exactly nothing to stop the Empri who chose to use it.
And here he is. Using it. Casually, the way someone else might adjust the temperature in a room. The guards aren't afraid because he's decided they won't be.
He looks at me.
The calm doesn't come.
I wait for it. Brace for the invasion, the slick wrongness of having my own feelings rearranged by someone else's will. I know what it's supposed to feel like. I've read the accounts, the testimonies from the Accords hearings. Witnesses described it as a warmth that wasn't theirs, asudden conviction that everything was fine, that the person in front of them was safe, trustworthy, that there was nothing to fear.
My fear stays exactly where it is. Lodged in my throat, acid-bright, entirely my own.
He steps closer. The bioluminescence along his jaw flares, just slightly, like a candle caught in a draft. His eyes move over me the way Astra's did, but where hers were professional, his are something else I don't have a word for. It isn't want, because want implies uncertainty. There is nothing uncertain in the way he looks at me.
"Your cortisol levels are dangerous," he says. His voice is low, even. The kind of voice that doesn't need volume. "You haven't eaten in three days and you've slept fewer than four hours total. The medical team flagged it."
"I was busy being kidnapped."
His mouth moves. Not a smile. The ghost of one, killed before it fully lived. "Acquired."
"Same thing."
"Not legally."
