But the final coordinates match the anomaly. That fold in space where instruments go soft and signals turn to noise. The place my father went six years ago and never returned from.
St. Laurent's final transmission plays, his voice steady with the particular calm of a man who has made peace with the thing he's about to do. "Contact made. Proceeding."
Three words. Then static. Then nothing.
No return signal. No distress beacon. No emergency transponder activation. No further logs of any kind.
The ship's automated systems recorded another four minutes of telemetry before the data simply stops, as if the vessel crossed a threshold and ceased to exist in any way the instruments could comprehend.
He went through. Just like Malachar. Neither of them cameback.
I close my eyes and let the implications settle into the architecture of what I know. Two men, separated by years, both drawn to the same impossible point in space. Both choosing to cross. Both vanishing completely. My father was running from something. St. Laurent was carrying something for him. The cargo, whatever was in those sealed units, was important enough that a man left his daughter as collateral to fund the journey.
The door behind me opens. I don't need to turn around. The bond tells me before her footsteps do, a warmth at the base of my skull like sunlight through frosted glass.
"You've been in here for hours." Talia's voice carries the particular rough edge of someone who woke up alone and didn't like it. "Your side of the bed was cold."
"Couldn't sleep."
She comes to stand beside me, close enough that I can smell the station soap on her skin, the faintest trace of the tea she drinks before bed. Her eyes find the holo-display, and I watch her face as the information registers. The ship name. The logs. The coordinates.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't cry. Six weeks ago, when I told her that her father's debt transferred to her, she'd stared at me with eyes like a cornered animal, all terror and defiance. Now she looks at the evidence of his likely death with a grief that runs deep and still, a river that has found its course and settled into it.
I pull up the final telemetry data, the readings that dissolve into noise. "He made it to the anomaly. He transmitted once. Then he went through."
"Like your father."
"Like my father."
She's quiet for a long time. The holo-display cyclesthrough the data, patient and indifferent, casting blue shadows across her face. I feel her grief through the bond, not the sharp, lacerating kind that demands immediate attention, but something older and more honest. She suspected this. She's been carrying the weight of this suspicion for weeks, letting it settle into her bones gradually so that the confirmation wouldn't shatter her.
She's learning to hold pain without breaking. I don't know if that makes me proud or sorry.
"He left me as collateral for this." Her voice is even, almost academic. "Signed the debt contract knowing he might not come back. Knowing what would happen to me."
"Yes."
"And whatever he was carrying for Malachar was worth that."
I don't answer, because we both know the answer, and saying it out loud would be a cruelty she doesn't need from me right now.
Her hand finds mine in the blue light. Her fingers are cool, steady. The mark at her throat pulses once, a soft flare that echoes through the bond and settles in my chest like a second heartbeat.
"Show me everything," she says. "All of it. Don't protectme from it."
So I do.
Ethan Eames sitsacross the briefing table like a man who knows exactly how many weapons are pointed at him and has decided not to care.
Two of Dexter's best flank the door. Astra stands at the far wall with her arms crossed and her expression communicating, in its efficient way, that she would very much like to break something. Dexter himself occupies the chair to my left, lounging with that deceptive casualness that means he's already mapped three ways to kill everyone in the room and is working on a fourth.
Ethan looks at none of them. He looks at me.
"The 7 Protocol," he says, as if the words are a gift he's choosing to give rather than intelligence being extracted. "That's what you need to understand."
"Then help me understand." I keep my voice level. The bond is quiet. I left Talia in the command center reviewing the rest of her father's logs, giving her the privacy to grieve without my empathic awareness pressing against her like unwanted hands. Some grief needs to be carried alone.
Ethan leans forward. The overhead lights catch the faint luminescent tracery along his forearms, his Empri heritage visible in those pale lines that shift and pulse with bioluminescent subtlety. Half-Empri.
