"Because he can't." Lysander's expression shifts, something flickering behind his composure that I can't read. Regret, maybe. Or the cousin of regret that lives in people who carry messages they didn't choose. "The passage changed him. He's tied to that place now. Part of it."
Part of it. I turn the phrase over in my mind and feel it resist comprehension, the way some concepts are too large to fit into the space language provides for them. Malachar, a man who bent this galaxy around his will, who built empires and broke families and left wreckage that his children are still navigating. Tied to another place. Part of it. The scientist in me wants to ask what that means on a molecular level, a quantum level, whether the anomaly altered his physiology or his consciousness or something we don't have a category for. The woman in me, the one standing beside her husband in a room full of people whose lives this man ruined, just feels the cold spreading through my chest.
"He says to tell you he's sorry." Lysander pauses, and the flicker is back, that expression that might be recognition of howinsufficient the words are. "For everything. But this is bigger than any of us. And he needs your help to finish it."
Sorry. The word sits in the room like a coin dropped on a coffin. Too small for the debt. Too late for the wound. And yet it lands, because apologies from monsters always land, not because they heal anything but because the people who needed to hear them can't stop their bodies from reacting to the sound.
I watch Talia's jaw clench. I watch Zane's hand move to her knee under the table. I watch Dexter lean back in his chair with an expression that says he's doing math on whether this is a trap, and I watch Elissa's eyes go bright with something that isn't tears but isn't far from them.
Nobody speaks for a long time.
The briefing room afterward.The implications settling like sediment in still water.
Malachar alive. Changed. Building something in a place none of us can imagine because none of us have been there. Sending a messenger with half-Empri skin and borrowed words and an apology that costs nothing from a man who took everything. Asking for help.
"He wants us to come to him." Zane says it finally, into the silence that has calcified around the table like bone growing over a break. "After everything he did. Every lie. Every cruelty. He wants us to walk through that anomaly."
"Are we going to?" Dexter asks.
Silence. But a different kind now. Not the pressurized absence of before, the kind that precedes an explosion. This silence is the sound of people making decisions they'll carry for the rest of their lives, turning them over in the dark of their own minds, testing the weight.
Talia speaks first. "I have to know what happened to my father on the other side. What Malachar did to him." Her voice doesn't waver. The fracture lines hold. She isn't asking permission. She's stating a fact about herself that she discovered in the last hour, something she didn't know was true until Marcus St. Laurent's voice came through the static and rearranged the architecture of her grief.
Elissa next. "I want to understand what he found. What was worth abandoning us for." Not forgiveness in her voice. Not rage either. Something more surgical. The need to know, because not knowing is its own kind of wound, and she's carried it long enough.
Zane looks around the table. At his family. At Talia, whose hand has turned under the table to grip his, their fingers laced together in a hold that looks like it could bend metal. At the allies who have become something closer to kin over these forty days of crisis and proximity and shared meals eaten too fast in rooms that smell like fear.
His eyes find Ethan.
"Then we plan a mission. A real one." The command is back in his voice, but underneath it I hear the thing Zane Torrence almost never lets anyone hear. The cost. The knowledge that he is about to lead people he loves into something none of them will come back from unchanged. "And we use everything we know to survive it."
Not victory. He doesn't promise victory. He promises survival, and he promises it the way a man promises something he intends to deliver through sheer force of will even if the universe has other plans.
The room begins to move. People talking, planning, the energy of a decision made replacing the paralysis of a decision pending. Voices overlap. Someone pulls up star charts. Someone else is already running supply calculations. The machinery ofaction engaging, because action is easier than sitting still with what you feel.
I stand beside Ethan and watch them, these people I didn't know two months ago, this family I married into sideways, this station that became something more than a posting. I watch them choose to walk into the dark, and I feel the weight of what I'm about to do settle into my bones like ballast.
Ethan looks at me. He doesn't ask the question. He knows me well enough now to know the answer, or maybe he knows me well enough to know I've already decided and the question would be an insult. His eyes hold mine, and what passes between us isn't a conversation so much as a confirmation. A treaty signed in silence.
Wherever he goes. Whatever waits on the other side of that wound in space, that anomaly that breathes and grows and carried a dead man's apology across the void.
Whatever it costs.
I'm going too.
Chapter 18
Ethan
The holotable throwsblue light across every face in the room, and I watch them study the anomaly data like it's a death sentence they're trying to commute.
It might be.
"The passage window holds for approximately eleven minutes once the anomaly reaches full dilation." I rotate the three-dimensional model, expanding the throat of the thing so they can see the internal structure. The readings I stole from Protocol archives six months ago. The theoretical physics I spent years pretending I didn't understand. "After that, spatial compression makes transit impossible for anything larger than a hydrogen atom."
Zane leans forward, arms crossed over the table's edge. "Eleven minutes to get through."
"Eleven minutes to get through, execute retrieval, and establish a defensible position on the other side. Assuming the other side has positions to defend." I pull up the radiation spectra, the gravitational lensing data, the fragments of telemetry from Protocol's failed probes. "Three probes went through over a two-year period. Two sent back data forapproximately ninety seconds before signal loss. The third sent back nothing."
