I'll deal with it after the Zalt proposal is secured. After the Protocol threat is neutralized. After I've mapped whatever Marcus found at those coordinates and determined whether it's a weapon I can use or a danger I need to contain.
After, after, after.
I watch Elissa laugh at something Ethan says, her head tipping back, her throat exposed in a gesture of trust so complete it makes my teeth ache. I watch him watch her laugh, and the look on his face isn't calculation. It isn't the cold focus of a man running an operation. It's hunger, and it's something worse than hunger, something that almost looks like the way I look at Talia when she isn't watching.
That's what frightens me.
Because if he's manipulating her, I can fight that. I can dismantle a manipulation. I can deprogram her, given time and the right approach, and she'd hate me for it but she'd be free.
But if some part of what he feels is real, tangled up in whatever game he's playing, then Elissa isn't beingdeceived by a stranger. She's being loved by someone who will eventually have to choose between her and his own survival. And I know, with the bone-deep certainty of a man who just made that exact bargain with a woman sleeping in his bed, that those choices break everyone involved.
I minimize the feed. I don't close it. Closing it would feel too much like permission.
The second screen holds different ghosts.
The coordinates from Marcus St. Laurent's ship sit in a file I've opened and closed a dozen times in the past week, the data arranged in columns that tell a simple story: a location in space, beyond the outer jump gates, in a sector catalogued as empty. No stations. No mining operations. No registered traffic of any kind. According to every chart the syndicate maintains, there is nothing at those coordinates.
According to Marcus St. Laurent's final logged heading, there is everything.
The sensor data Talia helped me decrypt shows an energy signature that doesn't match any known source. Not a star. Not a reactor. Not a weapon, at least not any weapon in the databases I have access to. The readings spike and flatten in patterns that look almost biological, like a pulse, like breathing, like something alive and vast opening and closing in the black.
A tear.
That's what Marcus called it in the fragments of personal log we recovered. Not a wormhole, not a gate, not anything the jump drive engineers would recognize. A tear in the fabric of normal space, leading somewhere else.
Somewhere that swallowed Marcus St. Laurent and his ship and spit it back out without him.
Somewhere that might have swallowed my father.
Two men. Two disappearances. The same coordinates, or close enough that the overlap can't be coincidence. Whatever waits at that location has been waiting for a long time, and it has a taste for men who run stations and make enemies and love their children too much to explain where they're going.
I close the file. The screen goes dark, and for a moment my reflection stares back at me from the black glass, and I look like him. My father. The same jaw, the same set to the mouth, the same eyes that see everything and reveal nothing. I wonder if he sat here, in this chair, at this console, and stared at those coordinates the way I'm staring at them now. I wonder if he made the same calculation I'm making: that some doors, once opened, don't close behind you.
I wonder if he thought he'd come back.
I shut the console down. All of it. Every feed, every file, every window into the station's nervous system. The screens die and the room settles into the honest dark of night cycle, the only light the faint blue thread pulsing at Talia's throat and the answering glow at mine.
The bed is warm when I slide back in. Talia stirs, her body registering my return before her mind surfaces, and she reaches for me without waking. Her hand finds my chest and flattens there, right over my sternum, right where the bond anchors. Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt and hold.
She smells like the soap from my shower, like clean skin. Her heartbeat meets my palm where my hand rests against her ribs, and I count the beats the way I counted camera feeds minutes ago.
Steady. Alive. Here.
The station hums around us. Recycled air pushesthrough the vents with its low, eternal whisper, the sound of a machine that never sleeps keeping us all breathing. Somewhere below, the gravity generators pulse in the sub-frequencies I feel more than hear, a vibration in the bones of the place, the synthetic heartbeat of a world I built from the wreckage my father left behind. Somewhere above, through layers of hull plating and radiation shielding, the stars turn in their ancient, indifferent circuits, and the nebula glows in colors no human eye was meant to process without filters.
Somewhere in corridor seven, my sister is standing in the dark with a man who will ruin her. She doesn't know it yet. She may not know it until the damage is done, until his particular brand of poison has rooted so deep that removing it means removing parts of herself.
I could stop it.
I should stop it.
I will stop it, I tell myself, after. After the Zalt negotiation. After the Protocol. After whatever waits at those coordinates reveals itself.
After. The most dangerous word in any language. The word that lets you set a fire and walk away, because the flames haven't reached the hull yet, because there's still time, because you'll come back with an extinguisher before anything truly burns.
I've watched enough stations burn to know that's never how it works.
Somewhere beyond the jump gates, in a sector that should be empty and isn't, something waits. Something that took two fathers. Something that pulses in patterns that look like breathing. Something that drew Marcus St. Laurent across the black with coordinates he coded and hid and never shared with his daughter, and something thatmight have whispered to my father thirteen years ago in a frequency only Empri blood can hear.
