The question hangs in the recycled air between us. Green diffuser scent and the distant hum of life support and the stars turning slowly past the viewport behind me, indifferent witnesses to the smallest, most devastating reckoning of my life.
She's waiting. Hands shaking. Eyes red. The soft girl gone and something fiercer standing in her place, demanding answers from the man who taught her that answers can be weapons.
I open my mouth.
I have nothing.
Not nothing as in I won't answer. Nothing as in, for the first time in my life, I don't know which face to wear. There is no desire to read, no need to mirror, no angle to calculate. There is only a girl I wounded standing in my doorway asking me for the one thing I've never been sure I possessed.
The truth.
And the worst part, the part that will keep me awake for whatever hours remain before dawn and the contract and the new cage I'm walking into, is that I don't know the answer. I don't know if any of it was real. I don't know if I'm capable of real. I don't know if the man who brought her coffee and made her laugh and let her trust him was a performance or a person, and the fact that I can't tell the difference is the most honest thing about me.
She's still standing there. Still shaking. Still waiting.
The ghost I can't outrun. The sin I can't confess. Standing at my door, demanding answers I don't have.
Chapter 3
Aura
The human girlarrives at his door at 23:47 station time.
I almost miss it. I'm reviewing the dossier Ky compiled on the Torrence family's financial holdings, cross-referencing shell corporations with known Dominion trade routes, when the motion sensor on camera six trips and the secondary monitor flickers to life. I glance over, expecting a patrol guard or maybe a cleaning drone on its scheduled sweep.
Instead, there's a girl.
Young. Mid-twenties at most, though humans age in ways I still find difficult to read. Pale skin, almost translucent under the corridor's cold lighting. Pale eyes, red-rimmed and swollen in a way that speaks to hours of crying before this moment, not minutes. Hair pulled back in a knot that's coming loose, like she started the evening put-together and has been unraveling ever since.
No bioluminescence. Not a trace. No faint glow along the cheekbones, no shimmer at the temples, no telltale luminous threading in the veins of her wrists. Entirely, unmistakably human.
She stands outside Ethan Torrence's door, and her hand hovers over the chime panel without pressing it. Hovers there, fingers trembling, for eleven seconds. I count.
I set down the dossier.
The girl presses the chime. Then she wraps her arms around herself like she's trying to hold her ribs together, and she waits.
I lean forward in my chair and pull the feed to the primary monitor, enlarging it until her face fills the screen. The resolution on these cameras is exquisite. Torrence Station security thinks they're the only ones with eyes in these corridors, but I had my own installed within four hours of our arrival. Redundancy isn't paranoia. It's professionalism.
Her lips move. I can see them shaping words, but the cameras are visual only. I hadn't prioritized audio on this particular corridor, a miscalculation I'm already correcting in my head. She's rehearsing, I realize. Practicing whatever she plans to say, her mouth forming and reforming the same phrases, trying different versions. The body language is all wrong for a political operative or an intelligence asset. Too raw. Too uncontrolled. Her shoulders curve inward. Her weight shifts from foot to foot. She keeps touching her own throat, a self-soothing gesture that reads as deeply habitual.
This is a woman who has been wounded, and who has come back to the blade that cut her.
The door opens.
Ethan stands in the frame, and I watch his face cycle through three expressions in less than a second. Surprise, which reads as genuine. Then something softer that I can't quite categorize from this angle, something that lives in the space around his eyes and the way his lips part. Then the mask. Smooth, composed, the diplomatic face I've been studying in briefings for weeks. He rebuilds himself so quickly that if I'd blinked, I would have missed everything that came before.
But I don't blink. Not when I'm watching.
The girl says something. Her hands come up, palms open, the universal gesture of supplication. Ethan's jaw tightens. He responds, and whatever he says makes her flinch like he's struck her, though he hasn't moved. Hasn't shifted his weight, hasn't leaned toward her, hasn't so much as uncrossed his arms from where they've folded over his chest.
Words can be violence. I know that better than most.
She steps closer. He doesn't step back, but something in his posture changes, a stiffening along the spine that I recognize because I've felt it in my own body. The effort of not reaching for something you want. Or the effort of holding yourself still when someone else's pain is a gravity you're trying not to fall into.
She's crying now. I can see it in the way the light catches the wetness on her face, in the small convulsive movements of her shoulders. Her mouth is working around words that are clearly costing her something enormous, and Ethan is standing there receiving them with an expression that has gone perfectly, terribly still.
He says something. Short. Three words, maybe four. His mouth barely moves.
