When I brought up the Obsidian Protocol by name, his shoulders tightened by a fraction. His breathing stayed steady, but the emotional frequency underneath shifted into something guarded. Walled off. The way someone feels when they're actively suppressing a reaction they can't afford to show.
He knew. He already knew about the network. He already knew about the Protocol.
The question was how. And the question after that was what he'd done with the knowledge.
I finished the briefing without letting any of what I'd noticed reach my face. Talia asked two more questions about the anomaly's proximity to shipping lanes. Zane gave orders for increased sensor sweeps of the sector. Ethan said nothing, offered nothing, and when the briefing ended, he straightened off the wall and left with a nod that was perfectly calibrated to convey respect and nothing else.
I waited until Talia followed him out, then closed the door.
Zane was still studying the display. The network map glowed against the dark wall, all those points of light connected by lines that the Protocol's researchers had drawn between them. It looked like a constellation. It looked like a web.
"Your advisor is compromised."
Zane didn't move. Didn't turn. "I know."
"You know." I let that sit for a beat. "And you're handling it."
"I am."
"Are you? Because I just watched him react to information he shouldn't have. The network, Zane. He recognized it. He knew about the Protocol before I put it on that screen."
Now Zane turned. His eyes were flat, the way they got when he was calculating rather than feeling, running scenarios and outcomes behind that mask. "His reactions were subtle."
"To anyone who wasn't reading him, sure. To me?" I shook my head. "He lit up like a target."
Zane's jaw tightened. A muscle jumped beneath the skin, visible for a second before he locked it down. "It's complicated. Elissa..."
"Is our adopted sister the reason you're letting a potential traitor walk free?"
The silence that followed was its own answer. It filled the room the way vacuum fills a hull breach, absolute and suffocating, and I watched my brother stand in it without flinching because that was what Zane did. He stood in impossible situations and refused to buckle, even when buckling would have been the honest thing.
"She cares about him," Zane said finally. The words cost him something. I could feel it, the bitter edge of a man forced to weigh family against security and finding that the scales wouldn't balance.
"She cares about someone who may be feeding intelligence to people who want us dead. That doesn't earn him clemency. It earns her a conversation she's not going to like."
"And you're going to be the one to have it?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Because the truth was I didn't know how to have that conversation any more than he did, and we both knew it.
"Watch him," I said instead. "Closer than you have been. I don't care what it costs you with Elissa. If he moves wrong, I need to know."
Zane held my gaze. Whatever he was feeling, he'd buried it so deep that even I couldn't reach it without pushing harder than I was willing to push. "You'll know."
I left it there. Not because I was satisfied, but because pressing harder would fracture something between us that we couldn't afford to break. Not now. Not with everything else bearing down.
Talia caughtme in the corridor outside my quarters. She had a way of appearing that suggested she'd been waiting rather than passing by, a studied casualness that fooled precisely no one.
"Astra," she said. No preamble, no warmth-up. Just the name, dropped between us like a blade on a table.
I kept walking. She fell into step beside me.
"What happened out there?"
My hand found the door panel. I pressed my thumb to the scanner and waited for the lock to cycle, using the three seconds it took as an excuse not to answer.
Talia waited too. She was good at that.
The door slid open. I stepped inside. She leaned against the frame, not entering, not leaving. Her dark eyes tracked my face with that particular Talia sharpness, the one that cut through deflection like it was tissue paper.
