"You look like a man wrestling with his conscience."
Ky settles onto the bench beside me with the easy grace of someone who grew up in low gravity. His hazel eyes are more brown than blue today, calm and steady, which means his Empri half is quiet. I've learned that the color shifts with his emotional state, or with the emotional states around him, and the fact that they're staying brown tells me he's either very controlled right now or I'm projecting less than I think.
"I'm wrestling with something," I tell him. "Not sure I have enough conscience to qualify."
"My sister thinks you do."
"Your sister might be wrong."
"She's rarely wrong."
He says it simply, like he's stating the orbital period of a moon. A fact so established it doesn't need emphasis. I look at him, this half-human, half-Empri young man who didn't trustme when I married his sister. Who watched me with those shifting eyes and saw, I'm sure, every shade of self-interest and manipulation that colored my reasons for accepting Aura's arrangement.
"I didn't trust you," he says, as if hearing my thoughts. Maybe he can. I've never been entirely clear on the boundaries of his abilities. "When you married her. I thought you were using her."
"I thought I was too."
The honesty surprises me as it leaves my mouth. Not because it's untrue, but because I usually keep truths like that locked behind three layers of deflection and a carefully placed smile. Something about Ky makes directness feel less dangerous. Maybe it's the calm. Maybe it's that he'll know if I'm lying anyway.
"And now?" he asks.
I watch the artificial light play across the engineered leaves. A small maintenance drone hums past overhead, adjusting the moisture levels, keeping the simulation alive.
"Now I don't know what I am. Just that I'm hers. Whatever that means."
Ky is quiet for a long moment. The drone finishes its circuit and disappears into a panel in the ceiling, and the soft buzz of its motors fades until all that's left is the whispered cycling of the air processors and the faint, false smell of green things growing.
"It means enough," he says finally. He stands, brushes nothing off his pants, a nervous gesture or a habitual one, and looks down at me with those calm brown eyes. "Give them the intelligence, Ethan. Not because my mother demands it. Not because the Council voted. Give it because the alternative is a messier assault with more bodies on both sides, and some of those bodies will be people my sister cares about."
He walks away through the manufactured garden, and I sit there on my fake stone bench among my fake ferns and thinkabout how a half-Empri kid just handed me the only argument that could actually move me.
Not duty. Not strategy. Not even guilt.
The people Aura cares about.
Which, somehow, impossibly, includes me.
I findher in a side corridor off the war room, leaning against the wall with a data tablet in her hands and her brow furrowed in a way that means she's running numbers she doesn't like. She looks up when she hears my footsteps, and her expression shifts through several things in quick succession. Concern. Assessment. Something softer that she tucks away before it fully forms.
"You left the briefing quickly," she says.
"Needed air. Or whatever passes for it here."
"The gardens?"
"Your brother found me."
Her eyebrows rise a fraction. "Ky sought you out?"
"He made his case. Subtly. For a Zalt."
The ghost of a smile. She sets the tablet down on a narrow ledge built into the corridor wall, and for a moment she just looks at me. Studies me, the way she does, with those eyes that miss nothing and forgive less than they should.
"My mother isn't asking," Aura says quietly. "The Council voted. The operation is happening with or without your help."
"I know."
"The only question is whether you help us do it efficiently. Fewer casualties on both sides. Or whether we go in without your intelligence and more people die."
