"Security Chief." She nods. Formal. We're not friends. We're professionals who happen to respect each other's capacity for violence.
"Ms. St. Laurent."
She sits. The mark at her throat pulses blue, in sync with Zane's patterns. The visible claim. The thing that tells everyone who sees her exactly what she is.
I don't have a mark.
I have scars.
Same language. Different alphabet.
The door opens.
Dexter enters, and the temperature drops. Not physically. Emotionally. The weight of history pressing down like atmosphere failure.
He's changed clothes. Station-standard tactical gear now, dark and functional. The blood is gone from his throat, the wound already closed. But I can still see where my blade sat. Can measure the exact depth, the precise pressure.
Not deep enough to kill. Deep enough to mark.
He takes the empty chair. Directly across from me. Of course.
Zane pulls up the holo display. The Vex operative's movement patterns scatter across the projection in red threads. "This started three weeks ago. Small breaches. Testing our detection. Then yesterday?—"
He zooms in.
The operative got into a secondary navigation system. Downloaded jump coordinates. Got out clean.
"They know our routes now," Talia says. Her voice is steady, but I can see tension in her shoulders. "Every cargo run. Every patrol pattern. Everything."
"Not everything." I lean forward. Tap the display, isolating the timestamp. "They got the main routes. But we've been rotating secondary paths since the Vex siege. Those aren't in the system they accessed."
"Because you don't trust the system." Dexter's eyes on me. Reading. Always reading.
"I don't trust anything I didn't build myself."
"Smart."
The compliment sits wrong. I don't want his approval. Don't want anything from him except distance and the answers that might let me sleep without checking every shadow.
Zane continues. "The operative's signature matches someone from the Outer Rim conflicts. Someone with military training. Advanced tactics."
"Someone like us." Dexter's attention shifts to his brother. "Someone from the joint operations."
"We're considering that possibility."
"You're considering that Webb is alive."
The name drops into the room like a body.
Talia looks between us. She's smart enough to feel theweight, not smart enough yet to know the full story. "Who's Webb?"
"Our unit's intelligence officer." Dexter's voice is careful. Controlled. "Six years ago."
"The one who—" She stops. Looks at me. At Dexter. Understanding shifts across her face. "The one who sold you."
"We don't know that he sold us," I say. Precise. Professional. "We know someone gave our coordinates to the enemy. We know Webb had access. We know he died six months later in a training accident that was never fully investigated."
"Convenient," Talia says.
