On the third day, I saw her in the training bay, running hand-to-hand drills with two of her security team. She moved like water, like violence with a rhythm, and I stood in the observation gallery above and watched until she pinned the larger of the two against the mat for the third time and I had to leave because my body was remembering things my discipline couldn't override.
I respected the distance. I understood it. She needed to be who she was on this station, needed her authority intact, needed the space to process what had happened between us without me crowding the edges of her life.
Understanding it didn't stop it from gutting me.
Late on the third night, I lay in my bunk with the lights off and the viewport showing nothing but stars and the station's slow rotation. Sleep wouldn't come. It hadn't come properly since Haven's End, since I'd learned what she sounded like when she stopped fighting what she wanted.
I reached out with my abilities.
Not far. Not invasive. Just enough to extend my awareness beyond my quarters, through the corridors and bulkheads and the hum of environmental systems, past sleeping crew and night-watch guards, until I found her.
Her emotional frequency was distinctive. I'd learned it on Haven's End, in moments of fear and desire and the complicated space between. Now I could locate it in my range the way you'd find a familiar voice in a crowd. Not by searching for it, but by knowing its shape so well that it surfaced on its own.
She was in her quarters. Awake. I could feel the textureof her awareness, alert but not anxious, the low steady burn of someone lying in the dark with their thoughts for company. Underneath the composure, something ached. Something that reached in my direction without reaching, like a hand held out in a room where she thought she was alone.
I didn't push. Didn't probe. Didn't try to read the specifics of what she was feeling. I just held the thread of her presence in my awareness and let it anchor me. She was okay. She was here. She was alive and whole and on the other side of walls she'd chosen to build, and I would stand on my side of them for as long as she needed me to.
She probably knew I was there. An Empri of her training would sense the faint resonance of another's abilities at the edge of her awareness, the psychic equivalent of hearing someone breathe in the next room. She'd know it was me. She'd know what it meant.
She hadn't told me to stop.
I held the thread until my breathing slowed and the tension in my body released by degrees. Not sleep, not quite, but something close to it. Something that let me close my eyes and feel, for a few minutes, like the universe wasn't about to come apart.
The alert wokeme at 0347.
My console was screaming. Priority level maximum, the kind of alert that bypassed standard notification protocols and hit every command-level officer on the station simultaneously. I was on my feet before I was fully conscious, hand on the console, eyes processing the data before my brain caught up.
Sensor array data from the perimeter buoys at the edgeof Torrence space. Fleet signatures. Dozens of them. Warships in attack formation, troop carriers holding position behind the line, support vessels arrayed in a pattern that any tactician would recognize as staging for a full-scale invasion.
The Vex Collective.
I scrolled through the ship classifications with cold spreading through my chest. Destroyers. Cruisers. Assault carriers with launch bays already pressurized. This wasn't a raid. This wasn't a probing action or a show of force designed to test response times. This was an army.
And buried in the fleet's communication signatures, flagged by our intelligence algorithms, a transponder code I recognized.
Webb.
He'd joined them. Taken everything he knew about our defenses, our patrol routes, our station vulnerabilities, our family's operations, and handed it to the people most willing to use it against us. Every access code he'd memorized, every security protocol he'd helped design, every weakness he'd catalogued during his years inside our organization, all of it gift-wrapped for the Collective's war planners.
I stared at the display until the numbers stopped blurring and resolved into the shape of what was coming. The fleet was holding position, not advancing yet, but the staging pattern suggested they were waiting for something. A signal. A final piece of intelligence. An opportunity.
My hand found the comm panel.
"Zane. Wake up. We have a problem."
A pause. Then my brother's voice, sharp and clear, no trace of sleep. He'd been awake already. "I see it."
"Webb's with them."
Another pause. Longer. When Zane spoke again, the coldness in his voice had crystallized into something that could cut through hull plating. "I see that too."
The display updated. The fleet hadn't moved, but new signatures were appearing at the edges of the formation. More ships. Still assembling.
Still growing.
I stood in my quarters in the dark, the alert's red light washing everything in the color of emergency, and thought about Astra three corridors away. About Elissa on deck seven with a traitor's hand on hers. About Zane carrying the weight of a syndicate that might not survive the month. About my father, who'd walked into an anomaly knowing what it was, and left us to face whatever came after.
The siege was coming. And the station that had felt too small when I'd docked three days ago now felt like exactly what it was.
