"Nothing that needs a debrief," I said.
"I didn't ask for a debrief. I asked what happened."
I dropped my kit on the bunk and stood with my back to her, staring at the viewport. Stars. The same ones I'd been looking at my entire life. They hadn't changed. Everything else had.
"She's fine."
"I didn't ask if she's fine." Talia's voice softened by a degree. Just one. "I asked what happened. There's a difference, and you know it."
I turned around. Talia's face held no judgment, no amusement, nothing I could use as an excuse to shut the conversation down. Just steady attention and something underneath it that looked dangerously like concern.
"Something," I said. The word felt inadequate. Enormous and useless at the same time. "Something happened."
"I know." She pushed off the doorframe. "Be careful with her. She's harder than she looks, but she's not unbreakable."
The laugh that came out of me was short. Not bitter, exactly, but honest in a way that surprised me. "Neither am I."
Talia's smile was sharp. The kind of smile that held a warning inside it like a pin inside a grenade. "I know. That's what worries me."
She left. The door closed behind her, and I stood in my quarters listening to the hum of the station's environmental systems and wondering when the people around me had started seeing things I thought I'd hidden.
I foundElissa in the common area on deck seven.
Found is generous. I went looking for her because the conversation with Zane had left something jagged in my chest, and I needed to see her with my own eyes. Needed to assess. That was the word I used inside my own head. Assess. As if I could reduce my sister to a tactical consideration and make the whole thing cleaner.
She was sitting at one of the long tables near the viewport wall, a data tablet propped against a coffee cup, laughing at something Ethan was saying. Her pale skin caught the overhead lights and threw back a warmth that didn't belong to this station, that had always seemed borrowed from somewhere softer. Her grey-blue eyes crinkled at the corners when she laughed, and the sound of it carried across the space with an ease that made something in my chest tighten.
She looked happy.
Ethan sat across from her with his body angled in, attentive without crowding. He was telling a story, his hands moving in small, precise gestures, and every few seconds his fingers would brush the table near hers. Not touching. Almost touching. The kind of proximity that reads as coincidence if you're not watching for it, and reads as strategy if you are.
I stood at the entrance to the common area and watched.
Empri touch manipulation is subtle. It works through skin contact, through the bioelectric interface that full-blooded Empri use for emotional bonding and communication. Ethan was only half, which should have limited his capacity, but half was still enough. Half was enough to nudge. To influence. To create a sense of warmth, trust, connection that felt organic even when it wasn't.
And Elissa was human. Fully human. Adopted into an Empri family, raised among us, loved fiercely and completely, but her neural architecture had no defenses against the kind of influence Ethan could exert. She'd feel it as chemistry. As attraction. As the dizzy certainty that this person understood her, saw her, wanted her in ways that felt too perfect to question.
She wouldn't know. That was the part that made my hands curl into fists at my sides. She wouldn't know that what she felt might not be entirely hers.
I should have walked over. Should have sat down beside her and said something. Should have pulled her aside and told her what I'd felt in that briefing room, what I suspected, what I feared. I should have warned her.
I thought about what I'd say. The words assembled themselves in my mind with clinical precision. I think yourcrush is a traitor and I can't prove it. I think he's using his half-Empri abilities on you and you don't even know it's happening. I think you're in danger from someone you trust.
And then I thought about her face. The way the laughter would drain out of it. The way she'd look at me, her brother, standing there dismantling the one thing in her life that was making her smile. She'd argue. She'd defend him. She'd say I was paranoid, overprotective, that I didn't understand, and maybe she'd be right about all of it.
Or she'd believe me, and the light in her eyes would go out, and I'd be the one who killed it.
I stood there for a long time. Long enough to watch Ethan make her laugh twice more, long enough to see his hand finally make contact with hers in a gesture that looked accidental, long enough to see the slight flush that climbed her throat at the touch.
Then I turned and walked away.
Another failure. Filed alongside all the others, in a drawer that was getting full.
Three days passed.
Astra was already back at work. Head of Security, moving through the station with the kind of focused efficiency that left no room for anything personal. I watched her in briefings, in corridor crossings, in the mess hall where she ate alone at the corner table with her back to the wall and her eyes on every entrance. Professional. Contained. The walls rebuilt so thoroughly that you'd never know they'd come down.
We passed each other in the main concourse on the second day. Her eyes met mine for approximately onesecond. Something moved behind them, a heat, a recognition, something alive that she buried before it could reach her expression. She nodded. I nodded. We kept walking.
