The door closes behind her with a soft pneumatic hiss.
I stand in the empty armory, surrounded by weapons that won't help, and feel her emotional signature retreating down the corridor. The steady, controlled frequency of someone who's rebuilt their walls and is determined not to let them crack again.
My marks are still glowing. Pulsing with what I felt when she touched me.
Want. Grief. The terrible, consuming need to reach back, to smooth her out, to make this easier for both of us.
I don't.
That restraint is the only proof I have that I'm not my father.
It's going to have to be enough.
TheWhisperlaunches on schedule.
Kesh handles the navigation. Torres manages systems. Astra stations herself in the small tactical hub, running surveillance on our route.
I find myself in the galley, staring at coffee I don't want.
The ship settles into cruise velocity. The subtle vibration of engines running clean. The barely perceptible hum of the gravity generators maintaining the comfortable fiction that we're not hurtling through vacuum at speeds that would liquify an unprotected human body.
I've spent years on ships like this. Smaller, sometimes. Transports crammed with soldiers, the emotional cacophony of fear and adrenaline and boredom pressing against my awareness until I wanted to claw my way out of my own skull.
This is worse.
Because this ship only has four people. And one of them is Astra, and her emotional signature is loud enough to drown out the other two.
I try to focus on Torres. Her frequency is muted, controlled, almost as locked down as Astra's. Professional. Competent. She's running a diagnostic on our weapons systems, and the satisfaction she takes in clean maintenance reads as a low, steady hum.
Kesh is easier. Young Empri don't have the same control. His nervousness bleeds through—the awareness that he's on a ship with Dexter Torrence, legendary combat operative, about to hunt a traitor who's been hiding for six years. His bioluminescence keeps flickering along his temples. Excitement. Fear. The strange pride of being chosen for something dangerous.
And Astra.
She's in the hub. Ten meters away through two bulkheads. I shouldn't be able to feel her this clearly.
I do.
Anger. Always the anger, my constant companion from her. But underneath—something else. Something she's trying to bury but can't quite lock down completely.
Fear.
Notof Webb, I'd recognize that frequency anywhere, sharp and immediate like static across sensors. Not of the mission either, she's done worse, and the steady determination underneath her surface thoughts tells me she's already calculating extraction points and fallback positions.
No.
This fear is different. Slower. More insidious.
Fear of being trapped on this ship. In these cramped quarters where you can't walk ten meters without running into someone. With me. For two full days of transit with nowhere to hide and emotions that bleed through bulkheads whether she wants them to or not.
I taste it on the back of my tongue, copper and ice and the particular bitterness of dread that's been marinading for six years. She's been afraid of this exact scenario since I walked back into her life. Close quarters. Forced proximity. The inability to maintain distance when the ship itself won't allow it.
And underneath all that fear, buried so deep she probably doesn't even know it's there—probably doesn't want to know, would deny it if I told her, would absolutely put a knife in me if I dared to name it out loud, there's something else.
Want.
The ghost of it. The echo. A frequency so faint I almost miss it in the noise of everything else she's feeling. But it's there. Has been there since the docking bay, since the training room, since every moment we've spent trying not to look at each other directly.
She wants me.
