Her walls crack. Just for a second. I feel it. The surge of something hot and wounded and furious underneath all that ice.
Then the walls slam back into place, harder than before.
"I don't care what you thought about," she says. "I care what you did. And what you'd do again."
"I'd do it again."
The words are out before I can stop them. Honest. Brutal. The worst thing I could say.
Her laugh is sharp enough to cut. "I know. That's the problem."
She gathers the last of her equipment. Crosses to the door. I'm running out of time to say whatever I came here to say. Except I don't know what that is. Apologies are useless. Explanations are worse. All I have is the truth, and the truth is the thing she hates most.
"The investigation," I say. "I can help."
She pauses. Hand on the door controls. Doesn't turn around.
"Why would I let you help?"
"Because I'm good at finding traitors. I've been one."
The silence stretches. I can feel her processing, calculating. The hatred is still there, copper-bright and familiar. But underneath, something else. Curiosity, maybe. Or the tactical assessment of someone who knows useful when she sees it, even when useful comes wrapped in the shape of her worst mistake.
"Fine," she says finally. "But understand this. You reach for my emotions again, try to read me without permission, use your abilities on anyone on my team?—"
"You'll put another knife to my throat."
"No." She turns. Looks at me with those green eyes that miss nothing. "I'll let you bleed out while I watch. And I won't feel a single thing about it."
She would. I can taste the certainty in her emotional signature. She's not bluffing. She's not performing. She means every word.
It's the most honest threat I've heard in years.
"Understood," I say.
She leaves.
I sit in the empty conference room, breathing in the ghost of gun oil and antiseptic, feeling the place on my throat where her blade broke skin this morning.
Six years. I've thought about her every day. Calculated and recalculated. Looked for an answer that didn't end with her capture and my choice. Never found one.
The math hasn't changed.
But sitting here, tasting her hatred like blood in my mouth, I'm starting to wonder if there are some equations that matter more than survival.
My console chimes. Message incoming. Priority level indicates intelligence, not administration.
I open it.
A face fills the screen. Human. Male. Mid-forties. Unremarkable features that I recognize immediately because I've spent six years trying to forget them.
Lieutenant Commander Marcus Webb. Our unit's intelligence officer. The man who had access to every mission parameter, every extraction plan, every tactical position.
The man who sold us to the enemy.
The man who's been dead for five years, according to official records.
The man who's very much alive in this surveillance photo, taken three days ago on a Vex-controlled station two jumps from here.
