I see them.
The scars.
I've known about them in the abstract. Knew they existed—felt the echoes of her pain through our empathic connection during the chaos of Sigma-9, felt every brutal moment of her captivity before the distance grew too great and the sensing finally cut off, leaving me with nothing but the ghost-memory of her screaming.
I knew they existed. Knew she'd been damaged. I felt the echoes of her pain through our connection during Sigma-9, felt every moment of her captivity before the distance grew too great and the sensing cut off.
Knowing is different from seeing.
Her back is a map of damage. Burn scars across her left shoulder blade—the worst of them, puckered and twisted, the kind that came from prolonged contact with something hot. Thin white lines from knife work tracing her ribs. A latticework of old wounds, layered over each other, six years of damage inscribed in flesh.
Some of them are straight. Too straight. Too deliberate.
She did those herself.
My marks flare bright enough to cast shadows.
She freezes mid-stretch. Catches my reflection in the small mirror bolted to the bulkhead.
Her walls slam up so hard I actually stagger.
It's not a metaphor. The psychic pressure of her locking down hits my awareness like a physical blow. My temples spike with sudden pain—the Empri equivalent of feedback, of trying to sense someone who's just become a blank wall ofnothing.
"Don't."
One word. Cold. Final.
She lowers her arms. Pulls her shirt down. Turns to face me with an expression that could freeze stars.
"I shouldn't have looked."
The words taste like ash. Useless. We both know it.
"No." Her voice is flat. Dead. The tone that means she's already gone somewhere I can't follow. "You shouldn't have. But you did."
"I'll go."
I turn toward the door. Every instinct screaming at me to fix this, to stay, to make her understand?—
"Wait."
I freeze. Don't turn back. Don't trust myself to look at her without my marks betraying everything I'm feeling.
The silence stretches. Long enough that I almost turn anyway. Almost ask what she wants, what she needs, what I can possibly give her that won't make this worse.
Then her voice, rough now. Raw in a way I've never heard from her:
"Did you feel it?"
The question lands like a blade between my ribs.
"When they took me. Could you sense what they were doing?"
My breath stops.
I could lie. Should lie.
Her hand moves to her hip. Where her knife usually sits. It's not there—she's in sleep clothes, unarmed—but the gesture is instinct. Reach for the weapon. Establish the threat.
