Elissa looked at him. I watched her face and I searched for the girl who'd laughed at dinner three weeks ago, who'd complained about the station food and stolen dessert off Dexter's plate, who'd called him Dex in the particular sing-song way that made his expression go soft in a room full of people who feared him. She was there. She was still in there, behind the glaze of neurochemical persuasion, behind the gentle rewiring that Ethan had performed one touch at a time.
But she didn't move toward Dexter.
She stepped forward. Toward Ethan. Toward the portal.
"Take me with you," she said.
My hand tightened on Dexter's arm. I felt his whole body lock, every muscle coiling with the force of what he was restraining, the violence that wanted to cross the room and tear Ethan apart and carry his sister out of here over his shoulder, the instinct that screamed at him to do whatever it took. I held on. Not because the instinct was wrong, but because Ethan was standing three feet from an active portal with his hand near the controls, and if we pushed him, he could take her through before we crossed the distance.
"Elissa, no." The words fell out of Dexter like stones. Each one cost him something.
But she was looking at Ethan with an expression that made my chest ache, the perfect, terrible devotion of someone who had found their answer and couldn't be reasoned away from it. She didn't see the manipulation. She saw a man who'd told her the truth, who'd shown her something extraordinary, who'd made her feel seen in a family of extraordinary people where she was the ordinary one. She saw purpose in those glowing blue eyes. She saw someone who needed her.
She couldn't feel the invisible hand reshaping her devotion into chains. She couldn't taste the biochemical lie coating every genuine emotion until she couldn't tell where her own feelings ended and Ethan's influence began. She was eighteen, and human, and in love with someone who had turned her own heart into a leash.
Ethan's hand extended toward her. Those blue eyes flickered to me, to Dexter, and in them I read the truth of what this was. Not cruelty. Not malice. Necessity, or what he'd convinced himself was necessity, which amounted to the same thing in the end. He needed her for something on the other side. Or he needed us to not follow. Or both.
The portal hummed. The ozone thickened until I could taste it in the back of my throat like a mouthful of lightning.
"You could come too," Ethan said to Dexter. "See what's really out there. What your station is sitting on top of."
Dexter's arm trembled under my hand. Not with fear. With the effort of holding still.
"Let her go," Dexter said. "Whatever you need, whatever this is, take me instead."
"She chose," Ethan said. And Elissa's fingers reached for his.
The blue light from the portal swelled, washing out the room, swallowing the details of every face until we were alljust silhouettes against something vast and impossible and hungry. The hum became a sound I felt in my organs, a vibration that rearranged the rhythm of my heart.
Elissa's hand closed around Ethan's.
I didn't let go of Dexter's arm. I felt the exact moment he understood that rushing forward would lose her faster, felt it in the way his muscles went from trembling to still, a stillness worse than the trembling because it meant he was choosing not to act, and the cost of that choice was written in every rigid line of his body.
The portal pulsed. And Ethan smiled, soft and sad and certain, the expression of a man stepping off a cliff he'd been walking toward his whole life.
The betrayal wasn't complete yet. But his fingers were laced through hers, and the light was growing, and I could feel in my bones that the next thirty seconds would determine whether we lost Elissa Torrence to a hole in space, or whether Dexter and I could find the thread that would pull her back from a man who had turned devotion into a weapon and aimed it at the youngest, most human heart in the room.
Thirty seconds. The portal hummed like a throat preparing to speak.
Dexter's pulse hammered against my palm. Once. Twice.
The light swallowed everything.
Chapter 14
Dexter
The portal throwslight like a wound splitting open across the ceiling, and Ethan Eames stands at its heart with his hands on the controls and my sister at his side.
I have my weapon drawn before the light finishes crawling across the walls. Beside me, Astra mirrors the motion, her sidearm leveled with the steady competence of someone who's been holding guns since before she could vote. The barrel doesn't waver. Neither does mine.
The anomaly research section is a cathedral of failed ambition. Banks of equipment line the curved walls, most of it dark, half of it jury-rigged with cables that run like varicose veins across the floor. The air tastes of ozone and something deeper, something that sits on the back of my tongue like licking a battery. The portal itself is a ragged oval of crackling energy, maybe three meters tall, its edges fraying and reconstituting in stuttering pulses that throw our shadows in six directions at once. Half-formed. Unstable. The kind of thing that could collapse into nothing or swallow the station whole, and I don't think Ethan knows which.
He looks at me across that ten meters of open floor, and he smiles.
"Dexter." Like we're meeting for drinks. Like he's not standing in front of a tear in spacetime with stolen access codes and my sister's life as a bargaining chip. "I was hoping for more time."
"I'll bet you were." My aim hasn't shifted. Center mass. The shot is clean from here, except for the variables. The portal's energy field. The equipment between us. Elissa, standing close enough to Ethan that a through-and-through becomes a conversation I don't want to have. "Step away from the controls."
