She looks up at me, one boot in her hand, her hair falling across her face in a way that makes her look younger than she is. "Everything changes things."
I sit beside her. The mattress shifts under my weight, tipping her toward me by centimeters, and she lets herself lean until her shoulder presses against mine. The warmth of her seeps through my shirt and settles somewhere behind my sternum, a coal that never quite goes out.
"The Torrences might go after Malachar," I say. "If they do..."
"Then we help them."
She says it like it's simple. Like following a crime family through a tear in space-time to find a man who might be amonster or might be something worse than a monster is just the next item on the list.
"That's what alliance means," she adds, and turns to look at me, and her eyes are steady in a way that makes my throat tight. Not because she's certain. Because she's not, and she's choosing this anyway, choosing it with open eyes and full knowledge of the cost.
"Do you want to go?" I ask. "Through the anomaly?"
She's quiet. The environmental system hums. Somewhere in the station, I can hear the distant percussion of cargo being moved, the ordinary rhythms of a world that doesn't know it might be about to crack open.
"I want to stay with you," she says. "Whatever that looks like."
"Even if it's the other side of space-time?"
She takes my hand. Her fingers are cool from the recycled air, and when they wrap around mine I feel the calluses on her palm, the evidence of the life she's built, the work she's done, the weapons she's held. She lifts my hand to her mouth and presses her lips to the knuckle of my index finger, and the gesture is so simple, so small, that it hits me harder than anything has in days.
"Especially then," she says against my skin.
I pull her in. My arm around her shoulders, her face turning into my neck, and for a minute we just sit there, breathing the same flat station air, holding on to each other in a galaxy that keeps finding new ways to test the grip.
Her breath is warm on my throat. Her heartbeat is steady against my ribs. And I think about anomalies and doorways and the specific courage it takes to say yes to someone when you don't know what yes will cost.
I press my mouth to her hair. She smells like the station's soap, generic and chemical, and underneath it something that isjust her, warm and alive and here. I hold on tighter than I need to.
"Whatever comes through that door," I say, "we face it together."
She nods against my neck. Doesn't speak. Doesn't need to.
The silence between us is the good kind. The kind that holds.
The alarm shatters it.
Station-wide. The klaxon cuts through every wall, every sealed door, every quiet moment in every quarter, a sound designed to reach the brainstem before the conscious mind can catch up. My body is moving before I've finished processing the noise, rolling off the bed, reaching for the console, pulling up the alert data with hands that remember crisis even when the rest of me is still catching up.
Aura is beside me in three seconds, boots back on, her eyes scanning the readout over my shoulder.
"The anomaly," she says.
The nearest one. Malachar's anomaly. The tear in space-time that's been sitting in the Protocol's coordinates like a held breath for twenty years.
It's expanding.
The readings cascade across my screen in real-time, each one worse than the last. Spectral output increasing by orders of magnitude. Gravitational distortion radiating outward in waves that the station's sensors are picking up as tremors, subtle but measurable, the kind of vibration you feel in your teeth before you feel it in your feet. The tear is widening, its edges pulling apart with a kind of deliberate slowness that feels less like physics and more like intention.
Something is coming through.
Not debris. Not radiation. Not the scrambled fragments of another failed probe returning in pieces. The biosignature readings are lighting up my display in patterns I've never seen, complex and structured and wrong in ways that make my skin crawl, because they're close to human but not close enough, altered in ways that echo the Protocol's descriptions of what happened to Malachar's readings over two decades on the other side.
My comm screams with Zane's frequency, and when I answer, his voice has lost even the pretense of calm.
"The anomaly. Are you seeing this?"
"Seeing it."
