He hands me the data pad. I read it while walking, the corridor lights sliding across the screen in rhythmic bars of white.
Three paragraphs. That's all it takes. Three paragraphs to redraw every border I've spent six years defending.
Aura Zalt. Matriarch-heir of the Consortium. The woman who inherited her mother's intelligence network and her grandmother's talent for making allies disappear into their own supply chains. I've met her once, across a negotiation table, she smiled the entire time. but it never reached her eyes.
She's proposing an alliance. Against the Protocol. Against the thing that sent the Vex to test my walls and found them harder than expected.
Military resources. Intelligence sharing. Territorial concessions that six months ago would have earned a laugh and a closed channel. The kind of concessions the Consortium doesn't offer unless the alternative is extinction. AuraZalt doesn't give ground. She trades it, and she always, always collects more than she spends.
The Vex attack changed her calculus. It changed everyone's. Isolated power is a coffin with a view port. Pretty view on the way down.
I keep reading. My stride doesn't falter. Dexter watches me from my periphery with the patience of a man who's already formed his opinion and is waiting for mine to catch up.
The binding mechanism she proposes is traditional. Ancient, even.
A marriage union between families.
Not me. She's too shrewd for that, knows I'm already claimed in ways that transcend political convenience.
Ethan Eames to Aura Zalt.
I stop walking. Read it again. The implications cascade.
"She knows about Ethan," I say. "She knows what he is."
"She knows he's half-Empri. She knows about the 7 Protocol. And she wants him bound to her family, where she can use him or contain him. Possibly both." Dexter watches me process this. "It's not a bad play."
"It's a brilliant play. That's what concerns me."
"You have time. She's not demanding an answer immediately. But she'll come here. In person. To discuss it."
I fold the data pad against my thigh and stare down the corridor at nothing. Somewhere on this station, Ethan Eames is settling into quarters I've assigned him, believing he's navigated the most dangerous part of his arrangement with me. He has no idea what's coming.
And somewhere else, in the residential wing, my sister is probably awake, because Elissa keeps hours that make no sense and follows curiosity the way most people followsurvival instinct. Bright and brave and fundamentally incapable of recognizing the specific kind of danger that wears a human face.
"Where is Elissa?" I ask.
"In the archive wing. She's been helping cross-reference the anomaly data. Making herself useful." Dexter pauses. "Eames was there earlier."
Something cold moves through my chest. Not the bond. Something older, more primal. The instinct that kept Torrences alive for three generations on a station where power is the only insulation against the void.
"Was he."
"He left when I arrived. But she was talking to him. Comfortable with him." Dexter's voice is carefully neutral. "She doesn't know what he is."
"No."
"She sees someone who bridges worlds. Someone different. Someone interesting." He stops walking, and I stop with him. "Zane. If the Zalt proposal goes through, Ethan marries Aura. But if Elissa has already formed an attachment..."
"She hasn't."
"You don't know that."
I don't.
That's the problem.
I see everything on this station, feel the emotional currents of every person who passes within range of the bond's sensitivity, and I have been deliberately, carefully not looking at my sister's emotional landscape when Ethan is in the room. Because looking would mean acknowledging. And acknowledging would mean acting. And acting would mean making a choice between protecting Elissa's innocence and the political reality that Ethan Eames ismore useful to me alive and cooperative than dead and principled.
