We have forty-seven problems, and we're flying straight toward one of them.
Chapter 10
Dexter
Veridian-7 looked wrong.
I noticed it the second we cleared the docking clamps, the way the station's spine caught light from the local star and threw it back in familiar patterns that should have felt like relief. Should have felt like coming home. Instead, the corridors were too narrow, the ceilings too low, and every bulkhead I passed reminded me that this place was held together by engineering and optimism in roughly equal measure. I'd spent my whole life on this station. I'd never once thought about how easy it would be to crack it open.
Haven's End had done that. Peeled back something I couldn't put back.
Astra was already three steps ahead of me on the gangway, her kit bag slung over one shoulder, her stride the measured clip of someone who'd decided the mission was over before the ship had even docked. She hadn't spoken to me since we'd entered Torrence space. Not hostile, not cold, just finished. Like she'd filed everything that happened on Haven's End into a drawer and locked it.
I watched the back of her neck as she walked. The placewhere her hair met skin, where I'd pressed my mouth in the dark while she came apart against me.
She turned left at the junction without looking back.
I turned right.
The intelligence briefingroom sat three levels below the command deck, shielded and swept for surveillance on a rotating schedule. Zane was already there when I arrived, standing at the head of the table with his hands clasped behind his back, studying the wall display like it owed him something. Talia occupied the chair to his right, legs crossed, fingers steepled, watching the door as I came through it. Ethan Eames stood along the far wall, arms folded, his posture relaxed in a way that read as careful to anyone who knew how to look.
I knew how to look.
"You're late," Zane said without turning.
"Docking took longer than it should have. Port authority wanted a full cargo manifest." I dropped the data core on the table. It skidded across the polished surface and stopped against Zane's knuckles. "They can wait. This can't."
Zane picked up the core, turned it over once, and slotted it into the briefing console. The wall display shifted, populated with the data we'd pulled from the laboratory on Haven's End. Schematics, frequency maps, location coordinates, decades of research condensed into files that the Obsidian Protocol had never intended anyone outside their circle to see.
"Talk me through it," Zane said.
So I did. The laboratory buried in Haven's End. The equipment designed to measure spatial anomalies. Therecords going back thirty years, forty, longer. Multiple tears in the fabric of space, not random, not isolated, but forming a network. Connected. Deliberate, or at least patterned in ways that suggested something beyond coincidence.
I pulled up the frequency map and let it speak for itself. Dots of light scattered across the display, each one marking a confirmed anomaly. There were more than we'd known. More than anyone outside the Protocol had known.
"The nearest one." I touched the display, expanded the sector. "Here. Close enough to Veridian-7 that you could reach it in a single jump."
Silence settled over the room like pressure.
Zane stared at the coordinate marker. His face did what it always did when something landed hard: nothing. Absolute nothing. That perfect mask of cold efficiency that I'd watched him build since we were boys, since the day he decided that feeling things where people could see was a luxury the heir to the Torrence syndicate couldn't afford. But I was his brother. I could read the tension in his jaw, the stillness in his hands that meant he was holding something down with both fists.
"Father knew about the network." His voice was level. Controlled. Dead. "The nearest anomaly. That's where he went."
Not a question. A confirmation of something he'd already suspected, maybe already known, fitted now into a larger picture that made it worse instead of better.
I nodded. There was nothing to say to that. Our father had walked into one of these tears and hadn't come back, and now we knew he'd done it with full knowledge of what he was stepping into. That changed things. The grief, the mystery, the thin hope that it had been an accident. All of it rewritten in a single coordinate.
Zane's hand closed over the edge of the console. His knuckles went white for half a second before he let go.
"What else?"
I gave him the rest. The Obsidian Protocol's research into stabilization. Their attempts to control the tears, predict them, use them. Their failures. The data suggested they'd been working toward something specific, a way to open anomalies on demand, and that they'd gotten close enough to be dangerous without ever getting close enough to be safe.
Talia asked the right questions. Strategic ones, resource ones, the kind that mapped threat to response with clean precision. I answered them while watching Ethan.
His control was excellent. I'd give him that. He stood against the wall with the same easy posture he'd held since I walked in, his expression attentive and measured, the perfect picture of a trusted advisor absorbing complex intelligence. But I'd spent the last two weeks in the field with my abilities dialed to their sharpest edge, reading hostiles in real time, feeling for deception through walls, and Ethan Eames was not as smooth as he thought he was.
When I mentioned the network, something flickered across his emotional register. Recognition. Not surprise, not the sharp intake of new information, but the duller resonance of hearing something confirmed that you already knew.
