"Correct."
"But did any of them survive? On the other side?"
I pull up the file I've been dreading. "One carrier's biosignature persisted for approximately fourteen months after transit. The data is fragmented, but the Protocol's analysts classified the carrier as having reached the destination." I pause. Read the name. "Marcus St. Laurent. Carrier Four. Status: unknown."
Talia's hand goes still on her belly. For three seconds, maybe four, she doesn't breathe. Zane's hand finds hers under the table, his fingers wrapping around her wrist, holding on, and she lets him, which tells me more about what she's feeling than any expression could.
"My father might be there too," she says. Her voice is steady in the way that things are steady right before they shatter. "On the other side."
Zane's thumb moves across her pulse point. He doesn't have answers. None of us do. But he holds on, and she lets him, and for a moment the room is just that: two people sitting with an impossible grief while the rest of us try not to look too closely.
It's Elissa who breaks the silence.
"Can we reach him?"
Every head turns. She's sitting straight in her chair, hands folded, eyes moving between the anomaly data and the biosignature readings with an analytical focus that belongs in a war room, not on the face of the youngest person in the room.
"Can we retrieve him?" she continues. "The Protocol's data gives us coordinates, spectral profiles, transit parameters. We have resources they didn't. Better ships, better tech, and people who actually want to come back instead of being sent as disposable sensors." She pauses, and her eyes settle on Zane. "Can we get to him?"
Not whether they should. Not what Malachar deserves after twenty years of silence, after the empire of pain he built and abandoned, after the children he broke and left to reassemble themselves from the pieces. Just the operational question, stripped clean of sentiment.
I watch her and feel the weight of every choice that brought her here. The soft girl would have asked why. Would have asked if Malachar wanted to be found, if he'd earned the rescue, if the father who left them deserved the risk. This Elissa asks how, because she's learned that the universe doesn't care about deserving and the only question that matters is capability.
Something harder than it should be. Something I helped make.
Astra, beside her, shows nothing on her face. But I catch the slight shift of her weight, the fractional adjustment that brings her shoulder closer to Elissa's, and I recognize it for what it is. Not comfort. Acknowledgment. The trainer noting that the student has arrived somewhere new.
"With the Protocol data, combined with our own research and the alliance's resources, a transit mission becomes theoretically possible." Dexter has his hands steepled now, his eyes distant with calculation. "The coordinates are precise. The spectral profile would allow us to tune our approach. We knowmore about the anomaly's behavior than the Protocol did when they attempted their carrier missions."
"Theoretically possible is not the same as advisable," Aura says.
"Nothing about this family is advisable." Astra's voice from the wall, dry as recycled air. "When has that stopped us?"
A sound escapes Zane that might be a laugh in another life. "The mission would be dangerous. Probably one-way. Possibly pointless."
"And if he's there?" Talia asks. "If he's alive, changed, on the other side of something we barely understand? If my father is there too?"
The question hangs.
Zane looks at his siblings one by one. Dexter, already running logistics behind his eyes. Astra, coiled and ready, waiting for a direction to point herself. Elissa, still and sharp, a blade someone forgot to sheathe. And Talia, carrying his child, carrying her own grief, carrying the impossible weight of a father she never got to bury because he might not be dead.
"We plan it," Zane says. "We don't commit yet. We plan it, we assess the risk, and we make the decision together." His eyes find mine. "Eames. You and Aura continue the data analysis. I want to know everything the Protocol learned about the other side. Every reading, every fragment, every failed transmission. If we're going to open that door, I want to know what's behind it before we step through."
"Understood."
The briefing breaks apart slowly. Dexter leaves first, already speaking into his comm, pulling logistics teams together with the quiet efficiency of a man who builds plans the way other people breathe. Astra and Elissa leave together, and I notice that they walk in step now, matched in rhythm, the human and thealien moving with the same predatory economy that makes the back of my neck prickle.
Talia stays seated for a moment after the others have gone. Zane beside her, his hand still wrapped around her wrist, both of them looking at the display where Marcus St. Laurent's name still glows in the pale blue light of incomplete data.
Aura touches my arm. We leave them to it.
Some things don't need an audience.
Our quarters are quiet.The door seals behind us and the sound of the station falls away, replaced by the soft thrum of environmental systems and the particular silence that belongs to spaces where two people have learned to exist together.
Aura sits on the edge of the bed and pulls her boots off, one and then the other, and I watch her the way I've learned to watch her: not cataloguing threats, not assessing angles, just looking at the person I chose and feeling the specific ache of knowing I'd follow her through an anomaly in space-time without hesitating.
"This changes things," I say.
