"I don't need to understand anything."
"The calculation I made. The ninety seconds. The thirty percent." His marks pulse faster now. Emotion bleeding through. "It wasn't about you not mattering. It was about the mission mattering more. To me. In that moment."
"I know." The truth, cold and clean. "I know exactly what it was about. You valued the objective over my life. You made a choice. You chose correctly by every tactical measure."
His mouth opens. Closes.
"That's what makes it unforgivable," I continue. "Not that you left. That you'd do it again. Given the same situation, the same math, you'd make the same choice."
Silence.
Because I'm right. We both know I'm right.
"Yes." His voice is rough. "I would."
The honesty is another knife.
I step around him. Reach the door. Palm the panel.
"But I'm here now." His words follow me into the corridor. "And I'm not leaving. Whatever you do with that—however you need to hurt me for what I did—I'm staying."
I pause.Don't turn.
"Forty-eight hours," I say. "Operations plan on my desk. Tactical assessment. Threat scenarios. Everything."
"You'll have it in twenty-four."
"Good."
I walk away.
Behind me, the door cycles shut.
My palm is still sticky with his blood. I look at it under the corridor lights—blue against my pale skin, drying darker at the edges.
I should wash it off.
I don't.
Not yet.
It's the first blood I've drawn from him. It won't be the last.
And forty-eight hours from now, I'm going to hunt the man who sold us with the man who left me, and one of them is going to pay for what I've become.
Maybe both.
My quarters aredark when I enter. I keep them that way. Lights off, just the blue glow of the station seeping through the viewport, the stars wheeling beyond like they're not watching everything burn.
I drop the files on my desk. Strip off my gear. The routine is automatic—weapons secured, armor stacked, the careful inventory of what came back with me versus what went out.
Everything accounted for.
Except the blood on my hand.
I stand at the sink. Run water. Watch blue spiral down the drain, and remember.
Venn is down. Unable to retrieve. Mission complete.
