Absolutely nothing. It's like pressing my hand against a bulkhead and trying to feel the vacuum on the other side. I know something is there. I know she's a living person with a full interior life, with emotions and reactions and the entire messy architecture of human consciousness. But from where I stand, she might as well be carved from the same alloy as the station walls. A perfect, featureless blank.
"I told you not to do that."
I stop walking. She stops three paces later, turning to face me with an expression that has dropped several degrees below the already frigid baseline.
"I didn't push."
"You tried to read." Her voice is quiet and precise, each word placed like a round in a magazine. "Same difference."
I open my mouth to argue the distinction, because there is a distinction, a meaningful one, a technical one that matters in the ethics of what I do. But the look on her face tells me that thedistinction doesn't matter to her, and she is the one who gets to decide what matters here. Her quarters. Her rules.
"Try again and we're done," she says.
I nod. Once.
She holds my gaze for a count of five, reading my compliance with whatever internal instruments she possesses, and then she resumes walking. After a moment, I do the same. The orbit re-establishes itself, and we complete another circuit in silence before she speaks again.
"What do you want from this marriage?"
I let out a breath that's almost a laugh. "Which version do you want?"
"Not the diplomatic answer." She cuts a glance at me as we pass on opposite sides of the table. "Not the alliance answer, not the Torrence-approved answer, not the version you've rehearsed with whoever handles your public face. What do you actually want?"
I consider lying. The reflex is so deep it barely registers as a choice anymore, just the automatic calculation of which truth serves which objective, which version of myself produces the optimal outcome. But she's already proven she can spot the architecture of deception even without reading the emotions behind it, and the realization of what that means keeps hitting me in waves, each one a little bigger than the last.
I cannot manage this woman. I cannot shape her perception of me. I cannot nudge her toward the conclusions I'd prefer or away from the ones I wouldn't. The only tool I have in this room is the actual, unmodified truth, and I am not sure I remember how to wield it.
"Survival," I say. "Purpose. Something to belong to that doesn't require me to destroy what I've built."
"You want to keep your Torrence loyalties."
"I want to serve both. The family I'm joining and the one I'm leaving." I stop walking. She stops too, and we face each other across the full width of the room, the table between us like a negotiation surface in a ceasefire. "Is that possible?"
"It is if I make it possible." Her smile is a weapon, sharp-edged and deliberate, the kind of expression that exists to remind you the person wearing it has options you don't. "What else?"
The word comes before the thought, bypassing every filter I have.
"You."
The silence that follows is a different species from the ones that came before. This one has texture. Weight. It sits in the air between us like something with mass, something I could reach out and touch if my hands weren't locked at my sides.
She didn't expect that. I can't read her emotions but I can read her body, the micro-stillness that replaces the fluid economy of her movement, the fraction of a second where her breathing pauses before resuming at its exact previous rate. Controlled. Recovered. But the pause was there.
"Explain," she says.
"I want to understand someone I can't read." I hear my own voice and it sounds strange to me. Stripped. Lighter than usual, missing some load-bearing component I've carried so long I'd forgotten it was there. "That hasn't happened in my life. Not once. Not ever. Every person I've met since my abilities manifested has been at least partially transparent to me, and I've spent twenty years navigating a world made of glass people, knowing what everyone feels, adjusting to it, managing it, drowning in the constant noise of other people's interiors."
I take a breath. The air in her quarters tastes clean. Spartan.
"You're silence," I tell her. "You're the first quiet room I've ever walked into. I want to know what that means."
She crosses to the table.Pulls out a chair. Sits.
I take this as permission and sit across from her. The surface between us is bare metal, polished to a matte finish. Our reflections are ghosts in it, too faint to read.
"Then here are my terms," she says, and her voice has shifted into a register I recognize because I've used it myself. The negotiation voice. The one that treats words as binding instruments, every sentence a clause in a contract being drafted in real time. "You don't push me. Ever. Not even testing. Not even the lightest touch. You don't read me without explicit verbal permission."
"And?"
