"He broadcast the anomaly coordinates. The exact location of the spatial tear." Zane pauses, and in that pause I hear the sound of everything we've been fighting for rearranging itself into something new and worse. "He told everyone. Vex, Torrences, independent factions, every ship in the sector. He told them the first group to take control of the anomaly controls the future of interstellar travel."
Astra's hand falls away from mine. She's on her feet, her face wiped clean of everything except the calculating focus I saw when she first walked into this station. Not a woman who was just holding my hand in a blood-soaked corridor. A navigator. A strategist. Someone whose mind is already running the implications at a speed I can feel but can't match.
"It's not a siege anymore," she says. Not to me. Not toZane. To the air, to the station, to the terrible new shape of what's coming. "It's a race."
Zane's confirmation is unnecessary, but it comes anyway, flat and final. "And everyone knows where the finish line is."
The comm cuts out. The corridor is silent except for the hiss of the damaged vent and the distant hum of a station that's still alive but changed, fundamentally and irrevocably changed, because the secret that was the only thing keeping us in a defensible position is no longer a secret.
I look at Astra. She looks at me. Between us, the space where our hands were joined, where three words undid six years, where blood and choice and something too fierce to call tenderness rewrote the terms of what I am.
The Vex outside the hull have new information. Every faction in the sector has new information. The calculation that governs the next twelve hours is no longer about holding a station. It's about reaching a point in space before anyone else does, and holding it against everyone who comes.
The math on that is catastrophic.
Good thing I'm done listening to the math.
Chapter 13
Astra
The war roomsmelled like burnt circuitry and fear, and I couldn't tell which was worse.
Webb's broadcast still played on loop across three of the remaining screens, his face frozen mid-sentence on the fourth where the display had taken shrapnel. The words scrolled beneath him in Universal Standard, Vex trade-script, and two languages I didn't recognize, because Webb hadn't just told the station. He'd told everyone. Every faction with a ship, a gun, and a hunger for power now knew what sat at the heart of Requiem Station: a hole in reality itself, and whatever waited on the other side of it.
The anomaly wasn't a secret anymore. It was an invitation.
Zane stood at the tactical display, his hands flat on the surface, the light from the holographic map painting his jaw in cold blue. He hadn't spoken in four minutes. I'd been counting. When Zane Torrence went quiet, it meant he was reshaping the world inside his head, and everyone in the room knew enough to let him finish.
Dexter leaned against the far wall with his arms crossedand his eyes on his brother. He'd washed the blood off his hands but not his forearms, and the dried rust color disappeared into the rolled cuffs of his sleeves like it belonged there. He caught me looking. Held my gaze for a beat that saidI knowandlaterandpay attentionall at once, then shifted his focus back to Zane.
I paid attention.
"The Vex aren't siege-holding anymore," Zane said finally, and his voice carried the particular flatness that meant he'd already accepted something terrible. "They're racing. Webb's broadcast put a clock on everything. Every independent fleet within jump range heard that signal. The Kessari trade consortium, the Hollow Saints, the remnants of the Ninth Column. Three days, maybe four, before the first of them arrive. The Vex know that. They'll push for the anomaly core within hours, not days."
He looked up from the map. His eyes moved across the room, touching each face, calculating what he could spend and what he couldn't afford to lose. When they landed on me, they stayed.
"We move first," he said. "We secure the anomaly before they can breach the inner ring."
The room shifted. I felt it in the way shoulders tightened, in the way hands drifted toward weapons that weren't drawn. Splitting forces during a siege was a gamble that could gut them from both sides at once, and everyone standing in this room understood the math.
"Half our people hold the defensive perimeter," Zane continued, pulling the holographic map apart with his fingers, sectoring the station into zones that glowed red, amber, and a thin sliver of green. "The other half pushes inward toward the anomaly core. We take it. We hold it. We control the only thing that makes this station worth dyingfor, and then we negotiate from strength when the vultures arrive."
"Or we get cut in half and die in pieces," said one of the lieutenants from the back. Morrow, I thought. Stocky, competent, bad at keeping his mouth shut.
"Morrow." Zane didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "If you'd like to present an alternative that doesn't end with every faction in known space fighting over our corpse, I'll hear it."
Silence. The hum of the station's failing ventilation system filled the gap, a low vibration that I could feel in my back teeth, like the station itself was grinding its jaw.
"Good." Zane turned to the display. "Team assignments in ten. Dexter, you're leading the inner push."
Dexter straightened off the wall. "Already packed."
I was already running the angles, mapping corridors in my head, calculating choke points and fallback positions, when Talia's voice cut through the comms channel like a blade through silk.
"Zane. We have a problem that isn't the Vex."
Talia's face appeared on the one functional secondary screen, her expression carrying the particular stillness she wore when the information was bad enough to be useful. Behind her, I could see the dim glow of her intelligence alcove, screens reflecting off surfaces I couldn't identify.
