And now she fights like someone building armor out of muscle memory and mean.
I watch her take down a third sparring partner. Her form is getting better. Her mercy is getting worse.
I leave the observation deck before she can look up and see me standing there like a ghost she hasn't agreed to be haunted by.
The corridoron Deck Nine is empty at shift change. Everyone is either heading to their posts or heading to rack out, and this stretch near the secondary water reclamation units smells like ozone and wet metal and nothing alive. I'm cutting throughit because it's fast, because I don't want to be seen, because I've been avoiding main corridors for three days now and I'm running out of alternate routes.
I hear her boots before I see her. That new walk. Measured. Quiet. But not quiet enough to hide from someone who's been trained to listen.
We round the same junction at the same time.
She stops. I stop. Six meters of empty corridor between us, lit by the blue-white strips that make everyone look like a corpse.
"Elissa."
"Don't." The word hits the air between us and dies there. Her pale eyes fix on mine and there's nothing in them I recognize. Nothing soft. Nothing warm. The girl who used to light up when she saw me is gone, and what's standing in her place has a jaw set like concrete and hands that don't shake. "Don't say my name like that. Like you have the right."
"I wanted to." I stop. The sentence has nowhere honest to go.
"Apologize?" She tilts her head. "Explain? Make yourself feel better?"
Her laugh comes out of her like something scraped off the bottom of a boot. Bitter and small and finished.
"You used me. You pushed me." She takes one step forward and I hold my ground because I owe her that much. I owe her the discomfort of not retreating. "I felt it happen and I let myself believe it was real anyway. That's on me. But what you did." Another step. Close enough now that I can see the new scar on her knuckle, the raw skin where she's been hitting bags without wrapping her hands. "That's on you."
I don't argue. I don't explain. I stand in the corridor that smells like recycled water and ozone and I let her words land where they're supposed to land, which is somewhere in the center of my chest where the shame lives.
"Elissa, I know that nothing I say."
"Then don't say it."
She walks past me. Close enough that her shoulder almost touches mine but doesn't. The air moves between us and it's cold, station-cold, nothing like the warmth I used to generate between us on purpose, that counterfeit heat I pushed into her emotional field until she mistook it for something real.
Her boots on the deck plates. Getting quieter. Gone.
I stand alone in the corridor for a long time after that. The reclamation units hum behind the wall, cycling water through filters, cleaning it, sending it back out as something usable. I think about how the station reclaims everything. Waste becomes water. Scraps become fuel. Nothing is allowed to be ruined beyond recovery.
I don't know if people work that way.
Ky Zalt findsme in the galley alcove on Deck Twelve. I'm sitting with a cup of station coffee that tastes like someone described coffee to a machine that had never encountered a bean, and I'm not drinking it. I'm holding it because the heat against my palms feels like a kind of penance. Too hot. I don't adjust my grip.
He slides into the seat across from me without asking. Aura's brother has her bone structure, the sharp Empri angles softened by their human father's genetics, but where Aura carries herself like a drawn blade, Ky has always moved through the world like still water. Calm surface. You forget what's underneath.
"I saw you with Elissa Torrence." His voice is mild. Conversational. He picks up my untouched coffee and sniffs it, wrinkles his nose, sets it back down.
"I'm sure you did."
"She's damaged because of you." Ky folds his hands on the table. His fingers are long, artist's fingers, and he keeps them very still. "My sister's network told me everything. Theemotional manipulation. The way you amplified her attachment. All of it."
I wonder briefly which of Aura's contacts fed him the details, whether it was one of the formal intelligence sources or just the ambient gossip that flows through stations like atmosphere through vents. It doesn't matter. The information is accurate.
"I know."
"Do you?" His hazel eyes flash blue. Not the controlled, muted shimmer that half-Empri learn to suppress in public, but a genuine break in his composure. Real emotion bleeding through the conditioning. It happens so fast I almost miss it, but I don't, because I'm half-Empri too and I know what that flash costs. It means he's angry enough to lose his grip. "Because knowing and caring are different mechanical processes, Ethan. You can know you broke a bone and still walk on it."
I look at him. Really look. The gentle exterior. The soft voice. The way he holds his shoulders open instead of squared. Everything about Ky Zalt reads as safe, approachable, harmless, and I've been around his family long enough to understand that the Zalt children are all weapons. They just come in different calibers.
"If you hurt Aura the same way." He leaves the sentence half-built, a structure missing its roof, letting me see inside it.
