"What the fuck," Dexter says, and the profanity from a Torrence on an open channel is enough to make Zane's jaw tighten.
"Report," Zane says.
"There's..." A pause. The camera pans across a room that takes me several seconds to process, because my brain keeps trying to reclassify what I'm seeing into something that makes sense, something that fits inside the parameters of a research facility. "There are people down here. In cells. Dozens of them. Some kind of, I don't know, containment pods, medical rigs. They're hooked up to machines I've never seen before."
The war room goes quiet.
I pull the feed larger on my display. The resolution sharpens and I wish it hadn't. The room is vast, carved from the station's substructure, lined with transparent containment units that glow with a faint bioluminescence I recognize from Empri tech. Inside each one, a person. Some human. Some clearly Empri, their features carrying the distinctive markers. Some somewhere between, with the half-formed quality of people caught in a transformation they didn't choose. Half-Empri. Like Ethan.
They are thin. They are damaged. Several of them have surgical scars visible even through the glass, their bodies mapped with the evidence of procedures I don't want to understand. One woman is curled in the corner of her pod with her hands over her ears, rocking. A man in the adjacent unit has his eyes open but nothing behind them, his face slack with the absence of a mind that checked out and never returned.
"Ethan." My voice is barely above a whisper. "Did you know about this?"
His feed shows him stopped in a corridor, one hand braced against the wall. He heard Dexter's report. He's hearing it all.
"No." The word sounds like it costs him something vital, something he won't get back. "No. I didn't. I swear to you, Aura, I didn't know."
I believe him. Not because I'm naive, not because love has made me stupid, but because I can hear the particular texture of a man discovering that the place he thought he understood had an entire floor dedicated to horrors he never imagined. The intelligence he gave us was good. It was thorough. It was everything he knew.
It just wasn't everything there was.
"We need medical teams," I say, turning to Zane. "Those people need extraction and treatment. Some of them look like they've been there for months. Years, maybe."
Zane's expression is calculating. Not cruel, but pragmatic in the way that makes me want to hit him sometimes. "Medical teams divert resources from the primary objective."
"The primary objective is the data core, and it's ninety seconds from secured. Redirect the reserve unit to the sublevel." I hold his gaze. "We don't leave them there. That's not what we're fighting for."
Something shifts behind his eyes. A calculation I'm not privy to, factoring in variables I can't see. Alliance optics, maybe.The propaganda value of liberation footage. Or maybe, buried somewhere under the Torrence pragmatism, something that still recognizes the line between necessary cruelty and unnecessary evil.
"Send the reserves," he says.
I findEthan's feed again. He's made his way to the sublevel on his own, ignoring the tactical plan, ignoring the route I would have told him to take. He's standing in the doorway of the prisoner wing and his camera shows me what his face can't, the slow pan across the containment units, the lingering focus on a pod where an Empri woman is pressing her hand against the glass like she's trying to touch the world she can still see but can't reach.
He moves through the room with the carefulness of a man walking through a graveyard where some of the graves might be his.
A voice stops him.
"You." A woman's voice, rasped thin by disuse or damage or both. "I know you."
The camera turns. She's in a pod that's been opened, either by the breach team or by some malfunction in the facility's systems. She's sitting on the edge of the medical platform, her legs dangling, her hospital gown stained with things I don't want to identify. Her eyes are what freeze the air in my lungs. Too bright. Not the brightness of intelligence or fever but something else, something that looks like it was put there by someone who wanted to see how much light a human iris could hold before it stopped being human.
"Handler Reis," Ethan says, and his voice carries the particular shock of recognition that rewrites the present tense.
She laughs. It sounds like glass in a garbage disposal. "Not a handler anymore. Not for a long time. They ran out of subjects and started using staff. Funny how that works."
"I didn't know." He says it again. The same words, but smaller this time, as though repetition is wearing them down to nothing.
"You did this." Her too-bright eyes fix on his camera, on his face behind it.
"The attack? Yes."
"Not just the attack." She slides off the platform and her legs buckle but she catches herself on the edge, and the gown shifts and I can see the surgical scars running down her arms like a map of everything they did to her. "You gave us to them. The Torrences. The Consortium. You handed us over."
"I—"
"We built you." Her voice drops to something intimate and terrible, the voice of a woman who helped create a weapon and then was consumed by the machine that forged it. "We trained you. We gave you every tool you used to betray us. Sent you out into the world like a good little operative and you brought the war right back to our door."
Ethan doesn't move. Doesn't speak. On the feed, his breathing is the only sound, ragged and too fast, and I grip the edge of the holotable until my knuckles ache because I can't reach through the screen and touch him and there is nothing else in the world I want to do.
