"I'll get her."
"Not alone."
Something moved behind his eyes. Resistance, maybe. The instinct to protect his family himself, to keep me out of the blast radius of whatever was about to happen. I watched him fight it and I watched him let it go, not because I'd convinced him but because he was smart enough to know that pride was a luxury he couldn't afford right now.
"Together," he said.
I was already checking my sidearm.
The corridorsbetween the command center and the anomaly research section had taken damage in the second wave of Vexincursions. Emergency lighting cast everything in intervals of red and shadow, and the air tasted wrong, metallic and thin, like the station's lungs were failing somewhere in the walls. I could hear the ventilation system laboring, a wheezing rhythm that reminded me of the breathing of something wounded.
Dexter moved ahead of me, not because he thought I needed him in front but because he knew these corridors the way I knew the sound of my own heartbeat, every turn committed to muscle memory, every shortcut and dead end mapped in the years he'd spent making this station his territory. I matched his pace and let him lead, watching the spaces he didn't, covering angles while his focus tracked forward along Ethan's trail.
We moved in sync. No discussion needed about who took which side of a junction, who paused at a corner while the other swept, who covered the retreat while the other advanced. We'd fought together enough times now that the choreography was automatic, written into the way our bodies occupied space relative to each other. Partners. The word sat in my chest with a weight I didn't have time to examine.
The first Vex patrol hit us at the junction of Levels Four and Five.
Three of them, moving fast through the damaged section, their armor scarred from earlier engagements. They came around the corner and Dexter was already firing, two shots that dropped the lead soldier before the other two could process the contact. I took the one on the right as he raised his weapon, my shot catching him in the gap between his helmet and his chest plate where the armor didn't meet. The third managed to get a burst off that chewed the wall two inches from my head before Dexterput him down with a shot that I felt in my teeth from the concussive report in the enclosed corridor.
We stepped over the bodies without breaking stride. Dexter's boot landed in the spreading pool of blood and didn't slip, and I noted distantly that my own pulse hadn't elevated beyond operational baseline. My hands were steady on the grip of my sidearm. The bodies behind us were already just obstacles, terrain features in a corridor I needed to clear.
I noticed that. Filed it somewhere cold for later examination. Kept moving.
The second patrol was larger. Five Vex soldiers holding a checkpoint at the maintenance shaft access that Ethan and Elissa would have used to reach the research section. They'd set up a portable barricade and had overlapping fields of fire covering the approach, which meant they'd been here for at least thirty minutes, which meant Ethan had either known they would be here and routed around them, or he'd arranged for them to be here as a barrier behind him.
I was betting on the second.
Dexter assessed the position in three seconds. I could almost see the tactical geometry assembling behind his eyes: angles, cover, timing, the math of violence that he performed like breathing.
"Left corridor, thirty meters back," he murmured. "Maintenance access panel. It opens into the duct system above their position."
"You go high, I go loud?"
The ghost of something that might have been a smile on anyone less dangerous. "Make it convincing."
He disappeared into the shadows of the side corridor, silent in a way that a man his size had no right to be. Icounted to thirty. Then I stepped into the Vex patrol's line of sight.
I fired twice, both shots aimed at the barricade, deliberately imprecise but close enough to force them down. Then I threw myself behind the corridor bulkhead as return fire shredded the air where I'd been standing, the sound of their weapons echoing in the confined space until my hearing compressed to a high, ringing tone.
I leaned out. Fired again. Drew their attention forward, kept their eyes on the corridor mouth, kept them thinking the threat was here, was me, was a single shooter in an indefensible position who was either brave or stupid.
The duct cover above their position exploded outward. Dexter came through it like gravity was a suggestion, landing among them with a violence so efficient it was almost beautiful. Three of them went down in the first two seconds, before the remaining two could turn their weapons around. I was already running forward, covering the distance while Dexter worked, and I put the fourth one down with a shot to the back of the knee that dropped him screaming, followed by a second shot that stopped the screaming.
The fifth tried to run. Dexter caught him by the back of his armor, slammed him into the barricade so hard the portable barrier skidded three feet, and leaned close enough to speak into the soldier's face.
"The girl who came through here. Where did they go?"
I watched the Vex soldier's eyes. The moment his gaze slid involuntarily toward the maintenance shaft access beyond the checkpoint was all the answer we needed.
Dexter let him go. Then reconsidered, and knocked him unconscious with a strike so precise it barely made a sound.
"Didn't want to?" I asked, stepping over bodies.
"Wanted to." He was already at the maintenance access. "Didn't need to."
We went through.
The anomaly researchsection occupied a sealed subsection of the station's lower ring, a series of reinforced labs and monitoring rooms that had been built when the anomaly was still a curiosity, a scientific oddity to be studied and catalogued. The halls here were wider than standard, designed for equipment transport, and the walls had a thickness to them that I could feel in the deadened quality of sound, as if the station had tried to insulate itself from what it contained.
