"They want to use your intelligence to do it."
"I know."
"Why did you agree?"
The dock hums around us. Loading mechs grinding across the deck plates. The hiss of pressurized seals. A maintenance crew shouting instructions to each other across the bay in the clipped shorthand of people who've worked together so long they barely need full sentences. All of it recedes into background noise, and what's left is Zane's face and the question sitting between us like a loaded weapon.
"Because she asked."
Three words. Simple. True.
Zane looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Aura, who has stopped a few paces behind me with her travel case in one hand and her expression carefully neutral. Something passes between them, some silent sibling-like exchange that I'm not fully part of and may never be, and then Zane nods.
"Okay," he says. Just that.
He picks up one of the equipment cases from the dock loader and walks toward the station interior, and I watch his back and think about how "okay" can sound like absolution when the right person says it.
That night,our quarters on Veridian-7 feel smaller than I remember. The viewport is the same wide sweep of reinforced glass looking out on the same spray of stars, but the room has accumulated evidence of habitation in the weeks we've been gone. My jacket over the back of a chair. A data reader on the shelf beside the bunk with a bookmark halfway through something Aura was reading before we left. Two coffee cups in the sanitizer, because she always makes two even when I say I don't want one, and I always drink it.
Small things. Evidence that someone lives here. That two someones live here, together, in this metal box hanging in the void.
I can't sleep.
The intelligence I provided plays behind my eyes every time I close them. Not the data itself, not the layouts and rotations and sensor gaps, but the faces attached to the data. Hallas, showing me how to field-strip a pulse rifle, his thick fingers moving with surprising delicacy. Pesh, sliding that extra protein bar across the mess table with a wink. Kenner's snoring, so loud and so constant that it became a kind of comfort, proof that someone was alive in the dark beside me.
I stand at the viewport in my sleep clothes and press my forehead against the glass. It's cold. Station-cold, the specific chill of a surface that's one layer of engineering away from the killing vacuum outside. The stars don't care about my intelligence reports. They don't care about Kael-9 or the peopleinside it or the assault that's being planned in rooms all over this station right now. They just burn.
I hear her before I feel her. The soft pad of bare feet on the deck plates. The whisper of fabric as she crosses the room.
"Having second thoughts?" Aura asks.
"Having all the thoughts. Second, third, thousandth."
She comes to stand beside me. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her through the thin material of her sleep shirt. She smells like station soap and her own skin and the faintest trace of whatever she was drinking before bed, something herbal that Ky sent her from the Consortium.
"Is this too much?" she asks.
I turn my head to look at her. The starlight catches the planes of her face, the sharp line of her jaw, the slight furrow between her brows that means she's worried but trying not to lead with it. She's beautiful in the way that a well-made blade is beautiful. Functional. Precise. Capable of drawing blood.
"Nothing about you is too little."
The furrow deepens, and I turn to face her fully, leaning my shoulder against the viewport glass.
"I've done terrible things to belong somewhere. To have purpose. This is just more of the same."
"I'm not using you." Her voice is quiet, but there's steel in it. The same steel that was in it when she presented me with a marriage contract and looked me dead in the eyes and dared me to say no.
"I know." I reach out and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and my fingers brush the skin of her temple, which is warm and real and alive. "That's the difference. You're not using me. You're asking me. And I'm saying yes because I want to, not because I have to."
She's quiet for a moment, and the station breathes around us. The low hum of the life support. The distant clang ofsomething mechanical settling in the corridors. Stars burning in their slow, indifferent way beyond the glass.
Then she crosses the space between us and wraps her arms around me.
For a moment, she just holds on. Her face pressed into my chest. Her arms tight around my ribs. The full length of her body against mine, not demanding, not leading, not calculating. Just holding, the way people hold each other when the dark is too big and the only solid thing in the universe is the person in front of you.
I close my arms around her. Rest my chin on the top of her head. Breathe in the smell of her hair and feel her heartbeat against my sternum, steady and sure, the heartbeat of a woman who has never been uncertain about what she wants, only about whether she'll get to keep it.
"I love you."
