"I'm a calculating person. It's why you found me useful."
"Past tense?"
I met his eyes. "Present tense. I'm just calculating for different purposes now."
The silence that followed was the kind that weighs things. Zane held it for three full seconds, which was longer than most people could sustain without filling the space with noise. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to the console.
"Walk me through the command structure. Top down."
I did. For the next two hours, I dismantled the organization I'd spent years embedded in, laying out its skeleton for a man who had every reason to distrust me and was choosing, provisionally, not to. I gave him the names of handlers I'd reported to. The locations of dead drops I'd serviced. The recruitment methodology, the indoctrination process, the way they identified and cultivated assets with specific abilities. I described the Protocol's interest in anomalous phenomena, their research into the boundary between known physics and whatever lived on the other side of it.
I held nothing back. Not because I was noble, but because holding back would have been pointless. Aura would have known. She'd have felt the shape of the lie even if she couldn't identify its content, and the fragile thing we were building in those shared quarters would have cracked along whatever fault line my deception created.
So I told the truth. All of it. And it felt like peeling skin.
Talia caughtme in the corridor afterward, falling into step beside me with the ease of someone who'd learned to navigate the station's rhythms as naturally as breathing. I remembered what she'd been when she first arrived. Debt cargo. Owned in all the ways that mattered, stripped of agency so thoroughly that most people in her position never recovered it.
She'd recovered it. She'd rebuilt herself into something that made powerful people careful about their words when she entered a room. I respected that more than I could articulate, because I understood the cost of becoming someone new. The difference was that Talia had become someone real. I was still working on that part.
"You're different with her," she said without preamble. "Aura."
I kept walking. "Different how?"
"More careful." She matched my pace, her boots quiet on the station floor. "More honest."
"She can tell when I'm not."
"That's not why."
I glanced at her. Talia's eyes were sharp, the kind of sharp that came from surviving things that should have broken her and emerging with better vision instead of less. She read people the way navigators read star charts, with precision and an instinct for hidden gravity wells.
"You actually care what she thinks," she said. "That's new."
The observation sat in my chest like a splinter. I didn't have a response, because she was right. Every manipulation I'd ever run, every cover I'd maintained, every carefully constructed persona I'd presented to the world had operated on the same principle: what other people thought of me was a tool. Their opinion was leverage. Their trust was access. I managed their perceptions the way an engineer manages system outputs, with calculation and clear objectives.
With Aura, I cared. Not strategically. Not because her opinion affected my operational position. I cared the way people care when the answer matters to them for no reason they can justify in tactical terms. I wanted her to think well of me, and the wanting felt like standing on a ledge without a safety tether.
Talia watched my silence with something that might have been understanding. "That's terrifying for someone like you, isn't it?"
"Someone like me."
"Someone who's never had to be anything real before." She said it without judgment, which made it worse. Judgment I could have deflected. Understanding went straight through my defenses like a blade through silk.
She left me at the junction where the corridor split toward the residential ring, and I stood there for a moment longer than I should have, feeling the recycled air cycle through the vents above me, tasting the metallic flatness of it on my tongue. The station hummed around me, that constant low-frequency vibration that lived in the teeth and the sternum, the sound of thousands of systems keeping thousands of people alive in the void.
I'd worn masks so long I wasn't sure there was a face underneath. Every version of me had been designed for a purpose. The Protocol operative who reported to his handlers with clean data and cleaner lies. The trusted advisor who sat in briefings and guided decisions toward outcomes his masters preferred. The charming ally who made people feel comfortable enough to show him their vulnerabilities. Each mask fit perfectly because I'd built them to fit, sculpted them from observation and practice until they were more real than whatever they covered.
Aura stripped them away. Not with force, not with confrontation. She simply refused to accept them. Her ability meant she could feel the falseness, the slight dissonance between what I presented and what I was, and she wouldn't engage with the mask. She'd wait. She'd watch. She'd let the silence stretch until I either offered something genuine or walked away.
I kept offering something genuine. That was the terrifying part.
The question I couldn't answer, the one that followed me through the corridors and into our shared quarters and into the thin space between sleeping and waking: when all the masks came off, was there anything left? Or was I just absence shaped like a person, a hollow space that had learned to mimic substance so convincingly that even I'd forgotten there was nothing inside?
The fight started over socks.
Not literally, though socks were involved. I came back to our quarters on the evening of day seven to find that Aura had reorganized the entire storage unit. My clothes were refolded according to her system. My datapad had been moved from the desk to the shelf. My boots had been relocated from beside the door to a compartment I hadn't known existed. Even my toiletries in the refresher had been rearranged, my razor now stored in a case I'd never seen before, positioned at an angle that suggested she'd calculated the optimal reach distance from the sink.
The socks were the last straw. She'd rolled them into tight cylinders, sorted by thickness, and filed them in a drawer with dividers she must have fabricated or acquired from somewhere. My socks. In a system I hadn't agreed to.
