He said nothing.
Zenith emitted a sharp, descending beep — the two-note pattern Skarreth had cataloged years ago as her most pointed editorial commentary. The sound dropped in pitch at the end, almost dismissive, carrying more opinion in two tones than most beings could pack into a paragraph.
"She agrees with me," Nadir said.
Skarreth's jaw tightened. He stared at the star chart where the blue arc was fading, the display cycling toward standby, the route Octavia had pulled from nothing dissolving back into nothing.
"Everyone I care about gets destroyed."
He heard his own voice as if from a distance — rough, raw, stripped of the aristocratic register and the operative's precision and every other vocal mask he wore. What remained was a man standing in a closet-sized room at four in the morning, saying the truest thing he knew to the only two in the world he trusted enough to hear it.
Nadir's gaze didn't waver. The gold eyes held him — not with pity, which Skarreth would have rejected, and not withjudgment, which he would have deserved. With the steady, uncompromising clarity of someone who had watched him for too long to accept comfortable lies.
"So does everyone you push away."
The words hung between them.
Zenith was still. Completely still — wheels locked, arm folded, lens fixed. A total stillness she achieved only when something had surprised her or when she was waiting for something important to happen.
"At least one option doesn't leave you alone," Nadir said.
Skarreth's hand found the console edge. His grip tightened until the metal creaked — a sound like a ship's hull under stress, a sound he knew from the inside of vessels that were holding together through nothing but structural stubbornness and the refusal to acknowledge physics.
He thought about Octavia in the operations room — hands steady on the console, voice calm on the frequency to Teck, routing twelve lives through a corridor of space that didn't exist on any standard chart. She had seen what he was — the lord, the beast, the operative, the man who held her in the dark — and instead of running, she had saved twelve people who belonged to his mission and then told him the truth about himself so precisely it had drawn blood.
She didn't run from monsters. She painted them.
"The signal vulnerability," he said. The words came out flat. Operational. The only register he had left. "If Voss traces her transmission —"
"Then we address the vulnerability." Nadir's voice carried the gentle immovability of bedrock. "We don't address it by treating her as a liability. She is not a liability, my lord. She proved that tonight."
"She's a civilian with no extraction protocol."
"Then give her one."
Skarreth looked at him. The butler stood with his broad hands folded at his waist, the tarnished crest pin on his lapel catching the low light — Skarreth's mother's crest, worn every day for decades, the only sentimental object Nadir permitted himself. His expression held the quality Skarreth had never been able to fully read: patience that went deeper than strategy, loyalty that predated the mission, a care that extended beyond duty into something Skarreth didn't have a tactical framework for.
Zenith emitted a low, sustained tone — not her skeptical note, not her sarcastic descending pair. Something warmer. A single sound that rose slightly at the end, almost questioning, almost hopeful. It was a register Skarreth had heard fewer than a dozen times in all the years he'd known her.
He looked at the star chart. The blue arc had faded completely. The display showed nothing but standard navigation data — coordinates, empty space, the distances between objects that didn't care whether anyone crossed them.
Somewhere in the estate above him, Octavia sat in a room where she had pinned his portraits to the wall and then taken them down. Somewhere above him, a woman who saw the truth beneath every surface was deciding whether the truth she'd seen in him was worth the cost of having seen it.
He could feel her through the building the way he felt stress in a ship's hull — not with any specific sense, but with the whole-body certainty of learning to read the signs before the fracture.
His hands had stopped shaking.
He straightened. Drew a breath that went all the way down, filling the spaces that had been hollow since he'd walked out of the operations room and left her standing in his silence.
"Brief me on the transit details," he said to Nadir. "All of them. And pull the signal analysis from her transmission. I wantto know exactly what Voss could have intercepted and what he couldn't."
Nadir inclined his head. If he recognized the deflection — and he recognized it; he always recognized it — he allowed it to stand. Some walls came down in their own time. Pushing only reinforced the mortar.
Zenith pivoted and glided toward the door, already anticipating the move to the primary briefing alcove. Her lens tracked back to Skarreth for one final second — a brief, focused attention that read, in the language he had spent years learning to interpret, as something close to: good.
Skarreth followed. At the threshold, he paused. Turned back to the star chart display, now blank, now showing nothing but cold data and the absence of a blue arc that a painter had drawn across the dark.
At least one option doesn't leave you alone.
