I lie in the dark of our quarters, staring at the ceiling where recycled air hums through the vents, and I keep reaching for it. The empathic space where Elissa Torrence existed for nearly a decade. The steady, readable pulse of her trust, her affection, her quiet devotion that I cultivated like a crop I intended to harvest. It's gone. Not muted, not distant. Gone. She's learned to wall herself off from me completely, or she's simply stopped feeling anything in my direction, and I'm not sure which possibility is worse.
I'd forgotten what true blindness feels like. A decade surrounded by humans whose emotions I could taste like weather patterns, and I'd grown fat on the information. Lazy with it. Elissa's hurt had always been a thing I could monitor, adjust for, manage. Now there's nothing. Just the flat, human silence of a person who has decided I don't deserve access to her interior world.
She's right. I don't.
Beside me, Aura breathes. Slow and even, though I know she's awake. I can feel her the way I can feel all Empri, thatfamiliar resonance of a mind built like mine, but hers has always been different. Guarded in layers I haven't fully mapped. What I can read is surface calm over something warmer, something she's choosing not to hide anymore.
She rolls toward me. Her hand finds my chest in the dark, palm flat over my sternum, and the contact sends her emotional register straight through my skin. Concern. Steady, unsentimental concern. And underneath it, a thread of something I'm learning to recognize as tenderness, though she'd sooner airlock herself than call it that.
She sits up. The ambient light catches the sharp lines of her face, the deliberate architecture of a woman who was built to be a weapon and chose to be a person instead. She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and pads to the small galley unit. I hear the hiss of the coffee system, the ceramic click of a mug being pulled from the rack.
When she comes back, she presses the mug into my hands and sits cross-legged on the mattress facing me, watching me drink with an expression that doesn't need empathic ability to read. She can see how I'm doing. She doesn't need to taste my emotional state to know that I'm sitting in the wreckage of my own choices and finding no angle that makes it look better.
"You've been awake for hours," she says. Her voice carries that particular edge of someone stating facts rather than asking questions—the tone of a woman trained to assess situations and render judgment without sentiment. The coffee mug settles warm in my hands, a counterweight to the cold certainty in her words. "Staring at the ceiling won't change what happened."
It's not a question, and it's not quite a command. It's an observation delivered with the precision of someone who's spent a lifetime reading people the way I read emotions. Aura doesn't need my abilities to know that I've been lying here cataloging failures, running through scenarios where differentchoices might have led to different outcomes. She can see it in the tension of my shoulders, the way my hands have gone white-knuckled around the ceramic.
"I know," I say. The admission costs something, not much, but something. "I know that too."
She sits up. The ambient light catches the sharp lines of her face, the deliberate architecture of a woman who was built to be a weapon and chose to be a person instead. She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and pads to the small galley unit. I hear the hiss of the coffee system, the ceramic click of a mug being pulled from the rack.
When she comes back, she presses the mug into my hands and sits cross-legged on the mattress facing me, watching me drink with an expression that doesn't need empathic ability to read. She can see how I'm doing. She doesn't need to taste my emotional state to know that I'm sitting in the wreckage of my own choices and finding no angle that makes it look better.
"The Torrences will know by now," she says. "Elissa won't have kept quiet."
"No." The coffee is bitter, station-standard, nothing like the imported blends Zane keeps in his office. It tastes like penance. "She won't."
"What are you going to do?"
I set the mug on the narrow shelf beside the bed. Look at her. This woman who married me knowing exactly what I am, who heard my confession and didn't flinch but also didn't forgive, who is still here in this bed choosing to hand me coffee instead of a knife.
"Face it," I say. "What else is there?"
She nods. Once. Like that's the only answer she would have accepted.
The summons comesthree hours later. A single line on my personal comm, stripped of pleasantry, stripped of pretense.
My office. Now.
Zane Torrence's communication style has always been efficient, but this is something else. This is a man who doesn't trust himself to write more than four words without saying something he can't take back.
I dress. Station-standard clothing, nothing that could be read as armoring up or dressing down. Aura watches from the doorway of the washroom, her hair still damp, her arms crossed.
"I'm coming with you."
"No."
"Ethan."
"This is between me and them." I seal the collar of my shirt. My hands are steady, which feels like a lie my body is telling on my behalf. "I hurt their sister. I don't get to bring backup."
"You're my husband." She says it like she's testing the word, turning it over, checking its edges. "That makes it my business."
"Not this time."
Her jaw tightens. I can feel the flare of her frustration, hot and immediate, but she doesn't push. Aura Zalt has never been the kind of woman who repeats herself. She makes her position known and then she lets you choose wrong.
I'm choosing wrong. I know that. But some debts have to be paid alone.
