I climb off him.
My back screams. I ignore it the way I've ignored every inconvenient signal my body has ever sent me. I find my undersuit on the floor, pull it on with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be, and zip it to my throat. I don't look at him. I can feel his eyes on me, can feel the pulse of his marks in my peripheral vision, warm and questioning.
I walk out of the med bay.
The corridor is dark. The ship hums around me like a living thing, recyclers and gravity generators and the low throb of engines pushing us through the black toward Veridian-7. I make it four steps before I have to lean against the bulkhead, my hand pressed to the cold metal, my wound pulsing heat against the bandages. My legs are shaking. My eyes are dry.
Behind me, through the half-open med bay door, I can see the faint amber glow of his marks in the darkness. He doesn't move. Doesn't call after me. Just lies there on the cot where I left him, marks slowly dimming, and the silencebetween us fills the corridor like atmosphere venting from a punctured hull.
I walk to my quarters. I close the door. I sit on the edge of my bunk and stare at my hands, at the faint tremor I can't quite control, and I do not think about what just happened. I do not think about the way he said my name. I do not think about how his pulse felt under my palm, strong and steady and alive because of me, because I put my body between his and a bullet without thinking, without calculating, without being the person I've spent my entire adult life becoming.
I do not think about any of it. I am a professional. I have a mission.
My hands stop shaking by the time I fall asleep.
Morning.If you can call it morning on a ship where the lights cycle on a timer and the sun is a concept measured in light-years. I surface from sleep to find the pain has retreated to a dull roar, manageable, the kind I can file away and function through.
I shower. Dress. Run a diagnostic on the wound site with the med bay's portable scanner while standing in the corridor, because I am not going back into that room. The tissue regenerator has done its work. Nerve inflammation is down forty percent. I'll be functional within another day.
When I enter the galley, Dexter is already there. Coffee. Two mugs. He slides one across the counter without looking up from his data pad, and the gesture is so domestic, so normal, that something in my chest clenches before I crush it.
"The lab data needs analysis," he says. His voice is neutral. Professional. His marks hold at a steady, unremarkableamber. Nothing in his face suggests that twelve hours ago I had my hand around his throat while I fucked him in the med bay.
"I know." I take the coffee. It's bitter and too hot, and it tastes like his world. Expensive beans, real ones, not the synthesized powder that comes standard on ships like this. I drink it and let it burn.
We don't mention it. We're professionals. We have a mission. The laboratory data sits on the ship's secure drive, encrypted layers we've been peeling back since before the ambush, and there are answers in there that matter more than whatever is festering between us.
We work. Side by side in the cramped cockpit, his data pad synced to the ship's main display, my fingers moving across the console as I run decryption protocols and spatial analysis algorithms. We trade observations in clipped, clean sentences. No banter. No loaded pauses. Two people doing a job.
But everything has changed. I can feel it in the space between us, in the way the air shifts when his arm brushes mine reaching for the display, in the way I track his breathing without deciding to, in the way his marks pulse faintly brighter every time our eyes meet and then dim again, controlled, deliberate, like he's holding himself on a leash.
We both know. We just aren't saying it.
The decryption finishes mid-afternoon, or what passes for it. The data unfolds across the main display in layers of coordinates and spectral analysis and energy signatures that make my breath catch, and for a long moment neither of us speaks.
Not one anomaly. Not one tear in the fabric of space-time, not the isolated incident we'd been told about, notthe singular phenomenon that justified a two-person retrieval mission to a dead station.
A network.
Tears scattered across the galaxy like fracture lines in glass, dozens of them, connected by energy signatures that pulse in synchronization, as if something on the other side is breathing and each tear is a nostril. The display renders them as points of light, and the pattern they form is too regular to be natural. Someone made these. Or something did.
"How many?" My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"Forty-seven confirmed." Dexter's fingers move across the data, pulling coordinates, cross-referencing known systems. His marks have gone very still, the kind of still that means he's processing something that scares him. "Twelve more probable. And these aren't new. Some of these energy signatures date back decades."
Decades. Decades of tears in space-time, hidden, unmonitored, unreported. The scope of the cover-up alone makes my head swim.
Then he stops. His hand hovers over the display. His marks flicker once, a cold blue I've never seen before.
"There's a tear." His voice goes flat, stripped of everything, the way it gets when he's delivering information that might kill someone. "Right on our doorstep. And someone has been using it."
The coordinates pulse on the display. I know them before I even read the numbers, know them the way you know the coordinates of home, the way your body recognizes danger before your mind catches up.
Veridian-7. Close enough to touch. Close enough that whoever has been using it could walk to work.
The secret is bigger than we knew. It's been hiding inplain sight, sitting right next to us, breathing through the wall of the universe while we lived our small, violent lives and never looked up long enough to see it.
I stare at the display. Dexter stares at me.
