The words hit me in a place I didn't have armor for, somewhere behind my sternum that went cold and then hot and then cold again. I adjusted my grip on the weapon, and the movement was small enough that he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been watching for exactly that kind of fracture.
"What does that mean?" My voice came out flat. Good.
"Sigma-9 was supposed to be a capture mission." He paused to breathe, and the breathing sounded wrong, too much liquid in it, too much effort for too little air. "You specifically. Not dead. Taken. Alive and controllable and useful as leverage over Torrence military assets."
The corridor tilted. Not really, the artificial gravity held, but something inside me shifted so hard that the world seemed to respond. I kept my face empty. I kept my weapon up.
"Leverage against who?"
"Against his sons." Webb's eyes were too clear for a man bleeding out on a corridor floor. Too purposeful. He was spending the last of something to make sure I heard this. "Malachar Torrence ordered the operation. He wanted you as insurance. A leash for Dexter. A pressure point for Zane. A way to ensure they stayed in line when he needed them to."
I heard the name and I understood it and I rejected it in the same breath, the way a body rejects a foreign organ. Malachar. Their father. The patriarch who had vanished into the black and left his sons to inherit an empire built on blood and silence.
"You're lying."
"I'm dying, Venn." He said it the way someone would state their coordinates, just a fact, just where he was. "What would be the point?"
I stared at him. My finger rested along the trigger guard, not on the trigger itself, and that distinction felt like the width of everything I'd ever been versus everything I was becoming. The metal was warm from my hand. The corridor hummed with the ship's failing systems. Somewhere distantly, I could hear the muffled concussions of Talia's team taking the bridge, each blast transmitted through the hull like a heartbeat.
"The kill team went wrong," Webb continued, each word costing him something visible. "They didn't follow orders. It was supposed to be clean. Extract you, leave enough bodies to make it look like an enemy action. But the team panicked, or they interpreted their orders too freely, and instead of a capture it became a massacre." He swallowed. "When the mission failed, when you were taken by the anomaly instead of by his people, Malachar covered it up. Blamed it on hostile action. Buried the realoperation so deep that no one left alive could trace it back to him."
"Except you."
"Except me." His mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile. "I was the handler. I gave the kill team their target coordinates. I didn't know about the anomaly. That part was bad luck. Or the universe's idea of justice, depending on how you look at it."
I looked at him and saw all of it at once. The man who had sold my team. The man who had cost me six years in the dark. The man who was, underneath all the layers of complicity and cowardice, just another tool in someone else's hand. And the hand that had held him belonged to the father of the man I loved.
My arm ached from holding the weapon steady. My finger had not moved to the trigger.
"I should kill you," I said, and I meant it the way you mean a prayer, with everything inside the words and nothing left over.
"You should." He agreed without argument, without begging. "I've earned it."
I thought about it. I stood in that corridor that smelled like blood and failing systems and I weighed the bullet against everything it would and wouldn't give me. It would give me the satisfaction of an ending. A period at the end of a sentence I'd been writing for six years. It would close the book on Sigma-9, at least the chapter that had Webb's name on it.
But the book wasn't closed. Malachar's chapter was still open, and Malachar was gone, unreachable, a ghost whose consequences kept walking the corridors of his sons' lives. Killing Webb wouldn't close that. Killing Webb wouldn't give me what I actually wanted, which was to stand in frontof Malachar Torrence and ask him why. Why her. Why Sigma-9. Why his own sons.
I lowered my weapon.
Webb watched it go down, and something moved across his face that was too complicated for a single name. Relief and disappointment and maybe, underneath both of those, a grudging kind of respect.
"Die knowing I could have ended you." My voice was very quiet and very steady and belonged to someone I was still learning how to be. "Die knowing I chose not to. That's worse, isn't it?"
He laughed, and the laugh cost him badly, his whole body contracting around the sound, blood darkening the floor beneath him. "It might be, actually."
I holstered my weapon. The click of it settling into the holster was the loudest sound in the corridor, louder than his breathing, louder than the ship dying around us.
I turned and walked away. I didn't look back. Not because I was afraid I'd change my mind, but because looking back would have been a kind of tenderness, and he hadn't earned that. He'd earned the mercy of my indifference, and that was all.
The bridge felltwelve minutes later.
I know because I counted. I found my way back to the main corridor, linked up with Reeves and Kaito outside the secondary CIC, and helped them clear the last pockets of resistance with the mechanical efficiency of someone operating on something deeper than adrenaline. My body did the work. My mind was somewhere else, turning Webb's words over and over like a stone I couldn't stop pressing against a bruise.
Malachar Torrence wanted you as leverage.
Insurance against his sons.
A leash for Dexter.
