The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. I keep my face neutral, which is the one skill I have that doesn't require my abilities. The human kind. The learned kind. The mask I built before I ever understood I could build masks inside other people's minds.
I should lie. I have seven versions of the Elissa story, each calibrated for a different audience, each containing enough truth to pass surface scrutiny and enough omission to protect the people who need protecting. I've told the version for allies, the version for enemies, the version for people who think they already know and just need confirmation of whatever they've decided to believe.
I look at Aura Zalt, and every single version dies in my throat.
She can feel manipulation. Not suspect it, not intuit it, not guess at it with the educated instinct of someone trained in behavioral analysis. She can feel it the way I can feel other people's emotions: as a tangible thing, a pressure, a current inthe air between bodies. Every lie I tell her will have to stand on its own architecture, unsupported by the subtle emotional scaffolding I've spent my entire adult life learning to build without thinking.
So I tell her the truth. Not because I'm brave. Because I'm strategic, and the strategy here is terrifying in its simplicity.
"I used her." The words come out flat and clean, like a scalpel laid on a tray. "Deliberately. To hurt someone else."
She doesn't move. Doesn't blink. "The other woman? Your Aura Zalt equivalent?"
"There was no other woman. Not then."
"Then why?"
The silence between question and answer is three seconds long. I count them in heartbeats. "Because I could. Because she was there. Because I was angry at everyone who'd cornered me and she was the softest target."
The room's recycled air hums in the quiet that follows. I can hear the faint pulse of the station's gravity generators through the floor plates, that low-frequency vibration that lives in the back teeth. I wait for the thing that always comes next. The flinch. The recalibration. The moment someone's opinion of me visibly rearranges itself around this new, uglier data point.
It doesn't come.
Aura Zalt looks at me the way a surgeon looks at an imaging scan. Not with feeling. With assessment. With the clinical focus of someone who needs to understand the full topology of a problem before she decides how to cut.
"You're more honest than I expected," she says.
"You can tell when I'm lying?"
"I can tell when most people are lying." Something almost warm moves through her expression, but it's gone before I can name it. "My training covered that too."
A pause settles between us. Not uncomfortable. Loaded, like a weapon with the safety still engaged.
"What did you push into her?" she asks.
I hold her gaze. "Trust. Desire. The amplification of feelings she already had."
"Already had."
"I didn't create anything." The words taste like the rationalization they are, and I let her hear that in my voice. The slight roughness of a man who has rehearsed his own defense so many times he can hear the cracks in it. "I just nurtured what was there. Through sustained contact. Touch-based manipulation over weeks."
She processes this. I can see her doing it, and it's fascinating in a way that makes me uncomfortable, because I'm used to seeing people's emotional responses to information like this. The guilt spike. The pity. The revulsion. The complicated cocktail of horror and attraction that some people feel when they encounter someone who can do what I do. With her, I see nothing. I feel nothing. She is a closed system, and I am standing outside the airlock, reading nothing but my own reflection in the glass.
"Does that make it better or worse?" she asks.
"I haven't decided yet."
Her mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "At least you're honest about that too."
We circle each other.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The room is small enough that the circuit takes eight steps, and we move through it like binary stars locked in mutual orbit, maintaining a consistent distance that neither of us has explicitly negotiated but both of us respect. She moves counterclockwise. I mirror her. The table sitsbetween us at the halfway point, and we pass it on opposite sides each time we complete the loop, and there's something almost ritualistic about it. Two predators pacing the boundaries of a shared cage, establishing territory through motion rather than markers.
I try, once, to read her.
Not a push. I am careful about that, more careful than I've been about anything in recent memory. Just a brush. The lightest extension of my senses, the equivalent of turning my head to listen more closely to a conversation in another room. I'm not reaching into her, not inserting anything, not manipulating. I'm just opening myself to whatever she might be projecting. Trying to catch the ambient temperature of her emotional state the way you might feel heat radiating from a body standing close to yours in the dark.
Nothing.
