She was teaching me something my Empri instructors never could. That bodies have their own language. That over-reliance on sensing makes you sloppy.
The night before Sigma-9. I went to her quarters. The mission brief was in six hours. Standard extraction, they said. Simple, they said.
I was going to tell her something. Something that had been building for three months, something I'd been feeling every time I was near her, something that made my marks pulse even when I tried to stay controlled.
The alert sounded before I could start.
"Did you feel it?"
Her voice cuts through the memory. I'm still holding the photograph. Still looking at people who believed they'd all come home.
"What?" I know what she's asking. I need her to ask it anyway.
"When they took me." Her green eyes are level. Steady. The steadiness costs her. I can feel the effort radiating off her like heat. "Could you sense what they were doing?"
The silence stretches between us like a wire pulled taut—fragile, dangerous, ready to snap.
My bioluminescence dims. It's the Empri tell for pain so profound I can't suppress it, can't hide it behind tactical assessment or professional distance. The patterns along mytemples and spine go dark, nearly black against my turquoise skin. It's vulnerability made visible. A confession written in the language of light and shadow.
She knows what it means. Of course she knows. Astra has spent six years learning every tell, every flicker, every biological confession my Empri heritage makes without my permission. She's cataloged them with the same brutal precision she uses for everything else.
She's still waiting for the answer. Still holding herself rigid. Still giving me space to lie, to deflect, to offer some version of events that makes what I did less monstrous.
I don't take it.
"Yes."
The word drops between us like a blade falling. Clean. Final. Terrible in its simplicity.
She goes completely still. The kind of stillness that comes before violence or breaking. I can feel her emotions through the narrow gap in her walls—shock layering over rage layering over something that tastes like grief.
"And you still?—"
She can't finish the sentence. Can't quite voice what she's asking:And you still left me there? And you still completed the mission? And you still chose the numbers over my life while feeling every second of what they were doing to me?
"Yes."
The second confirmation is somehow worse than the first. I felt it all. The terror. The pain. The desperate, animal fear as they dragged her away. I tasted copper and lightning and the specific flavor of hope dying. I felt her calling for me—not out loud, she was too well-trained for that—but emotionally, every cell of her screaming my name.
And I finished the extraction. Secured the asset. Got everyone else out.
I left her in that fear while I completed the objective.
She crosses the space between us in three steps. Her fist catches my jaw before I can react. Before Iwantto react. The impact snaps my head to the side. Copper floods my mouth. My own blood, blue and bitter.
I let her.
She hits me again. Catches my cheekbone this time. The skin splits. I feel blood running down my face, warm and wrong. My marks flare bright with her rage, with her pain, with the satisfaction she's taking in hurting me.
I stand there. Take it. Don't raise my hands to defend. Don't step back. Don't use my abilities to dampen her fury or redirect it somewhere less destructive.
She's breathing hard now. Fists still clenched. Waiting for me to do something.
I don't.
"Fight back," she snarls. "Push me. Use your fucking alien magic. Make this easier."
She's bracing for it. I can feel her walls slamming up, her training kicking in, every defense she's built against Empri manipulation activating.
