"Thank you."
She nods. Steps aside. I walk past her and feel her watching. Assessing. One human woman to another. We've built something tentative. Not friendship. Mutual recognition. Shared experience navigating Empri power dynamics.
I don't look back.
What matters is keeping my composure when I walk through that door.
The briefing roomsmells like coffee and the ozone ghost of too many bodies in too small a space. Strategic displays glow on the walls. Webb's known locations, his patterns, his likely hideouts mapped in red.
Dexter sits on the opposite side of the table.
His turquoise skin shows darker in the blue-tinted light. His marks—concentrated along his temples and down his spine—pulse with his heartbeat. Steady. Controlled. He doesn't look at me when I enter.
Good.
I take the seat farthest from him. Pull up the tactical display. Webb's last confirmed location: Station Gamma-7. Mining station. Rough clientele. No law except what you can enforce yourself.
Zane walks in. Talia behind him, carrying the coffee I saw earlier. She sets one cup in front of her partner. Keeps the other. Neither of them mentions me standing in a corridor looking like I hadn't slept.
"Webb." Zane's voice is flat. All business. "Confirmed sighting three days ago. Departed before we could establish surveillance."
"Heading?" Dexter asks. His voice sounds normal. Clipped, efficient, military cadence. Nothing in his tone suggests he had his tongue in my mouth twelve hours ago.
"Unknown. But he transmitted a message before he left. Encrypted. We're still breaking it."
I pull up the encryption analysis. The linguistic patterns don't match any known cipher. Webb's been busy. Learning new tricks. Or someone taught him.
"We'll need to move fast," I say. My voice sounds normal too. Professional. "If he knows we're tracking him, he'll go deeper into contested space."
"Agreed." Zane's pale eyes flick to me. To Dexter. Back to me. He knows something. Of course he knows something. His brother was feeling things last night, and Zane probably tasted the echo.
The tension in the room is thick enough to cut.
Talia clears her throat. "I have contacts on Gamma-7. Debtor networks, information brokers. I can reach out."
"Do it." Zane's hand finds hers. Brief contact. His marks pulse once, bright.
I watch the exchange. The casual intimacy of it. Two people who've learned each other's rhythms, who trust without thinking about it.
I used to have that.
The knowing, the ease, the casual certainty that someone would be there when you reached for them. Six years ago, I had it. Before ninety seconds collapsed everything. Before the thirty percent chance that wasn't good enough to justify trying. Before I learned that trust was just another word for naive.
I force myself to look at Dexter. My eyes meet his electric blue ones across the table, and I find him already watching me. Of course he's already watching me. He's been watching me since I walked through the door, tracking my every movement with those vivid blue eyes that see too much. His expression is neutral, professional, but his bioluminescent marks pulse faint along his temples, a tell I've learned to read over the years of serving in close proximity to the Torrences.
He's waiting. Waiting for something. Waiting for me to crack, maybe, or to acknowledge what happened between us last night.
The weight of his attention is a physical thing across my shoulders.
I don't give him the satisfaction of looking away first.
"We leave for Gamma-7 in six hours," I say. "Full tactical kit. Small team. Fast insertion."
"Agreed."
That's it. That's the whole exchange. Professional.Tactical. Two soldiers coordinating an operation. The kiss is irrelevant. Ancient history. A mistake made in exhaustion and proximity and the ghost of what we used to be.
Except I can still taste him on my lips. The faint copper-ozone flavor of Empri biology that I've spent six years trying to forget and never quite managed to purge from my cellular memory.
