"I wouldn't have hesitated."
"I know that too."
He turns then. Looks at me full-on, and the expression on his face is the one I hate most, the one that says he's already three steps ahead of the emotional calculus I'm still trying to solve. "You're letting him live because of Elissa."
The statement sits between us like an open wound. I don't flinch from it, but I don't confirm it either, which is its own kind of confirmation, and Dexter reads silence better than most people read words.
"Because you can't break her heart," he continues, each word measured, precise, placed with the careful efficiency of a man who builds weapons for a living and knows where to put the payload for maximum damage, "while you're still using Talia."
The name lands somewhere below my ribs.
He's right. He's right in the specific, surgical way that only Dexter can be right, cutting through every justification and strategic rationale I've been building in my head to find the soft, human thing underneath.
I can't stand in front of Elissa and tell her that the man she cares about has been manipulating her, that his touch might have been rewriting her feelings for a decade, because that particular truth requires a moral authority I don't possess.
Not while Talia is sleeping in my quarters. Not while I'm keeping her close for reasons that started strategic and have become something I don't have the honesty to name.
I don't respond. There's nothing to say that wouldn't prove his point further.
Dexter turns back to the displays. The anomaly data pulses on the screen, rhythmic and alien, like a heartbeat that belongs to something vast and patient and utterly indifferent to the small human dramas playing out in its proximity.
"The Vex attack was a test," he says. His voice shifts registers, moving from brother to analyst with the clean efficiency of a man who's more comfortable with threats he can quantify. "The fleet composition was wrong for a real assault. Too many scouts, not enough heavies. They were probing our defenses, mapping our response times, cataloguing our weapons systems. They lost ships they didn't need to lose because the losses were the point. The data was worth more than the hardware to someone."
"Ethan's masters."
"Ethan's masters. Or whoever's pulling strings behind the faction that placed him here." Dexter pulls up a star chart. The anomaly sits at its center, a smear of impossible energy that our instruments still can't fully map. "They're coming, Zane. And when they do, they won't test." He highlights approach vectors, calculated fleet positions, the cold mathematics of invasion laid out in light and numbers. "They'll take."
I stare at the chart. At the anomaly. At the approach vectors that point toward this station like arrows aimed at a target that can't move.
"Timeline?"
"Weeks. Maybe less. Depends on what Ethan feedsthem, if he feeds them anything at all, and whether his defection is genuine or the next layer of an operation we haven't mapped yet." Dexter closes the display. The light fades from his face, and in the dimness he looks like our father in the last months, hollowed out by the weight of knowing what was coming and not being able to stop it. "You made a choice today. I'm not saying it was wrong. I'm saying it has a cost, and the bill is going to come due when those ships drop out of transit."
I stand. Walk to the view port.
The stars look the same as they always do. Cold points of light scattered across the black like shrapnel frozen in the moment of explosion. Distant. Indifferent. They don't care about the anomaly or the faction or the traitor I let walk free because my sister looked at me with hurt in her eyes and I couldn't add more. The void doesn't take sides. It just takes.
War is coming. I can feel it the way you feel pressure changes before a hull breach, that deep, subdermal wrongness that your body registers before your mind catches up. It's in the anomaly's pulse, in the coded messages we keep intercepting, in the way Ethan's eyes flashed blue for a fraction of a second and then went grey again, as if the mask could still hold after the face beneath it had been seen.
I think about Elissa. About the fury in her face when she left. About the choices I'm making for her that she'd never forgive if she understood them.
I think about Talia. About the way I've bent my own rules around her until the shape of my authority doesn't look the way it used to, and whether that makes me better or worse than the man I just let walk out of an interrogation room.
I think about Dexter, who sees me more clearly than Iwant to be seen, and who will fight beside me anyway because that's what family does on this station. You see the monster. You hand it a weapon. You point it at the door.
Somewhere beyond the view port, past the cold stars and the empty black, something is moving toward us.
Patient. Certain. Inevitable.
And I am not sure my family will survive what it brings.
Chapter 16
Talia
The station smellslike burnt circuitry and antiseptic, and somewhere below Deck Nine, they're still pulling bodies from the wreckage.
I stand in the briefing room with my arms crossed, watching Astra tick through casualty reports on the holo-display like she's reading a grocery list. Fourteen dead. Twenty-two injured. Three sections of the lower ring still venting atmosphere behind emergency seals. The numbers float in pale blue light above the conference table, and I track each one with the strange, clinical calm that's settled into me since the siege broke.
