I grip the railing until my knuckles go white. The metal is cold. The stars are fake. The applause is still echoing in my skull, and underneath it, my mother's voice, calm as the void.
The Consortium is going to war.
And I just bet everything on a battle I didn't know was being fought.
Chapter 14
Ethan
The holomapburns blue across the war room table, and every light on it is a life I'm about to help end.
Vera Zalt stands at the head of the table like she was born there, which she probably was, her silver hair pulled back from a face that could pass for carved basalt. She doesn't look at me when she speaks. She doesn't need to. Everyone in this room knows who the briefing is really for.
"7 Protocol Research Station Kael-9." Her fingers move through the projection, peeling back layers of the facility like skin from an orange. Exterior hull. Defense grid. Internal corridors branching like veins. "Twelve decks. Approximately four hundred personnel, split between military security and research staff. The facility conducts anomaly experimentation, weapons development, and what our intelligence suggests is live subject testing on empathic-class individuals."
My stomach doesn't turn. It should. I spent three years inside facilities like this one. Walked those corridors. Ate in those mess halls. Slept in bunks that looked exactly like the ones rendered in pale blue light on deck seven.
"The Consortium Council has voted unanimously to seize Kael-9," Vera continues. "We want the technology. The researchdata. The scientists, alive where possible. And we want to send a message that the Protocol's infrastructure is no longer untouchable."
Military planners line the edges of the room, their faces lit from below by personal displays, tactical overlays casting them in shades of blue and amber. They look like ghosts. Maybe we all do. Aura sits three seats to my left, close enough that I can smell the faint clean scent of whatever she uses in her hair, something botanical that doesn't exist in nature, not real nature, but it smells like rain on warm stone. She's watching her mother with an expression I've learned to read over these past weeks. Attentive. Calculating. Not cold, exactly, but disciplined in a way that makes the warmth underneath harder to reach.
Ky leans against the far wall with his arms crossed, his half-Empri features catching the light in a way that makes him look younger than he is. He's watching me, not his mother. His hazel eyes track my face like he's reading a language he's only recently started to learn.
"The assault requires detailed intelligence on Protocol facility design, security protocols, rotation schedules, and defensive capabilities." Vera's gaze finally finds me. It's the gaze of a woman who has sent people to die before and slept well after. "Mr. Eames. You possess that intelligence."
Not a question. She doesn't deal in questions when she already knows the answer.
"I do," I say.
The room shifts. Subtle things. A planner's stylus pausing mid-notation. Someone's breath held half a second too long. They know what I am. They know where I came from. Having me confirm it out loud, in a room full of Consortium brass, still lands like a stone dropped into still water.
"Then you understand what we're asking."
I understand exactly what she's asking. She's asking me to draw a map to the throats of people I once called colleagues. She's asking me to hand over the security rotations I memorized because memorizing things was the only skill I had that kept me useful. She's asking me to sit at this table and translate three years of shared meals and training exercises and late-night conversations into tactical vulnerabilities.
"I understand."
Vera nods, a single dip of her chin, and moves on to logistics as if the matter is settled. For her, it probably is. The Council voted. The machine is in motion. I'm just a component.
The briefing runs another forty minutes. Force composition. Insertion vectors. Acceptable casualty thresholds, a phrase that makes my skin crawl every time someone says it with a straight face. I sit through all of it, cataloguing the gaps in their planning, the places where their intelligence is thin or outdated, the assumptions that will get people killed if no one corrects them.
People on both sides.
When Vera dismisses the room, I'm the first one standing.
The Consortium gardens are a lie,and I find that comforting.
Artificial light filtered through engineered spectrum panels to simulate a sun that's light-years away. Plants grown in synthetic soil, their roots wrapped around nutrient tubes instead of earth. Even the air is manufactured, pumped with moisture and organic compounds to smell like a forest floor on a planet most of these plants have never seen. Everything here is controlled. Curated. A careful simulation of something wild, domesticated into something manageable.
I sit on a bench made of composite material shaped to look like stone and stare at a fern that has never felt wind.
The faces come whether I want them to or not. Sergeant Hallas, who taught me to strip and rebuild a pulse rifle in under ninety seconds and then sat with me in the mess afterward, talking about his daughter's school recitals. Dr. Pesh, who ran the cognitive assessments and always left an extra protein bar on my tray because she said I was too thin. Kenner, who bunked two slots down from me and snored like a malfunctioning ventilation unit and once covered for me when I missed a check-in because I was having the kind of nightmare that leaves you unable to remember your own name for twenty minutes.
I left them. Walked away from the Protocol because I saw what it was becoming, or maybe because I finally admitted what it had always been. I betrayed them by leaving. Now I'm being asked to betray them again, in a way that's permanent.
Hallas might be at Kael-9. Pesh almost certainly is. She was a researcher. She went where the research went.
The thought sits in my chest like a swallowed coal.
