"Both sides?" The word catches on something in my throat.
"I don't want to waste Consortium soldiers either." She says it plainly, without softening, without apology. "Your knowledge saves lives. Even if it ends others."
There it is. The math. Not manipulation, which is ironic given what I am, what I was trained to be. Just the clear, unflinching calculation of cost. She's not dressing it up. Not telling me it's the right thing to do, or the noble thing, or that those Protocol personnel deserve what's coming. She's telling me the numbers. X lives if I help. Y lives if I don't. Y is bigger than X.
Simple arithmetic. Devastating arithmetic.
"Okay," I say.
She blinks. "Okay?"
"I'll give you everything I have on Kael-9. Layouts, security protocols, shift rotations, defensive capabilities, research staff locations. Everything."
She doesn't celebrate. Doesn't even look relieved, exactly. What crosses her face is something more complicated. Recognition, maybe. The look of someone who understands what a thing costs because she's paid similar prices herself.
"Thank you," she says, and the words have weight in them that "thank you" shouldn't be able to carry.
"Don't thank me." I push off the wall where I've been leaning. "Not for this."
I spendthe next two days in a secure briefing room, emptying my head into holographic displays.
Kael-9's layout unfolds under my hands like the guts of an animal I'm dissecting. Here, the main security checkpoint, staffed by four at standard rotation, six during alert status, with a blind spot on the port side where a maintenance conduit creates a gap in the sensor grid. Here, the researchwing, accessible through three corridors, two of which can be sealed remotely from the command center on deck three. Here, the barracks, separated from the labs by a bulkhead that was reinforced two years ago after an incident with a test subject. I know about the incident. I was stationed three decks away when it happened. I heard the screaming through the intercom before someone killed the feed.
The Consortium planners take notes. They ask precise, clinical questions. How many armed personnel on a standard overnight shift. What class of weaponry. Are the research staff trained in combat. What are the emergency evacuation protocols. Where would the facility commander go if the perimeter was breached.
I answer everything. My voice sounds like someone else's. Flat and professional, the voice of a man reporting data, not a man drawing targets on the backs of people who once shared their ration packs with him.
Aura sits in on every session. She doesn't speak unless someone asks her a direct question. She just watches, and I feel her gaze on my face like the heat from a reactor core, constant and inescapable, not burning but impossible to ignore. When I describe the barracks layout, I feel her eyes sharpen. When I give the estimated personnel count for the research wing, where Dr. Pesh almost certainly works, I hear her take a breath that's slightly deeper than the one before it.
She knows what this costs.
She doesn't flinch from it either.
At the end of the second day, the lead planner closes his display and nods once, a gesture so similar to Vera's that I wonder if it's Consortium training or just what happens to people who make decisions that end in body counts.
"This is comprehensive," he says. "This will save lives."
He means Consortium lives. The other lives, the ones my intelligence will help end, don't factor into his gratitude.
I nod. Leave the room. Make it to the nearest head before my hands start shaking.
It passes. It always passes. I brace my palms on the edge of the sink and stare at my reflection in the polished metal surface. The face that looks back is the same one that looked out from a Protocol uniform for three years. Same jaw. Same eyes. Same mouth that learned to lie before it learned to mean anything it said.
Different man. I think. I hope. I'm not entirely sure.
The transitback to Veridian-7 takes four days, and the ship carrying us feels different than the one that brought us to the Consortium. Heavier, maybe, though that makes no physical sense. The vessel is the same class, the same model, even the same berth assignments. What's heavier is the cargo. Not the crates of tactical equipment or the encrypted data cores packed into the hold. The plans. The weight of what we've set in motion.
Aura spends most of the journey in communication with her mother's staff, refining logistics, adjusting timelines. I spend it staring at the interior of our shared cabin, which is slightly larger than the one on the outbound trip and smells faintly of the cleaning solution the Consortium uses on all its surfaces, something astringent and vaguely citric that I've come to associate with Aura's world. Her world. Which is, apparently, now mine.
Veridian-7 appears in the viewport as a cluster of lights against the dark, and even at this distance I can see it's changed. More ships docked at the outer rings. New sensor arrays extending from the station's spine like the antennae of some vast, slow-waking insect. Torrence territory is becomingsomething else. A staging ground. An alliance foothold. The quiet frontier station where Aura and I first stood in the same room and calculated each other's worth is gearing up for war.
Zane meets us at the dock.
He looks like he hasn't slept well in days, which for Zane means he looks slightly less immaculate than usual instead of polished to a military shine. His jaw is tight, and his eyes move from Aura to me and back again with an expression that's too complicated to name with a single word. Concern and calculation and something that might be disappointment, directed at me or at the situation, I can't tell.
"The Consortium wants to attack the Protocol," he says. Not a greeting. Not a question.
"I know."
