After Sigma-9. After the interrogation rooms and the surgeries and the moment I looked at my reflection and understood that the woman Dexter left had died in that station whether my body survived or not.
I became something else. Something useful. Something Zane Torrence hired three years ago when he was still just the heir, still trying to escape his father's shadow, still believing control meant safety.
We understand each other.
We both know what it is to be left. His mother. My team. Different circumstances, same wound, abandonment by people who should have chosen differently.
My console chimes.
Zane's message sits there, blinking priority red.
The Vex have a new operative in-system. Intelligence suggests connections to the Sigma-9 incident. You and Dexter will investigate. Together.
Together.
I read it three times. The words don't change.
Sigma-9. The mission that killed Holt and Vasquez and the woman I used to be. The ambush that came from inside, from someone who sold our coordinates for reasons I never learned.
Someone who might be back.
And I'm supposed to hunt them with the man who left me there.
I should refuse. Tell Zane to find someone else, that my history with Dexter compromises professional judgment, that putting us in the same room is a liability waiting to detonate.
I don't.
Because whoever sold Sigma-9 is mine. Has been mine for six years, every night I couldn't sleep, every time I checked a corridor three times because once wasn't enough, every moment I remembered Holt's last transmission and Vasquez going down covering our retreat.
I'm not delegating this.
Not to anyone. Not for anything.
The door chimes.
I know who it is before I check the camera. The timing is too perfect, the station cycle too predictable. Zane promised thirty minutes. Dexter's giving me ten.
Testing. Seeing how far the blade goes.
"Come in."
The door opens. He fills the frame, not as tall as his brother but broader, the build of someone who spent years in variable gravity warfare. Still in his arrival clothes, dark tactical jacket with the faint shimmer of woven armor catching the blue light.
The blood on his throat is a thin line now. Already healing. Empri physiology recovers faster than human. Another advantage they've got, another reason the galaxy fears them.
I wanted that cut to scar.
"You could have sent a message." I don't look up from my screens.
"I could have."
"But you're here."
"I'm here."
The silence stretches. I count it. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
He breaks first.
